The Federal Emergency Management Agency has decided to stop enforcing rules designed to prevent flood damage to schools, libraries, fire stations and other public buildings. Experts say the move, which has not been publicly announced, could endanger public safety and may be in violation of federal law.
The change in policy was laid out in a Feb. 4 memo by FEMA’s chief counsel, Adrian Sevier, that was viewed by The New York Times.
The rule in question, called the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, was one of the Biden administration’s most significant efforts to address the growing costs of disasters. The rule says that when public buildings in a flood zone are damaged or destroyed, those structures must be rebuilt in a way that prevents future flood damage if they are to qualify for FEMA funding. That could include elevating a structure above the expected height of a future flood or relocating it to a safer spot.
In some cases, the standards also apply to private homes repaired or rebuilt in a flood plain.
The rule has a tortured history. FEMA first proposed it in 2016, in response to an executive order from President Barack Obama. The powerful homebuilding industry opposed the rule on the grounds that it would increase construction costs. When President Donald Trump first took office in 2017, he revoked Obama’s order, stopping FEMA’s effort. Soon after taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden signed a new executive order calling for a federal flood standard, which culminated in a final rule issued by FEMA last July.
The goal wasn’t just to protect people and property, according to Deanne Criswell, the head of FEMA at the time. It was also to save taxpayers’ money as climate change made flooding more frequent, causing buildings in flood plains to be repeatedly damaged and then repeatedly rebuilt with government help. “We are going to be able to put a stop to the cycle of response and recovery, and rinse and repeat,” Criswell said at the time.
Trump, on his first day back in the White House, again revoked the executive order calling for a federal flood standard. In his memo last week, Sevier said that while FEMA considers how to amend the rule, the agency will not enforce it. “This pause must be implemented immediately while FEMA takes action to rescind or amend the policies,” Sevier wrote.
In a statement, FEMA said that the flood rule “is under review per the president’s executive order.”
But FEMA cannot simply stop enforcing a regulation, according to David A. Super, a law professor at Yale University who specializes in administrative law.
If the agency wants to reverse course, it must follow a process clearly laid out by federal law: issuing a public notice, seeking and reviewing public comments and then publishing a new final rule.
Repealing a regulation can take months or longer. Until that happens, the law says that the rule remains in effect, Super said.
FEMA’s effort to “pause” the rule is in keeping with Trump’s expansionist view of presidential authority, Super said. “The president is pursuing an extremely ambitious constitutional agenda to invalidate legislation regulating the executive branch.”
Jennifer Nou, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said the legality of FEMA’s decision depends on the length of the pause in enforcement. If FEMA stops enforcing the flood rule for an extended period of time, that would put the agency in greater legal jeopardy than just a short pause, she said.
Courts generally give agencies discretion over enforcing rules, Nou said. “But that discretion is not unlimited,” she added — for example, if the agency’s position amounts to abdicating its responsibility.
(Christopher Flavelle, NEW YORK TIMES)
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SIERRA MADRE, CA — Residents of a Southern California foothill community near the Eaton fire burn scar dug out of roads submerged in sludge Friday after the strongest storm of the year swept through the area, unleashing debris flows and muddy messes in several neighborhoods recently torched by wildfires.
Dry weather returned to the region but the risk of rock and mudslides on wildfire-scarred hillsides continued Friday — dangerous slides can strike even after rain stops, particularly in scorched areas where vegetation that helps keep soil anchored has burned away.
Water, debris and boulders rushed down the mountain into Sierra Madre on Thursday night, trapping at least one car in the mud and damaging several homes with mud and debris.
Bulldozers on Friday were cleaning up the mud-covered streets in the city of 10,000 people.
“It happened very quickly but it was very loud and you could even hear the ground or feel the ground shaking,” Bull Duvall, who has lived in Sierra Madre for 28 years, said of the debris flows.
Sierra Madre officials issued evacuation orders for areas affected by the Eaton fire, warning that fire, police and public works personnel would not enter areas experiencing active mud and debris flows and anyone who remained in a home under evacuation orders would need to shelter in place until areas are deemed safe for city personnel to enter.
Residents of the city also had to evacuate during the Eaton fire, which destroyed 15 homes in the community.
In Pacific Palisades on Friday, some residents washed their mud-covered driveways and bulldozers worked to clear mud-coated roads not far from where, just weeks ago, officials moved abandoned cars after people fleeing last month’s wildfires got stuck in traffic and fled on foot.
Southern California reported 1 to 3 inches of rain in coastal areas and valleys and 3 to 6 inches across the coastal slopes on Thursday, said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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By early today, the wildfire danger across San Diego County is expected to ease dramatically thanks to the first major storm of winter — a cold, blustery system that moved into the region Thursday night with enough energy to drop 0.75 inches of rain at the coast and twice as much in the backcountry.
But the National Weather Service cautioned that the storm would do comparatively little to lift the county’s precipitation to seasonal levels, and that a prolonged dry spell is likely to begin throughout Southern California on Monday.
The region was getting drenched by an atmospheric river — a column of moisture out of the west that flowed into coastal North County just after 5 p.m. Thursday and was expected to spread into the backcountry and then slide into downtown San Diego, possibly unleashing heavy downpours in some areas.
The San Diego River was forecast to rise a bit but remain far from flood stage. The rain was likely to be heaviest in the Palomar Mountain area, which was projected to get 3 to 4 inches of precipitation.
Even so, seasonal rainfall totals will remain way below normal. San Diego International Airport averages 5.76 inches of precipitation from Oct. 1 through Feb. 13 — but this season it had recorded only 0.86 inches through noon Thursday. The storm was capable of adding at least 0.75 inches by dawn today, but the city would still have a large deficit.
Ramona also was faring poorly. It averages 8.24 inches of rain during that period but had only recorded 1.77 inches through noon Thursday. The figure could rise about 1 inch overnight.
Forecasters say the small amount of rain the county got this week and about a week ago is producing green shoots of vegetation in the backcountry. But those could quickly wither if long-term conditions remain fairly dry.
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Storms dumped heavy snow and freezing rain on a swath of the U.S. East from Kentucky to the nation’s capital, causing hundreds of traffic accidents, knocking out power in places and threatening to flood waterways as temperatures began rising Wednesday.
The storm system, which cut a path from Kentucky to Maryland and points farther north on Tuesday, brought more than 14 inches of snow to Iron Gate, a tiny Appalachian town in Virginia, and 12 inches to White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., a small city about 65 miles to the west, the National Weather Service said.
By Wednesday more than 190,000 customers in Virginia and nearly 16,000 in North Carolina had lost electricity, according to PowerOutage.us. Appalachian Power, which serves a million customers in West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, said more than 5,700 workers were trying to restore power.
The region’s airports received several inches of snow, according to Scott Kleebauer, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center. “After a pretty quiet few seasons here, things have kind of picked back up again,” he said. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled or delayed across the United States, including almost 300 into Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware.com.
School was canceled throughout Virginia for a second straight day, and districts in the Baltimore and Washington areas also told students and teachers to take Wednesday off. Some families took the opportunity to go sledding outside the U.S. Capitol.
As temperatures climbed, concerns emerged about rain and melting snow washing into rivers and streams in regions already saturated from previous storms. A flood threat through this morning stretched from eastern Tennessee to southwestern Virginia and into other parts of South, the weather service said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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ATHENS, Greece — Scientists have detected several thousand earthquakes, the vast majority of them with small magnitudes, in just over two weeks near Greece’s volcanic island of Santorini, the University of Athens’ crisis management committee said Tuesday, adding that a larger quake cannot be ruled out.
The highly unusual barrage of earthquakes, which began in late January, has alarmed authorities. They have declared a state of emergency on Santorini, one of Greece’s most popular tourist destinations, deploying rescue crews with drones and a sniffer dog and putting coast guard and navy vessels on standby.
Thousands of residents and visitors have left the island, while schools on Santorini and nearby islands have been ordered to remain closed for the week.
Extra doctors and paramedics have been sent to Santorini’s hospital, while six disaster medicine teams are on standby as reinforcements.
Scientists have been closely monitoring the earthquake swarm occurring between the islands of Santorini and Amorgos, and the two volcanoes in the area. They say it’s unclear if the dozens of quakes each day — ranging from magnitude 3 to roughly 5 or just above — are a precursor to a significantly larger, main earthquake.
Overall, about 12,000 earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 1 have been registered since Jan. 26.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A snowstorm blew into the mid-Atlantic states Tuesday, causing dozens of accidents on icy roads, prompting school closures and stoking worries about possible power outages.
The heaviest snowfall, up to 10 inches, was expected in parts of Virginia and West Virginia. Ice accumulations could range from a glaze in Kentucky and West Virginia to a half-inch in some higher elevations of West Virginia and the Roanoke Valley of southwestern Virginia, the National Weather Service said. Power outages and tree damage were likely in places with heavy ice buildups.
“Did you think winter was over? Think again!” the weather service’s office in Blacksburg, VA, said in a post on the social platform X.
Appalachian Power, which serves 1 million customers in West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, said it requested 700 additional workers from neighboring utilities to assist with problems.
Winter storm warnings extended from Kentucky to southern New Jersey, and the snow-and-ice mix was expected to become all rain by this afternoon as temperatures climb.
Meanwhile a separate storm system was expected to dump heavy snow on an area stretching from Kansas to the Great Lakes starting Tuesday night, the weather service said.
The Kansas Legislature canceled meetings for today because of the weather.
In Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency and schools and government offices were closed Tuesday, state police reported dozens of accidents, including four injuries.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Emergency teams in China’s southwestern Sichuan province raced against time Sunday to locate 28 people after a landslide triggered by rains killed one person and buried homes.
Nearly 1,000 personnel were deployed following the landslide in the village of Jinping in Junlian county on Saturday. Some officers navigated through the remains of collapsed buildings, using drones and life-detection radars to locate any signs of life with the help of locals who were familiar with the area, state broadcaster CCTV said.
Two injured people were rescued and about 360 others evacuated after 10 houses and a manufacturing building were buried, CCTV reported.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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CONCORD, NH — New Englanders stocked up on both Super Bowl snacks and staples such as bread and milk over the weekend ahead of a fast-moving storm that dropped up to a foot of light, fluffy snow.
The parking lot was packed and the checkout lines were long at a Market Basket grocery store in Epping, NH, on Saturday, WMUR-TV reported. None of the shoppers seemed to panic about the storm, which cleared out by Sunday morning well ahead of kickoff time.
Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service, said the storm moved from the Great Lakes into the Northeast, with accumulated totals of 6 to 12 inches in upstate New York and New England and 3-5 inches around Boston and New York City.
While northern areas enjoyed the powder, the snowfall in New York City was wet and dense, clogging storm drains and creating ponds of water at sidewalk intersections in Northern Manhattan.
Airports in Boston and New York saw increased flight delays and cancellations Sunday.
Earlier Saturday, heavy snow fell in sections of northern and central Wisconsin, with the community of Medford reporting 13 inches on Saturday. Some places in northern Michigan got more than a half a foot on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
The next storm is also expected to move quickly, Oravec said. It is forecast to form across the plains on Tuesday and push eastward, bringing a swath of snow to areas south of the states hit this weekend.
“We expect the potential for heavy snow all the way from areas of Kansas, eastward into the upper Ohio Valley, central Appalachians and into the mid-Atlantic,” he said.
Meanwhile, the weather service issued freeze warnings for parts of south central California and the San Francisco area on Sunday, cautioning that below-freezing temperatures could kill crops, damage unprotected outdoor plumbing and put vulnerable populations at risk of hypothermia.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Two tornadoes moved through eastern Tennessee, leaving a mother and daughter dead and injuring three other people, officials said Friday.
A mother and daughter from the same household were killed when the storm passed through the sparsely populated communities of Deer Lodge and Sunbright in Morgan County on Thursday night, according to a social media post by the county emergency management agency.
Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers were on-site Friday morning helping to secure structures that were damaged or destroyed, Capt. Stacey Heatherly said in an email. Officials didn’t believe anyone was still missing, Heatherly said.
Preliminary storm surveys released midday Friday determined that two tornadoes hit the region on Thursday, the National Weather Service office in Morristown said. The tornado in Deer Lodge in Morgan County had maximum winds of 135 mph and was rated as an EF2, which is considered “significant” on the Enhanced Fujita scale. The tornado in Thorn Hill in Grainger County had maximum winds of 115 mph and received an EF1 rating.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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SAN FRANCISCO — Back-to-back atmospheric rivers have dumped buckets of rain across Northern California, filling its rivers to the brim and beyond. The Russian River spilled over its banks in Sonoma County, and in the far reaches of the state, Lake Shasta, a key marker of the state’s overall water levels, has nearly filled up.
And just east of Napa Valley, a rare not-fully-natural phenomenon was observed for the first time since 2019: Water began gushing, furiously, through a spillway in Lake Berryessa. The eye-catching event has happened only three other times in the past 20 years, and it has drawn curiosity seekers to the man-made reservoir, 70 miles northeast of San Francisco.
“People were taking pictures and videos and just standing in awe,” said Peter Kilkus, editor of the Lake Berryessa News, who was there Wednesday morning with about two dozen other people. The 72-foot-wide spillway, called the Glory Hole by locals because its shape mimics the flower, is a unique funnel-shaped cement pipe that sits within the reservoir.
The mechanism is a type of drainage system with water pouring down the pipe and into Putah Creek on the other side of Monticello Dam. The spillway is among a few with that shape in the country; there’s also a smaller one at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area near Shasta, and it spilled over this week, too.
Chris Lee, general manager of the Solano County Water Agency, also made the trip to take a look.
“It’s mesmerizing to watch,” he said. “It’s not something you can see in very many places in the world.” Lee said the reservoir sits in a canyon that’s too narrow to accommodate a more typical design with a dam equipped with a spillway. The spillway functions like the outflow at the top of a bathtub. When the water gets too high, it pours into the drain to prevent the tub from overflowing.
The water doesn’t get too high all that often. In recent history, the spillway was activated in 2019, 2017 and 2006. Last year, the lake level was about a quarter of an inch from the hole spilling over — “as close to going without going,” said Jay Cuetara, the supervising water resources engineer for the Solano County Water Agency.
Cuetara said that the combination of the past two wet winters and the recent deluge of rain finally pushed the reservoir to the point of spilling over. “We started the summer with a topped-off lake, and then this winter we had a lot of these storms that produced a lot of runoff. That did it,” he said.
Lake Berryessa was created in 1958 after the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built Monticello Dam and harnessed the waters of Putah Creek. The reservoir is in Napa County but supplies waters to residents, businesses and farmers in neighboring Solano County.
The lake is also a popular spot for recreation, and boaters zip across the waters in summer, but the spillway may be the lake’s best-known feature. People flocked to the area six years ago when the water last spilled, too. Cuetara gets the attraction.
“There’s really nothing like it,” he said. “It’s a very odd-looking spillway that just disappears into the void. You almost have to see it.” For those who do want to see it, Cuetara said he expects the spillway to continue to be active through the weekend and likely for another week or two.
(Amy Graff, NEW YORK TIMES)
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Even as much of the United States shivered under frigid conditions last month, the planet as a whole had its warmest January on record, scientists said Thursday.
The warmth came as something of a surprise to climate researchers. It occurred during La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which tend to lower the globe’s average temperature, at least temporarily.
Earth’s surface has now been so warm for so much of the past two years that scientists are examining whether something else in the planet’s chemistry might have changed, something that is boosting temperatures beyond what carbon emissions alone can explain.
Those emissions, the byproduct of burning coal, gas and oil, remain the main driver of global warming, which reached record levels in both 2023 and 2024. It’s because of La Niña that scientists expected this year to be slightly cooler than the past two years, both of which experienced the opposite pattern, El Niño.
According to Copernicus, the European Union climate monitoring agency, last month was much balmier than usual in northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia, as well as parts of Australia and Antarctica.
Abnormally high temperatures above the Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea helped shrink Arctic sea ice to a record low for January, Copernicus said.
January 2025 globally was 0.16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than January 2024, the previous hottest January, and was 3.15°F warmer than it was before industrial times, Copernicus calculated.
It was the 18th month of the last 19 that the world hit or passed the internationally agreed upon warming limit of 2.7°F above pre-industrial times.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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Storms spawned at least one brief tornado, sent creeks over their banks and caused flash flooding Thursday in portions of West Virginia and Kentucky, while a wintry mix coated trees and roads in ice and even dropped “thunder ice” in several states.
Residents and storm spotters in portions of Indiana, southern Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania reported the unusual mix of freezing rain accompanied by flashes of lightning in the unstable air.
“You ever seen that?” Brian Heffner of Spencerville, Ohio, said in a video he posted on Facebook. “I’ve never seen lightning and heard thunder during an ice storm. It’s cool.”
A long line of thunderstorms kept residents awake overnight with hours of heavy rains, flooding neighborhoods, triggering mudslides and rockslides, and causing accidents where water ponded on some interstate highways. Schools in numerous counties delayed classes or closed Thursday. Multiple drivers had to be rescued after getting stranded in the floodwaters, authorities in West Virginia said. And the rescues weren’t limited to humans.
The Kanawha-Charleston Humane Association asked the community to adopt or foster 15 dogs after a portion of its shelter began flooding. Several inches of rain in Charleston prompted county officials to activate an emergency operations center. In Huntington, along the Ohio River, residents of some areas were told to remain in their homes for several hours during flooding before the advisory was lifted Thursday afternoon.
In south-central Kentucky, the National Weather Service confirmed a short-lived EF1 tornado with winds of up to 95 mph tore apart some roofs and scattered debris in Hart County, about an hour south of Louisville. No injuries were immediately reported.
The storm coated trees and roads in ice in several mid-Atlantic states before warmer temperatures moved in midday Thursday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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SACRAMENTO — As Los Angeles reels from deadly January wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an order Thursday directing the state to advance long-delayed regulations requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to clear combustible materials around their homes.
Newsom ordered the state to publish draft regulation next month, with a deadline to adopt those rules by the end of the year. The requirements were passed by lawmakers in 2020 and originally set to take effect by Jan. 1, 2023. Newsom signed the order after he returned from Washington to advocate for disaster aid.
The rule requires homeowners to clear materials like dead plants and wooden furniture within 5 feet of their homes in fire-prone areas.
As multiple fires roared through L.A. neighborhoods in January, the regulations still weren’t written, and the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection told The Associated Press last month it had no firm timeline for completing them. State officials said in a November meeting that the draft language likely won’t be considered by the board until late this year, though the state has already encouraged homeowners to take up the practice of clearing items around their houses on its website.
In response to questions from the AP last month, lawmakers who sponsored the original legislation said they were frustrated by the delay. Experts said it is likely the stringent requirements could have saved some homes from the Palisades fire, which became the most destructive fire in Los Angeles city history.
Most of the neighborhoods ravaged by the Palisades fire are in areas that must follow state requirements to keep the immediate surroundings of their homes free of combustible materials and would be subject to the new rules because they are deemed at highest fire risk by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The fire, driven by hurricane-force winds that spread embers by air, destroyed at least 5,000 structures across areas including Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga Canyon.
Under the latest proposal, existing homes would have three years to comply with the regulations, so it is not clear how many homes would have been saved. But clearing the immediate area around homes likely would have made some difference, several experts said.
“These steps will spur proactive actions to defend the most vulnerable homes and eliminate combustible material within five feet of homes to reduce the risk of a home igniting in an ember-driven fire,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said. His agency oversees the board that is responsible for writing the regulations.
The executive order also directs Cal Fire to add about 1.4 million acres, or nearly 2,200 square miles, of land onto the map of fire-prone areas, which will subject homeowners in those areas to the fire mitigation rules. Some cities and homeowners are already taking on the practice voluntarily.
“To meet the needs of increasingly extreme weather, where decades-old buildings weren’t planned and designed for today’s realities, these proposals are part of a bigger state strategy to build wildfire and forest resilience from forest management, to huge investments in firefighting personnel and equipment, community hardening, and adopting state-of-the-art response technologies,” Newsom said in a statement.
State officials told the AP last month that Newsom has proposed to spend $25 million to ensure homeowners follow the rules and other defensible-space requirements. The majority of neighborhoods that burned in the Eaton fire, including Altadena and parts of Pasadena, are not on the state’s fire-prone map, so this requirement doesn’t apply to them.
Roy Wright, CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety that supported the 2020 law, said he hasn’t seen the details of the executive order but was optimistic about the Thursday announcement after years of delay. “What we’re seeing here is a very clear priority from the governor that this needs to move forward,” Wright said. “The administration is leaning in and says, ‘Let’s get this done. The people in California need this.’”
California already enforces some of the most stringent defensible-space laws in the West, which require homeowners in fire-prone places to keep the area immediately around their homes free of landscaping and other materials that could catch fire.
The state began requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to clear flammable materials within 30 feet of their houses in the 1960s and then expanded the rules to include areas within 100 feet of structures in 2006.
The latest measure creates a new “ember-resistant” zone, dubbed “zone zero,” that bars things like brush, wooden fencing, furniture, sheds and mulch within 5 feet of homes.
The idea is to clear all materials that could catch fire from flying embers carried by winds and spread to the structure. State officials and researchers said embers are responsible for 90% of structures destroyed by wildfire.
The zone-zero law passed with bipartisan support after California experienced record-breaking fires in 2017 and 2018, including a fire that wiped out the town of Paradise, destroying more than 17,000 structures and killing 85 people.
(Tran Nguyen, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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SAN DIEGO — Fire-Rescue officials confirmed Monday that three fires that had prompted several hundred people to flee their homes during Santa Ana conditions late last month originated in homeless encampments.
And San Diego police said Monday they believe one of those fires, the Center fire in Rancho Bernardo on Jan. 22, was started by a 66-year-old man. No suspects have been identified in the other two fires — one near Fashion Valley mall and the other near UC San Diego.
On the day of the Center fire, authorities said, one person had been taken to a hospital, but they did not provide further information. On Monday, San Diego police said they have requested that the 66-year-old be charged with starting an unlawful/reckless fire, but said he had not been booked into jail due to his injuries. Investigators have submitted his case to the District Attorney’s Office for review.
Over just a few days in late January, high winds, low humidity and dry brush fueled several fires around the region. Crews were able to keep most relatively small, although a fire in Bonsall grew to 85 acres and a fire on Otay Mountain exploded to more than 6,600 acres.
The three worrisome fires in San Diego started in well-populated neighborhoods and carried the potential to quickly spread. The Friars fire damaged an apartment as it swept across 7 acres along the hillsides north of Friars Road west of state Route 163 in the early afternoon Jan. 21.
The Center fire happened the following day, about 9 a.m. along Camino del Norte just west of Interstate 15 in Rancho Bernardo. It prompted evacuations in homes and a day care center. Officials initially feared it would grow to 100 acres, but crews boxed it in at 3 acres.
Then Jan. 23, the Gilman fire erupted near UC San Diego in La Jolla, prompting evacuations just south of campus. Fast-working crews kept it to 2 acres.
Authorities made arrests in other, much smaller fires during the stretch of particularly high fire danger, including a 31-year-old woman suspected of starting a small fire in the area of San Diego Mission Road in Mission Valley. Also, a man was arrested on suspicion of setting trash on fire near a tree in City Heights.
(Teri Figueroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Authorities deployed emergency rescue crews to Greece’s volcanic island of Santorini on Monday as hundreds of people scrambled to leave after a spike in seismic activity raised concerns about a potentially powerful earthquake. Schools on four islands were also to shutter through Friday.
Precautions were also ordered on several nearby Aegean Sea islands — all popular summer vacation destinations — after more than 200 undersea earthquakes were recorded in the area over the past three days.
“We have a very intense geological phenomenon to handle,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said from Brussels, where he was attending a European meeting. “I want to ask our islanders first and foremost to remain calm, to listen to the instructions of the Civil Protection (authority).”
Mobile phones on the island blared with alert warnings about the potential for rockslides, while several earthquakes caused loud rumbles. Authorities banned access to some seaside areas, including the island’s old port, that are in close proximity to cliffs.
“These measures are precautionary, and authorities will remain vigilant,” Civil Protection Minister Vasilis Kikilias said.
While Greek experts say the quakes, which have reached magnitude 4.9 are not linked to Santorini’s volcano, they acknowledge that the pattern of seismic activity is cause for concern.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The firefighter pulled the black hose down a hill. “Good?” she called out. “All the way down,” a voice responded. Brea Kirklen kept walking. Below her were the remnants of a homeless encampment in a small canyon by San Diego’s Valencia Park neighborhood.
While the county had recently gotten some rain, the sun was again out and baking the foliage on Tuesday afternoon. Kirklen stopped a few feet from the bottom, aimed the hose’s nozzle upward and squeezed a trigger.
The clear liquid that shot out toward leaves and debris alike was a citrus-based fire retardant called Citrotech that leaders hope will limit the size of any future blazes, including those started by people living outside. Officials began spraying brush along evacuation routes last year and added probable encampment spots to the list in January, all of which should now be less likely to ignite for the next several months.
This approach to fire prevention is new for both San Diego and the nation: The company making Citrotech, Mighty Fire Breaker, only launched a few years ago and is in the early stages of selling cities on the spray, according to records filed with the federal government. “I’ve never seen anything else like it,” said Tony Tosca, a deputy chief at the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
A central part of the pitch is that, in contrast to many cancer-linked chemicals that firefighters have long relied on, Citrotech won’t kill you. It shouldn’t even bother the plants. The company on its website touts the use of “environmentally benign chemicals” that are “safe to use around our homes, schools, pets and children.”
In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the company an award for using safer ingredients. One caveat: Mighty Fire Breaker notes online that the award is not the same thing as an endorsement, nor did the EPA conduct its own tests of the spray. The agency instead relied on the company for “information on the product’s composition, ingredients, and attributes.”
The San Diego Union-Tribune asked the organization for a list of ingredients and information about its safety tests. Steve Conboy, founder and president of Mighty Fire Breaker California, responded in an email that the spray is made with water and “food grade constituents” pulled from the EPA’s “Safer Chemical Ingredients List.” He sent a link to the agency’s directory of safe chemicals.
Regarding safety checks, Conboy said they’d run 90 aquatic tests at a lab in Ventura and that the U.S. Forest Service had spent months confirming the substance didn’t hurt trout or mammals. (The forest service did not immediately return requests for comment.)
San Diego’s fire department appears to be the only one nationwide that’s widely employing the spray. Conboy was not aware of others. San Diego used a nearly $367,000 state grant to buy about 4,000 gallons of Citrotech. Officials estimate that around half has so far been sprayed on more than 40 fire-prone acres, including at least six places where homeless people have been known to camp. (Firefighters wait until after city crews clear the area.) The grant also helped pay for equipment to distribute Citrotech, including a Ford F250 pickup.
All of the sprayed sites can be tracked online through a publicly available map. Now comes the monitoring. The fire department didn’t create a full environmental impact report before work began — city officials decided the pilot program was limited enough to be exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act — but staffers are now watching to see if the spray has any effect on local plants and animals.
