The scale of the effort will be vast — the area scorched by the major fires is equal to three times the size of Manhattan.
The iconic landscape of Los Angeles County and its surrounding region have been forever transformed by a massive, multi-front firestorm that has leveled an area more than twice the size of
For more perspective, Central Park in NYC is only 843 acres. So, the wildfire is currently the equivalent of almost 24 Central Parks combined. Actually, the entirety of Manhattan is 14,600 acres, or 22.81 square miles, so the Palisades Fire is bigger than the whole borough.
The Pacific Palisades blaze has wreaked havoc on over 5,000 structures and is set to reshape Los Angeles long after it burns out.
Even as four wildfires continued to burn in Los Angeles County Wednesday, the blazes were already rewriting the record books.
The damage the Southern California wildfires have inflicted in the Los Angeles area so far is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.
“I could be having a Manhattan and a steak ... ‘I just want to go to my house and see what’s left,’” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said at a Monday briefing.
The wildfires in Southern California have led to the evacuations of over 130,000 people and have destroyed over 10,000 structures. Overlaying the wildfire outbreak across other major U.S. cities shows that the blaze is one of the worst in United States history, as it continues to spread across residential areas in Los Angeles.
Police say that they were dispatched to the waterline at the 3500 block of the strand just after 7 p.m. after receiving reports that the man's body had washed ashore.
One of the two major fires that devastated this region — the Eaton fire — is not even in the city of Los Angeles; it is in an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County. The response to the Eaton fire was led by the county fire department; the city fire department was at the forefront in fighting the Palisades fire.
Somini Sengupta, a climate reporter who has lived across Los Angeles, reflects on the city, its mythology and its reckoning with disaster.
L.A.'s wildfire recovery may be on a collision course with Trump's immigration policy. Southern California's construction industry is heavily reliant on immigrant labor.