Destructive California Wildfires Burn Across L.A., Including Hollywood: Live Updates

The city was bracing for more damage as one of the blazes climbed Mount Wilson, site of the famous observatory along with communication towers that broadcast phone and radio signals across the region. As winds picked up again on Thursday afternoon, yet another fire broke out, this time in the Woodland Hills.

President Biden announced from the White House on Thursday that the federal government would pay for 100 percent of the region’s firefighting needs for the next 180 days, pledging the full weight of the federal government — and his successor’s administration — to help contain the fast-moving fires, which have killed at least five people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate, and support recovery.

“We are with you,” Mr. Biden said. “We are not going anywhere.”

So far, more than 29,000 acres, about twice the size of Manhattan, have burned. Robert Luna, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, said some areas “look like a bomb was dropped in them,” adding, “I think the death toll will rise.”

Here’s what we’re covering:

• Fighting for control: Easing winds gave firefighters a chance to better fight the blazes, with helicopters and planes dropping water from the sky — something they couldn’t do during heavier gusts earlier this week. The largest fires, Palisades and Eaton, remained out of control, but smaller ones were extinguished or partially contained. Here’s the latest on each fire.

• Latest forecast: Forecasters warned that moderate to strong Santa Ana winds were expected to pick up on Thursday night, with wind speeds of 20 to 30 miles per hour and gusts up to 60 m.p.h. Heavy winds could arrive again over the weekend and possibly next week. Read more on the latest forecast.

• New blaze: The Kenneth Fire in the West Hills neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley, near the city of Calabasas and north of Malibu, has grown to at least 50 acres and was burning south, the Los Angeles Fire Department said on Thursday afternoon. A mandatory evacuation order was in effect for areas around the fire.

• Mayor blamed: Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles was criticized by political opponents and some residents who accused her of failing to prepare the city, saying that citizens did not receive enough warning and questioning the shortage of water that hampered firefighters during their initial efforts to control the blazes.

• Damage estimates: The economic cost of the fires could exceed $50 billion, and California’s insurance industry could take a huge hit in an already unstable market. Insurers there are already struggling to find their footing after previous wildfires crushed their profits.

The Los Angeles County supervisor, Lindsey Horvath, said at the news conference that the Kenneth fire was “serious” given its rate of spread and the density of nearby communities.

Senator Adam Schiff also spoke at the news conference, offering a warning to people in the fire areas: “If you are told to evacuate, then get the hell out.”

Schiff called the fires over the last few days “unprecedented in our state’s history.” And he warned that the danger had not passed. “We keep seeing these fires pop up in different places,” he said. “We may see more before this is over.”

Kristin Crowley, the Los Angeles fire chief, said at a news conference that more than 60 fire companies from the city of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County and Ventura County had been dispatched to the Kenneth fire, and that additional resources were en route.

The Kenneth fire shows “we are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” Crowley said.

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The alert blared on cellphones across Los Angeles County, including in Culver City, Long Beach and Santa Monica, which all have their own city governments.

In a statement, Los Angeles County said that the alert had been meant just for residents of Calabasas and Agoura Hills, near the Kenneth fire. That blaze, the latest to erupt in the Los Angeles area, began burning in West Hills on Thursday afternoon.

It was not immediately clear how many people received the alert. About 9.6 million people live in the county.

A second alert, issued about 20 minutes later, told residents to “disregard the last evacuation warning.”

Janice Hahn, a Los Angeles County supervisor, said on social media that the alert was sent out mistakenly because of a technical error.

So Dr. and Ms. Sykes donned masks and set off from northern Santa Monica into the Palisades on foot, hiking with a neighbor five miles through smoldering canyons to reach their street.

They passed their grocery store: gone. The bank: gone. The roar of fire alarms rang out into the street from restaurants that no longer existed. Ms. Sykes said it looked like the set of the postapocalyptic television series “The Last Of Us.”

As she rounded the corner into her neighborhood, she saw her well-manicured hedges in the distance and her green front gate. But behind them was only rubble.

“Oh my god,” she screamed, cursing. “No! Oh, no.”

There was a broken sconce dangling from a lone pillar where her neighbor’s house had been, and a support beam that had, less than 24 hours before, held up her own front door. When she reached the edge of her yard, she stood there quietly. “Oh my god. It’s gone,” she whispered.

Ms. Sykes waded through the debris, the Santa Ana winds still whipping the branches of burned trees. The baby clothes, the photographs, the art projects were gone. But it wasn’t the stuff she missed, she said; lost was “the energy of the house” — the sense of security they had built for their family.

“I was so proud of what I was able to create for them and make them feel safe,” Ms. Sykes said, “because I didn’t have that. It’s bringing up old wounds that I thought were healed.”

The couple headed out of the Palisades and told their daughters the devastating news. When Dr. Sykes goes back to work at Cedars-Sinai in Santa Monica, Ms. Sykes said, it will be her job to figure out where the girls will go next — what school, what house, what life.

“The Palisades was the perfect bubble for all of us, the kids and the adults, to hide and forget about the chaos of the world,” she said.

Remembering her own childhood journey to America from Iran, she added, “I was hoping to shelter my kids from the kind of loss I experienced, but I think it’s life and the lessons we can’t escape.”

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For example, an update on the Lidia fire, which broke out on Wednesday afternoon about 50 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, confirmed that it had burned about 350 acres as of Thursday morning. According to Anthony C. Marrone, the fire chief for Los Angeles County, the fire was 40 percent contained, meaning that 40 percent of the blaze’s boundary is hemmed in by barriers like rivers, streams, highways or areas that were already scorched, leaving no more vegetation to ignite.

It also means that fire crews are confident that the fire will not grow along that 40 percent of the fire’s perimeter as it continues to burn.

Other times, these perimeters, or containment lines, can be established by 10- to 12-foot-wide trenches that crews have dug along the fire’s edge — sometimes with bulldozers — to try to stop the spread.

“The fire may stop spreading due to natural or human effects — firefighting efforts, changes in weather or lack of fuel in the fire’s path,” said Janice Coen, a visiting scholar in the environmental science department at the University of San Francisco, and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

That does not mean the danger is over. Even when the fire stops spreading, it can still smolder, burn within the already affected area or reignite under favorable conditions.

When officials say a fire is 100 percent contained — as they have with the Sunset fire north of downtown Los Angeles — that still does not mean it has been put out. It means only that firefighters have it fully surrounded by a perimeter; it could still burn for weeks or months.

“The fire may still be actively burning inside the containment lines, but it is no longer spreading beyond them,” Dr. Coen said on Thursday.

Once a fire is extinguished, it is declared “controlled.”

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Fire crews for hire can cost between $3,000 and $10,000 a day, and hiring them is not as easy as putting out a post on social media. Most of these crews contract with insurance companies or the government and don’t work directly with homeowners. But they can be crucial for some businesses and homeowners in firestorms.

Though much of the central business district of Pacific Palisades burned to the ground, Palisades Village, an upscale outdoor mall owned by Rick Caruso — the billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate — has survived the fires so far.

During the height of the fires, from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, Mr. Caruso was on the phone with his security team that was directing a group of private firefighters protecting his property and, he said, trying to save nearby homes.

“Our property is standing,” Mr. Caruso said in an interview on Wednesday. “Everything around us is gone. It is like a war zone.”

Private firefighters gained widespread recognition in 2018, when TMZ reported that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had hired a crew to protect their mansion in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hidden Hills.

Online, critics accused the couple of using their wealth to undermine what should be a public service, although the TMZ post noted, and Ms. Kardashian said later on a talk show, that the firefighters also saved neighbors’ homes.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wasserman faced similar blowback, as people online accused him of being tone-deaf. He later deleted the post. Calls to Mr. Wasserman’s cellphone went directly to voice mail on Thursday, and he did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles held a special Mass on Thursday. Several families whose homes were razed by the Palisades fire attended. Msgr. Liam Kidney, the pastor of Corpus Christi Church in Pacific Palisades, which was destroyed in the fire, offered words of comfort.

Among those in the pews were Shelly Detmer, 50, and her family, whose house was destroyed in the Palisades fire. “We’ve lost our whole community,” she said. “The only things we have left are our family, our friends and our faith. It’s why we’re here.”