Firefighters will additionally track whether fewer fires begin in areas covered by Citrotech, or if future blazes stop spreading once they reach a treated area. Hopes are high. One video from the company shows a pile of sprayed wood chips refusing to ignite despite being surrounded by roaring flames, and the product’s fans include Jeff Bowman, a former San Diego fire chief who’s now listed as a member of Mighty Fire Breaker’s advisory board. If results are good, leaders are open to buying more.
Officials say dozens of recent blazes likely originated in encampments, and police officers are now supposed to report any fire-starting material they find outside so supervisors can alert both cleanup crews and firefighters, who should then come by to spray the site, according to acting Lt. Brent DeVore.
Kirklen, the San Diego firefighter, moved the nozzle back and forth over the canyon on Tuesday. The air smelled faintly of hand sanitizer, although some observers said they couldn’t detect any odor. The area had certainly burned before: A short walk away were more than three dozen palm trees with blackened trunks. After a minute or so, Kirklen switched off the spray, trudged back up the hill
and shot out some more. The whole operation took maybe 15 minutes. An estimated 10 gallons had been used.
Sitting in a tent across the street was 33-year-old Geryl Andrews. Andrews had been living around the canyon for about a month, following the loss of a job and some “poor decision making,” he said.
Andrews had started fires at night, but nothing that burned out of control, he added.
The name Citrotech was new to him. He hadn’t known that the spray was now on nearby trees, and a reporter asked whether Andrews was still comfortable camping in the area.
“I do want more information,” he said.
(Blake Nelson, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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It could take weeks or months for the public to know what caused the fire that last month charred 6,600 acres in the Otay Mountain Wilderness as local Cal Fire officials continue their investigation.
But it’s not just the Border 2 fire — the public still doesn’t have answers as to what has caused dozens of other wildfires in San Diego County from the past few years.
The vast majority, about 95%, of all wildland fires are caused by humans, said Cal Fire San Diego spokesperson Robert Johnson. But often the exact causes remain unknown — or are reported under a catch-all “other” category by Cal Fire.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reviewed Cal Fire’s incident data from 2019 through 2023, the most recent years for which comprehensive wildfire cause data is available. For nearly half of all fires in Cal Fire San Diego’s jurisdiction, no specific cause is reported to the public. A quarter of those wildfires in San Diego County are recorded as having an “undetermined” cause. Another 20% of fires are categorized as “other,” meaning they don’t fall under one of Cal Fire’s categories of causes.
When asked, Cal Fire San Diego could not elaborate as to what “other” fire causes could include. In previous years, some fires classified under this category statewide have included ones started by fireworks, shooting and spontaneous combustion.
Wildfire investigations are often difficult to complete and take significant amounts of time and resources, Johnson said. Cal Fire investigators study burn patterns to find the path traveled by the fire and the spot where the fire originated.
Once they find it and determine the cause, they may decide they need to investigate further, by conducting interviews and collecting data and other evidence. That evidence could include matches, small pieces of metal, leftovers of fireworks, cigarettes, lighters or catalytic converter pieces.
If evidence is missing, or has been damaged or destroyed, that makes it harder for investigators to find the cause.
The fire’s size, location and weather conditions all can also affect how long it takes to investigate. “Investigations consider all possible causes of a fire until, based on their findings, they can determine the causes that are not a possibility or may be more probable than others,” Johnson said in an email.
Among all the fires in Cal Fire’s jurisdiction, the share of wildfires whose cause goes undetermined is significantly higher in San Diego County than elsewhere in California. Statewide, only 15% of those wildfires in the five-year span from 2019 through 2023 had no cause determined, and 16% of fires were categorized as “other.”
The single most common known cause of wildfires in San Diego County from 2019 through 2023 was vehicles, which account for 12% of fires during that time period. That can include fires ignited by cars, buses, motorcycles, off-road recreational vehicles, motor homes and trailers; fires could, for example, spark from a vehicle’s exhaust or from chains dragging on the ground.
About 11% of local fires have been caused by mechanical or electrical equipment, which could include sparks from welding, cutting or exhaust systems. That category doesn’t include electric utility equipment, such as power lines.
Arson accounts for 9% of local wildfires. It’s closely followed by open burning of trash, brush and the like, which accounts for 8% and could include, for example, prescribed burns that went awry or burning of yard debris.
About 5% of local wildfires have been caused by electric power generation, transmission or distribution equipment — lower than the statewide average of 8%.
San Diego Gas & Electric, the county’s electric utility company, has said it has not had a utility-related wildfire in 15 years — by which it says it means its equipment has not sparked a large wildfire of more than about 200 acres.
The company has invested billions in fire prevention efforts, which include a network of weather stations and proactive power shut-offs during very dry and windy conditions.
SDG&E officials say sometimes its equipment contributes to a fire ignition because of incidents outside its control, such as when mylar balloons or birds interfere with the equipment or when vehicles run into it. And sometimes fires can spark because of a utility equipment failure.
Relatively few wildfires in San Diego County in recent years have been started by campfires or ceremonial fires (fewer than 3%), lightning strikes (fewer than 4%) or smoking (fewer than 1%).
(Kristen Taketa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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A fire in the hills near the U.S.-Mexico border that burned for nearly a week and charred more than 6,600 acres was declared 100% contained Thursday, fire officials said. All remaining evacuation orders and warnings for the Border 2 fire area were lifted and all roads were reopened Thursday, the county Sheriff’s Office said.
The blaze that roared to life, forcing hundreds of residents in South County and East County communities to evacuate and canceling school in several districts, didn’t cause damage to any homes, fire officials said.
Weather played a starring role in the fire’s weeklong run. The fire ignited last Thursday afternoon during a red-flag warning. Gusty Santa Ana winds spread it quickly in steep, rocky terrain amid low humidity and pushed it toward populated areas late on the first night. By early Friday, the fire had spread in multiple directions with crews reporting “extreme fire behavior” amid windy conditions, a Cal Fire spokesperson said at the time.
Helicopter crews worked night and day dropping water on flames for most of the week, and for several days, air tankers were sent to make retardant drops on fire in the remote, steep terrain.
By Monday night, Cal Fire air tankers had dropped 127,500 gallons of retardant while helicopters dumped more than 161,000 gallons of water.
“We were dealing with that remote area with the winds shifting on us, and when that wind shift happened it started blowing the fire downhill toward Otay Lake Road. That was one of the main contributors to that rapid fire growth,” Cal Fire Capt. Mike Cornette said of the fire’s first night.
A storm brought relief late on the third day, rain that tamped down flames and helped firefighters make good progress on establishing containment lines.
The rain — the first the region has seen for months — helped firefighters get a handle on the fire. “It did pretty much extinguish the fire, but the firefighters had to go out and verify that line and make sure the line was holding and there weren’t any more hot spots,” Cornette said.
Areas evacuated included the Otay Open Space Preserve, the Olympic Training Center and the Pio Pico Campground, some neighborhoods in Chula Vista and residents near Honey Springs Ranch and Dulzura.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation, with three fire investigators working to determine what or who sparked it. The fire was discovered shortly before 2 p.m. Jan. 23 along the Otay Mountain Truck Trail near Doghouse Junction. At its peak, there were more than 2,600 firefighters working the Border 2 fire, including crews from around California and beyond.
Cornette said Thursday the fire is now in “patrol status” meaning a few engines will be sent out for the next couple of days to ensure it doesn’t flare up.
(Karen Kucher, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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San Diego County wants to buy a second firefighting helicopter equipped for making water drops at night. It has nearly $4 million in hand but needs to find $14 million to pay for it.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted a unanimous 4-0 to pursue funding for the new helicopter, as well as buying four water tenders, which cost nearly $1 million each, and another $750,000 per tender a year to cover staffing costs. Finding money for the big-ticket items will be considered for the budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1.
The supervisors also want to take a hard look at brush management money and methods — from grants to goats — to clear hazardous vegetation and also get a better handle on the region’s fire preparedness. That includes learning more about water supply and hydrant systems, the approach behind public safety power shutoffs and hearing from the insurance industry about the issues homeowners face.
The whole idea is to stop fires as fast as possible and prevent the out-of- control spread that led to the destruction seen in Los Angeles County earlier this month, and in San Diego in prior firestorms. “If we can spend millions to save billions, I think that’s a better effort,” said Supervisor Jim Desmond, who brought the wildfire preparedness plan to the board.
The decision to pursue buying a second chopper, more water tenders and enhanced brush management efforts followed a presentation at the board meeting from regional public safety officials about the county’s fire preparedness. In 2008, following two devastating and deadly firestorms, officials created the County Fire Protection District to improve and coordinate fire service in incorporated areas. Staffing is provided by Cal Fire.
Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire Chief Tony Mecham told the board Tuesday it is one of the largest fire protection districts in the state. He also said that, after the Los Angeles County fires, he is “expecting additional investments by the state to bolster wildland fire protection.”
Fires are top of mind in San Diego County. Last week, fueled by high winds, low humidity and dry brush, the region was beset with several brush fires that sent thousands scrambling to evacuate. The fires drew a robust regional response and crews were able to keep most relatively small, although a Bonsall fire scorched about 85 acres and a fire on Otay Mountain exploded to more than 6,000 acres. Still, crews kept that fire in remote areas and out of the Chula Vista neighborhoods it threatened.
The county is looking at buying a new twin-engine helicopter capable of flying at night, which would cost about $18 million. The funding has a start: a $3.75 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service.
The county already has a new $15.7 million night-flying helicopter, a twin-engine aircraft it bought in 2023. The county owns other helicopters that can be used for firefighting in the day, but the twin-engine is necessary to meet the safety requirements for nighttime water drops.
But the board learned Tuesday that the new chopper still hasn’t been deployed on a fire for night-time airdrops. Mechanical issues shoulder some blame — the transmission of the new helicopter had to be pulled out, sent back to the maker and rebuilt, which took up to three months, sheriff’s Capt. Ted Greenawald said. There also was a problem with the tail rotor gearbox that needed to be shipped back to the factory. In all, Greenawald said, it was down for maintenance for about eight months. “Anytime you have a brand new aircraft, there is a break-in period, especially a newer model of an aircraft,” he said.
The county-owned helicopters are placed with the sheriff’s office and staffed by sheriff’s pilots, with a Cal Fire crew on board. It takes months of intense training so the sheriff’s pilots can learn to fly nighttime water-dropping missions. “We actually planned on having our first water drops coming into last fire season,” Greenawald said of night-flying missions. “But because of the maintenance issue, we didn’t.”
As for buying additional water tenders, Mecham noted that most of the district depends on groundwater, making water tenders necessary.
The presentation highlighted the Genasys Protect app the region started using last year to coordinate evacuations. It allows officials to make more surgical decisions about which areas to evacuate and also to get that information immediately out to anyone who has the app.
Mecham also highlighted defensive measures employed in the region, including a roadside brush maintenance program that clears up to 20 feet along key evacuation roads. He said more than 800 miles of county and state roads have been treated since 2022. He also pointed to a $24 million program designed to help some backcountry residents harden their homes against wildfires.
As for the next steps, the board wants to hear from and work with several regional agencies, including San Diego County Water Authority, to assess several areas, such as water supply, reservoir management and regional communications.
(Teri Figueroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Southern California Edison on Monday reported a fault on a power line connected miles away from ones located near the origin of the Eaton fire, the deadly blaze that ignited outside of Los Angeles on Jan. 7 and killed at least 17 people.
Edison says there is still no evidence that its equipment caused the blaze, which has destroyed more than 9,000 structures in and around the community of Altadena. The official investigation into the fire’s cause has not been completed.
The utility’s new filing with the California Public Utilities Commission comes the day of a court hearing in a case filed by attorneys for a homeowner whose property was destroyed in the fire. The attorneys allege the utility’s equipment sparked the fire, pointing to video taken during the fire’s early minutes that shows large flames beneath electrical towers.
The attorneys have introduced new video they say shows arcing and electrical sparking on a transmission tower in Eaton Canyon just before the wind whipped the fire into a fast-moving blaze. They say the video came from security footage of a gas station.
In its new filing, Edison reported that the fault occurred at 6:11 p.m. While those lines that experienced the fault do not traverse Eaton Canyon, they are connected to the system, which did experience a surge, the utility reported.
“Preliminary analysis shows that, because SCE’s transmission system is networked, the fault on this geographically distant line caused a momentary and expected increase in current on SCE’s transmission system, including on the four energized lines” in the fire area, SCE’s filing said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The first significant storm of the season brought snow and downpours to Southern California that doused wildfires and caused ash and mud to flow across streets in the Los Angeles area Monday.
More than an inch of rain fell in many areas, loosening Los Angeles hillsides burned bare by the recent blaze near the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where crews cleared inundated roadways including Pacific Coast Highway.
In neighboring Malibu, four schools were closed Monday “due to dangerous road conditions” and challenges accessing schools, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District said in a statement.
Clouds were clearing, but flood watches from lingering pockets of rain were still in effect for fire-scarred areas of the Palisades, Altadena and Castaic Lake. “All these fresh burns are very susceptible to rapid runoff,” said Joe Sirard, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s office for Los Angeles.
North of Los Angeles, snowy conditions late Sunday shut down the mountainous Tejon Pass section of Interstate 5, a key north-south artery. It reopened Monday afternoon.
Mountains across San Bernardino and Riverside counties were under a winter storm warning Monday and were forecast to get about a foot of snow from the slow-moving storm. Chains were required for some vehicles heading to ski resorts in the Big Bear Lake area because of icy roads.
The rain began Saturday after months of dry and often gusty weather that created dangerous fire conditions. Los Angeles County crews spent much of last week removing vegetation, shoring up slopes and reinforcing roads in areas devastated by the Palisades and Eaton fires, which reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble and ash after breaking out during powerful winds Jan. 7.
(Christopher Weber, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Rain that arrived late Saturday in San Diego County brought with it cautious optimism as officials removed most evacuation orders and warnings in the Border 2 fire area. Cal Fire officials said the Border 2 fire, which began Wednesday, was 6,225 acres in size and 40% contained as of Sunday evening.
Officials credited the wet weather — a little less than half an inch of rain fell in the area — with helping firefighters make progress on containment.
Rainy conditions are expected to persist through Tuesday but are not expected to pose a risk for debris flows although officials noted it did create tougher work conditions for fire personnel.
“So far it’s come in a pretty slow fashion,” Mark Loeffelbein, the incident meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said in a Cal Fire video update.
Evacuation orders for the Dulzura and Honey Springs communities to the east of the fire area and orders for an area on the north side of the fire were lifted Sunday, allowing those areas to be repopulated, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office said. Officials also rescinded most other evacuation warnings and advisories. Evacuation orders remained in place for the wilderness area.
“Firefighters have made great progress slowing the spread of the fire,” Cal Fire officials wrote on social media. The agency said more than 2,400 firefighters and other personnel are now assigned to the blaze as they labor to get containment lines dug out around it.
During a 7 a.m. briefing, Loeffelbein said about one-tenth of an inch of rain fell overnight Saturday. While the precipitation was likely to aid fire crews, the weather also brought concerns over lightning and flooding. Loeffelbein said there was a roughly 15% chance of thunderstorms, which could produce lightning — a potential fire-starter. The meteorologist also said brief pockets of heavy rain “could be a little bit of a problem over a fresh burn scar,” where the water could produce flooding or mudslides.
Jonathan Pangburn, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire, said during the briefing that the rain would halt the danger of “fine fuels” — such as grass, twigs and leaves — carrying the fire. But he said the fire could still move, albeit slowly, in the shrubs and brush that are still critically dry.
“My main message for today is pay attention to where you are, make sure your vehicles are in a safe place, and make sure you’re ready in the event of any lightning,” Pangburn said.
Cal Fire officials said their objective was to keep the fire north of the U.S.- Mexico border, east of Wueste Road, south of Proctor Valley Road and west of state Route 94.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation, officials said.
(Alex Riggins & Christian Martinez, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Ireland called in help from England and France as repair crews worked to restore power to hundreds of thousands of people after the most disruptive storm for years. Even as the cleanup continued, more wet and windy weather hit the U.K., Ireland and France on Sunday.
More than 1 million people in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland were left without electricity after Storm Éowyn roared through on Friday.
In Ireland, which suffered the heaviest damage, the wind snapped telephone poles, ripped apart a Dublin ice rink and even toppled a giant wind turbine. A wind gust of 114 mph was recorded on the west coast, breaking a record set in 1945.
At least two people died during the storm.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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LOS ANGELES — Rain fell on parts of Southern California on Sunday and the scattered showers were expected to continue overnight, boosting the risk of toxic ash runoff in areas scorched by Los Angeles-area wildfires.
Flood watches were in effect through 4 p.m. today for burn areas from recent fires that broke out around the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, Altadena and Castaic Lake, said Joe Sirard, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
“All these fresh burns are very susceptible to rapid runoff,” Sirard said, warning of even small amounts of rain in a few minutes’ time. “What that means is we have a fairly high danger of mud and debris flows once we get above those thresholds.”
A flood advisory was issued for parts of Ventura County through Sunday evening, and forecasters expected snow to fall in the mountains.
One benefit that could come from the rain: It may help firefighters who are reining in multiple wildfires after weeks of windy and dry weather.
Los Angeles County crews spent much of the past week removing vegetation, shoring up slopes and reinforcing roads in devastated areas of the Palisades and Eaton fires, which reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble and ash after breaking out during powerful winds on Jan. 7.
The Palisades fire, the largest of the blazes that destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least 11 people, reached 90% containment Sunday. The Eaton fire, which broke out near Altadena and has killed at least 17 people, was 98% contained. The Hughes fire, which ignited last week north of Los Angeles and caused evacuation orders or warnings for more than 50,000 people, was 95% contained as of Sunday evening.
Most of the region was forecast to get about an inch of precipitation over several days, but the National Weather Service warned of a risk of localized cloudbursts causing mud and debris to flow down hills. “So the problem would be if one of those showers happens to park itself over a burn area,” weather service meteorologist Carol Smith said on social media. “That could be enough to create debris flows.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued an executive order last week to expedite cleanup efforts and mitigate the environmental impacts of fire-related pollutants. Los Angeles County supervisors also approved an emergency motion to install flood-control infrastructure and expedite and remove sediment in fire-impacted areas.
Fire crews filled sandbags for communities, while county workers installed barriers and cleared drainage pipes and basins.
Officials cautioned that ash in recent burn zones was a toxic mix of incinerated cars, electronics, batteries, building materials, paints, furniture and other household items. It contains pesticides, asbestos, plastics and lead. Residents were urged to wear protective gear while cleaning up.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Last January’s destructive floods highlighted the many problems that need fixing within San Diego’s flood prevention system, problems that the city’s stormwater department and residents alike have warned about for years.
But a year later, even after the hardest-hit flood channels were cleared, many of those infrastructure problems persist and continue to leave San Diego vulnerable to flooding risk, department officials say. The city’s stormwater facilities are still underfunded and outdated, and not all of them are being maintained.
While the stormwater department cleared 18 miles of stormwater channels last year in the flooding aftermath — the most it has cleared in one year in recent history — dozens of channel segments across the city still have not been maintained in at least 14 years, recent city records show.
And the city is still behind on fixing or updating several known deficiencies in other stormwater facilities, such as its levees and drain pipes. Following through with more of the needed repairs and upgrades will prove difficult.
The stormwater department doesn’t get nearly as much funding as it needs to properly update and maintain its facilities. Its unfunded infrastructure needs total more than $1.6 billion for the next four years.
Meanwhile, city leaders declined to try for a parcel tax measure in November’s election that, if passed, could have provided a sorely needed funding boost for the city’s stormwater system.
At the same time, San Diego is confronting a structural budget deficit of more than $250 million for each of the next five years, Mayor Todd Gloria said during his State of the City address earlier this month. He did not mention the flood in the speech.
San Diego officials say they have responded efficiently and effectively to the disaster, noting the 200-plus water rescues made on the day of the flood. The city quickly secured a disaster declaration, paving the way for federal relief. Officials also helped sign up thousands of victims for federal aid, opened two relief centers and waived permit fees to help applicants rebuild.
“A year ago, parts of San Diego were hit by an extraordinarily rare storm that devastated some of our communities, and many San Diegans are still living with its impacts every day,” Gloria said in a statement. “I am extremely proud of our first responders who saved lives that day,” he said.
But the city also succeeded in limiting its legal responsibility for flood damage suffered by business owners who applied for emergency response grants. The grant applications include language that releases San Diego from future legal damages. “The city of San Diego shall not be liable hereunder for any type of damages, whether direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, exemplary, reliance, punitive or special damages,” the grant application stated in part.
It was not immediately clear how many San Diego small-business owners agreed to the terms.
Meanwhile, the city is confronting dozens of lawsuits from more than 1,500 flood victims, the City Attorney’s Office told the City Council earlier this month. The cost of defending the flood-related litigation is likely to reach into the millions. Two weeks ago, the City Council agreed to spend some $6 million on outside law firms to fight complex litigation, including the lawsuits filed by flood victims.
Even worse, internal records show San Diego is badly underinsured, and may not have the cash it needs to resolve the slew of litigation. City records show San Diego had seven insurance policies in effect for the year ending June 30, 2024, capped at a combined $50 million. In legal complaints filed to date, plaintiffs’ lawyers have claimed damages of up to 10 times that amount.
‘Before you cause another flood’
The city says it cleared more than 66,000 tons of vegetation and sediment from its flood channels and other stormwater facilities last fiscal year. The stormwater department says it will continue to maintain the channels that were cleared last year following the flooding to ensure vegetation doesn’t grow back in them this year.
The flooding emergency cost the stormwater department $8.8 million for staff overtime and other expenses for channel clearing, city spokesperson Ramon Galindo said in an email. It also prompted more than 20 emergency stormwater infrastructure improvement projects totaling $73 million.
Even after that maintenance blitz, however, significant infrastructure deficiencies remain and are exacerbating flood risk, stormwater officials say.
More than 30 flood channel segments across the city still have not been maintained or cleared in at least 14 years, according to city documents — including channels in Point Loma, Mid-City, Balboa Park, Chollas View and San Ysidro.
Aside from flood channels, other parts of the city’s stormwater system are also in disrepair, per the stormwater department’s own performance metrics for the last fiscal year.
More than 86% of deficiencies in the city’s levees, such as excessive vegetation growth and burrow holes, have not been addressed. About 29% of flood channels are unable to carry stormwater as intended. And 15% of storm drain inlets were not inspected.
The city replaced less than a mile of drains made of corrugated metal pipe, considered an outdated and inferior material — the stormwater department says at least 5 miles should have been replaced that year. There are about 20 miles of corrugated metal pipe still in use in the city.
“Many of these (corrugated metal pipe) drains are beyond their useful life and need replacement,” Galindo said.
There were several days during the wet season early last year when stormwater pump stations were not fully functional. Many of the city’s 15 pump stations are more than 50 years old and need significant upgrades, Galindo said; the city has plans to upgrade two pump stations in Pacific Beach and Old Town using federal loan funding.
Residents have noticed the failures. According to the city’s Get It Done online portal where people can report infrastructure problems, residents have filed more than 3,200 stormwater-related complaints since the day of the floods. More than a quarter of those have yet to be marked by the city as resolved.
Many of the reports cite storm drains or flood channels that are clogged with trash, debris or vegetation. “The city of San Diego came out last week and cut down trees and brush but left it all in the channel behind the houses,” says one complaint filed last week by a resident of Valencia Park, just east of the Southcrest neighborhood that was badly damaged a year ago. “This is an area that was flooded last year due to clogged drains,” the report said. “The city will need to clear the debris they left in the channel before you cause another flood.” The Get It Done app lists the complaint response as “in process.”
A similar problem was reported earlier last week along Minerva Drive, upstream from the section of Chollas Creek that flooded last year. “Current dried brush is a fire hazard, blocked storm brow ditch drainage,” the report states. “Reported eight months ago, case closed when still unresolved today!!!!!” The response to that complaint also is listed as “in process.”
The city has many capital projects in the works to update its stormwater infrastructure, including four dozen projects to replace corrugated metal pipes, a dozen green infrastructure projects and the pump station upgrades. But most of the projects are still in the planning or design phase and won’t be completed for years.
Tackling a $1.6 billion backlog
Year after year, San Diego’s stormwater department is left far short of the funding it needs to maintain or upgrade its facilities properly. The department anticipates it will have $132.1 million in unfunded maintenance and operation costs for the next fiscal year, which include costs to clear flood channels.
In addition, early last year the city pegged its unfunded infrastructure capital project needs for the following five years at more than $1.6 billion — a figure the city calculates every year, and that has climbed every year since 2016. The latest five-year estimate is expected to be released early next month.
The stormwater department “has consistently shared the significant funding needs in public reports to the City Council over the past several years,” Galindo said. The problem of stormwater systems needing more funding isn’t unique to San Diego, he notes. It is a common theme across the country, where stormwater often must compete with other priorities in cities’ general funds for revenue.
San Diego collects a stormwater fee of 95 cents per single-family home and, for multifamily and commercial properties, less than 7 cents per 100 cubic feet of water used. But the fee, which hasn’t been raised since its inception in 1996, is so low that in recent years it hasn’t covered even 10% of the stormwater department’s operating budget.
After last January’s floods, city leaders discussed potentially putting a parcel tax to voters that would have raised $129 million a year for stormwater infrastructure. That tax would have paid only for capital projects, rather than regular maintenance such as channel clearing — but it would have helped the stormwater department begin to address its $1.6 billion backlog of unfunded infrastructure needs.
But city leaders declined to put a stormwater tax on the ballot amid concerns it wouldn’t pass. In California, special taxes like that one are particularly difficult to pass because they must win a two-thirds majority from voters, rather than the simple majority that general use taxes require.
Critics had also complained that the proposed tax was set too high, and at a rate higher than Los Angeles residents pay for a similar stormwater tax. The San Diego stormwater tax would have raised the median cost for a single-family household by $18.67 a month.
City leaders opted instead to go only for a general citywide one-cent sales tax increase to provide revenue for the entire city budget. That tax measure still failed at the polls.
Without sufficient local funding, the stormwater department has resorted to seeking public loans and grants to fund fractions of its true needs. The department’s biggest pot of funding for capital projects comes from a $733 million federal loan, for which the city has to match funds.
More recently, the city secured a $37 million state loan for storm drain upgrades and green infrastructure in South Mission Beach.
The city is waiting to hear back on its applications for another state loan that would pay for restoring Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, as well as two federal grants that would upgrade stormwater infrastructure in the Chollas Creek Watershed and two federal grants that would make improvements for its Jamacha Drainage Channel and Auburn Creek. “The City has been aggressively pursuing stormwater funding through all available sources,” Galindo wrote in an email.
(Kirsten Take & Jeff McDonald, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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A wildfire in the rugged hills near the U.S.-Mexico border exploded to several thousand acres Friday, charring land near Lower Otay Reservoir before east winds yielded to an onshore flow that may have helped push the fire east toward Dulzura.
Several people awoke Friday — some in the middle of the night — to evacuation orders throughout the Otay Wilderness Area, and evacuation warnings to neighborhoods just west of the reservoir. The blaze, named the Border 2 fire, also triggered school closures and smoke advisories in southern and eastern portions of the county. By the end of the day, communities east of the fire were ordered to evacuate.
Crews spent the week running from fire to fire in the region, as high winds from the east, low humidity and critically dry brush combined to create conditions favorable to flames. But a Pacific storm headed for San Diego County in waves starting late tonight could produce enough rain and snow to lower the threat of wildfires.
The Border 2 fire grew Friday to nearly 6,300 acres, the county’s biggest blaze of the week. Nearly 700 firefighters were assigned to the fire, and crews had contained only about a tenth of it as it continued growing.
“We are hoping for favorable conditions tonight, and that firefighters can continue to make good progress,” Cal Fire Capt. Robert Johnson said. The weather change could bring good news.
“Anytime we get increased humidity as well as precipitation, the fire activity tends to decrease,” Johnson said.
No one appears to have been injured, nor have any structures burned.
High winds overnight Thursday to Friday also led San Diego Gas & Electric to shut off electricity for as many as 20,000 customers countywide, most of whom were in rural and backcountry communities, to prevent power lines from falling over and sparking more fires. Everyone had power restored by the afternoon.
Evacuations
The evacuation area included the Otay Open Space Preserve, the Olympic Training Center and the Pio Pico Campground. Roy Carmichael, a 66-year-old who lives at the campground in an RV, said he first spotted an orange glow atop Otay Mountain on Thursday night. “We thought everything was going to be OK,” he said. “But the wind direction changed.” He fled the area around 2 a.m. and was one of dozens who parked Friday at the Regal Edwards Rancho San Diego movie theater, one of three designated spots for the displaced.
Among the group was Carmichael’s 80-year-old neighbor, Jerry Campbell. He hadn’t been able to hook up his trailer to an SUV in time, and the two men were worried that Campbell’s RV might be lost if the campsite burns. Roughly 600 people are under an evacuation order, and another roughly 6,800 are under an evacuation warning, according to county officials.
In addition to the theater, which has since closed, the second evacuation point is Southwestern College in Chula Vista at 900 Otay Lakes Road. Chula Vista police said the latter site was for residents living south and west of the lake, and few people were there when a reporter visited around noon.
Officials later closed the Southwestern College evacuation point and added a different location where evacuees would be able to sleep and eat: Cuyamaca College by 900 Rancho San Diego Parkway.
By late afternoon about 50 people had showed up. Most, if not all, came from the RV park. The Red Cross handed out food and water while the county’s animal services department arrived with crates and blankets. At that point, just one cat was in need of aid.
Closures
Plumes of smoke were visible from as far as Del Mar. The San Diego County Air Pollution Control District sent out an air quality advisory for southwestern, central and eastern San Diego County. The affected communities included El Cajon, Alpine, Pine Valley, Jamul and surrounding areas
Concerns about the quality of the air helped shutter a number of schools Friday, from Eastlake High to Arroyo Vista Charter. Eight institutions from the Chula Vista Elementary School District closed their doors. The same went for schools in the Dehesa, Mountain Empire Unified and Warner Unified districts, according to the San Diego County Office of Education.
Southwestern College moved to remote learning Friday.
“Air quality is what we’re mostly concerned about,” said Brian Melekian, who runs the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center, a facility facing an evacuation warning.
There are not currently any evacuations underway at prisons or jails. The sheriff’s department did suspend visits at three county jails in the Otay Mesa area and outdoor activities have been canceled at the Richard J. Donovan state prison. That complex is only a few miles southwest of the fire, but the blaze appears to be moving away from prisoners and officers.
The fire
Cal Fire first posted about the flare-up mid-afternoon Thursday, saying on social media that some brush had ignited along the Otay Mountain Truck Trail. Soon after, the Air Pollution Control District warned residents in the southwestern part of the county about smoke.
Johnson, the Cal Fire captain, said about 200 firefighters were initially deployed. That total more than tripled when the blaze spread out in multiple directions. Crews were seeing “some extreme fire behavior,” Johnson said shortly after 4 a.m.
Although the speed has since slowed, the captain remained concerned about the wind blowing embers to other parts of the county — and gusts picked back up late morning.
The region continues to suffer from a lack of rain, low humidity and fast- moving Santa Ana winds, setting the stage for small fires to quickly grow. The National Weather Service put San Diego valleys and mountains under a red- flag warning — meaning the conditions were perfect for a fire — until at least 10 a.m. Friday.
A crowd of police officers, firefighters and other officials watched planes and helicopters drop water on the blaze from county Fire Station 38, which serves as the local command center. The planes had to refill farther north in Ramona, but the helicopters could use the nearby reservoir.
Leaders hope its water will protect Chula Vista’s Otay Ranch neighborhood.
Cal Fire was using 10 helicopters as of Friday morning and Johnson said crews were “making good progress.” Firefighters from Northern California had luckily arrived in the San Diego area earlier in the week. One man from Sacramento said his team previously helped battle the Palisades fire in Los Angeles County.
Gusts from the east were at one point blowing at nearly 30 mph around Otay Mountain and the relative humidity was just 2%. Although a storm may be coming, rain isn’t likely to arrive until the weekend. Forecasters said the weather will cool today while scattered showers might reach the fire by Sunday.
Lin Green, another resident of the Pio Pico Campground, hadn’t been sure that she had enough gas in her RV to make it to the evacuation point. “I had paid all my bills and thought, ‘Well, I don’t really need gas until the 31st,’” she said. After seeing the order to leave, she thought about taking only a car and abandoning the RV. “But this is home,” she added, her RV safely parked near the theater. “We just couldn’t leave it.”
For a map with updated emergency evacuation information, visit emergencymap.sandiegocounty.gov/index.html.
(Teri Figueroa, Blake Nelson, Tammy Murga & Alex Riggins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Kelly Davis, Rob Nikolewski, Gary Robbins)
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LOS ANGELES, CA — President Donald Trump surveyed disaster zones in California and North Carolina on Friday and said he was considering “getting rid of” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, offering the latest sign of how he is weighing sweeping changes to the nation’s central organization for responding to disasters.
In fire-ravaged California, the state’s Democratic leaders pressed Trump for federal assistance that he’s threatened to hold up, some setting aside their past differences to shower him with praise. Trump, in turn, pressured local officials to waive permitting requirements so people can immediately rebuild, pledging that federal permits would be granted promptly.
Instead of having federal financial assistance flow through FEMA, the Republican president said Washington could provide money directly to the states. He made the comments while visiting North Carolina, which is still recovering months after Hurricane Helene, on the first trip of his second term.
“FEMA has been a very big disappointment,” the Republican president said. “It’s very bureaucratic. And it’s very slow.”
Trump was greeted in California by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Trump critic whom the president frequently disparages. The duo chatted amiably and gestured toward cooperation despite their bitter history.
“We’re going to need your support. We’re going to need your help,” Newsom told Trump. “You were there for us during COVID. I don’t forget that, and I have all the expectations we’ll be able to work together to get a speedy recovery.”
Newsom has praised Trump before when looking for help from the federal government. In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, he called Trump “thoughtful” and “collaborative.”
Trump flew over several devastated neighborhoods in Marine One, the presidential helicopter, before landing in Pacific Palisades, a hard-hit community that’s home to some of Southern California’s rich and famous. Accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, he walked a street where all the houses have burned, chatting with residents and police officers.
It takes seeing the damage firsthand to grasp its enormity, Trump said after. The fires, which continue to burn, could end up being the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
“It is devastation. It really is an incineration,” Trump said.
Trump’s brief but friendly interaction with Newsom belied the confrontational stance he signaled toward California earlier in the day. Even on the plane en route to Los Angeles, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was using Trump’s disparaging nickname for the governor, “Newscum,” and telling reporters “he has wronged the people of his state” and saying Trump was visiting to pressure Newsom and other officials “to do right by their citizens.”
Trump said Los Angeles residents who lost their homes should be able to get back onto their properties immediately to clear them, adding several told him it will be months before they can rebuild.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said residents should be able to return home within the week, but keeping people safe from hazardous materials is a top priority. She said the city was easing the process to get permits, but she was repeatedly interrupted by Trump as she tried to explain the city’s efforts. He downplayed the concerns about toxins, saying: “What’s hazardous waste? We’re going to have to define that.”
Trump has a long history of minimizing the risks of asbestos. In his 1997 book, “The Art of the Comeback,” Trump called asbestos “the greatest fireproofing material ever used” and “100% safe, once applied,” and claimed the movement against the insulator was led by the mob, “because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal.”
Before flying to California, Trump reiterated that he wants to extract concessions from the Democratic-led state in return for disaster assistance, including changes to water policies and requirements that voters need to show identification when casting ballots.
Beyond Trump’s criticism of FEMA, he’s suggested limiting the federal government’s role in responding to disasters, echoing comments from conservative allies who have proposed reducing funding and responsibility.
“I’d like to see the states take care of disasters,” he said in North Carolina. “Let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen.”
(Will Weissert, Chris Megerian & Makiya Seminera, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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LONDON, UK — Millions of people in Ireland and northern parts of the U.K. heeded the advice of authorities to stay at home Friday in the face of hurricane-force winds that disabled power networks and brought widespread travel disruptions.
Forecasters had issued a rare “red” weather warning, meaning danger to life, across the whole island of Ireland and central and southwest Scotland.
Ireland bore the brunt of the storm first, as it was hit with wind gusts of 114 mph, the strongest since World War II, as a winter storm spiraled in from the Atlantic before hitting Scotland. A man died after a tree fell on his car in County Donegal in the northwest of
Ireland, local police said.
The storm was moving fast and was expected to have cleared Scotland’s shores by late Friday.
City centers, such as Dublin in Ireland, Belfast in Northern Ireland and Glasgow in Scotland were eerily quiet, much like the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as shops stayed closed and people heeded the advice to not venture out. For those that did leave home and were caught in one of the wind gusts, it was a struggle to stay upright.
“I want to thank members of the public for largely following Police Scotland’s advice not to travel,” said Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney. More than a million homes, farms and businesses in the island of Ireland and Northern Ireland were without power as record-breaking wind speeds swept across the island. A further 100,000 customers in Scotland were also reported to have lost power.
Schools were closed and trains, ferries and more than 1,000 flights were canceled in the Republic of Ireland and the U.K., even as far south as London Heathrow, as the system, named Storm Éowyn by weather authorities, roared in.
The disruption is set to last through today. ScotRail, for example, said the storm caused significant damage to infrastructure and that a full assessment of the network will need to be done, which will include the removal of debris.
Ireland’s weather office, Met Eireann, said the 114 mph gusts early Friday were recorded at Mace Head on the west coast, beating a record of 113 mph set in 1945. Wind speeds in Scotland were slightly lower through the day, though still historically high.
Part of the storm’s energy originated with the system that brought historic snowfall along the Gulf Coast of the U.S., said Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster at the private weather company AccuWeather.
Éowyn was expected to clear into the Norwegian Sea today, allowing a brief lull of drier and calmer conditions, but another storm system is forecast to bring similar hazards on Sunday and Monday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Hours before they were expected to fade away, powerful Santa Ana winds swept San Diego County from the mountains to the sea Thursday, stoking new wildfires — one near UC San Diego, the other on Otay Mountain near the U.S.- Mexico border.
The winds exploded out of the east, dropping into Gilman Canyon and onto Otay Mountain and interrupting the Farmers Insurance Open golf tournament at Torrey Pines.
Santa Ana winds gusted to 91 mph in the mountains and 30 mph near the coast Thursday in San Diego County, in what was expected to be the longed-for finale of weeks of perilous windstorms.
Soon after the Otay Mountain fire erupted early Thursday afternoon, it grew to more than 500 acres and threatened the Otay Mountain Repeater Site — home to critical telecommunications infrastructure, officials said.
As that fire got moving, a fire also erupted near UC San Diego in La Jolla, prompting evacuations just south of campus. But fast-working crews — 175 firefighters — kept the Gilman fire to 3 acres, a San Diego Fire-Rescue spokesperson said.
And by Thursday evening, high winds led San Diego Gas & Electric to shut off power to nearly 20,000 customers living mostly in rural and backcountry communities, in an effort to prevent high winds from causing power lines to fall to the ground and potentially igniting a wildfire. There was the potential for an additional 64,000 customers to lose power should conditions worsen.
Adding to the risk of wildfires: bone-dry conditions. Across the region, humidity ranged from 3% to 9%. Casey Oswant, a forecaster at the National Weather Service, said it got down to 3% at McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad — “really unusual for a place so close to the ocean.”
Today could see some easing. “The winds probably won’t reach the coast on Friday, and they’ll only blow about 35 mph in the mountains,” Oswant said. And, he said, “the relative humidity won’t be as bad.”
There’s also rain in the near-term forecast. “A cold low pressure system from the north is expected to bring cooling with widespread showers and mountain snow for Sunday through Tuesday,” the weather service said in a statement. “There is even a slight chance of thunderstorms for Sunday, and potentially Monday.”
Those could prove a mixed blessing. Thunderstorms can produce lightning capable of starting a wildfire if it hits the ground — and the ground is unusually dry, especially in the backcountry. Most of the county has had less than 0.25 inches of rain since July 1, and much of it has recently slipped into extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Forecasters say areas west of Interstate 15 could get about 0.25 inches of rain over the weekend and into Monday, while twice as much could fall across inland valleys and up to 1 inch in the mountains.
Still, the storm is not expected to bring an end to wildfire season.
And crews have a big job tackling the fire on Otay Mountain, on Bureau of Land Management lands not far north of the international border. The National Weather Service in San Diego reported winds in the area to be around 20 miles per hour with 5% humidity when it started around 2 p.m.
The fire appeared to be located in steep and rocky terrain east of multiple structures, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center, Calpine Otay Mesa power plant, the East Mesa Juvenile Detention facility and Richard J. Donovan Detention Facility.
Aircraft could be seen dropping flame retardant on the mountainsides. Ground crews faced terrain that was difficult to navigate. As of late Thursday, they had not been able to draw a containment line around any of it. Cal Fire said the blaze was burning at “a moderate rate of spread.” The fire generated a column of smoke that could be seen from Rancho San Diego, San Carlos and into North County.
Smoke from the fire in La Jolla could also be seen from afar, rattling nerves as evacuations were ordered for neighborhoods between North Torrey Pines Road, Gilman Drive and La Jolla Parkway. Areas farther west were warned to be ready to evacuate. Among those in the evacuation zone who fled were Jewish community members at Hillel of San Diego, immediately south of the UC San Diego campus.
“We evacuated right away,” said Karen Parry, the center’s executive director. “We took Torahs with us.”
That fire broke out around 2 p.m. near Gilman Drive and Via Alicante and within 30 minutes had charred an acre, said Jose Ysea, a spokesperson for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
Just before 3:30 p.m., UC San Diego told the campus community in an email that forward spread had been stopped.
On Thursday morning, crews also doused a small fire in the Grantville neighborhood. A San Diego police official said one person had been arrested in connection with the fire.
Thursday’s fires follow a busy week for fire crews, who have put out blazes in Mission Valley, Poway and other areas of the county amid dangerous fire conditions. The causes of those fires are under investigation.
(Gary Robbins, Teri Figueroa & Christian Martinez, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Caleb Lunetta, Rob Nikolewski, Karen Kucher, Sam Schulz)
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Evacuation orders were lifted Thursday for tens of thousands as firefighters with air support slowed the spread of a huge wildfire churning through rugged mountains north of Los Angeles.
The Hughes fire broke out late Wednesday morning and in less than a day had charred nearly 16 square miles [, 10,250 acres,] of trees and brush near Castaic Lake, a popular recreation area about 40 miles from the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires that are burning for a third week.
Crews made significant progress by late afternoon, with about a quarter of the fire contained.
In Ventura County, a new fire briefly prompted the evacuation of California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo. Water-dropping helicopters made quick progress against the Laguna fire that erupted in hills above the campus of about 7,000 students. The evacuation order was later downgraded to a warning.
Rain is forecast for the weekend, potentially ending the region’s dry spell that has lasted months.
Winds are also not as strong as they were when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, allowing for firefighting aircraft to dump tens of thousands of gallons of fire retardant. That helped the fight against the Hughes fire, allowing helicopters to drop water, which kept it from growing, fire spokesperson Jeremy Ruiz said. “We had helicopters dropping water until around 3 a.m. That kept it in check,” he said.
Nearly 54,000 residents in the Castaic area were still under evacuation warnings, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Thursday. There were no reports of homes or other structures burned.
The Palisades fire was nearly three-quarters contained, and the Eaton Fire was 95% under control Thursday. The two fires have killed at least 28 people and destroyed more than 14,000 structures since they broke out Jan. 7.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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After a rare winter storm walloped the southern United States with record snowfall, the region faced dangerous icy road conditions and a bitter chill Thursday that raised the possibility that some streets may remain impassable until the weekend.
From the swamps of Louisiana to beaches in the Carolinas, the conditions left officials in much of the South delivering a similar message. The effects of the storm were not over, they told residents, and driving remained hazardous.
While temperatures briefly rose above freezing in parts of Louisiana, southern Alabama and Mississippi, nighttime temperatures plummeted in areas including Georgia, northern Florida and coastal communities in the Carolinas, causing snow and ice to refreeze on roads. Morning commuters faced an increased risk of black ice.
That pattern — of ice partially melting, only to refreeze at night — was expected to continue for much of the South until at least Saturday morning.
The threat is worse in a region that is unaccustomed to severely cold weather and where snow plows are not regularly well stocked.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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The last time it was this dry in January, there were barely more than 500 people in San Diego.
The year was 1850, and only a quarter-inch of rain had fallen in six months. It made the region ripe for wildfire — but that wasn’t much of a concern. The city’s population was clustered along the coast, far from the backcountry, where most fires burned.
Today, San Diego is the seat of a county that’s home to 3.3 million people spread over an area about the size of Connecticut, and many of them are nervous. Unusually persistent Santa Ana winds are stoking wildfires in a region that’s gotten about 0.16 inches of rain since July 1 — significantly less than has fallen in parts of the Mojave Desert.
People want to know why this is happening, and when it will end. And their questions have intensified over the past three days.
On Monday, firefighters had to knock down a blaze in Poway. On Tuesday, they did the same in the Fallbrook and Bonsall areas. On Wednesday, a blaze erupted in Rancho Bernardo, not far from the National Weather Service’s offices. More fires could erupt today, when the Santa Anas again roar to life, forecasters said.
Wednesday’s fire came at an ironic moment: Exactly one year ago, a super-powerful rain cell stalled over southeastern San Diego, unleashing heavy precipitation that helped create flooding that damaged more than 1,000 homes and businesses.
The wild weather happening now is on some levels well-understood but on others confusing and mysterious. San Diego County is experiencing historic dryness because the northern jet stream hasn’t been guiding winter storms into Southern California as it did the previous two years.
The path of the jet stream is known to vary. But scientists don’t know how to accurately predict what it will do during the winter months. Even near-term forecasts can be dicey. Forecasters say a weak extension of the jet stream could produce one-half to 1 inch of rain in the mountains and valleys this weekend, and about one-quarter inch at and near the coast. But it’s not a guarantee.
They’ve learned not to guess about such things. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted the jet stream would produce a wet winter in Southern California. The opposite happened.
Some scientists say the dryness might also be tied to some degree to La Niña, a periodic and natural climate change that sometimes leads to mild winters on the West Coast. But researchers have yet to prove their hunch about current conditions.
In the meantime, Santa Ana winds have caused the region’s vegetation to further wither. Their presence is no surprise; the Santa Anas usually blow, on and off, from October through January, and sometimes into February.
And while the current series of windstorms is unusual, it’s not unprecedented. About 30 wildfires ignited in Southern California during a roughly monthlong period beginning Oct. 20, 2007 — among them the Witch Creek fire near Julian, which destroyed more than 1,100 homes and buildings and forced more than 500,000 people to evacuate.
Scientists cannot accurately forecast whether a Santa Ana wind season will be mild or severe. But they’ve made some interesting observations about what might happen in the future. In 2019, for instance, researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography said it appeared the winds would become less common by the end of this century due to the effects of climate change.
Further insights are expected in the coming months — partly due to the efforts of people like Julie Dinasquet, a marine biologist at Scripps. On Wednesday, she was continuing to help guide the collection of water samples off Los Angeles County, where ash from the recent wildfires fell into the ocean. In a bit of serendipity, NOAA had a research ship offshore when the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted.
“Our first job is to characterize the ash,” Dinasquet said Wednesday. “What are the potential toxicants in there? What are the potential nutrients? We’ll build up the story. It will take time to understand if there is a cascading effect on the food web in the ocean.”
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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RANCHO BERNARDO, S.D. COUNTY - Fire crews quickly boxed in a fierce fire that led hundreds of people to flee their Rancho Bernardo homes Wednesday as dry brush, low humidity and Santa Ana winds combined to create high fire danger that’s keeping San Diego County on edge.
The region remains under a red-flag warning with bone-dry conditions, prompting San Diego Fire-Rescue officials to order a massive response after the blaze in the area of Bernardo Center Drive and Camino del Norte was discovered around 9 a.m.
Officials initially worried it could reach 100 acres, but a force of around 200 firefighters, aided by aerial support, were able to keep its footprint at about 7 acres.
The Center fire is one of a string of blazes that firefighters have battled in recent days, as a series of Santa Ana winds blew through the county.
And the fire weather will continue: A red-flag warning issued by the National Weather Service remains in effect through 8 p.m. today for the inland valley and mountain communities. The weather service says the Santa Anas will greatly strengthen today, gusting to 70 mph in the mountains and 40 mph or more along Interstate 8 east of Alpine.
High wind conditions and a lack of rain have combined to raise the risk of downed power lines igniting a wildfire, which has prompted San Diego Gas & Electric again to shut off electricity in specific areas. As of 6 p.m. Wednesday, some 8,000 SDG&E customers were without power across the county, and the utility had warned that another 75,000 could see their electricity cut if conditions worsen.
The gusty winds should be gone by Friday, and forecasters say a low pressure system might drop a quarter-inch of rain at or near the coast and a half-inch to full inch of rain in the mountains over the weekend.
With the danger of fast-moving wildfires atop everyone’s minds, firefighters are pouncing on any reported fires. And on Wednesday, shortly after the fire erupted in Rancho Bernardo, dozens of firefighters were quickly on-site, as three helicopters dropped water and four air tankers dumped red retardant.
The fire chewed through thick vegetation growing on a hill along Camino del Norte, not far west of Interstate 15. The busy thoroughfare lines the north end of the hill, but the rest is surrounded by homes.
Authorities ordered evacuations for neighborhoods west of Interstate 15 and south of Camino del Norte, and a temporary evacuation point was set up at a nearby shopping center. Rolling Hills Elementary School students and RB Kinder Care were both evacuated. Several other neighborhoods were warned they too might need to flee. During that time of day, about 8,200 people live and work in the areas ordered and warned to evacuate.
Area resident Wendy Hoke didn’t hesitate when she saw smoke. She grabbed her 14-year-old son and the family dog and fled. “I have been in enough evacuations and fires in California that I just don’t wait,” she said. She was among several residents who made their way to a nearby shopping center parking lot where evacuees had been directed.
As soon as Julie Hebron and her husband saw smoke from their Paseo Montanoso home, they started packing. Their street wraps around the south side of the hill whose north flank the blaze was burning. Although they ended up staying put, the fire came very close. “It was scary,” she said. “But the response was really quick.”
One person was taken to a hospital to be treated for burn injuries. Fire investigators will try to determine the cause of the blaze.
(Teri Figueroa & Karen Kucher, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Maura Fox, Alex Riggins, Rob Nikolewski, Gary Robbins, Jemma Stephenson)
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A major storm spread heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain across the southern United States on Wednesday, breaking snow records and treating the region to unaccustomed perils and wintertime joy.
From Texas through the Deep South, down into Florida and to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, snow and sleet made for accumulating ice in major cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, and Jacksonville, Fla. In Alabama, the weight of the snow collapsed the dome of the Mobile Civic Center, which was being demolished to make way for a new entertainment facility.
At least eight deaths were attributed to the storm as dangerous below-freezing
temperatures with even colder wind chills settled in. Arctic air also plunged much of the Midwest and the eastern U.S. into a deep freeze, grounding hundreds of flights. Government offices remained closed, as were classrooms for more than a million students more accustomed to hurricane dismissals than snow days.
New Englanders know what to do in weather like this: Terry Fraser of Cape Cod, MA, didn’t have her trusty windshield scraper while visiting her new granddaughter in Brunswick, GA, so she used a plastic store discount card to remove the snow and ice from her rental SUV in a frozen hotel parking lot. “This is what we do up north when you don’t have a scraper,” Fraser said. “Hey, it works.”
The record 10-inch snowfall in New Orleans was more than double what Anchorage, Alaska, has received since the beginning of December, the National Weather Service said. “We’d like our snow back,” the weather service office in Anchorage joked in a post on X. “Or at least some King Cake in return.”
Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are forecast to persist through southern areas this morning, with widespread frost continuing in some places through the weekend, the weather service said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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CASTAIC, CA - More than 50,000 people were under evacuation orders or warnings Wednesday as a huge, fast-moving wildfire swept through rugged mountains north of Los Angeles, but fire officials said a rapid ground and air assault was giving them the upper hand.
The Hughes fire broke out in the late morning and within six hours charred about 15 square miles — more than 9,200 acres — of trees and brush near Lake Castaic, a popular recreation area about 40 miles from the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires that are burning for a third week. Though the region was under a red flag warning, winds were not as fierce Wednesday as they had been when the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out, allowing for firefighting aircraft to dump tens of thousands of gallons of fire retardant.
“The situation that we’re in today is very different from the situation we were in 16 days ago,” Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said Wednesday evening. There were no reported homes or other structures burned. “This fire had a robust response today, and as you can see behind us, the responders are doing great work to try to contain this fire,” said Joe Tyler, director of Cal Fire. “Certainly, we are not out of the woods yet.”
More than 31,000 people had been ordered to evacuate and an additional 23,000 are under evacuation warnings, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said.
Parts of Interstate 5 that had been closed reopened Wednesday evening. A 30-mile stretch had been closed for emergency vehicles, to move equipment and to prevent accidents due to smoke billowing across the freeway. Crews on the ground and in water-dropping aircraft tried to prevent the wind-driven fire from moving across the interstate and toward Castaic.
Marrone said that because winds were not as strong as they were two weeks ago, aircraft crews were able to drop fire retardant on the south side of the fire, where the flames were moving, he said. More than 4,000 firefighters were assigned to the fire, he said.
Winds in the area were gusting at 42 mph in the afternoon but were expected to increase to 60 mph later in the evening and today, the National Weather Service said on the social platform X.
Kayla Amara drove to Castaic’s Stonegate neighborhood to collect items from the home of a friend who had rushed to pick up her daughter at preschool. As Amara was packing the car, she learned the fire had exploded in size and decided to hose down the property. “Other people are hosing down their houses, too. I hope there’s a house here to return to,” Amara said as police cars raced through the streets and flames engulfed trees on a hillside in the distance.
Amara, a nurse who lives in nearby Valencia, said she’s been on edge for weeks as major blazes devastated Southern California. “It’s been stressful with those other fires, but now that this one is close to home it’s just super stressful,” she said.
To the south, Los Angeles officials began to prepare for potential rain even as some residents were allowed to return to the charred Pacific Palisades and Altadena areas. Gusty weather was expected to last through today and precipitation was possible starting Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
“Rains are in the forecast and the threat of mud and debris flow in our fire-impacted communities is real,” Supervisor Kathryn Barger said during a Wednesday morning news conference. Fire crews were filling sandbags for communities while county workers installed barriers and cleared drainage pipes and basins.
Red flag warnings for critical fire risk were extended through 10 a.m. Friday in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Officials remained concerned that the Palisades and Eaton fires could break their containment lines as firefighters continue watching for hot spots.
The Palisades and Eaton fires, which have killed at least 28 people and destroyed more than 14,000 structures since they broke out Jan. 7, have burned more than 37,400 acres combined. Containment of the Palisades fire reached 70%, and the Eaton fire was at 95% Wednesday night.
(Christopher Weber & Marcio Jose Sanchez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A rare frigid storm charged through Texas and the northern Gulf Coast on Tuesday, blanketing New Orleans and Houston with snow that closed highways, grounded nearly all flights and canceled school for more than a million students more accustomed to hurricane dismissals than snow days.
The storm prompted the first ever blizzard warnings for several coastal counties near the Texas-Louisiana border, and snowplows were at the ready in the Florida Panhandle. Snow covered the white-sand beaches of normally sunny vacation spots, including Gulf Shores, AL,and Pensacola Beach, FL. The heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain hitting parts of the Deep South came as a blast of Arctic air plunged much of the Midwest and the eastern U.S. into a deep freeze.
A powdery South made for some head-turning scenes — a snowball fight on a Gulf Shores beach, sledding in a laundry basket in Montgomery, AL, pool-tubing down a Houston hill.
One of the country’s quirkiest cities, New Orleans, didn’t disappoint under the snowy spotlight. There was an attempt at urban skiing along Bourbon Street; a priest and nuns in a snowball fight outside a church; snowboarding behind a golf cart; and sledding down the snow-covered Mississippi River levees on kayaks, cardboard boxes and inflatable alligators.
David Delio, a 50-year-old high school teacher, and his two daughters glided down the levee on a yoga mat and a boogie board. “This is a white-out in New Orleans, this is a snow-a-cane,” Delio said. “We’ve had tons of hurricane days but never a snow day.”
Nearly 2,000 flights to, from or within the U.S. were canceled Tuesday, with about 10,000 others delayed, according to online tracker FlightAware.com.
The East Coast, meanwhile, was blanketed in snow while people from the Northern Plains to the tip of Maine shivered in bitter cold from the arctic air mass that plunged temperatures well below normal.
A state of emergency was declared in at least a dozen New York counties, with up to 2 feet of lake-effect snow and extreme cold expected around Lake Ontario and Lake Erie through today.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Thankfully, Rod Mitchell’s dogs roused him at 2 a.m. He’d slept through his landlord’s phone calls, unaware of an approaching wildfire. But after Oscar and Max got him going, the Bonsall man opened his front door to find flying embers racing through the air and firefighters already on the 5-acre property. “The fireman, he said, ‘Where did you come from?’ ” Mitchell said. “And I said ‘I just got out of bed,’ and he says, ‘We didn’t think anybody was left up here.’”
Mitchell, 72, was among scores of inland North County residents jarred from sleep very early Tuesday and urged to flee as wind-whipped fires hurtled through bone-dry brush. Three fires erupted there overnight, one of them growing to 85 acres.
Hours later and several [tens of] miles to the south, residents of neighborhoods near Fashion Valley mall got a jolt of their own from evacuation orders and warnings as a brush fire swept along a hillside. San Diego Fire-Rescue said it grew to 15 to 20 acres.
Fire crews moved fast, throwing heavy resources at the fires as Santa Ana winds delivered a big, direct hit on San Diego County, arriving from the east-northeast before dawn and whooshing largely unfettered through arid mountain passes and canyons. Sill Hill in the Cuyamaca Mountains received a gust of 102 mph, equivalent to a Category 2 hurricane. Deer Canyon near Black Mountain: 80 mph, equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane.
The winds led authorities to divert high-profile vehicles off Interstate 8 from Alpine to Ocotillo for a stretch of time, and a toppled big rig blocked freeway traffic.
San Diego Gas & Electric cut power to more of its customers to minimize the chances of starting wildfires. Through 4 p.m. Tuesday, nearly 16,000 customers were without electricity, and the utility warned that another 68,000 could potentially have their power lines shut off.
Weaker Santa Anas are expected to blow in late today and early Thursday, according to Adam Roser, a weather service forecaster. There’s also a chance of seeing more than a quarter-inch of rain in the mountains Saturday and Sunday. “But it won’t be enough to make the threat of wildfires go away,” Roser said.
San Diego has only received 0.16 inches of precipitation (measured at San Diego International Airport) since July 1 — barely enough to cover the bottom of a drinking glass. Weather service forecaster Dave Munyon said the region has never seen a period starting from July 1 stretch this long with so little precipitation since record keeping started in 1850. The brush is dry and the winds are harsh — conditions for a wildfire to grow out of control.
Within about an hour starting shortly after midnight Tuesday, three wildfires sparked in the Fallbrook and Bonsall areas. The largest was the Lilac fire, which jumped to 85 acres as it headed toward homes west of Interstate 15 and south of state Route 76.
Authorities used night-flying helicopters to drop water, and scores of firefighters battled it on the ground. “We were having pretty strong gusts in the beginning of the fire,” Cal Fire Capt. Mike Cornette said.
At one point, both sides of Interstate 15 in the area were closed to traffic, as were parts of Old Highway 395, including at SR-76.
Sheriff’s deputies fanned out to warn sleeping Bonsall residents to clear out, using patrol cars and a sheriff’s helicopter to sound distinctive “hi-low” sirens. Residents also were notified by reverse 911 calls and deputies going door to door, said sheriff’s Lt. Noah Zarnow.
After finding firefighters on his doorstep in Bonsall, Mitchell fled with his dogs but without his phone. By mid-morning, he sat in his pickup truck at a road closure. He’d been there through the night, waiting to be allowed to return home, where the exterior walls are made not of wood clad in stucco or siding but of foam blocks filled with concrete.
At the Castle Creek Country Club outside north Escondido, about 20 vehicles were waiting in the parking lot when Red Cross volunteers arrived at 3 a.m. to open it as an evacuation center, volunteer Nat Giraud said.
The Lilac fire spread from the edge of nearby I-15 in a southwesterly direction and raked across the rear of a tan-colored home on the eastern side of Ranchos Ladera Road, burning up to the property’s patio. The homeowners had clearly put significant effort into clearing away brush, providing room for a solid defense.
Strike crews were able to hold out at these locations. By preventing them from igniting, they avoided the shower of embers that the wind would have pushed south and west toward more homes.
“The team that fought here did an amazing job,” said Battalion Chief Shawn Johnson of the Sonoma County Fire District. His unit and others, after helping to fight the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, were sent south two weeks ago, staged for a quick response.
Hours later, as crews got a handle on the Lilac fire, a brushfire erupted on Friars Road across from Fashion Valley mall. It raced toward residences and prompted evacuation orders and warnings for some on the west sides of Mission Valley and Linda Vista.
Law enforcement knocked on doors to evacuate people and blocked streets to keep others from entering the area. In both directions of state Route 163, the Friars Road off-ramps were also shut down for several hours, reopening around 4:30 p.m.
With dozens of fire trucks and police vehicles parked along Friars Road and throughout the mall parking lot, onlookers stood at the top of the parking structure near Nordstrom taking photos and videos.
With the fire stopped and crews mopping up, all evacuations were lifted by late afternoon.
By late afternoon, crews working on the Lilac fire in Bonsall had drawn a containment line around 50% of the fire’s footprint. The Pala fire, north of I-15 and SR-76, reached 17 acres and was entirely contained. The smallest of the three North County fires was the 1-acre Riverview fire in the area of Santa Margarita Drive in Fallbrook.
(Teri Figueroa, Karen Kucher, Gary Robbins & Paul Sisson, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Caleb Lunetta, Phil Diehl, Rob Nikolewski)
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The stiff Santa Ana winds that stoked a short-lived but dangerous wildfire Monday in Poway were expected to be flat-out wicked before dawn today in San Diego’s backcountry, where something as minor as the heat from a car muffler could spark a major blaze, the National Weather Service said.
The winds began to accelerate Monday night as they descended the western slopes of the county’s inland mountains and spread into valleys and foothills that are starving for rain — something they won’t get until late Saturday, if then. About one-quarter inch of rain could fall over a three-day period, not enough to snuff out the risk of wildfires.
Forecasters said winds out of the northeast will blow 25 mph to 35 mph before dawn, with gusts to 60 mph at times, possibly reaching 80 mph on favored coastal mountain slopes and canyons.
San Diego Gas & Electric turned off power to more than 1,000 of its customers through 5:30 p.m. Monday, a figure expected to jump by early today. More than 83,000 customers have been notified that they could lose power at the very moment that cold air from Canada was forecast to arrive with the winds.
The temperature at dawn today was expected to drop as low as 31 degrees in Julian, 32 degrees at Oceanside Airport, 36 at Santee and 41 at Poway, the weather service said. Forecasters are more concerned about an expected drop in the relative humidity this morning and afternoon. It could fall to the 4% to 7% range in the mountains and to between 8% and 12% east of Interstate 15. Low humidity helps fan wildfires.
A red flag fire weather warning will remain in effect until 10 p.m. today east of Interstate 15.
The winds will be light by tonight. But the weather service says the Santa Anas could ramp up again Wednesday night into Thursday.
The danger posed by wildfires was clearly apparent Monday afternoon, when a fire erupted near Ted Williams Parkway and Pomerado Road in Poway, leading authorities to issue evacuation warnings.
At one point, the fire approached within 50 yards or so of some hillside homes. Firefighters pounced, attacking from the ground and overhead with helicopters and two air tankers. Crews kept the blaze to about 3 acres.
Forecasters say cold Santa Ana winds have started to arrive in the eastern mountains and foothills in what could turn out to be the worst storm of the winter locally.
Monday’s winds weren’t as fierce as they’re expected to be before dawn today, but they were still plenty brisk. There were gusts to 50 mph at Hauser Mountain south of Interstate 8 near Campo, 48 mph at Sill Hill in the Cuyamaca Mountains, 37 mph at East Willows Road along I-8, 37 mph at Moreno Dam, 36 mph at Sunshine Summit, 33 mph at Camp Pendleton, 30 mph near Julian, 26 mph at Otay Mountain and 25 mph at Ramona.
Forecasters say the winds have made it all the way to the coast in Del Mar, Carlsbad and Oceanside.
Today’s predawn winds could cause widespread tree damage and make driving in the local mountains difficult, especially along I-8, state Route 76 and state Route 78, and the county’s northwestern stretches of Interstate 15, forecasters said.
The need for rain is paramount. San Diego International Airport has recorded only 0.14 inches of precipitation since Oct. 1, when the rainy season began. That’s 4.11 inches below normal. The city is experiencing the driest rainy season since 1850.
The utility has stationed staffers in canyons and on peaks to watch for trouble. It also will closely monitor the 134 wildfire cameras that UC San Diego’s AlertCalifornia network is operating across the county.
(Gary Robbins & Teri Figueroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Rob Nikolewski)
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Windy and dry conditions returned to the Los Angeles area Monday, raising the risk of new wildfires sparking as firefighters continue to battle two major blazes that started in similar weather nearly two weeks ago.
Gusts could peak at 70 mph along the coast and 100 mph in the mountains and foothills during extreme fire weather that is expected to last through today. The National Weather Service issued a warning of a “particularly dangerous situation ” for parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Diego counties through this morning due to low humidity and damaging Santa Ana winds. “The conditions are ripe for explosive fire growth should a fire start,” said Andrew Rorke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
The low humidity, bone-dry vegetation and strong Santa Ana winds come as firefighters continue to battle the Palisades and Eaton fires, which have destroyed more than 14,000 structures since they broke out during fierce winds on Jan. 7. The Palisades fire was 59% contained on Monday and the Eaton fire 87% contained, according to fire officials.
David Acuna, a spokesperson with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said the biggest concerns are the fires breaking their containment lines and a new blaze starting.
More evacuation orders were lifted Monday for Pacific Palisades and authorities said only residents would be allowed to get back in after showing proof of residency at a checkpoint. Over the weekend, two men impersonating firefighters attempted to enter an evacuation zone, according to the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Monday the city was prepared for any possible new fires and warned the strong winds could disperse ash from existing fire zones across Southern California. Cal Fire and local fire departments have positioned fire engines, water-dropping aircraft and hand crews across the region to enable a quick response should a new fire break out, Acuna said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Frigid temperatures engulfed the South on Monday ahead of a winter storm that’s expected to spread heavy snow and disruptive ice around a region from Texas to north Florida that rarely sees such weather, sending residents rushing to insulate pipes, check heating systems and stock up on emergency supplies.
In Texas, both Houston airports announced flight operations would be suspended starting today in expectation of hazardous conditions from an unusual blast of severe winter weather taking aim at a huge swath of the South. It will include much of the northern Gulf Coast.
Elsewhere, the East Coast contended with a thick blanket of snow while people
from the Northern Plains to the tip of Maine shivered in bitterly cold temperatures from an Arctic air mass that sent temperatures plunging well below normal Monday with dangerously cold wind chills.
Around 40 million people, primarily across the southern U.S., were under some type of weather hazard, including more than 21 million under a winter storm warning, said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park, Md. He added that about 170 million people from the Rockies to points eastward were under either an extreme warning or a cold weather advisory.
The online tracker FlightAware reported more than 560 flight cancellations by Monday afternoon within the United States or entering or leaving the country, along with more than 5,200 delays.
Winter storm warnings extended from Texas to Florida on Monday, with heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain expected around the region into Wednesday. Meanwhile, heavy lake-effect snow was expected in western New York state through Wednesday morning, with 1 to 2 feet possible in some areas along Lake Ontario. Anticipating the storm, governors in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama declared states of emergency, and many school systems canceled classes.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A significant winter storm settled into portions of the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast on Sunday ahead of dangerously low temperatures that will envelop much of the country in some of the coldest weather in years, National Weather Service forecasters said.
The heaviest snowfall was expected north and west of the Interstate 95 corridor, with up to 8 inches possible, according to NWS. Up to 7 inches of snowfall were recorded in preliminary observations in parts of West Virginia by Sunday afternoon, the weather service said. Lighter accumulations were reported from Kentucky to Massachusetts by Sunday evening. In New York City, snow began to accumulate on cars and grassy areas by Sunday evening.
Much of the Northeast is under winter storm warnings or winter weather advisories.
Airports across the Northeast were experiencing delays and cancellations throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Major airports around New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C., were clearing snow and ice from runways throughout the day, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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LOS ANGELES — Southern Californians are bracing for gusty winds and a heightened risk of wildfires, less than two weeks after the outbreak of deadly blazes that have killed at least 27 people and charred thousands of homes.
The National Weather Service has issued a warning of a “particularly dangerous situation” for parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties for this afternoon through Tuesday morning due to low humidity and damaging Santa Ana winds. Gusts could peak at 70 mph along the coast and 100 mph in the mountains and foothills.
Windy weather and single-digit humidity are expected to linger through Thursday, said Rich Thompson, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. He said the fire risk is also elevated because the region hasn’t seen rain since April.
Critical fire weather with wind gusts up to 60 mph was also forecast for Southern California communities stretching to San Diego today and Tuesday, with residents urged to take steps to get ready to evacuate such as creating an emergency kit and keeping cars filled with at least a half tank of gas. A windblown dust and ash advisory was also issued, as high winds could disperse ash from existing fire zones across the region.
The warnings come as firefighters continue to battle two major blazes in the Los Angeles area, the Palisades and Eaton fires, which have destroyed more than 14,000 structures since they broke out during fierce winds on Jan. 7. The Palisades fire was 52% contained on Sunday and the Eaton fire 81% contained, according to fire officials.
Firefighters have made progress on the perimeter of the Palisades fire, which has blackened more than 37 square miles [23,680 acres,] near the Pacific coast, but there are areas in the interior that continue to burn, said Dan Collins, a spokesperson for the Palisades fire incident.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has positioned fire engines, water-dropping aircraft and hand crews across the region to enable a quick response should a new fire break out, according to the governor’s office of emergency services.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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LOS ANGELES — It has been more than a week since two massive fires forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in the Los Angeles area, and officials said Thursday residents won’t be going home soon. As the search continues for human remains in the leveled neighborhoods, properties also face new dangers with burned slopes at risk of landslides and the charred debris laden with asbestos and other toxins.
More than 80,000 people are still under evacuation orders, and many do not know what, if anything, is left of their houses, apartments and possessions. Scores of people have gathered at checkpoints to plead with police and National Guard troops restricting access to their neighborhoods.
Officials said they understand their frustration, but they asked residents for patience as hazardous materials teams and cadaver dogs comb the sites block by block. They said it will be a week or more before people can go back.
“The properties have been damaged beyond belief,” Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said at a briefing. “They are full of sediment, debris, silt and hazardous materials.”
Hillsides have become unstable behind some damaged homes, and a small landslide in Pacific Palisades this week sent debris into the streets, he added.
As firefighters continued to battle the two largest fires, which have killed 27 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures, heartbroken families and burned-out business owners began to confront another monumental task: rebuilding what was lost.
The scale of the effort will be vast — the area scorched by the major fires is equal to three times the size of Manhattan. It is one of the most devastating natural disasters in Southern California history. Recognizing the health risks, the county on Thursday prohibited any cleanup or removal of fire debris until a hazardous materials inspection is completed by government officials. The city is also working on ensuring the region’s storm drainage system does not get clogged when rain begins to return in the coming weeks. Rain also poses the risk of mudslides.
The fires struck at a challenging time, with the city in the midst of a post-pandemic transition that has reordered work life and left many downtown buildings with high vacancy rates. In addition, planning is underway to host the 2028 Olympics, and the region has perhaps the nation’s worst homelessness crisis, which had been Mayor Karen Bass’ priority before the fires broke out last week.
The government has not yet released damage estimates, but private firms expect losses to climb into the tens of billions of dollars.
Alex Rosewood and nearly her entire family in Altadena lost their homes — her father, whom she and her husband were living with, and her aunt, uncle and cousin next door. Lost were the keepsakes of a lifetime: Rosewood’s grandmother’s playing cards and unfinished quilt. Her wedding photos. Heirlooms from her grandfather, who served in the Navy. None of them could be saved. But Altadena remains home.
“We all plan to rebuild, for sure,” she said.
There will also be inevitable questions about whether it’s sensible to keep rebuilding in known high-risk areas, especially in an age of climate change. “It’s going to be a while before we can get in there and build anything,” said Michael Hricak, an adjunct professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, referring to the dangerous chemicals and rubble left behind. As for new construction, “it’s not being tougher than Mother Nature. It’s being somewhat respectful of Mother Nature and knowing what the challenges are.”
The Northern California community of Paradise, where the state’s deadliest wildfire killed 85 people in 2018, offers a glimpse into how painstaking and difficult the recovery and rebuilding can be.
That fire destroyed about 11,000 homes — some 90% of the community’s structures. About 3,200 homes and apartments have been rebuilt.
The town, which previously had a population of 26,000, has struggled under high construction costs, expensive insurance premiums and the uncertainty over money to be paid to people who lost homes by Pacific Gas & Electric, which was found liable for sparking the devastating blaze.
In Los Angeles, Bass issued an executive order this week intended to clear the way for residents to rebuild quickly. The federal government already has approved spending $100 million to remove paint, cleaners, asbestos, batteries and other household waste from the rubble before crews can begin clearing debris. Robert Fenton Jr., a regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called the plan a first step to getting people back in homes.
Elsewhere, the agency is handing out assistance to help people with short- term lodging. On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom extended price gouging protections on rental housing amid calls for authorities to prosecute landlords jacking up rents in the wake of the fires.
Under California law, price gouging protections kick in during a state of emergency and generally bar landlords, hotels and motels from charging more than 10% more than what they were charging or advertising before the crisis. The protections were set to expire in February, but Newsom’s executive order extends them in Los Angeles County until March 8.
Since the fires broke out last week, a wave of landlords have raised rent on their properties well beyond what the rules allow, including increases of more than 50%, according to online listings.
The listings have been widely shared on social media and have sparked calls from tenant organizations and even some landlord groups for authorities to prosecute.
(Michael R. Blood & Jamie Ding, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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On a recent day fighting the Los Angeles wildfires, a fire crew’s radios crackled to life, warning of nearby flames as helicopter blades thudded overhead. Juan Tapia — an experienced firefighter from Morelia, Mexico — tore out scrub brush as tall as himself, just days after arriving in California. And Karley Desrosiers, fresh from British Columbia, scrambled to communicate the latest update on the fire to an anxious public.
At the nearby incident command post — essentially a small city that is rapidly erected to act as a base of operations — workers coordinate aircraft, assess the weather, wash the smoke-soaked clothes of hundreds of firefighters and churn out meals by the tens of thousands every day. As wildfires burn across the Los Angeles area, the operation to save homes and people — from those on the fire line to the logistics of feeding thousands of firefighters — is monumental.
The Eaton and Palisades fires that sparked last week in the Los Angeles area have killed at least 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes. They could be some of the costliest wildfires in U.S. history, and required the mobilization of immense firefighting power from across the North American continent.
From Portland to Houston, hundreds of firefighters said goodbye to their families and loaded into engines bound for Los Angeles. Over 1,000 inmates in California filed onto hand crews in prison orange. Water bombers with “Quebec” stamped across their side swept over the blazes as a Mexican fire brigade touched down and set to work. Nearly two dozen from the Navajo Scouts, a Bureau of Indian Affairs-managed program, joined the fight.
All of them orbit the incident command posts, which are built in parking lots, fairgrounds or stadiums, with the post for the Palisades fire acting as headquarters for some 5,000 people. Those working behind the scenes do everything from quickly negotiating with landowners for spots to land helicopters to producing a new, roughly 50-page action plan every day sent via QR code to everybody working the fire.
Then, the operation adapts as blistering winds make these wildfires fearsome and unpredictable.
On sloping hills north of Los Angeles this week, in the burn scar of the Eaton fire, crews were combing the landscape for any remaining flames and digging line when a plume of smoke sent voices crackling over the radio.
As the winds picked up, a previously unburnt section of dense brush and trees torched, sending flames and embers — the potential start of another fire — into the sky. Homes sat maybe a mile away.
Firefighters scrambled toward the blaze, then two helicopters screamed in overhead, their sirens blaring to warn off crews, before dumping water and retardant. As the helicopters turned away, the crews quickly moved in, tearing at brush and cutting through trees with chainsaws to cut off the fires’ fuel. One stood with his radio directing the helicopters on the height and location of the drops before they returned, the crews dispersing under the ear-piercing sirens. It repeated until the fire was out, the firefighters huffing, their yellow jackets smattered with gray from ash, dirt and splotches of chainsaw oil.
To the west, on the biggest fire in California — the Palisades fire — Desrosiers from British Columbia was working out of an incident command post, the biggest she’s ever seen. The post runs for miles along the coast; it fills the beachside parking lots with fire engines, mobile kitchens, tents, equipment
repair shops, gear depots, laundry services, medical staff, storage, and about anything else they would need. “The biggest learning curve is seeing how all those people work together to keep those things together seamlessly,” said Desrosiers, whose job as public information officer is to provide journalists and the public with updates on the fires.
Back in British Columbia, Desrosiers might have worked alongside one other public information officer. At the Palisades fire, it’s somewhere near 50. In slower moments at the command post, people swap stories.
“It’s a lot of camaraderie and I think in the fire world, especially back home, it’s like a big family, and that’s how you feel in a fire camp, is that you’re surrounded by people who really do have your back,” Desrosiers said.
Rotating through the same incident command post as Desrosiers are firefighters from Oregon, including Sam Scott, who camped out in nearby Santa Monica. They pop in to grab batteries for their radios, eat meals, and pick up what Scott described as an 8-pound lunch bag replete with meals for a 24-hour shift.
For those long hours, Scott scours decimated neighborhoods, defending the homes that didn’t burn and searching for anything left burning, small fires or smoldering beams. Scott stepped through flattened home after flattened home, where the only things left standing are charred chimneys and car husks.
“I have a kid and a family, and just thinking about all the memories I’ve made with my family in my home,” said Scott, clearing his throat. “It can very easily make me cry. It’s a very heavy feeling. It’s someone’s entire life.”
By the end of those shifts, Scott and others are exhausted, retiring to clean and fix gear, before crawling into sleeping bags. It was that exhaustion that Tapia, of the 30-person fire brigade from Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, saw on the faces of U.S. firefighters when he first arrived at camp over the weekend. They brightened at the Mexican brigade’s arrival, said Tapia. “We came with the energy and attitude to help our brothers from the United States.”
(Jesse Bedayn, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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State Farm said Wednesday that it will offer renewals to residential policyholders affected by the Los Angeles County fires that it had previously planned to drop.
The decision applies to policies held by homeowners, owners of rental dwellings and residential community associations, which include condominium associations.
The figure includes roughly 70%, or 1,100, of the 1,626 residential policies still in place in Pacific Palisades’ primary 90272 ZIP Code — and thousands more in the neighborhood and elsewhere in the county. The offer does not apply to policies that had already lapsed when the fire started on Jan. 7.
The Department of Insurance said that among the thousands of policies State Farm had targeted for non-renewal, more than 7,600 were in the Palisades fire zone. There were also 525 in San Gabriel Valley’s Eaton fire and additional policyholders elsewhere.
It’s unclear how many of those policies had already lapsed when the fires began.
“We are in the business of helping people recover, and that’s exactly what we’re doing right now to those impacted by the fires. It’s just such a horrible tragedy,” said Jon Farney, chief executive of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., parent of State Farm General, its California subsidiary.
Farney made his remarks in an extended interview Tuesday before the insurer told The Times about the policy change.
