Wildfires rage through L.A., forcing thousands to flee as homes, businesses burn

Wildfires rage through L.A., forcing thousands to flee as homes, businesses burn

Multiple massive wildfires tore across the Los Angeles area with devastating force early Wednesday, destroying more than 1,000 structures and killing at least two people as desperate residents escaped through flames, ferocious winds and towering clouds of smoke.

At least four separate blazes were burning in the metropolitan area, from the Pacific Coast inland to Pasadena, home of the famed Rose Parade. With thousands of firefighters already battling the flames, the Los Angeles Fire Department put out a plea for off-duty firefighters to help. Weather conditions were too windy for firefighting aircraft to fly, further hampering the fight. Fire officials said they hoped to get the flights up later Wednesday.

In addition to the two deaths, Los Angeles County fire chief Anthony Marrone said at a news conference Wednesday morning that many others were hurt in the fires, which threatened at least 28,000 structures.

Images of the devastation that emerged overnight showed luxury homes that had collapsed in a whirlwind of flaming embers. The tops of palm trees whipped against a glowing red sky.

At least 70,000 residents were ordered to evacuate, officials said. The flames marched toward highly populated and affluent neighbourhoods home to California’s rich and famous. Hollywood stars, including Mark Hamill, Mandy Moore and James Woods, were among those forced to flee.

The home of Vice President Kamala Harris in Los Angeles was included in one of the evacuation zones, although no one was there, according to a spokesperson.

Flames that broke out Tuesday evening near a nature preserve in the foothills northeast of L.A. spread so rapidly that staff at a senior living centre had to push dozens of residents in wheelchairs and hospital beds down the street to a parking lot. Residents — one as old as 102 — waited in their bedclothes as embers fell around them until ambulances, buses and construction vans arrived to take them to safety.

Another blaze that started hours earlier ripped through the city’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, a hillside area along the coast dotted with celebrity residences. In the frantic haste to get to safety, roadways became impassable when scores of people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot, some toting suitcases.

A third wildfire started around 10:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday and quickly prompted evacuations in Sylmar, a San Fernando Valley community that is the northernmost neighbourhood in Los Angeles.

Fires cancel plans, including for president

The causes of all three fires were under investigation. The fires were at zero per cent containment early Wednesday and it was too windy for firefighting aircraft fo fly.

Flames were being pushed by Santa Ana winds topped 129 km/h in some areas by early Wednesday, according to reports received by the National Weather Service in Los Angeles. They could top 160 km/h in mountains and foothills — including in areas that haven’t seen substantial rain in months. 

California’s wildfire season typically begins in June or July and runs through October, according to the Western Fire Chiefs Association, but January wildfires are not unprecedented. There was one in 2022 and 10 in 2021, according to Cal Fire.

The 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, the association said.

The situation prompted the Los Angeles Fire Department to take the rare step of putting out a plea for off-duty firefighters to help.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X early Wednesday that California had deployed more than 1,400 firefighting personnel to combat the blazes, describing it as an “all hands on deck” situation.

U.S. President Joe Biden had to cancel plans to travel to inland Riverside County, where he was to announce the establishment of two new national monuments. He remained in Los Angeles, where smoke was visible from his hotel, and was briefed on the wildfires. The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a grant to help reimburse California for the firefighting cost.

Film studios cancelled two movie premieres due to the fire and windy weather, and the Los Angeles Unified School District said it temporarily relocated students from three campuses in the Pacific Palisades area.

‘They were crying and screaming’

The Pacific Palisades fire started around 10:30 a.m. PT and quickly consumed about 11.6 square kilometres of land in the neighbourhood in western Los Angeles, sending up a dramatic plume of smoke visible across the city. 

The traffic jam on Palisades Drive prevented emergency vehicles from getting through and a bulldozer was brought in to push the abandoned cars to the side and create a path. 

Pacific Palisades resident Kelsey Trainor said the only road in and out of her neighbourhood was blocked. 

“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 Pacific Palisades, which borders Malibu about 32 kilometres west of downtown Los Angeles, 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.   

Unprecedented situation, longtime resident says

Longtime Palisades resident Will Adams said he was down in town when the fires started and immediately went to pick up his two kids 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. 

“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.

By evening the flames had spread into neighbouring Malibu and several people there were being treated for burn injuries and a firefighter had a serious head injury and was taken to a hospital, according to Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott.

The Eaton fire, which started around 6:30 p.m. PT the day before, had quickly burned four square kilometres, according to fire officials, and the Hurst fire jumped to 202 hectares.

As of Wednesday morning, more than 200,000 people were without power in Los Angeles County, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us, due to the strong winds.

Published at Wed, 08 Jan 2025 14:51:29 +0000

Elon Musk is on a tear as he shakes up politics in Europe. What’s his endgame?

As if having the ear of incoming U.S. president Donald Trump weren’t enough, tech billionaire Elon Musk has been on a tear this week, trashing European politicians on both the left and right, and using posts on his social media platform, X, to disrupt politics across the continent.