An emergency alert that was sent to cellphones across Los Angeles County was sent in error, according to Los Angeles’s Emergency Management Department. “Evacuation orders have not changed,” the city agency wrote on social media. The alert had suggested that there was a new evacuation warning.

A new alert was just issued, saying that people should “disregard” the previous evacuation warning, which was supposed to go only to those threatened by the Kenneth fire, north of Calabasas. That’s the latest blaze to erupt, igniting at about 3:30 p.m. local time on Thursday.

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Sheriff Luna asked reporters at a news conference on Thursday to “be patient” with officials regarding death toll numbers. “Right now, frankly, we don’t know yet,” he said.

According to the sheriff, damage from the fires was so severe in some areas that it looked as though a bomb had been dropped. And with the fires still raging in many places, he said, there hadn’t been enough time or available resources to safely comb through the miles of wreckage.

“I think the death toll will rise,” Sheriff Luna said. “I hope I’m wrong.”

Determining the true number of fatalities from fires has historically been a daunting feat.

Officials rely on having accurate counts of missing people and on identifying remains that are discovered, but the mass displacement of Angelenos makes establishing a list of missing persons an overwhelming task. Almost 180,000 people have been under evacuation orders and another 200,000 have faced facing evacuation warnings.

Such widespread fires create many challenges. The flames reduce entire neighborhoods to ashes, and sets of human remains can be hard to distinguish from each other and from charred rubble.

Those factors played out in the aftermath of the wildfire that struck Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023, which was the deadliest wildfire to hit the United States since 1918, according to records kept by the National Fire Protection Association. Death toll estimates for that disaster initially indicated that more than 115 people had been killed, but that number dropped to 102 after search and identification efforts were completed. It took months for authorities to issue an official number.

Early indications suggest that the fires in Los Angeles are not expected to cause many fatalities, but local officials don’t expect to be able to take a complete count until the fires are more contained, Sheriff Luna said.

“You’ve got to understand the urgency, the chaotic nature of what we’re dealing with,” he said.

As of early Thursday afternoon, the two largest fires — the Palisades and Eaton fires — were zero-percent contained. The Hurst fire was 10 percent contained and the Lidia fire was 60 percent contained, according to Cal Fire.

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At least five people in total died across Los Angeles County, according to officials. On Thursday, the county sheriff, Robert G. Luna, said that officials were investigating neighborhoods where hundreds of homes burned, “hopefully not discover too many fatalities. That’s our prayer.”

“But this is a crisis, and we don’t know what to expect,” he added.

Here is what we know about the victims:

Victor Shaw

Victor Shaw’s tiled-roof house sat on Monterosa Drive, a cul-de-sac near the edge of the forest.

After the evacuation call went out late Tuesday night, one of Mr. Shaw’s neighbors, Willie Jackson, 81, packed his car, grabbing whatever belongings he could from the home where he had lived since the 1970s and left. So did other neighbors.

But not Mr. Shaw, 66, who had lived on Monterosa Drive beginning in childhood. He remained behind, doing what his father before him had always done — maintaining the family home.

“The house had a whole lot of significance for him,” said Mr. Jackson, a retired county employee. “His parents had always had it.”

Mr. Jackson moved to Monterosa Drive in the 1970s. When he got there, Mr. Shaw’s parents, Frank and Freddye Shaw, were already in the neighborhood. “In those days, the homes were costing $50,000,” Mr. Jackson said. “Now they’re over a million, $2 million.”

Mr. Jackson said Mr. Shaw’s father had taken meticulous care of the family’s home.

“He always kept his house up,” Mr. Jackson, recalling how he and the elder Mr. Shaw bonded over home maintenance. “He and I focused on maintaining our house. He’d be out there sweeping and cleaning up. I’d be out there too.”

When Mr. Shaw’s parents died, they left the home in a trust to him and his sister, Shari Shaw.

Mr. Shaw, who Mr. Jackson said never married, drove a bloodmobile and later made contract deliveries. “He was hard working,” Mr. Jackson said. “He was a great neighbor, always, like his father, working, maintaining the yard.”

Shari Shaw evacuated and her brother stayed, saying he was determined to protect the house, according to news reports. She could not be reached on Thursday.

