Current News

/

ArcaMax

After an unprecedented four-day siege, LA firefighters make progress against Palisades, Eaton fires

Clara Harter, Rong-Gong Lin II, Hannah Fry and Grace Toohey, Los Angeles Times on

Published in News & Features

LOS ANGELES — An unprecedented four-day fire siege that damaged or destroyed 9,000 structures and killed at least 10 people shows signs of finally easing Friday as winds lessened and firefighters began to contain the infernos.

Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said crews were in their best position yet — though still with a long way to go. The Palisades fire was 8% contained and the Eaton fire was 3% contained as of Friday morning, according to fire officials.

In addition to better weather, the fight has been aided by a stream of firefighting help from far and wide and the ability to use water-dropping aircraft, which were grounded by high winds during the first day of the fires.

“The region is in a much better posture than we were earlier this week,” Marrone said.

However, crews are already bracing for another red flag warning expected to begin on Monday. That leaves the next three days to build up defenses.

Besides fighting the flames, officials are trying to protect the massive burn zones in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena, Pasadena and surrounding areas from would-be looters. On Friday, members of the California National Guard were patrolling some areas.

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna asked the California National Guard for help assisting with traffic control and keeping people out of burned areas. More than 20 arrests have been made on suspicion of looting over the last few days.

The sheriff’s department has implemented a curfew between 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the mandatory evacuation zones around the Eaton and Palisades fires. The curfew was in effect Thursday night and will again be in effect Friday.

“We are not screwing around with this,” Luna said. “We don’t want anyone taking advantage of our residents that have already been victimized.”

Santa Monica has already imposed a nighttime curfew for some northern neighborhoods still affected by a mandatory evacuation order.

Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said authorities are focused on five crimes related to these fires: arson, curfew violations, looting, illegal drone usage and scams. For anyone who commits these crimes, Hochman said, “you will be arrested, you will prosecuted and you will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

Thursday brought a scare of a new wildfire — the Kenneth fire, which started near the western edge of Woodland Hills around 2:30 p.m, where Victory Boulevard terminates into the rolling hills of the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve.

The fire, fanned by strong Santa Ana winds, spread through open space and was threatening homes in the Malibu Canyon area north of the 101 Freeway near Calabasas. But firefighters working overnight stopped forward movement of the blaze. The fire had consumed 1,000 acres of brush as of Friday morning and was 35% contained, officials said.

Firefighting helicopters worked at a swift pace to douse the flames with water — an aerial attack that wasn’t an option during the worst of the spread of the Palisades and Eaton fires earlier in the week, when severe winds forced the grounding of firefighting aircraft.

Griffith Park, including Runyon Canyon, will be closed through Sunday, officials said.

“To all Angelenos, we are fighting hard for each of you,” Mayor Karen Bass said during a Friday morning news conference. “LAFD battled all night...and air drop efforts, thank goodness, continue.”

A man detained near the Kenneth fire on Thursday was not arrested on suspicion of arson because investigators said there was not enough evidence, LAPD Assistant Chief Dominic Choi said.

The man was detained after a caller reported a person attempting to light a fire in the 21700 block of Ybarra Road at 4:22 p.m. The man, who was not identified, was being held on a felony probation violation, Choi said.

The investigation into the cause of all the fires remains ongoing.

The dangerous combination of low humidity, bone-dry fuels and shifting winds has complicated firefighters’ efforts to get the blazes under control. The Palisades fire continued to make runs upslope fanned by gusts up to 40 mph on Thursday afternoon. On Friday, gusts of up to 70 mph are possible, forecasters say.

 

“Like a typical Santa Ana, this one will only last through the morning. Wind gusts will quickly diminish around noon,” the weather service said Friday morning. The red flag warning is set to expire at 6 p.m. Friday.

Farther east, efforts to protect Mt. Wilson from the Eaton fire proved successful, officials said. Mt. Wilson, north of Sierra Madre, is home to key radio and TV transmitters for the region, as well as a historic observatory.

A firefighter working the Eaton fire was injured in a fall on Thursday and is being hospitalized. The firefighter is in stable condition, officials said.

Residents across the county — already on edge from days of intense wildfire — were jolted awake early Friday by alerts on their cellphones urging them to evacuate. It was at least the second such erroneous alert the public received.

Another message had been blasted out on cellphones Thursday afternoon. The city Emergency Management Department said the alert was sent “in ERROR.” “Evacuation orders have not changed,” the department said in a post on X.

L.A. County Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan apologized for the alerts during a Friday morning news conference and said the agency is working to fix the issue.

“I implore everyone to not disable the messages on your phone,” he said. “These alert tools have saved lives during this emergency. Not receiving an alert can be a consequence of life and death.”

Smoke from the fire was leaving unhealthy air over the L.A. area. As of early Friday, the air was unhealthy across areas like central L.A., East L.A., Pasadena and Glendale; and unhealthy for sensitive groups across portions of the L.A. Basin and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, according to AirNow.gov.

Officials warned the public not to fly drones over the fire area after a small device collided with a firefighting aircraft — a Super Scooper, a massive fixed-wing plane that can drop large amounts of water — that was flying over the Palisades fire on Thursday.

The aircraft was damaged, but landed safely and the incident will be investigated, officials said. The drone was destroyed in the collision.

It’s a federal crime to interfere with firefighting efforts on public lands, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. The crime can be punishable by up to a year in prison. As of Thursday, drone flight restrictions near the wildfires in the Los Angeles area was extended until Jan. 23.

Hundreds of thousands of Southern California residents also remained without power Thursday. Some of the outages were a result of wind-caused damage, but many were also under planned electricity outages designed to reduce the risk of new fires being ignited.

Looking ahead, crews face more challenging conditions on the fire line.

After a day of brief respite from the winds on Saturday, gusty winds, coming from the north and northeast, are expected to return as early as Sunday. That could be the start to as many as three Santa Ana wind events next week.

“There is great concern that fire weather conditions could become exacerbated given the antecedent conditions, little rain across the area since the spring of 2024, and another offshore wind event on top of all of what we have seen,” the National Weather Service said.

Severe fire weather is being fed in part by desiccated vegetation. The last significant rain downtown Los Angeles has seen came on May 5, 2024, when 0.13 inch of rain fell. Since then, there hasn’t been a single calendar day in which more than one-tenth of an inch has fallen downtown.

There have been only five days since the water year began in October where downtown L.A. has seen measurable rain: 0.07 inch on Nov. 2, 0.03 inch on Nov. 24, and 0.02 inch on Nov. 23, Nov. 26 and Dec. 24.

That means that only 0.16 inch of rain have fallen since Oct. 1. That’s abysmal — the average for this time of the season is 4.87 inches, which is about one-third of L.A.’s average annual rainfall.

Times staff writers Tony Barboza, Terry Castleman, Sean Greene, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee, Don Lee, Summer Lin, Jasmine Mendez, Luke Money, Koko Nakajima, Matthew Ormseth, Faith E. Pinho and Richard Winton contributed to this report.


©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus