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January 8th, 2025

LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

Wildfires in Los Angeles County have led to 70,000 evacuations, two fatalities, and over 1,000 destroyed structures. Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency as firefighting efforts face significant challenges.

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LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

Wildfires in Los Angeles County have forced approximately 70,000 residents to evacuate as flames spread rapidly due to strong winds and dry conditions. The fires have resulted in two fatalities and the destruction of over 1,000 structures. California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency, and the National Guard, along with thousands of firefighters, is actively combating the blazes. The situation is critical, with around 400,000 residents experiencing power outages and water pressure issues hampering firefighting efforts. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is on emergency lockdown, with staff evacuated and some losing their homes. Although no fire damage has been reported at JPL, the facility is at risk, and backup plans are in place to control Mars rovers and spacecraft if necessary. Governor Newsom emphasized the extreme fire risk posed by the ongoing windstorm, while NASA Administrator Bill Nelson expressed concern for affected personnel and first responders. The fires remain largely uncontrolled, raising fears of further destruction.

- Approximately 70,000 people have been evacuated due to wildfires in Los Angeles County.

- Over 1,000 structures have been destroyed, and two fatalities have been reported.

- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is on lockdown, with staff evacuated and some losing homes.

- California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency.

- Firefighting efforts are hindered by power outages and failing water pressure.

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Link Icon 52 comments
By @bloudermilk - 4 months
We lost our house to the Eaton fire this morning. It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the destruction in our community. Everything within a couple square miles of us burned.
By @throwaway249281 - 4 months
There's a lot of fingerpointing but as Daniel Swain put it: 1. This was completely expected and forecasted both short and long term by regional climate and weather experts. Two very wet winters caused fuel buildup followed by an extremely hot and dry year. 2. There is very little that can be done in these situations. 100 mph gusts of embers can't be fought with hoses and air attack isn't possible in high winds. 3. Hard to believe but it could have been a lot worse. Daniel Swain points out there could have been several more major fires like the two big ones but they got put out quickly before they spread. 4. California's climate has likely been this way for millions of years, long before human habitation.
By @sapphicsnail - 4 months
I was in Pacific Palisades when the fire started yesterday. I've never seen one spread so fast. It went from there being smoke way in the distance and people going about their lives normally, then 90 minutes later the fire was everywhere and people were panicking and evacuating en masse.
By @segasaturn - 4 months
Los Angeles Fire Department funding was cut by over $23M only a few months ago. The fires are currently being fought by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers. Can't say if that funding would have prevented it, but cutting it definitely has not helped.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...

Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"

By @pizza - 4 months
Many neighborhoods and landmarks along PCH in Malibu just gone. There's nothing left. Hard to fathom or overstate what the impact of all this will be. Every year I go down to the beach at sunrise on January 1st with my dad. We pulled over somewhere, don't know where, along the way, to catch the sunrise. Today when I first woke up I opened twitter and saw a video of the charred skeletons of the houses right where we were standing just one week ago. Recognized it from the background of the picture I took of him. Fucking insane.

edit: much of today has been giving me flashbacks of the Woolsey fire. the only way, probably, this fire today is better than the Woolsey fire, is that there likely won't be a mass shooting the very next day, like what happened back then, at the Borderline shooting.

By @throwup238 - 4 months
I live south of the evacuation warning zone and the wind and fires have turned the entire San Gabriel Valley into an apocalyptic scene. Detritus littered all over the roads (with tons of dry flammable eucalyptus branches, yay!) and there’s ash falling from the sky in big flakes. Air quality in the tank though it was even worse a few hours ago and everything smells like smoke.

This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.

By @tobinfekkes - 4 months
A cousin works at JPL leading the Mars Rover program. Her house burnt down this afternoon :(

She's moved to an RV on her parent's property an hour away, temporarily. Thankful for backup option, but she put a lot of sweat and tears (and money) into fixing that little house up!