Rodney Nickerson

Rodney Nickerson, 82, also died, according to his family. He lived on a street that was just a short walk from Mr. Jackson’s home, although it is unclear if they knew one another.

Mr. Nickerson came from a multigenerational California family, his son, Eric Nickerson, said. His grandfather founded Golden State Mutual Life, an insurance company. A public housing project in the southern Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Nickerson Gardens, was named for the grandfather.

Mr. Nickerson himself had retired as an aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin and was an active deacon at his church, Eric Nickerson said, adding that his father “was an Angelenean from day one.”

“Everybody in that Pasadena Altadena community has been there for years — we’re talking, everybody knew everybody else,” he said. “Everyone bought their houses for $30 and $35,000 in the early ’70s, and now they’re worth millions. But now, they’re all gone.”

Erliene Kelley

Erliene Kelley, who lived a few blocks away from Mr. Shaw and Mr. Nickerson, died in her home, according to her family.

She was a retired pharmacy technician at Rite Aid and longtime resident of the neighborhood, according to Rita and Terry Pyburn, a couple who lived on her block.

“She was so, so, so sweet,” said Mr. Pyburn. He often had brief chats with Ms. Kelley about gardening and local news, and often left small Christmas gifts for her and other neighbors in the tight-knit community.

“She was an angel,” Mr. Pyburn said. “That’s the perfect neighbor. When you see her, you have a smile.”

Mr. Pyburn added that “unfortunately, there was not good communication” about the threat to life. He and his wife had initially heard on his car radio that “everything east of Lake Street was evacuated, and over here on the west side we were fine.”

“So we were in the house and just stayed there, thinking we were okay,” Mr. Pyburn said. “Until we started smelling smoke.” He and his wife prepared to leave, and then the emergency alert arrived.

“It was panic. Everyone took off and no one thought to check on anybody,” Mr. Pyburn said, adding, “I think the notice came too late.”

The search for other victims

The chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Anthony Marrone, said “human remains detection teams” would be going house to house, searching for others who might have died in the Eaton fire. Earlier in the day, Mr. Luna said they might employ dogs to help.

Officials said at least one person died in the Palisades fire, on the other side of the county.

On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Jackson was driving back to Altadena to see what remained of the home that he, like Victor Shaw and his parents before him, had nurtured through the decades. “It’s very disturbing to lose everything,” he said.

On Thursday, fire was still smoldering in the rubble of the Shaw home. Four burned cars were in the driveway, and a garden hose was pulled out into the front yard.

A filing cabinet and chimney still stood, and a water heater billowed smoke. Collapsed drywall and melted piles littered the property with debris, some in piles as high as six feet.

The cul-de-sac where the house once stood had burned completely, as had much of the neighborhood. Just one house stood intact down the street.

“The fire that came through this canyon wiped out the entire Altadena community that’s been standing for 50, 60 years,” said Mr. Jackson. A retired Los Angeles County employee, he is now staying in a hotel and wondering what the future holds.

Alain Delaquérière and Kitty Bennett contributed research. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.

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First, do your research

Natural disasters provide ample opportunity for scammers and fraudsters who prey on people’s generosity. So if you’re looking to help, before you open your wallet or dedicate your time, you need to do your research.

Charity Navigator and GuideStar provide information on nonprofit groups and aid agencies, and they can also direct you to reputable ones.

Officials with the Federal Communications Commission have said that scammers may use phone calls, text messages, email and postal mail, and may even go door to door. The Federal Trade Commission has tips on how to spot bogus charities and fund-raisers, including asking specific questions and resisting the pressure to donate on the spot.

How you can help

Looking for somewhere to donate to right this second? GoFundMe has created a centralized hub housing all verified GoFundMe pages related to the wildfires in Southern California. The company said its trust and safety team would update the hub with new verified campaigns as they became available.

GoFundMe also started a 2025 Wildfire Relief Fund that will go “go directly to people impacted who are seeking help through GoFundMe fund-raisers, and to nonprofit organizations on the ground providing relief.”

The American Red Cross said people looking to help could visit redcross.org, call 1-800-RED CROSS (800-733-2767) or text the word REDCROSS to 90999 to make a donation.