State Farm said in March it would not renew roughly 30,000 homeowners, owners of rental dwellings and other property insurance policies. It also said it would stop offering commercial polices to apartment owners and not renew roughly 42,000 of those policies in place. Renters’ policies were not affected.
That decision by the Bloomington, IL, insurer has drawn outrage given the enormous scale of the fires in Los Angles County, which have damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 structures and killed more than two dozen people.
State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara had urged insurers last week to suspend pending non-renewals in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones. “All eyes are on insurance companies right now, including mine. We are going to keep working to make sure everyone’s claims are paid fairly, quickly, and completely,” Lara said Wednesday in response to State Farm’s decision.
Lara also announced he had expanded the boundaries of a moratorium he issued last week that bars insurers from issuing new cancellation or non-renewal notices for one year. It applies whether or not homeowners have suffered a loss.
His spokesperson, Michael Soller, said that under existing law, if policyholders were notified about a non-renewal but the policy was still in effect and they experienced a “total loss,” State Farm is required to offer them two policy renewals anyway. However, that law does not apply to damages that are less than a total loss.
State Farm spokesperson Bob Devereux said that the policyholders in the fire zones would get one-year renewal offers and those with total losses would get two renewals, as required by law.
(Laurence Darmiento, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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LOS ANGELES - The windy, flame-fanning weather that put the Los Angeles area on edge eased up Wednesday as firefighters made significant gains against the two massive wildfires burning in the region.
A “Particularly Dangerous Situation” red-flag warning expired without explosive fire growth as had been feared, though forecasters said gusty winds could linger into early today, mostly in the mountains. Temperatures were predicted to drop, and a deep marine layer was expected to move in over the weekend, according to the National Weather Service in Los Angeles.
Those improved conditions should help fire crews make even more headway and allow residents to return to their neighborhoods.
But Santa Ana winds could return early next week.
“Good news: We are expecting a much-needed break from the fire weather concerns to close this week,” the weather service posted on social media Wednesday afternoon. “Bad News: Next week is a concern. While confident that we will NOT see a repeat of last week, dangerous fire weather conditions are expected.”
Still, firefighters and police faced new challenges. Since the beginning of the outbreak last week, authorities have arrested about half a dozen people accused of setting new, small fires that were quickly knocked down. One suspect admitted starting a fire in a tree “because he liked the smell of burning leaves,” Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said. Another said “she enjoyed causing chaos and destruction,” the chief said Wednesday.
Authorities have not determined a cause for the major blazes in what is on track to become the nation’s costliest fire disaster. Los Angeles officials, who already were criticized for hydrants running dry, faced more questions. Fire officials chose not to double the number of firefighters on duty last Tuesday as winds increased, and only five of more than 40 engines were deployed, according to internal records obtained by the Los Angeles Times and interviews with fire commanders.
The department also did not call in off-duty firefighters until after the Palisades fire erupted.
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley defended her decisions. “I can tell you and stand before you, we did everything in our capability to surge where we could,” she told a news conference.
Crowley said that despite “limited capacity” within the department, crews were able to respond swiftly by calling for assistance from other agencies and seeking help from off-duty firefighters.
“Of course, there’s always lessons learned,” Crowley said. “I tell you, I am taking this to the highest of high thought processes of how the LAFD and our entire region could do better in the future.”
On Wednesday, firefighters continue to focus on hot spots to reduce the risk that winds will pick up smoldering embers and carry them into new areas. The Palisades fire has burned more than 23,700 acres and was 21% contained as of Wednesday evening, up from 17% a day earlier. Containment is a reference to how much of the fire’s edge, or perimeter, has been surrounded to the extent firefighters believe they can stop the fire from expanding.
Infrared flights indicate there are still numerous hot spots burning within the Palisades fire footprint. “Very close attention was paid to address any flare-ups swiftly as to prevent any fire spread outside of the perimeter,” Crowley said.
The Eaton fire in the Altadena area has burned just more than 14,100 acres and was 45% contained as of Wednesday, up from 35% a day earlier.
“We are not out of the woods yet, and people need to stay on guard for a fast- moving fire,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Oxnard. A conventional red flag warning — which warns of severe wildfire behavior if ignition occurs — remains in effect in some mountainous areas and along the Interstate 5 corridor. The air is expected to remain quite dry, with relative humidity as low as 8% in some areas. Fire weather conditions are expected to improve through Saturday. But starting around Monday, there is a moderate risk for another round of red flag warnings.
Southern California is experiencing a painful dry spell that is among the driest starts to a winter on record, a major reason the fire risk is so high. There are still no significant chances of rain through Jan. 25, forecasters say.
Downtown Los Angeles has received barely a drop of water for months — just 0.16 of an inch since Oct. 1, or just 3% of the seasonal average. Typically, at this point in the water year, downtown Los Angeles has received an average of 5.45 inches of rain. The annual average is 14.25 inches.
“As long as we go without seeing rain, it just doesn’t take much. The vegetation is just starving for moisture, and then when you get the wind on top of it, there’s definitely potential for fire behavior” after an ignition, said Alex Tardy, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in San Diego.
Exacerbating the fire risk is that January is the peak season for Santa Ana winds. While Santa Anas are common in December and January, it’s not typical to have conditions this dry, Tardy said.
For many areas of Southern California, “this is the driest start to any water year,” Tardy said, “and you can see extreme fire behavior with the ignitions.”
The winds come as thousands of residents remain under evacuation orders or warnings. Many whose homes were destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires have not been allowed back to their properties as officials continue damage assessments and search for additional fatalities.
There are 2,191 structures that have been destroyed in the Palisades fire and 397 that have been damaged, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. However, officials are still doing damage assessments, so those numbers are likely to increase. Authorities estimate that 5,300 structures have burned in that fire.
Damage assessments have confirmed 4,627 structures destroyed in the Eaton fire, though inspection teams have completed assessments for only 45% of the structures in the fire’s footprint, according to Cal Fire.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES; ASSOCIATED PRESS; LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The stiff Santa Ana winds that led San Diego Gas & Electric to shut off power to 5,638 customers Tuesday will peak today, coinciding with dangerously low relative humidity in critically dry San Diego County, the National Weather Service says.
Forecasters also said Tuesday afternoon that another major Santa Ana wind event could hit Southern California late Sunday night and last well into Tuesday — elevating the wildfire risk from Los Angeles County, which is reeling from historic fires, to San Diego County, which has gotten only small blazes so far.
And SDG&E warned of the possibility of more safety outages in the backcountry, along with some areas near the coast, as the utility tries to reduce the risk of wildfires in a region experiencing historically low rainfall.
Winds are expected to hit 40 mph to 50 mph east of Interstate 15 and 20 mph to 30 mph at and near the coast. The relative humidity will range from 7% inland to 15% at area beaches.
Forecasters said the winds could show special force in and around Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, which sits near the mouth of a corridor that funnels winds from the desert toward the sea. The same is true of Camp Pendleton in North County.
Once again, the air will be cold. The winds have drawn energy from Canada. Before dawn on Tuesday, the temperature in San Diego dropped to 39 degrees.
The latest windstorm comes during a period of dryness that hasn’t been experienced by anyone alive today. San Diego International Airport has recorded only 0.14 inches of precipitation since October — the driest start to the rainy season since 1850, when record-keeping began locally.
“The vegetation is starving for moisture,” said Alex Tardy, a weather service forecaster. There’s no significant rain in the forecast through Jan. 28. High-pressure systems have been preventing storms from the Gulf of Alaska from sinking deep into Southern California. “I don’t see any pattern shift (this month) that would produce winter weather,” said Brian D’Agostino, vice president of wildfire and climate science at SDG&E.
Tuesday’s winds hit 74 mph at Sill Hill, a spot in the Cuyamaca Mountains, and reached 51 mph in Alpine, 40 mph at Ramona Airport and 39 mph on Sunrise Highway in the Laguna Mountains. There also have been gusts of 28 mph at Camp Pendleton, 20 mph in Carlsbad and 15 mph in Leucadia. Relative humidity across much of the county is in the 9% to 13% range.
Tuesday’s outages came as fire crews knocked down a small brush fire in Ramona that ignited early Tuesday and briefly threatened a home. The fire was reported shortly after 6:30 a.m. near Pamo Road and Haverford Road. Cal Fire Capt. Robert Johnson said no structures were damaged, and there were no reports of injuries. Fire officials initially reported the blaze had charred around 10 acres, but Johnson said it likely was around 5 acres. Two fire investigators were trying to determine what sparked the blaze, Johnson said.
On Monday, a wildfire burned 12 acres at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar before it was put out.
(Gary Robbins & Karen Kucher, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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San Diego has been slow to revamp how it monitors and removes flammable brush on city-owned land, despite a 2023 audit saying the city’s efforts are poorly coordinated and not comprehensive enough.
Brush management is considered a crucial strategy to help prevent the kind of large wildfires that have devastated the Los Angeles area in the last week and that destroyed thousands of San Diego County homes in 2003 and 2007.
The city’s slow progress comes just as the city auditor is planning to broaden his focus from brush management on city-owned land to brush management on private land, where property owners must follow city rules or face fines.
In the nearly 18 months since the critical audit, San Diego city officials have made only two of the seven policy and procedure changes it recommended — and neither of those was completed until last fall.
A plan to consolidate brush management efforts within the Parks and Recreation Department — instead of allowing 10 different city departments to handle those efforts individually — has run into budget and bureaucratic roadblocks.
City officials have struggled to identify exactly which areas would be handled by Parks and Rec and how other departments would compensate that department for its efforts. They said Tuesday that part of the problem is that they believe the audit overestimated how many acres with flammable brush they need to monitor. The audit put that number at roughly 3,000, but city officials say they have determined it’s closer to 1,500 — 1,100 acres under Parks and Rec and 400 under other departments like Transportation, Libraries, Stormwater and others.
This is the first time since the 2023 audit that city officials have publicly raised concerns about its acreage estimates. Andy Hanau, the city auditor, said Tuesday that one possible reason for the discrepancy could be that the city lacked a comprehensive list and map of all city-owned lands that require brush management when his staff was completing the audit. “While we have not reviewed the map Parks and Recreation has recently developed, we are happy to see the city is working to build on the audit findings to refine its mapping so that the city has the best information possible to facilitate brush management efforts,” he said.
The 35-page audit found the city’s lack of consolidation of its brush management efforts had resulted in inconsistent and potentially ineffective work by some departments that oversee land with high fire risk.
The audit praised Parks and Rec for taking a comprehensive approach that includes “regular and effective” brush management — but it criticized Transportation and Public Utilities for policies that are “primarily reactive” and “generally less systematic.”
Another hurdle to consolidation, city officials say, is the need for more workers. Parks and Rec is requesting two new employees — a biologist and a mapping analyst — to help avoid environmental damage and track brush management work that has been assigned and completed.
City officials said Tuesday they now expect to complete the consolidation by June — about one year after the target date they agreed to when the audit came out in 2023. But that timing will depend on whether the City Council includes the necessary funding in the budget for the new fiscal year that begins July 1.
Because the city is facing a roughly $300 million deficit, early budget discussions have focused more on what might be cut instead of what might be added. The coming budget will also impact another recommendation the city hasn’t yet implemented: Parks and Rec taking over from Transportation the responsibility for brush management on planned streets that as of now exist only on paper. Parks and Rec says it needs a budget boost to make this happen.
One key audit recommendation still in flux is a plan to have the city’s Fire- Rescue Department start proactively monitoring and inspecting city-owned land in high-risk areas. The audit called for San Diego to begin requiring Fire-Rescue officials to evaluate brush management work that has been performed by other departments and to provide publicly available reports on its evaluations. The process is supposed to involve Fire-Rescue developing work plans with brush management goals for each department that manages land with flammable brush. A spokesperson for Fire-Rescue said this week that the department couldn’t respond to questions about progress toward this goal because officials hadn’t yet completed an update due to the city auditor this Friday. “Our report isn’t ready yet,” said the spokesperson, Monica Munoz.
In the most recent update from Fire-Rescue last summer, officials said they had begun identifying land managed by the city that is subject to brush management regulations. Officials also said they have developed “a concept” that would allow city departments that handle brush to self-certify that their efforts have met city goals. But they said finalizing such a process was an ongoing effort. They said a mapping specialist working with a deputy chief would create the self-certification tool and a portal for defensible space requirements by the end of 2024.
Fire-Rescue also said last summer that the department would need several new employees to conduct the kind of proactive monitoring and evaluation recommended in the audit. Those workers would include an information systems analyst, a wildfire program manager and 10 wildfire mitigation specialists. The audit says the kind of proactive monitoring it recommends for Fire-Rescue is common for fire departments in other cities, citing Oakland and Santa Barbara as examples.
The only two audit recommendations that city officials have completed are an evaluation of contractors the city has used for some brush management work and the establishment of a brush management working group.
The working group, which began meeting in December 2023, includes all departments with significant brush management responsibilities.
The city’s limited progress on flammable brush has some San Diegans worried. Clairemont resident Mitch Wagner told The San Diego Union-Tribune in an email Tuesday that the lack of proactive effort makes the city ripe for the same catastrophic wildfires engulfing parts of Los Angeles. He and his neighbor, Derek Trent, submitted a comprehensive request for better brush management to the city in August 2023.
Cheryl Geyerman of University City also has complaints. “It seems to me that there is little urgency by city government to aggressively clear brush and to urgently insist private property owners clear the brush on their property,” she said by email last week.
(David Garrick, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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LOS ANGELES — Easing winds delivered a brief but much-needed reprieve to firefighters Tuesday as they battled two massive blazes burning in the Los Angeles area, and the National Weather Service pushed back its unusually dire warning of critical fire weather until early today.
Forecasters said the winds were below danger levels in the evening, but they were expected to strengthen overnight with potentially fire-fueling gusts. Red flag warnings remained in effect from Central California to the U.S.-Mexico border until late afternoon today.
Winds increased Tuesday but not to the near-hurricane-force levels that were predicted for earlier in the day. Still the danger was not over, officials said.
“Key message: We are not out of the woods yet,” the National Weather Service in Los Angeles said in a post on social media. “The winds underperformed today, but one more enhancement could happen tonight-tomorrow.”
This round of Santa Ana winds was not expected to be as mighty as last week, but they could carry fire-sparking embers for miles and stoke new outbreaks in a region where at least 25 people have already been killed.
Firefighters made more progress on the Palisades fire, the largest and most stubborn blaze. CalFire Operations Section Chief Christian Litz said he took a helicopter ride around the perimeter and saw no active flames, though it was far from contained.
Nearly 90,000 households lost electricity Tuesday as utilities shut off power to prevent their lines from sparking new blazes.
Weary and anxious residents were told to be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice. They remained vigilant, keeping an eye on the skies and on each other: Police announced roughly 50 arrests, for looting, flying drones in fire zones, violating curfew and other crimes.
Of those, three people were arrested on suspicion of arson after being seen setting small fires that were quickly extinguished, Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said. One person was using a barbecue lighter, another ignited brush and a third tried to light up a trash can, he said. All of the incidents were far outside the disaster zones. Authorities have not determined a cause for any of the major fires.
Among nine people charged with looting was a group that stole an Emmy from an evacuated house, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said.
The biggest worry remained the threat from intense winds. Now backed by firefighters from other states, Canada and Mexico, crews were deployed to attack flareups or new blazes. The firefighting force was much bigger than a week ago, when the first wave of fires began destroying thousands of homes in what could become the nation’s costliest fire disaster.
Kaylin Johnson and her family planned to spend the night at their home, one of the few left standing in her neighborhood in Altadena. They intended to keep watch to ward off looting and to hose down the house and her neighbors’ properties to prevent flareups.
“Our lives have been put on hold indefinitely,” Johnson said via text message, adding that they cannot freely come and go because of restrictions on entering the burn areas. “But I would rather be here and not leave than to not be allowed back at all.” Javier Vega, who said he feels like he has been “sleeping with one eye open,” and his girlfriend have planned out how they can quickly pack up their two cats, eight fish and leopard gecko if they get orders to evacuate.
“Typically on any other night, hearing helicopters flying overhead from midnight to 4 o’clock in the morning, that would drive anyone crazy,” Vega said. But figuring they were helping firefighters to keep the flames from threatening their neighborhood, he explained, “it was actually soothing for me to go to sleep.”
Tuesday’s forecast included a rare warning: The winds, combined with severely dry conditions, have created a “Particularly Dangerous Situation,” the National Weather service said, meaning that any new fire could explode in size. The forecast was later adjusted to say gusts were expected to pick up strength early today.
Planes doused homes and hillsides with bright pink fire-retardant chemicals on Tuesday, while crews and fire engines deployed to particularly vulnerable spots with dry brush.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other officials who were criticized over their initial response expressed confidence that the region is ready to face the new threat. The mayor said she was able to fly over the disaster areas, which she described as resembling the aftermath of a “dry hurricane.”
Winds this time were not expected to reach the same fierce speeds seen last week but could once again ground firefighting aircraft, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said. He urged homeless people to avoid starting fires for warmth and to seek shelter.
With almost no rain in more than eight months, the brush-filled region has had more than a dozen wildfires this year, mostly in the greater Los Angeles area. Firefighters have been jumping on small blazes that pop up. One, in a dry riverbed near Oxnard on Monday night, was quickly smothered. “We’ve got helicopters ready to go, to drop water on any new fires,” said Andrew Dowd, a spokesperson for the Ventura County Fire Department.
The four largest fires around the Los Angeles region — Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth and Hurst fires — have scorched more than 63 square miles, roughly three times the size of Manhattan.
Cal Fire reported containment of the Palisades fire at 17% and the Eaton fire at 35% on Tuesday.
The Palisades fire, along the coast, has been blamed for eight deaths, while the Eaton fire farther inland has been blamed for 17 others, the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office said. But the death toll is likely to rise, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna. Nearly 30 people were still missing, he said Tuesday. Although some people reported as missing earlier have been found.
Investigators are still trying to determine what sparked the fires, which could be the nation’s costliest ever. Government agencies haven’t provided preliminary damage estimates yet, but AccuWeather, a company that provides data on weather and its impact, puts the damage and economic losses at $250 billion to $275 billion.
(Jaimie Ding, Julie Watson & John Seewer, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Homeowners, HOA boards and managers can be overwhelmed by the many decisions they face after a disaster. Careful actions can avert increased financial losses and thereby avoid worsening the impact of the tragedy sustained.
Immediate action
Insurance claims, public adjusters
After receiving a claim, your insurance company will assign a claim number and an adjuster.
Banks
It can seem impossible to pay for a temporary home and simultaneously make mortgage loan payments on a destroyed residence, but don’t give up. Some lenders may allow a temporary moratorium on payments.
Contractors
You need a contractor. After disasters, contractors seem to be everywhere, soliciting repair contracts. Do your research — a firm handshake or friendly smile does not prove a contractor’s competence or honesty. Caution is essential.
(Kelly G. Richardson, Columnist for S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Four lawsuits were filed Monday accusing Southern California Edison of sparking the Eaton fire, one of the deadly blazes that broke out last week amid a historic windstorm and destroyed hundreds of homes.
Lawyers for homeowners in the Altadena area announced the suits Monday, saying their clients either had to evacuate their houses or lost their homes entirely in the Eaton fire. Each of the suits blames the utility because the fire started under a Southern California Edison transmission tower. An official cause for the fire has not been determined.
“We believe that the Eaton fire was ignited because of SCE’s failure to de-energize its overhead wires, which traverse Eaton Canyon,” said attorney Richard Bridgford, who is representing a local homeowner.
The three other suits filed Monday — one representing a FedEx worker who lost their Altadena home, a second representing a homeowner who rented his property out in Altadena, and a third representing multiple Altadena homeowners — echo that claim.
Ali Moghaddas, an attorney with the firm Edelson PC, said that despite weather forecasts and wildfire plans, the utility company was unable to prevent the large wildfire. “They were on notice of the significant wind events that were coming in that week,” Moghaddas said. “They chose not to use all the tools at their disposal.”
Gerald Singleton, an attorney with the firm Singleton Schreiber, who is suing SCE on behalf of another homeowner, said part of the reason the lawsuit was filed so early even as the Eaton fire is just 33% contained is to preserve evidence.
A spokesman for the utility, Jeff Monford, said the company is aware of the lawsuits but has not yet been served.
“SCE will review the complaint when it’s received. The cause of the fire continues to be under investigation,” he said. “Our hearts remain with our communities during the devastating fires in Southern California and we remain committed to supporting them through this difficult time.”
The utility has said in statements that it does not believe that its transmission tower was responsible for the fire. The Eaton fire is being investigated by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The lawsuits point to Southern California Edison’s responsibility in other wildfires and the fact that the fire started under the transmission tower as evidence that the company’s power lines caused the fire, but experts have said it is too soon to draw any conclusions.
(Noah Goldberg & Salvador Hernandez, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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When the flames in Los Angeles County are finally extinguished, the region will face the costly, time-consuming and heart-wrenching task of hauling away tons of toxic rubble. Given the scale of devastation in and around the county, that cleanup could become one of the country’s most complex debris removal efforts ever.
In each of the thousands of ash piles where homes once stood, there are remnants of lives upended. But the photo albums, football cards and family heirlooms are intermixed with a noxious cocktail of asbestos, gasoline and lead, a reality that will make cleanup extremely complicated. “We kind of treat each of these properties as its own hazardous waste cleanup site,” said Cory Koger, a debris expert with the Army Corps of Engineers who has responded to several major wildfires, including the blaze that destroyed much of Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023.
The immediate focus in Los Angeles is putting out the wind-fueled fires that have burned for days, destroying thousands of structures, scorching thousands of acres and killing at least 25 people. But once the threat has passed, attention will more fully shift to dealing with debris fields in hard-hit areas like Altadena and Pacific Palisades, where homes that stood for decades burned down in minutes and where the charred remains of Jeeps and Cadillacs line the streets.
“Recovery planning really begins as soon as the fire starts,” said Jenn Hogan, the deputy director for disaster debris recovery operations at CalRecycle, a state agency that focuses on waste management and climate. “Once the fire is contained, you’ll start seeing a lot of those recovery resources hit the ground.”
Mark Pestrella, the Los Angeles County public works director, described a “tremendous amount of debris” that had already made its way into local reservoirs and filtration systems, hurting water quality. He said the debris was being moved in some cases to help firefighters maneuver through hard-hit areas, but stressed that the most significant handling and removal of the detritus would take time.
The process will be at once familiar and altogether unique. Even in a calamity-weary state where destruction has become so common that officials now refer to a “fire year” rather than a “fire season,” there is no playbook for what happened this past week, when several blazes roared simultaneously in dense urban settings.
It is too soon to know the extent of the damage or the cost of cleaning up, but recovery experts struggled to name a disaster analogous to the one unfolding in Los Angeles. Unlike in some rural areas or mountain towns hit by fires, which might be hard to access with heavy machinery, recovery crews in Los Angeles will have the advantage of robust road infrastructure and a large local workforce. But experts said they anticipated challenges in finding landfills to take the huge quantities of toxic material that will need to be “burrito-wrapped” in plastic and hauled away, as well as in managing the flow of high-bed dump trucks and other heavy equipment in a city already notorious for its traffic.
“If it takes two hours to dump a load, I mean, do the math on 1,000 properties,” said Alyssa Carrier, the founder and CEO of AC Disaster Consulting, a private emergency management company that has worked on wildfire responses in Colorado, Florida and Oregon. “One house could be 15 loads,” she added, “so that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges.”
Cleanup generally occurs in distinct phases over several months. After an initial assessment of damage, workers wearing full hazardous material gear remove dangerous items in clear view. Later, crews return to haul away ash, burned trees and other remaining debris. Before rebuilding begins, officials test the soil to ensure that no toxins remain from the fire.
The cleanup process is filled with dangers. Bryan Schenone, the director of the emergency services office in Siskiyou County, a rural area that has seen a series of devastating fires, including the Mill fire in 2022, said common household items become an environmental threat when they burn. Propane tanks or loose ammunition can explode and present a safety risk. “Imagine what’s in your garage: all the paint, all the chemicals underneath your sink,” Schenone said. “That leaches into the ground, and that all has to be cleaned up and becomes a toxic footprint.”
As destructive wildfires become more common because of climate change, a muscle memory has developed among the government officials and private contractors who respond to calamity after calamity. Each of those disasters has its own complexities, but many of the processes and lessons are the same. And no state has as much practical expertise in responding to wildfires as California. “This is probably the worst scenario but the best location,” Koger said of the Los Angeles fires. “Because the state of California has the resources and the knowledge and the historical knowledge to perform this safely and effectively.”
(Mitch Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)
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LOS ANGELES - Additional water tankers and scores of firefighters arrived at the Los Angeles area on Monday ahead of fierce winds that were forecast to return and threaten the progress made so far on two massive infernos that have destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least 25 people.
Planes doused homes and hillsides with bright pink fire-retardant chemicals, while crews and fire engines were being placed near particularly vulnerable spots with dry brush. Dozens of water trucks rolled in to replenish supplies after hydrants ran dry last week when the two largest fires erupted.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other officials — who have faced criticism over their initial response to fires that began last week — expressed confidence Monday that the region was ready to face the new threat with additional firefighters brought in from around the U.S., as well as Canada and Mexico. “We’re absolutely better prepared,” Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said when asked what will be different from a week ago, when hurricane-force winds propelled multiple fires across the parched, brush-filled region that hasn’t seen rain in more than eight months.
The winds are predicted to pick up early today, but they are not expected to reach hurricane force as they did last week. However, they could ground firefighting aircraft, Marrone said, warning if winds reach 70 mph, “it’s going to be very difficult to contain that fire.”
Fire officials advised residents in high-risk areas to just leave home — and not wait for formal evacuation orders — if they sense danger. That’s exactly what Tim Kang of La Crescenta did Wednesday. Feeling sick from the smoky air and fearful of nearby fires spreading, Kang and his brothers packed up and have stayed away from their neighborhood. “Everything just felt like, oh man, the world’s ending,” said Kang, who’s staying with his girlfriend in Pasadena.
Tabitha Trosen said she and her boyfriend feel like they are “teetering” on the edge with the constant fear that their neighborhood could be the next under threat. “Our cats are ready to go, we have their carriers by the door prepped with their little stuffed animals and things like that,” Trosen said, adding that she keeps adding things as she thinks about what she could lose. “It’s like, how do I take care of myself, and what are the things that will ground me as a human and remind me of my background and my life and my family.”
In less than a week, four fires around the nation’s second-biggest city have scorched more than 62 square miles [, 39,680 acres], roughly three times the size of Manhattan. The Palisades fire had burned more than 23,700 acres and was 14% contained as of Monday. The Eaton fire, which has burned more than 14,100 acres, was 33% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.