By @consumer451 - 4 months
NASA's FIRMS site shows the scale of both fires. They are huge given their proximity to the city.

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.57,3...

By @kaycebasques - 4 months
Map of evacuation zones: https://protect.genasys.com/Search?z=9.689266971108566&latlo...

Looks like 3 independent fires?

By @sbohacek - 4 months
The relative humidity is 0.33 [1]. The previous lowest recorded relative humidity was 0.36 in Needles CA and Iran [2]

[1] https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=KSMO

[2] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/world-record-low-humidity-...

By @mrbluecoat - 4 months
JPL would be a national loss. I hope it doesn't come to that. Stay safe, SoCal folks!
By @beernet - 4 months
This is sad, devastating, and not surprising. Yet, people voted for policies that will further accelerate climate change and its consequential destructions in the next four years. As someone not living in the US, this is unbelievable to witness. Where did it all go wrong inside of people's heads?
By @JumpCrisscross - 4 months
With much of California, Texas and Florida property damage is concentrated where folks built where they shouldn’t have [1]. (At times nudged on by subsidised insurance [2].)

Is that true in this case, too? (Being so close to LA, it doesn’t strike me that it could be.) If not, is my general thesis off?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/06/1204923950/arizona-california...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

By @kamikazeturtles - 4 months
> The National Guard - along with thousands of firefighters (many of them prisoners working for $10 a day or less) - have been deployed to help tackle the conflagration.

I hope their compensation is a little more than $10 a day! By the looks of the fire, those guys/gals are heros.

By @earnestinger - 4 months
I see there are three separate fires several km apart. How do they start so synchronously?
By @baxtr - 4 months
Such a tragedy. I am very sorry for anyone affected by this :(

As a non-local it’s hard to judge how big this is. Can anyone point to map or explain to what extend LA is affected?

Is it 5% of the area/population or rather 50%?

By @prennert - 4 months
This is probably a naive question because I am not local, but how usual are wild fires during the winter?

There seems to be snow large parts of the US and freezing temperatures. In LA it is currently 8°C (46°F), which is not freezing, but also not hot.

Does this suggest even bigger fires are to be expected in the summer this year when it is actually hot?

By @tonymet - 4 months
Prayers go out to Snapchat, Riot, Naughty Dog, TigerConnect (nee TigerText) and other West LA / Santa Monica companies whose staff may live in the Palisades , Topanga & Malibu. I remember .XYZ & Headspace are also in the neighborhood.

Any other Silicon Beach companies that I missed?

By @vFunct - 4 months
After hurricane Andrew Florida changed their building codes to account for hurricanes. But can California do the same for wildfires? Is it even possible to construct fireproof homes? (With stone construction or whatever?)
By @rafram - 4 months
> With the fires still largely unconfined, and no sign of letup from the winds spreading the blazes, the loss of JPL is looking increasingly likely.

This is unsourced conjecture. If JPL actually burned, it would be a tragedy, but there's nothing to suggest that a massive, fenced, landscaped facility with a fire station literally at its gate [1] is in any real danger.

[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/B1F9ULKFrs7KvQa7A

By @freen - 4 months
Climate change is watching photos of disasters start at a great distance from you, but year after year they get closer and closer until you are there, taking the picture yourself.
By @jarsin - 4 months
Now they are saying another fire broke out near hollywood hills. If winds don't stop how much worse can this get?

Sixth fire: A new brush fire called the Sunset Fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills near Runyon Canyon Wednesday evening. A mandatory evacuation order is in place for Laurel Canyon Boulevard (on the west) to Mulholland Drive (on the north) to 101 Freeway (on the east) down to Hollywood Boulevard (on the south).

By @username135 - 4 months
https://app.watchduty.org/i/40388

Altadena fire

By @lend000 - 4 months
This saga has led me to do some research on the state of modern firefighting. From what I've gathered, we're still using the same methods (more or less) we've been using since the 1960's when Phos-Chek was introduced. There have been significant improvements in information (locating fires early with satellites and drones as such), which is no doubt valuable, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of advancements in actually putting out an aggressive fire. Perhaps someone who knows the state of the art can correct me.