The organization said its first priority was to provide shelter and support to people who were affected and that “financial donations are the quickest and best way to help those who need it most.”

The Mutual Aid L.A. Network created a Google spreadsheet with information about shelters and animal centers that also lists volunteer and donation opportunities.

The group, which bills itself as a “connector and information hub for mutual aid efforts, people and resources across Los Angeles,” said in a post on Instagram that it would continue to update the spreadsheet as new information became available. It also shared resources on how to connect with local groups that might already be helping the people affected by the fires. You can also donate directly to the group.

The Y.M.C.A. of Metropolitan Los Angeles said that its Koreatown Center for Community Well-Being and Westchester Y.M.C.A. locations are accepting essential items for families affected by the fires.

Direct Relief, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that has been assisting by handing out free N95 respirators and other essential items in Los Angeles, is also accepting donations. Wildfire smoke can cause adverse health effects 50 to 100 miles from the flames, in communities that cannot see or even smell the smoke.

World Central Kitchen, the charity group founded by the chef José Andrés, is also in the region and providing help. The team is working with food trucks and restaurants to provide meals for emergency workers and anyone affected by the wildfires. You can also donate directly to the group here.

The duo of fires are among several still burning that have been incredibly devastating because of their proximity to densely populated areas.

The state’s most devastating wildfire is the 2018 Camp fire, which destroyed more than 18,000 structures as it burned across 153,000 acres. The second most destructive, the Tubbs fire, destroyed about 5,600 structures in Napa and Sonoma Counties in 2017.

The Tunnel fire in Oakland Hills in 1991, the Cedar fire in San Diego County in 2003 and the North Complex fire in 2020 all destroyed between 2,000 and 3,000 structures each. They were the third, fourth and fifth most destructive in the state, though the current Los Angeles fires have most likely surpassed them.

An exact tally of the fires’ impact will not be available any time soon, said David Acuna, a spokesman with Cal Fire, the state fire agency, but he added that the authorities “are confident there are thousands of homes destroyed.”

By contrast, the August Complex fire, which burned more than a million acres in a largely rural area of Northern California in 2020, destroyed fewer than 1,000 structures, according to Cal Fire data.

A structure can refer to not only a commercial building or a residence, officials said, but also other property like cars, mobile homes and sheds.

The Oakland Hills fire in 1991 burned just 1,600 acres — a much smaller footprint than the more than 25,000 acres that the Palisades and Eaton fires had burned around Los Angeles as of Thursday. But, like the Los Angeles fires, it took place around a densely populated area and destroyed 2,900 structures.

Officials have said that damage estimates for the current Los Angeles fires were preliminary and likely to increase in the coming days as fires continue to rage and officials make assessments.

Christine Hauser contributed reporting.

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On social media, popular right-wing accounts quickly reacted to the worsening wildfires on Wednesday by targeting the Los Angeles fire chief, Kristin Crowley, who is a lesbian. They highlighted old fire department documents signaling an interest in increasing diversity among firefighters and staff. Those arguments were repeated during segments on Fox News, where attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs — derided by the shorthand acronym DEI — have long been a feature.

“They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” wrote Elon Musk, X’s owner and its most-followed user, in a post written Wednesday and seen more than 13 million times. On Thursday, he added a catchphrase that has become popular among the right: “DEI means people DIE.”

The wildfires were caused by a rare combination of dry conditions and high winds, which helped the flames spread rapidly. The citywide response strained firefighting systems, resulting in some fire hydrants running dry in Pacific Palisades, an affluent residential area northwest of the city.

Right-wing influencers said the dry hydrants were a sign of mismanagement on the part of left-leaning city officials.

“Los Angeles refused to fill the water reservoirs and now there’s no water in the fire hydrants to fight the fires,” wrote a popular right-wing account with nearly 4 million followers on X, offering no evidence to support the claim. The account gained 15,605 new followers Wednesday, up from a recent average of about 2,000 per day.

City officials explained that the hydrants ran dry because that region sits at a higher elevation and relies on pumps to fill reservoirs for water storage that were taxed by the significant demand this week.

President-elect Donald J. Trump seemed to blame President Biden for the lack of water in hydrants, citing the issue on his Truth Social account and writing: “THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!”