The National Weather Service warned the weather will be “particularly dangerous” today, when wind gusts could reach 65 mph. A large part of Southern California is under this extreme fire danger warning through Wednesday, including Thousand Oaks, Northridge and Simi Valley. The weather service’s warning “is one of the loudest ways that we can shout,” said Rose Schoenfeld, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Meanwhile, the search for victims continues. On Monday, the number of confirmed deaths from the Palisades and Eaton fires jumped to 25. Eight died in the Palisades fire and 17 in the Eaton fire, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said. There are also still 29 people reported missing across both fires, officials said.
Officials warn that the death toll is likely to keep rising. Search and recovery operations are underway in the fire zones using cadaver dogs and grid searches, Luna said. Luna said he understands that people are eager to return to their homes and neighborhoods to survey the damage, but he asked for their patience. “We have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors,” he said.
The slower winds over the weekend allowed some people to return to previously evacuated areas. Many had no idea if their homes or neighborhoods were still standing. Jim Orlandini, who lost his hardware store in Altadena, said his home of 40 years survived. “The whole time I was thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to find when I get back here and after 40 years, you know, you got a lot of stuff you forget about that would disappear if the house burned down. So we’re thankful that it didn’t.”
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley urged people to stay away from burned neighborhoods filled with broken gas lines and unstable buildings. Just under 100,000 in Los Angeles County remained under evacuation orders, half the number from last week, but the danger remains acute.
The Palisades and Eaton fires are among the deadliest in California’s modern history. The state’s deadliest wildfire remains the Camp fire, which leveled the town of Paradise in Butte County in 2018 and killed 85 people. The second deadliest was the Griffith Park fire of 1933, with 29 fatalities; followed by the Oakland- Berkeley Hills fire of 1991, in which 25 died; and the Tubbs fire in Napa and Sonoma counties in 2017, with 22 killed.
Although there is no final tally yet of structures burned, the fires are already among the most destructive the state has experienced. Damage assessments have confirmed 1,902 structures destroyed in the Eaton fire, though inspection teams are through only about 30% of the fire footprint. Officials estimate that 7,000 structures were damaged or destroyed, though structures can include homes, businesses, smaller outbuildings and sheds and even vehicles. Officials estimate the Palisades fire has burned more than 5,300 structures. If those numbers hold, it would make the Palisades and Eaton fires among the top four most destructive wildfires in modern California history, according to Cal Fire.
Officials have been working to secure the fire zones from those who they say are traveling to the area to burglarize evacuated homes and commit other crimes. Authorities have arrested 34 people, including one burglary suspect who was allegedly dressed as a firefighter. Of those arrested, 30 were apprehended in the Eaton fire zone and four in the Palisades fire zone, Luna said.
Officials also are now starting to see price gouging and scams, including with hotels and short-term rentals and medical supplies, said Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman.
(Christopher Weber, Julie Watson & John Seewer, ASSOCIATED PRESS; LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The French territory of Mayotte was battered by a new tropical storm Sunday, just weeks after the worst cyclone to hit the islands in nearly a century laid waste to entire neighborhoods and villages and left authorities facing a huge recovery effort.
Mayotte issued a red alert and people were ordered to stay in their homes or find a solid shelter, and store food and water, as Tropical Storm Dikeledi brought heavy rains and strong winds to once again pound France’s poorest department. Some areas were experiencing flooding.
Mayotte, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, had only just begun the process of rebuilding after the devastation of Cyclone Chido last month, which killed at least 39 people, left more than 200 still missing, and injured more than 5,000 when in struck on Dec. 14.
Three people died in nearby Madagascar after Dikeledi made landfall there as a cyclone on Saturday, the country’s National Office for Risk and Disaster Management said. Parts of northern Madagascar were also placed under red alert.
Dikeledi had weakened to a tropical storm by the time it reached Mayotte on Sunday, French meteorological service Meteo-France said. The center of the storm would pass about 62 miles south of Mayotte, Meteo said. Chido had hit Mayotte head-on.
But Meteo-France warned Dikeledi could strengthen into a cyclone again, while authorities in Mayotte said there was a high danger of flooding and landslides across the islands and issued the red alert on Saturday night. That alert remained in place for Sunday and civilians were forbidden from being outside until the alert was lifted, said the Mayotte Prefecture, the French government department that runs the territory.
“The danger to the population persists,” the prefecture said on its official Facebook page. It said the weather would be calm at one point on Sunday but would become violent again later in the day.
Mayotte was also again opening cyclone shelters at schools and community centers for those in need, the prefecture said. The international airport, which was heavily damaged by Chido, was closed again until further notice.
Officials said they were taking no chances after the devastation of Chido, which prompted an angry reaction by Mayotte residents who vented their frustration at French President Emmanuel Macron when he visited days after the disaster. Mayotte’s people have previously accused the French government of neglecting them and the territory, which is the poorest in the European Union.
The French Interior Ministry said emergency personnel and security forces had been mobilized for Dikeledi’s arrival, with much of the focus on the precarious shantytowns around the capital, Mamoudzou, and other areas, which were largely destroyed by Chido. Many who had lost their houses in Chido still had no proper shelter when Dikeledi struck.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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After a freezing winter storm shut schools, cut power and canceled or delayed flights, the South was slowly thawing Sunday.
Crews working furiously by Sunday morning had power restored to parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, where tens of thousands of customers lost electricity over the last few days, according to Duke Energy.
Power was back for 97% of the customers served by Georgia Power — the state largest utility — which serves all but four of the state’s 159 counties, it said. “Crews have not slowed down, in fact, we have brought in additional resources to help us get across the finish line,” a news release on the Atlanta government’s Facebook page said.
Much of the winter weather has moved out of the area, said Dylan Lusk, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Peachtree, GA. “For the most part, we are slowly warming up and finally thawing a little bit after snow fall and a coating of freezing rain,” Lusk said.
Warmer weather was expected but some areas still were dealing with ice. Authorities warned people to drive slowly and be careful with slick spots on roads — especially when temperatures drop again at night and melted snow and ice refreezes. “Black ice will return as temperatures drop below freezing this evening through Monday morning,” the NWS said.
Planes needed deicing and more than 100 flights to and from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport were delayed Sunday — an improvement from Saturday, when 1,000 flights were canceled or delayed, according to FlightAware.com. By mid-afternoon Sunday, operations had returned to normal, airport officials said.
Earlier this week, the storm brought heavy snow, as much as 7 inches in some spots and made roads slick across much of Texas and Oklahoma before moving east. In some cities, the storm piled up more than a year’s worth of snowfall. As much as a foot fell in parts of Arkansas. In Memphis, a city that usually sees 2.7 inches a year, the Memphis International Airport recorded more than 7 inches.
Atlanta was hit with more than 2 inches of snow Friday, according to the NWS. The agency said it was the first time the city had over an inch of snowfall since 2018.
The NWS said many parts of the country may see snow today and to brace for a mass of cold, dry air from the Arctic region — including in the Great Lakes region. Although conditions were expected to improve, some places — including churches — announced closures for Sunday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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San Diego Gas & Electric notified nearly 55,000 of its customers Sunday that their power might be temporarily turned off today or Tuesday to help minimize the risk of wildfires when the next round of Santa Ana winds begins whipping across much of San Diego County. Most of the customers are located east of Interstate 15. But notices also went to people in parts of San Diego, and the outages could spread to other parts of the county.
The National Weather Service says a red flag fire weather warning will be in effect from 4 p.m. today to 6 p.m. Wednesday in the eastern half of the county.
Some of the winds could follow the mountain-to-coast corridor that spread the devastating Witch Creek fire in October 2007, the National Weather Service said. The roughly 100,000-acre blaze was largely responsible for destroying more than 1,100 homes and, at one point, appeared headed directly for San Diego.
The Santa Anas will begin to gain strength locally tonight and will peak on Tuesday when winds gust 40 mph to 50 mph in many inland areas and 20 mph to 30 mph at some spots along the coast. The relative humidity will fall below 20% from Borrego Springs to Oceanside and San Diego.
“This is going to be another long duration event because it won’t fully subside until Wednesday,” said Brian D’Agostino, vice president of wildfire and climate science at SDG&E.
“The state of the (vegetation) is very concerning because it is so dry, especially above the 2,000-foot level.” San Diego International Airport has recorded only 0.16 inches of rain since July 1. That’s close to 4 inches below average. A low-pressure system offshore could spin some moisture into the county on Tuesday. But forecasters said it would do little to nothing to tamp down the risk of wildfires.
The incoming winds will largely arrive from the east and have a fairly clearly path to the ocean. Some winds are expected to flow along a path that cuts through Lake Hodges, Olivenhain, Rancho San Fe en route to Encinitas, Solana Beach and Del Mar — a route similar to the one involved in the Witch Creek fire. A second corridor could funnel winds through Valley Center and Fallbrook all the way to Oceanside and Camp Pendleton.
“The only natural mechanism for starting wildfires is lightning, and we won’t be having that,” said Phil Gonsalves, a weather service forecaster. “Almost all wildfires are man-made — something that’s controllable by humans. People need to [be] aware, alert and careful about what could happen. And people should remember that a lot of fires that start in the backcountry — like the 2003 Cedar Creek fire — burn west toward the coast.”
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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LOS ANGELES - Firefighters scrambled Sunday to make further progress against wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes and killed 24 people in the Los Angeles area as forecasters again warned of dangerous weather with the return of strong winds this week. At least 16 people were missing, and authorities said that number was expected to rise.
The National Weather Service issued red flag warnings for severe fire conditions through Wednesday, with sustained winds of 50 mph and gusts in the mountains reaching 70 mph. The most dangerous day will be Tuesday, said weather service meteorologist Rich Thompson.
“You’re going to have really strong gusty Santa Ana winds, a very dry atmosphere and still very dry brush, so we still have some very critical fire weather conditions out there,” Thompson said at a community meeting Saturday night.
Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone said 70 additional water trucks arrived to help firefighters fend off flames spread by renewed gusts. “We are prepared for the upcoming wind event,” Marrone said. Fire retardant dropped by aircraft Sunday will act as a barrier along hillsides, officials said.
Fierce Santa Anas have been largely blamed for turning the wildfires sparked last week into infernos that leveled entire neighborhoods around the city where there has been no significant rainfall in more than eight months.
Twelve people were missing within the Eaton fire zone and four were missing from the Palisades fire, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said. Luna added that “dozens” more reports might have come in Sunday morning and investigators were reconciling whether some of the missing might be among the dead. There are no children among those reported missing, he said.
Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 24 over the weekend. Eight of the deaths were
attributed to the Palisades fire and 16 from the Eaton fire, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said in a statement Sunday evening.
Officials said they expected that figure to increase as teams with cadaver dogs conduct systematic grid searches in leveled neighborhoods. Authorities have established a center where people can report the missing.
Officials also were building an online database to allow evacuated residents to see if their homes were damaged or destroyed. In the meantime, Los Angeles city Fire Chief Kristin Crowley urged people to stay away from scorched neighborhoods.
“There are still active fires that are burning within the Palisades area, making it extremely, extremely dangerous for the public,” Crowley said at a Sunday morning briefing. “There’s no power, there’s no water, there’s broken gas lines, and we have unstable structures.”
Officials warned the ash can contain lead, arsenic, asbestos and other harmful materials.
About 150,000 people in Los Angeles County remained under evacuation orders, with more than 700 residents taking refuge in nine shelters, Luna said. Officials said most of the orders in the Palisades area were unlikely to be lifted before the red flag warnings expire Wednesday evening.
“Please rest assured that first thing Thursday we will begin talking about repopulation,” Marrone said.
By Sunday morning, Cal Fire said the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth and Hurst fires had consumed more than 62 square miles, an area larger than San Francisco. The Palisades fire was 11% contained and containment on the Eaton fire reached 27%.
Crews from California and nine other states are part of the ongoing response that includes nearly 1,400 fire engines, 84 aircraft and more than 14,000 personnel, including newly arrived firefighters from Mexico.
Minimal growth was expected Sunday for the Eaton fire “with continued smoldering and creeping” of flames, a Los Angeles County Fire Department incident report said. Most evacuation orders for the area have been lifted.
After a fierce battle Saturday, firefighters managed to fight back flames in Mandeville Canyon, home to Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities near Pacific Palisades not far from the coast, where swooping helicopters dumped water as the blaze charged downhill.
The fire ran through chaparral-covered hillsides and also briefly threatened to jump over Interstate 405 and into densely populated areas in the Hollywood Hills and San Fernando Valley.
Looting continues to be a concern, with authorities reporting more arrests as the devastation grows. Michael Lorenz, a captain with the Los Angeles Police Department, said seven people have been arrested in recent days, with two suspects “posing as firefighters coming and in and out of houses.”
Asked exactly how many looters have been arrested, Lorenz said he couldn’t give a precise number but that officers were detaining about 10 people a day. California National Guard troops arrived Friday to help guard properties.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X Saturday that “California will NOT allow for looting.”
The fires that began Tuesday just north of downtown Los Angeles have burned more than 12,000 structures. No cause has been determined for the largest fires and early estimates indicate the wildfires could be the nation’s costliest ever. A preliminary estimate by AccuWeather put the damage and economic losses so far between $135 billion and $150 billion. In an interview that aired Sunday on NBC, Newsom said the fires could end up being the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. “I think it will be in terms of just the costs associated with it, in terms of the scale and scope,” he said.
Along with crews from other states and Mexico, hundreds of inmates from California’s prison system were helping firefighting efforts. Nearly 950 incarcerated firefighters were dispatched “to cut fire lines and remove fuel to slow fire spread,” according to an update from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Though the state has long relied on prison labor to fight fires, the practice is controversial as the inmates are paid little for dangerous and difficult work. Inmates are paid up to roughly $10.24 each day, with additional money for 24-hour shifts, according to the corrections department.
Meanwhile, volunteers overflowed donation centers and some had to be turned away at sites including the Santa Anita Park horse racing track, where people who lost their homes sifted through stacks of donated items.
Altadena resident Jose Luis Godinez said three homes occupied by more than a dozen of his family members were destroyed. “Everything is gone,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “All my family lived in those three houses and now we have nothing.”
Newsom issued an executive order Sunday aimed at fast-tracking the rebuilding of destroyed property by suspending some environmental regulations and ensuring that property tax assessments are not increased. “We’ve got to let people know that we have their back,” he said. “Don’t walk away because we want you to come back, rebuild, and rebuild with higher quality building standards, more modern standards. We want to make sure that the associated costs with that are not disproportionate, especially in a middle-class community like this.”
The White House said as of Sunday more than 24,000 people have registered for federal assistance made available by President Joe Biden’s major disaster declaration last Wednesday.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Sunday that she has spoken with members of the incoming presidential administration and said she expects President-elect Donald Trump will come visit the devastated region.
Bass faces a critical test of her leadership during the city’s greatest crisis in decades, but allegations of leadership failures, political blame and investigations have begun.
Newsom on Friday ordered state officials to determine why a 117 million-gallon reservoir was out of service and some hydrants had run dry. Crowley, the Los Angeles fire chief, said city leadership failed her department by not providing enough money for firefighting. She also criticized the lack of water. “When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” Crowley said.
(Christopher Weber & Holly Ramer, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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All the ingredients were there for a massive wildfire. The mercurial Santa Ana winds gusted up to 85 mph before dawn Friday in San Diego County’s backcountry. The relative humidity fell below 10%. And the landscape was critically dry.
But for the moment at least, the county has escaped the sort of catastrophic wildfires that continue to roar across parts of Los Angeles County, destroying some homes in a matter of minutes.
“I was relieved when I woke up this morning and saw there were no fires here,” said Alex Tardy, a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Rancho Bernardo. “Everything was in play for something bad to happen. All it would have taken was a spark.”
The threat hasn’t passed. Forecasters say that a weaker round of Santa Ana winds will blow through the county tonight and early Sunday, and the winds will remain offshore well into next week. “We’re not going to be out of the woods until we get some rain,” Tardy said. “It doesn’t have to be a deluge. Just something to cause the vegetation to turn green. And we need to get past these offshore winds.”
San Diego has only received 0.16 inch of precipitation since July 1. And there’s no significant rain in the 10-day forecast.
Late Friday morning, fire crews quickly doused a brush fire along busy South Mission Road in Fallbrook, just south of Fallbrook High School. “Favorable wind conditions allowed firefighters to make an aggressive attack,” Cal Fire Capt. Robert Johnson said. The fire reached 3 acres and destroyed a residential structure, the agency said. Crews were building a line around its footprint and staying on the scene for several hours to put out hot spots.
Although fire didn’t scorch the county overnight, the very threat of it is still causing a lot of hardship. At 8 a.m., more than 8,200 customers were without electricity as SDG&E de-energized some circuits in backcountry and mountainous communities such as Alpine, Julian, Jacumba and the Viejas Reservation.
Utilities in California often employ what are called public safety power shut-offs in order to reduce the risk of high winds causing power lines to fall to dry ground, potentially igniting a wildfire.
“Power will remain out as long as high winds pose a safety threat to communities,” SDG&E said in a statement. Emergency crews will inspect power lines and other equipment and infrastructure when gusts die down, the utility said, and then start restoring power to affected areas.
(Gary Robbins & Rob Nikolewski, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Teri Figueroa)
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A powerful winter storm that dumped heavy snow and glazed roads with ice across much of Texas and Oklahoma lumbered eastward into southern U.S. states Friday, making for dicey travel and a rare snow day for many students.
Arkansas and North Carolina mobilized their National Guards for tasks such as helping stranded motorists, as governors in multiple states declared states of emergency. School was canceled for millions of children from Texas to Georgia and as far east as South Carolina.
The storm piled up more than a year’s worth of snowfall on some Southern cities. As much as a foot fell in parts of Arkansas. There were reports of nearly 10 inches in Little Rock, a city that averages 3.8 inches a year.
More than 7 inches fell at Memphis International Airport in Tennessee since late Thursday. The city usually sees 2.7 inches a year. In some areas where snow tapered off the worry was that wet roads would freeze overnight.
Farther south and east into Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, a wintry mix of sleet, snow and ice made travel treacherous. The sleet and snow that fell over parts of Atlanta into South Carolina and North Carolina was changing to freezing rain, and forecasters warned that if the ice accumulation gets heavy enough, power lines and trees could topple.
Snow began falling in metro Atlanta before dawn, leading to hundreds of flights being canceled and hundreds more delayed at the world’s busiest airport, according to flight tracker FlightAware. Controllers declared a ground stop before 8 a.m., meaning no planes could land or take off.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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When raging wildfires tore through Pacific Palisades and other local communities this week, they not only left a path of destruction reminiscent of a World War II bombing campaign, but threatened to deepen a crisis that has already left hundreds of thousands of Californians struggling to find and keep affordable homeowners insurance.
The multiple fires from Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley that have burned thousands of structures since Tuesday — leading to losses that by one early estimate are well into the tens of billions of dollars — hit Southern California as insurers have been dropping customers statewide, citing the increasing number and severity of wildfire-related losses.
The Palisades fire alone, which is estimated to have consumed more than 5,300 structures, is being called the most destructive fire ever to hit the city, while the fires across Los Angeles County are likely to be one of the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history.
“It’s just an unmitigated disaster,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a consumer advocacy group. “Wildfires in January? This just proves insurers’ point that the risk is so significantly increased due to climate change.”
On Thursday, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara issued a moratorium that bars insurers from canceling or not renewing home policies in the Pacific Palisades and the San Gabriel Valley’s Eaton fire zones.
The moratorium protects homeowners living within the perimeter of the fires and in adjoining ZIP codes from losing their policies for one year, starting from when Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Wednesday. The moratoriums, provided for under state law, are typically issued after large fires and apply to all policyholders regardless of whether they have suffered a loss.
State Farm, the state’s largest home insurer, announced in March it would not renew 72,000 property insurance policies, while Chubb and its subsidiaries stopped writing new policies for high-value homes with higher wildfire risk — just to name two insurers that pulled back from the California market.
It’s not clear how many homeowners in Pacific Palisades and elsewhere might not have had coverage, but at least some homeowners reported that insurers had not renewed their policies before the disaster struck. Actor James Woods, who lost his home in the Palisades fire, tweeted Tuesday that “one of the major insurances companies canceled all the policies in our neighborhood about four months ago.”
State Farm last year told the Department of Insurance it would not renew 1,626 policies in Pacific Palisades when they expired, starting last July.
A spokesperson for State Farm declined to comment on the decision but said: “Our number one priority right now is the safety of our customers, agents and employees impacted by the fires and assisting our customers in the midst of this tragedy.”
The situation has left many homeowners in neighborhoods at high wildfire risk with little choice but to seek relief from the California FAIR Plan, an insurer of last resort that sells policies with lesser coverage. The policies cover losses up to $3 million to a dwelling and its contents caused by certain hazards, such as fire, but do not include personal liability and other protection that are typically offered by private insurers.
The FAIR Plan has seen its policies grow from a little over 200,000 in September 2020 to more than 450,000 as of last September. That has roughly tripled its loss exposure to $458 billion over the same period. Pacific Palisades has one of the state’s highest concentrations of FAIR Plan policy holders, with the insurer estimating its exposure in the neighborhood at $5.89 billion.
JP Morgan analysts estimate that total Los Angeles County losses could be close to $50 billion, while the losses insurers will have to pay could top $20 billion. Another estimate puts the losses even higher.
Such losses could cause insurers to exit the market completely, which Tokio Marine America Insurance Co. and Trans Pacific Insurance Co. said in April they would do in not renewing 12,556 homeowners.
The losses also could prompt insurers to further raise premiums, even though some insurers already have been granted big rate hikes, such as a 34% increase Allstate received last year.
Denise Rappmund, senior analyst at Moody’s Ratings, said, “These events will continue to have widespread, negative impacts for the state’s broader insurance market — increased recovery costs will likely drive up premiums and may reduce property insurance availability.”
Should insurers further withdraw from the market, that would put additional pressure on the FAIR Plan, which is backed by the state’s licensed insurers, such as State Farm, who have to pay claims if they exceed the FAIR Plan’s reserves, reinsurance and catastrophe bonding. The insurers also can assess their own policyholders surcharges in the billions of dollars to bail out the plan under regulations put in place last year by Lara as part of his Sustainable Insurance Strategy to help the crippled market.
It’s unclear whether the plan will be able to absorb the losses like it did after the 2018 Camp fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in Northern California. That conflagration was the single costliest natural disaster in the world that year with $12.5 billion in covered losses and $16.5 billion in total losses, according to the reinsurance firm, Munich RE.
“This further complicates an already complicated and hardened market,” Lara said of the fires, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Nonetheless, Lara’s reforms seek to ensure the FAIR Plan remains solvent and to make it more attractive for insurers to write policies in fire risky neighborhoods now being absorbed by the program. He said the regulations should encourage insurers to write more homeowners policies, and if not, they can be adjusted. “I feel very confident,” he said.
For the first time, California insurers can use so-called “catastrophe models” in setting their rates. Instead of largely relying on past claims data, the computer programs attempt to better refine an insurer’s risk by taking into account a multitude of variables that affect a property’s likelihood to suffer a loss.
The other major policy change allows insurers to charge California homeowners for the cost of reinsurance they buy from other insurers to limit their losses during huge catastrophes, such as wildfires and floods. This cost shift to policyholders is common elsewhere but a big change for California, where it will raise premiums. In return for those concessions, insurers will have to write insurance in high-risk wildfire neighborhoods equivalent to 85% of their market share, meaning an insurer with a 10% statewide market share would have to cover 8.5% of the homes in such neighborhoods — a target they have at least two years to reach. Lara’s plan has been blasted by Consumer Watchdog, which says the regulations lack teeth in actually requiring insurers to meet the coverage goals.
“The Sustainable Insurance Strategy is not a magic wand. It’s a set of incentives,” Bach said. “At the end of the day, insurers are always still going to analyze, ‘Are we going to make money here or not?’”
How much this week’s fires will disrupt the already troubled insurance market depends, of course, on how big a disaster they are — but all indications are that insurers will have to absorb billions of dollars of claims given the number of homes destroyed, especially in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades, where the average home is valued at about $3.5 million by Zillow.
Insurance industry experts say a clearer picture on the estimated losses will only come after adjusters have time to review submitted claims. “I think it’s going to be 45 days before we know what the true damage is,” said Max Gilman, president of California personal lines at the brokerage HUB International.
Whatever the final cost, Gilman noted that the fires came after a couple of relatively light fire seasons — though in November the Mountain fire in Ventura County scorched more than 20,600 acres and destroyed more than 130 homes amid parched conditions. That made it at the time the third most destructive fire in Southern California in a decade.
“I think what’s currently transpiring is going to be of grave concern for the future,” he said. “I feel like we took three steps forward to take five steps back.” Denne Ritter, a vice president with the American Property Casualty Insurance Association trade group, said it is too early to assess the impact of the fires on Lara’s reforms, especially given how they are just being put in place. Only one catastrophe model has been submitted for review to regulators, while the reinsurance regulation released last month still awaits final approval by the Office of Administrative Law. “What the insurance industry wants is a healthy market in California where we can compete for business, as we have historically. And the number one priority right now is helping our customers get the resources they need to rebuild their lives and restore their property,” she said.
(Laurence Sarmiento, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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LOS ANGELES - Many watched their homes burn on television in a state of shock.
Since the flames erupted in and around Los Angeles, scores of residents have returned to their still smoldering neighborhoods even as the threat of new fires persisted and the nation’s second-largest city remained unsettled. For some, it was a first look at the staggering reality of what was lost as the region of 13 million people grapples with the gargantuan challenge of overcoming the disaster and rebuilding.
Calmer winds enabled firefighters to start gaining some control of the biggest blazes in metropolitan Los Angeles on Friday before gusty weather returns over the weekend to an area that hasn’t seen rain in more than eight months.
Bridget Berg, who was at work when she saw on TV her house in Altadena erupt in flames, came back for the first time with her family two days later “just to make it real.” Their feet crunched across the broken bits of what had been their home for 16 years. Her kids sifted through debris on the sidewalk, finding a clay pot and a few keepsakes as they searched for Japanese wood prints they hoped to recover. Her husband pulled his hand out of rubble near the still-standing fireplace, holding up a piece of petrified wood handed down by his grandmother. “It’s OK. It’s OK,” Berg said as much to herself as others as she took stock of the destruction, remembering the deck and pool from which her family watched fireworks. “It’s not like we just lost our house — everybody lost their house.”
Since the fires first began popping up around a densely populated, 25-mile expanse north of downtown Los Angeles, they have burned more than 12,000 structures, a term that includes homes, apartment buildings, businesses, outbuildings and vehicles. No cause has been identified yet for the largest fires.
Allegations of leadership failures and political blame have begun and so have investigations. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered state officials to determine why a 117 million-gallon reservoir was out of service and some hydrants ran dry, calling it “deeply troubling.” Meanwhile, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said city leadership failed her department by not providing enough money for firefighting. She also criticized the lack of water. “When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” she said.
