Hi folks,
Paige Vega, Vox’s climate editor here. As you might imagine, the Vox climate team has been busy reporting on the multiple fires that continue to burn in Los Angeles. The blazes continue to rage, and as of Friday afternoon, more than 153,000 people were still under evacuation orders.
The expansiveness of this disaster has been stunning: The Palisades Fire along the coast near the Santa Monica Mountains had burned more than 20,000 acres as of Friday afternoon (and was still expanding as of this writing). The Eaton Fire near Pasadena has now torched at least 13,000 acres.
The fires have killed at least 10 people and destroyed more than 10,000 structures.
As the scope of the damage is beginning to come into focus, the fires continue to expand in many places throughout Los Angeles and yet some are already describing this week’s events as the worst natural disaster in Los Angeles history. While wildfire is a natural part of the California ecosystem, human-driven climate change has amplified the dynamics fueling the fire: An extended dry period in the state has desiccated soil and fuels, priming the landscape to burn and ripping through entire neighborhoods.
The cost of the destruction is hard to fathom. One preliminary estimate calculated by AccuWeather, the weather forecasting service, put the damage and total economic loss at $52 billion to $57 billion — a sum that could rise if the fires continue to spread. J.P. Morgan also estimated the damage to exceed $50 billion. By Friday afternoon, AccuWeather said the loss could be as much as three times its earlier estimate.
While Californians will see some winds calm Friday, meteorologists are warning that winds blowing in from offshore are likely to persist into next week.
As my colleague Umair Irfan reported this week, these blazes are stunning in their scale and speed, jumping from ignition to thousands of acres in a day, but they’re hardly unexpected.
“Fire forecasters have been warning since the beginning of the year that conditions were ripe for massive infernos, particularly in Southern California,” he wrote. Indeed, an early January bulletin from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) warned that an “above normal significant fire potential is forecast across portions of Southern California.”
Stay safe, stay vigilant.
—Paige Vega, climate editor
