Over the past 48 hours, wildfires have consumed acre after acre and building after building across greater Los Angeles. More than 100,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and at least five people have died. The Times’s L.A. bureau chief, Corina Knoll, and our staff meteorologist, Judson Jones, explain the paths of the fires and the conditions that have made them so hard to contain.
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My name is Orlie Israel.
I live with my family in the Pacific battle States.
I found out about the fire about must have been like 10am when someone texted me, is everything okay?
To which I said, about what?
And I said, the fire.
And I looked out the window and there's this huge plume of smoke just coming over the mountains and it's big.
And you know, living in Los Angeles, there are fires around fairly often and you know, seeing smoke is not an unusual thing.
But this was really close.
And we start getting automatic evacuation warning and the fire was getting closer and closer and you could see it from the bedroom window.
You could see the flames waterfall down this hill towards the town.
The embers were just flying through the sky like a rain of fire.
And the sound of a fire, I never would have thought the sound, you know, it sounds like an airport just busy and blazing.
We had these two garden hoses and you know, a bush would catch on fire and we'd spray the bush and then another bush would get on fire.
And you know, eventually the fence caught on fire, the wooden fence between our house and the next house.