At least 11 people have been killed, with five dying in the Palisades fire and six in the Eaton fire, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office. Officials said they expected that number to rise as cadaver dogs go through leveled neighborhoods to assess the devastation.
Officials on Friday set up a center where people could report those missing. Tens of thousands of people remained under evacuation orders, and the fires have consumed about 56 square miles, [(35,840 acres)] larger than the size of San Francisco.
The disaster took homes from everyone — from waiters to movie stars. The government has not yet released figures on the cost of the damage, but private firms have estimated it will climb into the tens of billions. The Walt Disney Co. announced Friday it will donate $15 million to respond to the fires and help rebuild.
The flames hit schools, churches, a synagogue, libraries, boutiques, bars, restaurants, banks and local landmarks like the Will Rogers’ Western Ranch House and a Queen Anne-style mansion in Altadena that dated back to 1887 and was commissioned for wealthy mapmaker Andrew McNally.
Neighbors wandered around ruins Friday as they described now-vanished bedrooms, recently remodeled kitchens and outdoor living spaces. Some talked about the gorgeous views that drew them to their properties, their words contrasting sharply with the scene of soot and ash.
In the coastal community of Pacific Palisades, Greg Benton surveyed where he had lived for 31 years, hoping to find his great-grandmother’s wedding ring in the wreckage. “We had just had Christmas morning right over here, right in front of that chimney. And this is what’s left,” he said, pointing to the blackened rubble that was once his living room. “It’s those small family heirlooms that are the ones that really hurt the most.”
Elsewhere in the city, people at collection sites picked through cardboard boxes of donated items to restart their lives. Firefighters made progress for the first time since Tuesday containing the Eaton fire north of Pasadena, which has burned more than 7,000 structures. Officials said Friday most evacuation orders for the area were lifted. Crews were also gaining ground on the Palisades fire, which burned 5,300 structures and is the most destructive in the city’s history. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who faces a critical test of her leadership as her city endures its greatest crisis in decades, said several smaller fires also were stopped.
California National Guard troops arrived on the streets of Altadena before dawn to help protect property in the fire evacuation zone, and evening curfews were in effect to prevent looting after several earlier arrests.
The level of devastation was jarring even in a state that regularly confronts massive wildfires.
Anna Yeager said she and her husband agonized over going back to their beloved Altadena neighborhood near Pasadena after fleeing with their 6-year- old daughter and 3-year-old son, their two dogs and some clothes. A neighbor told them their house was gone. Now she regrets not grabbing her children’s artwork, her husband’s treasured cookbooks, family photos, and jewelry from her mom, who died in 2012, and her husband’s grandmother, who survived Auschwitz. When the couple returned, they saw blocks of only “chimney after chimney.” “Power lines everywhere. Fires still going everywhere” she said, adding that when they walked up to their home “it was just dust.”
Yeager’s neighborhood of Tudor homes was planning to celebrate its 100th anniversary in May. “You build a world for yourself and your family, and you feel safe in that world and things like this happen that you cannot control,” she said. “It’s devastating.” There were remnants of the front porch where Yeager had photographed her children nearly daily since 2020 and had planned to keep doing that until they reached high school. That gave her hope. “The porch is still there and it’s to me, it’s a sign to rebuild and not leave,” she said. “You know, it’s like saying, ‘Hey, I’m still here. You can still do this.’”
(Manuel Valdes, Julie Watson, John Seger & Heather Hollingsworth, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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LOS ANGELES - The two biggest wildfires ravaging the Los Angeles area this week burned at least 10,000 homes, buildings and other structures, officials said Thursday as they urged more people to heed evacuation orders after a new blaze ignited and quickly grew.
The fast-moving Kenneth fire started in the late afternoon in the San Fernando Valley near the West Hills neighborhood and close to Ventura County. Only hours earlier officials expressed encouragement after firefighters aided by calmer winds and help from crews from outside the state saw the first signs of successfully beating back the region’s devastating wildfires that have killed seven people so far.
“We are expecting this fire to rapidly spread due to high winds,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said, echoing the forecast that called for winds to strengthen Thursday evening through this morning.
The orders came as Los Angeles County officials announced the Eaton fire near Pasadena that started Tuesday night has burned more than 5,000 structures, which includes homes, apartment buildings, businesses, outbuildings and vehicles. To the west in Pacific Palisades, the largest of the fires burning in the area has destroyed more than 5,300 structures.
All of the large fires that have broken out this week in the Los Angeles area are located in a roughly 25-mile band north of downtown.
The Kenneth blaze ignited less than 2 miles away from the El Camino Real Charter High School, where people are sheltering from the fire in Palisades. The two fires are about 10 miles apart.
Dozens of blocks were flattened to smoldering rubble in scenic Pacific Palisades. Only the outlines of homes and their chimneys remained. In Malibu, blackened palm strands were all that was left above debris where oceanfront homes once stood.
At least five churches, a synagogue, seven schools, two libraries, boutiques, bars, restaurants, banks and groceries were lost. So too were the Will Rogers’ Western Ranch House and Topanga Ranch Motel, local landmarks dating to the 1920s. The government has not yet released estimates on the cost of the damage or specifics about how many structures burned.
AccuWeather, a private company that provides data on weather and its impact, on Thursday increased its estimate of the damage and economic loss to $135 billion to $150 billion.
Firefighters made gains Thursday at slowing the spread of the Eaton and Palisades fires, though the Eaton fire remained at 0% contained and the Palisades fire at only a small percentage.
Crews also knocked down a blaze in the Hollywood Hills, allowing an evacuation order to be lifted Thursday. The fire that sparked up late Wednesday near the heart of the entertainment industry came perilously close to igniting the famed Hollywood Bowl.
“While we are still facing significant threats, I am hopeful that the tide is turning,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said Thursday. Water dropped from aircraft helped fire crews quickly seize control of the fires in the Hollywood Hills and Studio City, officials said. Much of the widespread destruction occurred Tuesday after those aircraft were grounded due to high winds.
Fire officials said Thursday that they don’t yet know the cause of the fires but are actively investigating.
Earlier in the week, hurricane-force winds blew embers, igniting the Southern California hillsides.
Right now, it’s impossible to quantify the extent of the destruction other than “total devastation and loss,” said Barbara Bruderlin, head of the Malibu Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce.
“There are areas where everything is gone, there isn’t even a stick of wood left, it’s just dirt,” Bruderlin said.
Of the seven deaths so far, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley confirmed two were in the Palisades fire. County officials said the Eaton fire had killed five. Cadaver dogs and search crews are searching through rubble, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said. Homicide detectives are investigating deaths at several locations including some in the Malibu area, said Nicole Nishida, communications director for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. “Information is still very preliminary, but there have been multiple deaths in the fire areas,” Nishida said.
Anthony Mitchell, 67, and his son, Justin, who had cerebral palsy, were waiting for an ambulance to come, but they did not make it out, Mitchell’s daughter, Hajime White, told The Washington Post.
Shari Shaw told KTLA that she tried to get her 66-year-old brother, Victor Shaw, to evacuate Tuesday night but he wanted to stay and fight the fire. Crews found his body with a garden hose in his hand.
At least 180,000 people were under evacuation orders, and the fires have consumed about 45 square miles — roughly the size of San Francisco. The Palisades fire is already the most destructive in Los Angeles’ history.
All schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are closed today because of the heavy smoke wafting over the city and ash raining down in parts, and classes will not resume until the conditions improve, officials said.
At least 20 arrests have been made for looting, and the city of Santa Monica declared a curfew Wednesday night because of the lawlessness, officials said. Luna said to protect properties National Guard troops would be stationed near the areas ravaged by fire and a curfew was expected to go into effect from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., starting as soon as Thursday.
Actor Jamie Lee Curtis has pledged $1 million to start a “fund of support” for those affected by the fires that touched all economic levels from the city’s wealthy to its working class. Among the celebrities who have lost homes in the area are Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton.
California’s wildfire season is beginning earlier and ending later due to rising temperatures and decreased rainfall tied to climate change, according to recent data. Dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas, have contributed to warmer-than-average temperatures in Southern California, which has not seen more than 0.1 inches of rain since early May.
President Joe Biden said the federal government would pay 100% of the firefighting needs for the next 180 days and would send 400 additional firefighters and more than 30 firefighting helicopters and planes. “We are doing literally everything we can at a federal level,” Biden said.
The rapid spread of the fires has led to criticism of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was in Ghana for the country’s inauguration of its new president when the blazes broke out. At a news conference with other officials Thursday, she got a tough first question from a reporter, who asked, “What explains this lack of preparation and rapid response?” Bass said that when the crisis is over, “we will absolutely do an evaluation” to examine the city’s response. “But my focus now is on the lives and on the homes.”
(Christopher Weber, Julie Watson & John Seewer, ASSOCIATED PRESS; NEW YORK TIMES; LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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A powerful winter storm brought heavy snow and icy conditions to parts of the U.S. South on Thursday, forcing officials to close schools, cancel flights and warn residents in some of the worst-hit areas to stay off roads as it lumbered eastward through Oklahoma and Texas.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders mobilized the National Guard to help stranded motorists, and school was canceled Thursday and today for millions of children across a wide tract of southern states from Texas to Georgia.
The storm dumped as much as 6 to 7 inches in some spots in central Oklahoma and northern Texas before pushing into western Arkansas, according to the National Weather Service. Heavy snow fell in Little Rock, Ark., and farther south and east into Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama a wintry mix of sleet
and freezing rain glazed roads and made travel treacherous.
“I have not seen any accidents, but I have seen a couple of people get stuck out on the road and sliding around,” said Charles Daniel, a truck driver hauling a 48-foot trailer loaded with paint, auto parts and other supplies through slick, slushy roads in central Oklahoma on Thursday. “People do not need to be driving.”
Schools canceled classes for more than 1 million students in Texas and Oklahoma, and closures also kept students home in Kansas City and Arkansas, while in Virginia, frustrations mounted in the state capital over a boil-water advisory caused by an earlier round of winter storms.
Hundreds of flights were canceled by Thursday morning in Dallas, according to tracking platform FlightAware, with more than 3,800 delays and 1,800 cancellations reported nationally.
The storm system was expected to push northeastward today with heavy snow and freezing rain all the way to the Virginia and North Carolina coasts.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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With Santa Ana winds whipping across Southern California and raising the risk of wildfire, there are certain steps San Diego County residents can take to stay safe and prepare in case they need to evacuate.
A red flag warning is in effect in areas of San Diego County east of Interstate 15 through Friday evening. And if strong winds spark a fire in the county, fire officials say that every second counts.
With such high winds, blazes can move dangerously fast, said Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire Capt. Robert Johnson. “So you might not necessarily be in an evacuation area at the time when the fire starts — but you could be five, 10 minutes (into) packing a go-bag, and the fire is already at your front door.”
Here’s what else you can do to prepare before a wildfire ignites.
Pack a go-bag
A go-bag is an emergency supplies kit that you can grab at a moment’s notice during a wildfire or other disaster. Keep it by the front door, in the garage by your car or somewhere else easily accessible. Each person’s go-bag might look a little different depending individual needs, Johnson says, but everyone should include at least three days of non-perishable food and three gallons of water per person.
Plus, don’t forget any necessary medications and prescriptions, a first aid kit, a flashlight, extra batteries and important documents such as passports and birth certificates. Throw in chargers for your devices, too — and be sure they’re charged up ahead of time.
Johnson also recommends filling your vehicle’s gas tank or charging up electric vehicles. You want to have enough fuel to get safely far away from a fire, and gas stations may have their pumps off if they don’t have power.
Make a plan for pets
Pet owners should have carriers ready and at least a two-week supply of food and water — or at least three days of hay, feed and water for livestock and horses. Don’t forget leashes and litter boxes, and put animals’ vaccination records and proof of ownership documents in your go-bag.
And in a dire emergency, focus on personal safety, Johnson said. “We would hate to lose human life because they were trying to evacuate a cat,” he explained.
Stay informed with digital resources
There are several websites and apps that offer up-to-date information before and during a wildfire, including through the National Weather Service, SDG&E and Cal Fire’s firePLANNER, which sends out text alerts, tracks wildfires and lets users create personalized checklists.
Johnson recommends checking Cal Fire’s social media accounts and using the Alert San Diego website and San Diego Emergency app, which gives emergency notifications and information about evacuation shelters.
You can also sign up for emergency alerts sent to land-line phones, cell phones, internet phones and email. Search for evacuation zones and road closures through the Genasys Protect program.
And in case of spotty service, keep a battery- or crank-operated portable radio on hand to stay updated.
Know your evacuation plans
If you haven’t already, coordinate an evacuation plan with other members of your household — and don’t assume one plan is enough. “We like to recommend people have two or three different options,” Johnson said, pointing out that evacuation routes can be compromised if high winds topple trees across roadways or if a route is closed for safety or firefighting efforts.
Be sure to map out a meeting place beforehand, as well, especially if your group is taking separate vehicles. And check in with people you know who may have difficulty evacuating on their own, such as those who don’t drive or who have mobility issues.
Johnson also reminds residents that cell phone towers can be overwhelmed and services will be slower during a fire or other disaster, so it may be difficult or impossible to contact your friends and family via cell phone or use your device for navigation.
Monitor your health
If air quality dips due to wildfire smoke, aim to stay indoors, avoid strenuous activity and wear an N95 mask if outdoors. And if you have an in-home air cleaner or filter, bring it out — especially if the regional wildfires continue or if one starts in the county.
Breathing in wildfire smoke can be especially harmful for children and certain other vulnerable people, such as those with asthma, respiratory illnesses or heart disease or those who are pregnant.
(Maura Fox, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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As San Diegans hunker down amid another period of strong Santa Ana winds and a red flag fire weather warning, they may also want to prepare their devices with apps and alert programs that will notify them of potential danger. Emergency officials use apps, in addition to social media and other tools, to warn about everything from gas leaks to evacuations.
Here are some options to consider. For the apps, extra steps to turn on notifications may be needed, depending on the settings that are already in place.
AlertCalifornia
A statewide network of live fire and weather cameras operated by UC San Diego allows California residents to observe current wildfires or check out an area before one happens. For example, some of the available options for San Diego County are “Mt. Laguna Obsv North,” “Palomar Observatory North” and “San Marcos Peak N Axis.”
The cameras can be viewed live or with a look at amounts of time from five minutes ago to 12 hours ago. San Diegans may also want to use the cameras to observe wildfires elsewhere in the state. Go to cameras.alertcalifornia.org to see all the options.
Alert San Diego
This emergency notification system, run by San Diego County, notifies locals via landline phones, cellphones, internet phones and email. San Diegans with landlines do not need to sign up, according to county officials, but for alerts from cellphones or email, registration is required. Go to alertsandiego.org to sign up.
There is also an Alert San Diego app, which provides information on shelters, the latest emergency notifications, emergency maps and other resources. This app is also used for earthquake alerts.
Cal Fire Ready for Wildfire
This is a web-based app that is accessible from a browser; there is no download. To monitor current wildfire activity, go to incidents.readyforwildfire.org. There is an option to search by ZIP code or view a statewide fire map and individual incident reports.
Cal Fire also offers a program with text messaging about current wildfire incidents within 20 miles of the participant. Go to plan.readyforwildfire.org to sign up.
Genasys Protect
The city of San Diego’s office of emergency services recommends signing up for the Genasys Protect program, which provides notices about evacuation orders.
Users can customize their preferences and track multiple locations. Download the app or use the web platform at protect.genasys.com/search.
SDG&E
San Diego Gas & Electric provides alerts related to its public safety power shutoff program via an app. Users of the app can see a map showing locations that are without power or at risk for a shutoff. They can also input certain addresses to monitor them.
Sign up at sdge.com/alerts-sdge.
Watch Duty
Watch Duty is an easy-to-use wildfire app and website run by a nonprofit based in Sonoma County. It provides the latest news on specific fires, including evacuation notices, and detailed maps.
Other available information includes air quality notices and the latest videos from news conferences by emergency officials. App users can also sign up for alerts. Without the app, some features are still available on watchduty.org.
(Gary Robbins & Abby Hamblin, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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LOS ANGELES - A fast-moving fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday night, threatening one of Los Angeles’ most iconic spots as firefighters battled to get under control three other major blazes that killed five people, put 100,000 people under evacuation orders and ravaged the city from the Pacific Coast to inland Pasadena.
The Sunset fire was burning near the Hollywood Bowl and about a mile from the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The streets around Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Madame Tussauds were packed with stop-and-go traffic as sirens blared and low-flying helicopters soared by on their way to dump water on the flames. People toting suitcases left hotels on foot, while some onlookers walked toward the flames, recording the fire on their phones.
More than 1,000 structures, mostly homes, have been destroyed, and more than 130,000 people are under evacuation orders in the metropolitan area.
Winds eased up some Wednesday, a day after hurricane-force winds blew embers through the air, igniting block after block, and hundreds of firefighters from other states have arrived to help, but the four fires burning out of control showed the danger is far from over.
More than half a dozen schools in the area were either damaged or destroyed, including Palisades Charter High School, which has been featured in many Hollywood productions, including the 1976 horror movie “Carrie” and the TV series “Teen Wolf,” officials said.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said air operations were dousing flames. She warned they still faced “erratic winds,” though not of hurricane force like Tuesday evening, when much of the destruction occurred.
In Pasadena, Fire Chief Chad Augustin said between 200 and 500 structures have been damaged or lost from the Eaton fire that started Tuesday night. He said the city’s water system was stretched and was further hampered by power outages, but that even without those issues firefighters would not have been able to stop the fire as embers blown by the intense winds ignited block after block.
“We were not stopping that fire last night,” he said. “Those erratic wind gusts were throwing embers for multiple miles ahead of the fire.”
West of downtown Los Angeles, a major fire leveled entire blocks, reducing grocery stores and banks to rubble in the Pacific Palisades, a hillside area along the coast dotted with celebrity homes and memorialized by the Beach Boys in their 1960s hit “Surfin’ USA.” More than 1,000 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, the most destructive in the modern history of Los Angeles. Many people were hurt, including first responders, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said.
The scope of the destruction was just becoming clear: Block after block of California Mission style homes and bungalows were reduced to nothing but charred remains dotted by stone fireplaces and blackened arched entryways. Ornate iron railing wrapped around the smoldering frame of one house. The apocalyptic scenes spread for miles. Swimming pools were blackened with soot, and sports cars slumped on melted tires.
As flames moved through his neighborhood, Jose Velasquez sprayed down his Altadena home with water as embers rained down on the roof. He managed to save their home, which also houses their family business of selling churros. Others weren’t so lucky. Many of his neighbors were at work when they lost their homes. “So we had to call a few people and then we had people messaging, asking if their house was still standing,” he said. “We had to tell them that it’s not.” Beyond the burned areas, residents worked wearing N95 masks, unable to escape the toxic smoke wafting over huge sections of the city.
Actors lost homes
The flames marched toward highly populated and affluent neighborhoods, including Calabasas and Santa Monica, home to California’s rich and famous. Mandy Moore, Cary Elwes and Paris Hilton are among the stars who said Wednesday they had lost homes. Billy Crystal and his wife, Janice, lost their home of 45 years in the Palisades fire. “We raised our children and grandchildren here. Every inch of our house was filled with love. Beautiful memories that can’t be taken away,” the Crystals wrote in the statement.
In Palisades Village, the public library, two major grocery stores, a pair of banks and several boutiques were destroyed. “It’s just really weird coming back to somewhere that doesn’t really exist
anymore,” said Dylan Vincent, who returned to the neighborhood to retrieve some items and saw that his elementary school had burned down and that whole blocks had been flattened.
The fires have consumed a total of about 42 square miles — more than 26,800 acres — nearly the size of the entire city of San Francisco. Flames moved so quickly that many barely had time to escape. Police sought shelter inside their patrol cars, and residents at a senior living center were pushed in wheelchairs and hospital beds down a street to safety in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles.
In the race to get to safety in Pacific Palisades, roadways became impassable when scores of people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot.
Higher temperatures, less rain
California’s wildfire season is beginning earlier and ending later due to rising temperatures and decreased rainfall tied to climate change, according to recent data. Rains that usually end fire season are often delayed, meaning fires can burn through the winter months, according to the Western Fire Chiefs Association.
Dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas, have contributed to warmer-than-average temperatures in Southern California, which has not seen more than 0.1 inch of rain since early May.
The winds increased to 80 mph Wednesday, according to reports received by the National Weather Service. Forecasters predicted wind gusts of 35-55 mph, which could rise higher in the mountains and foothills. Fire conditions could last through Friday.
President Joe Biden signed a federal emergency declaration after arriving at a Santa Monica fire station for a briefing with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dispatched National Guard troops to help.
Several Hollywood studios suspended production, and Universal Studios closed its theme park between Pasadena and Pacific Palisades. With an estimated 1,000 structures destroyed and the fire still active, the Palisades fire is by far the city’s most destructive in modern history, topping the Sayre fire in 2008 that destroyed just over 600 structures, according to statistics kept by the Wildfire Alliance, a partnership between the city’s fire department and MySafe:LA. Structures refers to homes and other buildings.
Southern California Edison shut off service to thousands because of safety concerns related to high winds and fire risks. More than 1.5 million customers could face shut-offs depending on weather conditions, the utility said.
Several Southern California landmarks were heavily damaged, including the Reel Inn in Malibu, a seafood restaurant. Owner Teddy Leonard and her husband hope to rebuild. “When you look at the grand scheme of things, as long as your family is well and everyone’s alive, you’re still winning, right?” she said.
(Hallie Golden, John Seewer & Julie Watson, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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San Diego County will be hit by a second wave of Santa Ana winds tonight and early Friday that will pose a greater wildfire threat than the gusts that whipped parts of the region early Wednesday, the National Weather Service says. In preparation, power was preemptively shut off to thousands of residents in the county’s mountainous backcountry, and schools in several such districts were closed today for the second day in a row.
The Santa Anas will also continue to slam Los Angeles County, where they had already sparked huge wildfires that burned more than 1,000 homes and businesses and killed at least five people by Wednesday evening.
In greater San Diego starting today, “the relative humidity will be lower, the winds will be really strong, and the land is critically dry,” said Casey Oswant, a weather service forecaster.“The Santa Anas also will be out of the east, which means there could be stronger crosswinds on Interstate 8. The area east of Alpine could get 75 mph gusts, and there could be 50 mph to 60 mph winds in the inland foothills.” The relative humidity will drop to the 15%-to-20% level, which is more conducive to the start and growth of wildfires — especially east of Interstate 15, where there is a lot of chaparral, the most flammable kind of vegetation in the U.S.
A third, weaker round of Santa Anas could come on Sunday, and there’s the possibility of a fourth on Tuesday or Wednesday, forecasters said.
There’s no precipitation in the forecast through Jan. 16, and San Diego is now experiencing the driest start of the rainy season since at least 1850. Only 0.14 inch of rain has fallen since Oct. 1.
As of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, San Diego Gas & Electric had shut off power to nearly 9,000 customers to reduce the chance of strong winds knocking power lines to the ground and starting fires.
That number was expected to grow. Already the utility has notified more than 70,000 customers they face potential shutoffs. So far, the outages have been concentrated in the county’s backcountry, mountainous and East County communities, such as Alpine, Julian, Valley Center and Boulevard.
School closures were concentrated in those areas, too. For the second day in a row, schools are to be closed today in Mountain Empire, Warner and both Julian school districts. So are two Bonsall Unified schools, Sullivan Middle and Bonsall High.
SDG&E’s vice president of wildfire and climate science, Brian D’Agostino, described the situation as a “long-duration” windstorm that will see multiple, separate bursts of Santa Anas blow through the county. Dozens of workers were stationed in local canyons and on mountain peaks
Wednesday monitoring the winds. “We’re monitoring four different events coming through in the next seven days,” D’Agostino said at a briefing Tuesday. According to the utility’s outage map, most circuits that had lines de-energized Wednesday were not expected to be restored until Friday or Saturday. “SDG&E understands the difficulty of being without power and is focused on providing a variety of resources for their customers while they work to keep communities safe during high wildfire risk conditions,” it said in a statement.
A network of community resource centers has been established in areas with power outages so residents can charge their electronic devices, access Wi-Fi and get water, snacks and updates. The locations of those opened Wednesday are: Boulevard Community Center, 39919 Ribbonwood Road, Boulevard. Descanso Branch Library, 9545 River Drive, Descanso. Whispering Winds Catholic Camp, 17606 Harrison Park Road, Julian. Pine Valley Improvement Club, 28890 Old Highway 80, Pine Valley. Lake Morena Community Resource Center, 29765 Oak Drive, Campo.
On Wednesday, Cal Fire Capt. Robert Johnson said five engines and one hand crew previously sent from Northern California to San Diego County to be on standby had been rerouted to help Los Angeles County. Another five engines and a hand crew from up north would stay in San Diego County in case of a local emergency. Local firefighting agencies in San Diego, Poway, Chula Vista, Carlsbad and National City were also sending personnel to Los Angeles as part of another multi-agency strike team, which consists of four engines with four crew members each.
Pets are also getting a San Diego assist. The San Diego Humane Society sent four staffers to its Pasadena counterpart Wednesday to help free up space so the Los Angeles-area shelter could house newly evacuated animals. The local group will return with 15 to 20 dogs that will be put up for adoption here, then make another trip for more. The organization is asking San Diegans to consider adopting or fostering a dog.
(Gary Robbins & Rob Nikolewski, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Caleb Lunetta, Jemma Stephenson, Teri Figueroa)
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DALLAS, TX - An area stretching from Texas to Tennessee braced Wednesday for the expected arrival of freezing rain and snow, as some other parts of the country that already received an arctic blast this week prepared to go another round with the plunging polar vortex.
Arkansas’ capital, Little Rock, closed schools today and Friday in preparation for the storm, which could start dumping heavy snow on the region overnight. Although certain parts of the U.S. began to emerge from a deep freeze, life still hadn’t returned to normal in other locales, including the Kansas City area, which canceled classes Wednesday for a third consecutive day, and the Virginia capital, Richmond, which was still under a weather-related water-boil advisory until at least Friday.
A mix of sleet, snow and freezing rain was expected to fall on a stretch of the
U.S. from New Mexico to Alabama starting Wednesday night and early today, with the heaviest amounts likely in parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the National Weather Service. In the most southern locations, the snow could turn into sleet and freezing rain, which meteorologists warn could cause hazardous driving conditions.
That system is expected to push northeastward by Friday with a mix of heavy snow and freezing rain forecast from southeastern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas all the way to the Virginia and North Carolina coasts. As much as 8 inches of snow could fall in scattered parts of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia through Saturday, the weather service said.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced the closure of some state offices on Friday, while Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said all city offices would be closed that day, with employees working remotely.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that the state had deployed several emergency agencies and opened hundreds of warming centers ahead of the storm.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Relief teams in western China shifted their focus to resettling survivors after a search Wednesday for any remaining victims of a deadly earthquake that struck a day earlier near a holy city for Tibetan Buddhists.