However, I feel like there are some startup opportunities here, either for endpoint structure defense or firefighting equipment. There is a real need that will likely continue to grow over time.

Some things that came to mind: - Easily deployable, compressed CO2 canisters coordinated to smother fires from crossing strategic lines e.g. at a fire road on a ridge - More effective use of high powered drones for firefighting delivery - Use of special explosives or projectiles in remote / inaccessible terrain *yes, this comes with major caveats - Has materials science advanced to the point where we can launch reusable tarps on fires to smother them?

By @deadbabe - 4 months
Can someone explain what efforts will be made to rebuild if any? How could they rebuild knowing this can just happen again next year? It’s not like hurricanes where buildings can be made to withstand category 5 storms.
By @ridgeguy - 4 months
Even at a remove of decades from when I worked at JPL, this makes me very sad.
By @johanam - 4 months
For those in need of support or who want to donate, there are some resources at https://fireaid.info/
By @chris_va - 4 months
Map: https://app.watchduty.org/i/40335
By @dataflow - 4 months
Realistically -- how likely is this to go into the city? What is likely to stop it, if not water (given they're running short)?
By @trhway - 4 months
One can imagine an IR monitoring (satellite or high flying drones like Reaper, one drone can see an IR source like a tank from 100km, so it would take just a few drones to monitor the the whole state for fires) with [almost] automated immediate dispatching of the fleet of drones (not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers) once the fire is detected. Would be much cheaper than having multi-billion dollar fires every year (these LA fires have already hit $50B as of today).
By @gadflyinyoureye - 4 months
I hear how Californian laws make building difficult. I also hear that there is housing shortage. Will the complex and possibly convoluted build process limit the restoration of burnt communities?

For example, my understanding is that all new home construction requires solar. I assume that is about $60,000. Then the permitting process is something like $50-100,000. That is a sizable chunk of the insurance money just to meet new code.

By @deegles - 4 months
I live thousands of miles away and I can't help but wonder what natural disaster will hit me, eventually.
By @renewiltord - 4 months
It’s grown quite far actually. We have family who had to evacuate in the Hollywood Hills.
By @worik - 4 months
Lots of blame to go around. But in the end, it all comes back to climate change
By @anon291 - 4 months
California has a long history of failed forest management. At what point will the voters say enough is enough? But they keep electing the same people.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010382535/gavin-newsom-misle...

By @chiph - 4 months
Some coworkers had to evacuate. One of them was woken up last night by their doorbell camera sending multiple alerts because of the high winds.

I hope everyone gets to safety.

By @383toast - 4 months
is there a wildfire tracker?
By @consumer451 - 4 months
People have lost their lives and many more have lost their homes.

Elon Musk has chimed-in on the matter. I don't post this flippantly. As a huge fan of Tesla and SpaceX, someone please explain to me what is happening.

https://i.redd.it/iasdlw98tzbe1.png

By @usrnm - 4 months
What are the chances that the affected areas will be rebuilt with something else than single family homes? Something denser
By @mempko - 4 months
Global warming doing it's thing.
By @zokier - 4 months
I was wondering why JPL website was not working, I guess this answers that.
By @blondie9x - 4 months
Most of these wildfires are caused by humans. Not just because of climate change but because of people intentionally starting fires who want to watch the destruction unfold. There were fires near these exact areas where fires in homeless camps were found to be the cause. Not enough was done to enforce the law and stop street people from intentionally causing destruction and being pushing for it.
By @blackeyeblitzar - 4 months
It’s interesting to me how much attention these fires are getting because it affects relatively rich and tourist friendly areas. There are many, many wildfires every year across several states but most don’t even get their governor’s attention, let alone make national news. People seem shocked by what the fires can do but this is what many communities have had to deal with.