Tents, quilts, stoves and other relief items were being delivered to people whose homes were uninhabitable or unsafe. State media said that more than 46,000 people had been relocated following the quake, which killed 126 and injured 188 others.
Tibetans, many of whom have fled persecution in China, held vigils for the victims in neighboring India and Nepal, both of which have sizeable communities.
The earthquake struck an outlying county in Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet and the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.
It was not immediately known whether he was in his Tashi Lhunpo Monastery at the time. The epicenter was about 25 kilometers from the main part of the city, which is called Xigaze in Chinese and sprawls across a high altitude plain.
More than 500 aftershocks were recorded after Tuesday’s earthquake, which the U.S. Geological Survey said measured magnitude 7.1. The epicenter was about 50 miles from Mount Everest and the border with Nepal, where the shaking sent people running out of their homes.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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BEIJING - A strong earthquake shook a high-altitude region of western China and areas of Nepal on Tuesday, damaging hundreds of houses, littering streets with rubble and killing at least 126 people in Tibet. Many others were trapped as dozens of aftershocks shook the remote region.
Rescue workers climbed mounds of broken bricks, some using ladders in heavily damaged villages, as they searched for survivors. Videos posted by China’s Ministry of Emergency Management showed two people being carried on stretchers by workers treading over the debris from collapsed homes.
At least 188 people were injured in Tibet on the Chinese side of the border, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
More than 1,000 homes were damaged in the barren and sparsely populated region, state broadcaster CCTV reported. In video posted by the broadcaster, building debris littered streets and crushed cars.
People in northeastern Nepal strongly felt the earthquake, but there were no initial reports of injuries or damage, according to the country’s National Emergency Operation Center. The area around Mount Everest, about 50 miles southwest of the epicenter, was empty in the depth of winter when even some residents move away to escape the cold. The quake woke up residents in Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu — about 140 miles from the epicenter — and sent them running into the streets.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake measured magnitude 7.1 and was relatively shallow at a depth of about 6 miles. China’s Earthquake Networks Center recorded the magnitude as 6.8. Shallow earthquakes often cause more damage. The epicenter was in Tibet’s Tingri county, where the India and Eurasia plates grind against each other and can cause earthquakes strong enough to change the heights of some of the world’s tallest peaks in the Himalayan mountains.
Tibet is part of China, but many Tibetans’ loyalties lie with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader who has lived in exile in India since a failed anti-Chinese uprising in 1959.
There have been 10 earthquakes of at least magnitude 6 in the area where Tuesday’s quake hit over the past century, the USGS said. About 150 aftershocks were recorded in the nine hours after the earthquake, and the Mount Everest scenic area on the Chinese side was closed.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for all-out efforts to rescue people, minimize casualties and resettle those whose homes were damaged. More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed, CCTV said.
Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing was dispatched to the area to guide the work.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The plunging polar vortex brought subfreezing temperatures Tuesday to some of the southernmost points of the U.S., threatening to dump snow on parts of Texas and Oklahoma in the coming days and contributing to a power outage in Virginia’s capital that made the water unsafe to drink.
The arctic blast that descended on much of the U.S. east of the Rockies over the weekend has caused hundreds of car accidents, and thousands of flight cancellations and delays.
As the cold front moved southward Tuesday, it prompted a cold weather advisory for the Gulf Coast and pushed the low temperature in El Paso, along Texas’ border with Mexico, to 31 degrees, with an expected wind chill factor ranging from 0 to 15 degrees early today, according to the National Weather Service.
Parts of southeastern Georgia and northern Florida endured unusually frigid temperatures overnight into Tuesday and were under freeze warnings stretching into today. And an area stretching from the central Plains through the Ohio Valley into the Atlantic is likely to receive more snow and ice for a few days, according to forecasters.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fierce Santa Ana winds that stoked a blaze that scorched thousands of acres near Los Angeles are expected to wallop San Diego County early today, in the start of what forecasters say could be a week or more of off-and-on lashings in a region that’s drier than it’s been in years. The leading edge of the storm spread into the county Tuesday afternoon, producing 30 mph gusts at Camp Pendleton, Ramona and Fallbrook — numbers expected to soar by 10 a.m. today, when the Santa Anas will peak, the National Weather Service said.
On Tuesday night, the weather service issued a particularly dangerous situation (PDS) warning for the county’s northern edge — a rarely used warning that means that extremely severe and potentially damaging weather situation appears imminent. That warning applies to all of Orange County and the border with San Diego County. Winds were projected to reach 40 to 60 mph between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. today, with possible gusts up to 70 and 80 mph.
Forecasters are especially concerned about three other parts of the region, too, in addition to Camp Pendleton: Interstate 8 east of Alpine, areas flanking Palomar Mountain and areas along state Route 94, which begins in southeastern San Diego. Winds could gust 45 to 60 mph in some places, and a bit higher in isolated spots. By noon today, the relative humidity is expected to fall to 12% to 20%, further elevating the risk of wildfires.
“We’re not just looking at one Santa Ana wind — we’re actually looking at a series of Santa Ana winds that are going to be coming in over the next seven to 10 days,” said Brian D’Agostino, the vice president of wildfire and climate science at San Diego Gas & Electric. “This is the first extreme (weather) we’ve ever seen in January,” D’Agostino told reporters Tuesday. “And not only that, it’s multiple extreme days back to back. So we’re walking into a bit of an uncharted fire potential for us.” The prospect of strong, lengthy Santa Anas led SDG&E to notify almost 65,000 customers they could have their electricity turned off preemptively to avoid the risk of gusts knocking down power lines and igniting wildfires.
A second wave of Santa Anas is predicted to kick up on Thursday night into Friday, followed by weaker gusts on Sunday, and there’s potential “for another stronger event as we head into early next week,” D’Agostino said. As of today, San Diego will be experiencing the driest start of the rainy season since 1850. Only 0.14 inches of precipitation has fallen at San Diego International Airport since Oct. 1.
First responders, utilities, school districts and more hustled Tuesday to prepare for trouble.
SDG&E placed dozens of spotters and power line experts in canyons and on peaks throughout the county. Caltrans warned that winds could become strong enough to knock out traffic lights.
Although some local school districts were still on winter break, others whose students had returned closed schools in anticipation of the dangerous winds and possible outages. Schools are closed today in Mountain Empire, Ramona, Spencer Valley, Warner and both Julian school districts.
The federal government supplemented its fire team in the Palomar District of the Cleveland National Forest, adding five fire trucks, a water tender and a bulldozer — but the forest remained open to the public.
The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar and Camp Pendleton was monitoring the Santa Anas to gauge the possible effect on its fighter jets, the Marines said. All of these agencies were using UC San Diego’s AlertCalifornia, a network of real-time video cameras positioned in 34 locations across San Diego County.
In San Diego County, a grass fire burned about 3 1/2 acres in the Wynola area near Julian on Tuesday but was quickly put out. But the power of Santa Ana winds was especially evident near Los Angeles on Tuesday, where a wildfire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood scorched thousands of acres, forced tens of thousands of residents to evacuate and led drivers to abandon their cars and flee on foot.
Cal Fire officials said 45 engines from Northern California had been sent down to the southern region ahead of this week’s high-speed winds. Of those, 10 engines and two additional fire crews were brought to San Diego County, Cal Fire Capt. Mike Cornette said. Cal Fire also held firefighters’ time-off requests during the weather event, and all equipment, dozers and aircraft will be fully staffed around the county. “We’ve got a heightened level of awareness going into this wind pattern and the critical fire danger,” Cornette said. “Firefighters are preparing mentally, physically and getting our equipment squared away so that we’re ready.”
Extreme weather can be especially risky for those living outside. A spokesperson for the city of San Diego said officials were monitoring the storm and were prepared, if needed, to evacuate the city’s two designated camping areas by Balboa Park where hundreds of homeless people stay. Golden Hall, the recently shuttered Civic Center facility downtown, remains available as an emergency shelter.
Many homeless San Diegans have moved in recent years to isolated but potentially vulnerable areas like riverbeds as cities around the region cracked down on encampments. More than 420 were estimated to be living by local waterways as of last fall, the highest total yet, according to the San Diego River Park Foundation.
(Gary Robbins & Rob Nikolewski, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Caleb Lunetta, Blake Nelson, Jemma Stephenson)
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LOS ANGELES - A wildfire whipped up by extreme winds swept through a Los Angeles hillside dotted with homes Tuesday, burning structures in Pacific Palisades and prompting evacuation orders for tens of thousands. In the frantic haste to get to safety, roadways were clogged and scores of people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot, some toting suitcases.
The traffic jam on Palisades Drive prevented emergency vehicles from getting through and bulldozers were brought in to push the abandoned cars to the side and create a path, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was in Southern California to attend the naming of a national monument by President Joe Biden, made a detour to the canyon to see “firsthand the impact of these swirling winds and the embers,” and he said he found “not a few — many structures already destroyed.”
Officials did not give an exact number of structures damaged or destroyed in the Pacific Palisades wildfire, but they said about 30,000 residents are under evacuation orders and more than 13,000 structures were under threat.
And the worst could be yet to come. The blaze began around 10:30 a.m., shortly after the start of a Santa Ana windstorm that the National Weather service warned could be “life threatening” and the strongest to hit Southern California in more than a decade. The exact cause of the fire was unknown and no injuries had been reported, officials said.
The winds were expected to increase overnight and continue for days, producing isolated gusts that could top 100 mph in mountains and foothills — including in areas that haven’t seen substantial rain in months. “By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods,” Newsom warned residents, saying the worst of the winds were expected between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 5 a.m. today. He declared a state of emergency on Tuesday.
The fire quickly consumed about 4.6 square miles of land in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles, sending up a dramatic plume of smoke visible across the city. Residents in Venice Beach, some 6 miles away, reported seeing the flames. It was one of several blazes across the area.
Sections of Interstate 10 and the scenic Pacific Coast Highway were closed to all non-essential traffic to aid in evacuation efforts. But other roads were blocked. Some residents jumped out of their vehicles to get out of danger and waited to be picked up. Resident Kelsey Trainor said the only road in and out of her neighborhood was completely blocked. Ash fell all around them while fires burned on both sides of the road. “We looked across and the fire had jumped from one side of the road to the other side of the road,” Trainor said. “People were getting out of the cars with their dogs and babies and bags, they were crying and screaming. The road was just blocked, like full-on blocked for an hour.”
An Associated Press video journalist saw a roof and chimney of one home in flames and another residence where the walls were burning. The Pacific Palisades neighborhood, which borders Malibu, includes hillside streets of tightly packed homes along winding roads nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains and stretches down to beaches along the Pacific Ocean. An AP photographer saw multimillion-dollar mansions on fire as helicopters overhead dropped water loads. Roads were clogged in both directions as evacuees fled down toward the Pacific Coast Highway while others begged for rides back up to their homes to rescue pets. Two of the homes on fire were inside exclusive gated communities.
Long-time Palisades resident Will Adams said he immediately went to pick up his two children from St. Matthews Parish’s school when he heard the fire was nearby. Meanwhile, he said embers flew into his wife’s car as she tried to evacuate. “She vacated her car and left it running,” Adams said. She and many other residents walked down toward the ocean until it was safe. Adams said he had never witnessed anything like this in the 56 years he’s lived there. He watched as the sky turned brown and then black as homes began burning. He could hear loud popping and bangs “like small explosions,” which he said he believes were the transformers exploding. “It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades. One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames,” Adams said.
Actor James Woods posted footage of flames burning through bushes and past palm trees on a hill near his home. The towering orange flames billowed among the landscaped yards between the homes. “Standing in my driveway, getting ready to evacuate,” Woods said in the short video on X. Actor Steve Guttenberg, who lives in the Pacific Palisades, urged people who abandoned their cars to leave their keys behind so they could be moved to make way for fire trucks. “This is not a parking lot,” Guttenberg told KTLA. “I have friends up there and they can’t evacuate. ... I’m walking up there as far as I can moving cars.”
The erratic weather caused Biden to cancel plans to travel to inland Riverside County, where he was to announce the establishment of two new national monuments in the state. He remained in Los Angeles, where smoke was visible from his hotel, and was being briefed on the wildfires. The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a grant to help reimburse California for the firefighting cost.
Some trees and vegetation on the grounds of the Getty Villa were burned by late Tuesday, but staff and the museum collection remain safe, Getty President Katherine Fleming said in a statement. The museum located on the eastern end of the Pacific Palisades is a separate campus of the world-famous Getty Museum that focuses on the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.
(Jaimie Ding, Janie Har & Julie Watson, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A huge swath of the U.S. was blasted with ice, snow and wind Monday as the polar vortex that dipped south over the weekend kept much of the country east of the Rockies in its frigid grip, making many roads treacherous, forcing school closures and causing widespread power outages and flight cancellations.
The immense storm system brought disruption to areas of the country that usually escape winter’s wrath, downing trees in some Southern states, threatening a freeze in Florida and causing people in Dallas to search for hats and gloves.
Washington, D.C., received heavy snow as President-elect Donald Trump’s victory was certified. Taking advantage of the rare snowstorm in the nation’s capital, revelers engaged in a snowball fight in front of the Washington Monument as flags flew at half-staff in memory of former President Jimmy Carter.
In Kentucky’s biggest city, Louisville, Hugh Ross used his shovel Monday to break sheets of ice that were covering his driveway. Frozen rain fell atop snow that arrived Sunday, which he said “couldn’t have been worse.”
Ice and snow blanketed major roads in Kansas, western Nebraska and parts of Indiana, where the National Guard was activated to help stranded motorists. The National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings for Kansas and Missouri, where blizzard conditions brought wind gusts of up to 45 mph. The warnings extended to New Jersey into early today.
The polar vortex of ultra-cold air usually spins around the North Pole, but it sometimes plunges southward into the U.S., Europe and Asia. Studies show that a fast-warming Arctic is partly to blame for the increasing frequency of the polar vortex extending its grip.
Starting Monday, the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. was dealing with bone-chilling cold and wind chills, forecasters said, predicting temperatures ranging from 12 to 25 degrees below normal in many areas.
The Northeast was expected to get several cold days, said Jon Palmer, a weather service meteorologist based in Gray, Maine.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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San Diego County - which is in the midst of one of the driest periods on record — will be lashed by unusually cold and expansive Santa Ana winds early Wednesday that could spark wildfires, snap trees and knock out power, the National Weather Service said.
The enormous windstorm will shoot into Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties today, then expand into San Diego County, which hasn’t had significant rain since last spring.
The system is so volatile the weather service’s Los Angeles office took the highly unusual step Monday of placing a large, magenta headline on its homepage that read: “Life-threatening & destructive windstorm!!!” Following it was the guidance: “Extreme risk — take immediate action.”
The weather service usually takes a calmer approach.
The Los Angeles office also issued a “particularly dangerous situation” warning, a rarely used term that denotes that extreme weather could be on the way.
Not long after the warning was issued, Cal Fire said it was moving firefighting resources from Northern California to San Diego, Orange, Riverside, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties in case they’re needed.
Forecasters issued a red flag fire weather warning for the area of San Diego County east of Interstate 15. The warning will last from 4 a.m. Wednesday to 6 p.m. Thursday and could be extended if the winds persist.
San Diego Gas & Electric has notified nearly 65,000 of its customers that it could temporarily shut off their power to help minimize the risk of sparking wildfires in the high winds. Most of those customers live east of I-15. But there are also many who live at and near the coast, in such communities as Encinitas, Del Mar and Oceanside. The local outages could begin today, the utility said.
The Santa Ana winds will also affect customers north of San Diego. Southern California Edison is the investor-owned utility servicing 50,000 square miles within central, coastal and Southern California.
As of 1:45 p.m. Monday, Edison’s website said public safety power shutoffs are being considered for more than 294,000 of its customers — primarily in Los Angeles, Riverside and Ventura counties. That’s almost 6% of the customers in Edison’s service territory.
The windstorm comes at a perilous moment. As of Wednesday, this will be the driest start of the rainy season in San Diego since 1850. The city has recorded only 0.14 inches of precipitation, and there’s no significant rain in sight.
Santa Ana winds are usually warm. But the ones arriving before dawn Wednesday will be very cold, because much of the energy is dropping in from Canada. The early-morning temperature in Oceanside could be as low as 34 degrees.
The winds also will be spread over a wider area of the county than usual. They’ll zoom down the face of Palomar Mountain, causing big gusts in places like Escondido and Camp Pendleton, and down Mount Laguna, making it hard to drive on Interstate 8, east of Alpine, forecasters said.
Downtown San Diego could get the kind of wild and wicked gusts that toppled 80- to 90-foot eucalyptus trees in Balboa Park on Jan. 26, 2022. “Its hard to predict what will happen because the wind will be gusting everywhere,” said Alex Tardy, a weather service forecaster.
The relative humidity also will be a concern. It’s expected to drop below 20% from the mountains to the sea, elevating the risk of wildfire.
This is the first January since 2021 that the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office has issued such a dire late-season warning alert.
“It’s not a common occurrence,” said Rich Thompson, a weather service meteorologist, of the January red flag warning. But he said it does happen, particularly “at times in our drier winters.”
“We can’t let our guard down in Southern California,” said Brent Pascua, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “This year, we haven’t seen as much moisture ... so the fuel is primed.”
Parched vegetation on its own isn’t a major concern during cooler months, typically, but when a strong Santa Ana winds pick up and humidity drops, a single spark can rapidly become dangerous, Pascua said.
“That is the perfect recipe for a large wildfire,” he said.
Both the Mountain fire in November in Ventura County and the Franklin fire in December in Malibu erupted amid these dangerously dry, windy conditions.
“If fire ignition occurs, conditions are favorable for very rapid fire spread and extreme fire behavior, including long range spotting, which would threaten life and property,” this week’s red flag warning said. “Use extreme caution with anything that can spark a wildfire. Residents near wildland interfaces should be prepared to evacuate if a wildfire breaks out.”
While large wildfires in January remain rare for California — since 2016, there
have only been a handful of January fires and most of them have been small, according to the Cal Fire database —they are not unheard of. In 2014, the Colby fire broke out in Glendora and Azusa in mid-January, destroying several homes and structures in the area.
NB: By meteorological definition, this event is not a classical Santa Ana. The winds are generated
on the north side of a low pressure system in the south, causing easterly winds in San Diego County. For a classical Santa Ana, a high pressure system builds to the northeast, so that easterly winds are generated to the north of its center. Such a condition brings higher temperatures and lower relative humidities, which increases the risk of starting a wildfire.
(Gary Robbins&Rob Nikolewski, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; Los Angeles Times)
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LONODN, UK - Heavy snow and freezing rain brought widespread disruption across Europe on Sunday, particularly in the U.K. and Germany, with several major airports forced to suspend flights.
With the weather set to stay inclement on Sunday in the U.K., there were concerns that many rural communities, particularly in the north of England, could be cut off, with up to 15 inches of snow on the ground above 985 feet.
The National Grid, which oversees the country’s electricity network, said it had been working to restore power after outages across the country. Power cuts were reported in the English cities of Birmingham and Bristol, and Cardiff, Wales.
Many sporting events were postponed, though the heavyweight Premier League fixture between rivals Liverpool and Manchester United was on, following an inspection at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium.
Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and Manchester Airport had to close runways overnight but returned back to normal on Sunday.
Snow and ice were also causing havoc in Germany, where a bout of wintry weather spread from the southwest. Frankfurt airport canceled 120 of its 1,090 planned takeoffs and landings on Sunday, according to the Fraport press office.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A blast of snow, ice, wind and plunging temperatures stirred up dangerous travel conditions in parts of the central U.S. on Sunday, as a disruptive winter storm brought the possibility of the “heaviest snowfall in a decade” to some areas.
Snow and ice blanketed major roadways in nearly all of Kansas, western Nebraska and parts of Indiana, where the state’s National Guard was activated to help any motorists who were stuck. At least 8 inches of snow were expected, particularly north of Interstate 70, as the National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings for Kansas and Missouri, where blizzard conditions brought wind gusts of up to 45 miles per hour. The warning extended to New Jersey for today and into early Tuesday.
“For locations in this region that receive the highest snow totals, it may be the heaviest snowfall in at least a decade,” the weather service said early Sunday.
About 63 million people in the U.S. were under some kind of winter weather advisory, watch or warning on Sunday, according to Bob Oravec with the National Weather Service.
The polar vortex of ultra-cold air usually spins around the North Pole. People in the U.S., Europe and Asia experience its intense cold when the vortex escapes and stretches south. Studies show a fast-warming Arctic is partly to blame for the increasing frequency of the polar vortex extending its icy grip.
In Indiana, snow fully covered portions of Interstate 64, Interstate 69 and U.S. Route 41, prompting Indiana State Police to plead with motorists to stay off the roads as plows worked to keep up with the pace of the precipitation.
A section of I-70 was closed in central Kansas by Saturday afternoon. Roughly 10 inches of snow had fallen in parts of the state, with snow and sleet totals predicted to top 14 inches for parts of Kansas and northern Missouri.
In Kentucky, Louisville recorded 7.7 inches of snow on Sunday, a new record for the date that shattered the previous mark of 3 inches set in 1910. Lexington, KY, also set a snowfall record, with 5 inches. Parts of upstate New York saw 3 feet or more of snow Sunday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Road conditions deteriorated Saturday in the central U.S. as a winter storm brought a mix of snow, ice and plunging temperatures, with forecasts calling for the dreaded combo to spread eastward in the coming days.
“Winter returned,” said Bob Oravec, lead forecaster at the National Weather Service in College Park, MD.
By Saturday evening, snow was falling between central Kansas and Indiana, especially along and north of Interstate 70, where there was a high chance of at least 8 inches of snow. Part of the interstate was closed in central Kansas by the afternoon, and there were numerous wrecks.
A firetruck, several tractor-trailers and passenger vehicles overturned west of Salina, KS. Rigs also jackknifed and went into ditches, state Highway Patrol Trooper Ben Gardner said. He posted a video showing his boots sliding across the highway blacktop like an ice-skating rink. “We are in it now,” Gardner said as he drove to the scene of an accident. Online, he begged for prayers and warned that some roadways were nearly impassable.
Freezing rain in Wichita, KS, sent authorities to multiple crashes in the morning, and police urged drivers to stay home if possible and watch out for emergency vehicles. Governors in neighboring Missouri and nearby Arkansas declared states of emergency. Whiteout conditions threatened to make driving dangerous to impossible, forecasters warned, and heighten the risk of becoming stranded.
The storm was forecast to move into the Ohio Valley late Saturday, with severe travel disruptions expected. It will reach the Mid-Atlantic states today into Monday, with a hard freeze expected as far south as Florida.
Severe thunderstorms, with the possibility of tornadoes and hail, were also possible ahead of the storm system’s cold front as it crosses the Lower Mississippi Valley, the National Weather Service warned.
The Kansas City International Airport temporarily halted flight operations in the afternoon due to ice. Dozens of flights were delayed. Stores in Wichita were filled with shoppers stocking up on groceries in advance of the storm, and warming centers opened in churches and libraries. Several businesses closed across the Kansas City area, and the school district in suburban Independence, MO, said it might need to cancel classes for one or more days.
“Get where you’re going now & stay put. If you must travel, consider packing a bag & staying where you’re headed,” the Missouri Department of Transportation said in a message on X. The agency warned Friday that a shortage of workers could hamper the ability to clear roads. In Columbus, Ohio, crews treated major roadways with anti-icing liquids. “It will be a major headache,” said Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather. “The storm not only has the snow threat to it but the ice threat.” Power outages could be significant, particularly south of the Kansas City area, Kines said.
Starting Monday, the eastern two-thirds of the country will experience dangerous, bone-chilling cold and wind chills, forecasters said. Temperatures could be 12 to 25 degrees below normal as a polar vortex stretches down from the high Arctic.
On Saturday, temperatures hovered in the teens in Chicago and around zero in Minneapolis, while dropping to 14 below in International Falls, MN.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency Friday evening ahead of the storm and noted it could impact people’s ability to vote in the state’s special elections Tuesday. In a statement on X, he encouraged residents to vote early on Saturday before the bad weather arrives.
A similar declaration was issued in Maryland, where officials in the historic state capital near the Chesapeake Bay asked residents to remove vehicles from emergency snow routes. Annapolis also announced plans to open several garages today for free parking. The National Weather Service predicted 8 to 12 inches of snow for the Annapolis area, with temperatures remaining below freezing throughout the weekend.
In Baltimore, an extreme weather alert was issued instructing agencies to provide shelter and assistance for those in need. City officials said wind chills were expected to dip to 13 degrees overnight Saturday and remain in the teens through Tuesday.
(Heather Hollingsworth&Brian Witte, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Thousands of civilians in a remote part of northeastern Ethiopia are being evacuated because of potentially dangerous volcanic activity, officials said Friday.
The evacuations come after steam eruptions have been seen since Thursday from the long-dormant volcano of Mount Dofen, raising fears of a volcanic eruption that could put many people at risk.
Also, volcanic mud flowing from Dofen has caused huge cracks on critical infrastructure, including on major roads, and dozens of properties have been severely damaged in the region of Afar, according to the Afar Region Disaster Risk Management.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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A strong snow and ice storm followed by brutally cold conditions will soon smack the eastern two-thirds of the United States as frigid air escapes the Arctic, plunging as far south as Florida, meteorologists forecast.
Starting today, millions of people are going to be hit by moderate to heavy snow from Kansas City to Washington — including a high chance of at least 8 inches of snow between central Kansas and Indiana — the National Weather Service warned Friday. Dangerous ice particularly lethal to power lines — “so heavy like paste, it’s hard to move,” said private meteorologist Ryan Maue — is likely to set in just south of that in southern Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and much of Kentucky and West Virginia.
“It’s going to be a mess, a potential disaster,” Maue said. “This is something we haven’t seen in quite a while.”
As the storm moves out on Monday, hundreds of millions of people in the eastern two-thirds of the nation will be plunged into dangerous bone-chilling air and wind chills all week, government and private forecasters said. Temperatures could be 12 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal, they said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Parts of the United Kingdom were flooded Wednesday as heavy rains and powerful winds continued to disrupt New Year’s celebrations.
Several communities in the Manchester area were flooded, with several homes evacuated and cars submerged up to their roofs on roads and in parking lots after nearly a month’s worth of rain fell in two days.
A major incident was declared and mountain rescue teams were called in to help firefighters respond to swamped properties and stranded vehicles, Greater Manchester Police said.
“There’s still probably likely to be further flooding across the course of the day,” Met Office meteorologist Tom Morgan said. “We are potentially expecting the flood situation to get worse before it gets better.”
Tom Coulthard said the rain started late Tuesday afternoon and poured all night where he lives in Didsbury, south of Manchester, topping river banks and forcing a hotel to be evacuated before dawn. Roads and highways were closed in the area.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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