The French president, politicians in Germany and officials with the European Commission have all felt Musk’s online wrath, on issues concerning their electability and alleged hypocrisy. But it’s his withering attacks on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other U.K. politicians that have stood out.

In a 72-hour span starting over the weekend, Musk suggested King Charles should fire Starmer and call a new election, and pushed the false claim that Starmer was “deeply complicit in mass rapes” and should be sent to prison. 

Musk also posted that it might be up to the United States to “liberate” Britons from their “tyrannical government.”

These accusations have centred on Starmer’s role in an ugly chapter of Britain’s recent judicial history, concerning the prosecution of gangs of mostly British Pakistani men who groomed and sexually exploited thousands of girls between roughly 1997 and 2013.

Starmer was the head of the country’s Crown prosecution system starting in 2008 and oversaw many of the criminal prosecutions. Musk, without any evidence and in the face of repeated inquiries that said otherwise, has blamed Starmer for inaction.

A 2022 inquiry headed by Scottish child protection expert Prof. Alexis Jay concluded that while there was no prosecutorial cover-up, local authorities — but not Starmer — had made mistakes. 

Musk also smeared Jess Phillips, the Labour cabinet minister now in charge of women’s safeguarding, calling her a “rape genocide” apologist for refusing to heed calls for another national inquiry — even though Jay has said a new inquiry would only delay implementing the recommendations from her report.

Longtime U.K. politics watcher Tim Bale at Queen Mary University of London says Musk’s incendiary accusations have put Labour on the defensive and provided fresh ammunition to opponents on the political right.

“In all my years of covering British politics, I can’t remember an incident like this,” Bale told CBC News. “[Musk’s] goal seems to be to destabilize the British government and also to emphasize to Donald Trump that this is not an administration he wants to be friends with.”

France, Norway raise concerns

Starmer’s Labour Party is one of the few left-of-centre governments remaining in Europe, with recent elections witnessing seismic shifts to the right, including in Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

Germany’s Social Democrats may be the next to fall, with elections coming in February and Chancellor Olaf Scholz widely expected to go down in defeat.

Musk has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has said he plans to use X to host a discussion with its leader, Alice Weidel, who’s a fierce critic of multiculturalism. Some prominent AfD members have been ostracized for their failure to condemn the war crimes of the Nazis.

On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron slammed Musk for “directly intervening” in elections in Europe. Other EU leaders want to see regulators impose fines and other legal sanctions on Musk for improperly using his social media platform. 

Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre was quoted by Reuters as saying Musk’s political influence has become deeply troubling, and a spokesman for Spain’s government said Tuesday that social media platforms must always act with “absolute neutrality.”

Bale says the aim of Musk’s intervention may be to coerce unfriendly European governments into backing off from tougher legislation that could hurt tech companies. The U.K., for example, has just brought in a new digital regulations act with strengthened oversight of big tech companies and their business models.

“Perhaps [Musk is] going to make it more difficult for the British government to regulate social media platforms,” said Bale.

Fighting with Farage

But having friendly relations with Musk seems no guarantee of avoiding his wrath.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK who only three weeks ago lunched at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo estate with Musk and expected the tech mogul to make a big donation to his increasingly popular party, suddenly found himself on the outside, as Musk called for him to be replaced as party leader. 

Reform UK champions policies such as deep cuts to immigration, eliminating net-zero emission goals and drastically reducing taxes and spending.

The rift between the two men appears to stem from Musk’s insistence that far-right activist and anti-Islam crusader  Tommy Robinson should be freed from jail. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is a former member of an openly fascist British political party who has served multiple terms in jail, including for fraud and contempt of court.

Both Farage and Starmer — who rarely agree on much — contend that Robinson’s use of Facebook Live and flouting a judge’s order by broadcasting banned details of a 2018 sex exploitation case in the community of Huddersfield nearly resulted in a mistrial.

Farage, who has been trying to moderate his Reform UK’s image to attract more Conservative supporters, has said courting Robinson could cause “immense harm” to his party. But Musk has tweeted Robinson deserves to be freed — and that Farage should be fired.

Starmer claps back

In one of his strongest public statements since he became prime minister this past summer, Starmer took aim at Musk on Tuesday, accusing the world’s richest man of spreading lies.

“I’m prepared to call out this for what it is. We’ve seen this playbook many times, whipping up intimidation and threats of violence, hoping that the media will amplify it,” said Starmer. “When the poison of the far right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, then in my book, a line has been crossed.”

Many in the U.K. also blamed Musk for inflaming tempers and inciting violence in the aftermath of the killings of three young people at a dance class in Southport, England, this summer. Musk reposted conspiracy theories from far-right accounts linking the incident to mass immigration, stating that “civil war” in the U.K. was inevitable. 

Just how much traction Musk’s interventions are getting with the British public is difficult to gauge. In the aftermath of Musk’s social media attacks, pollster YouGov reposted its latest poll from November, underscoring that at the time, Musk was unpopular with 64 per cent of the British public. 

On the other hand, the Labour Party may be concerned that Musk’s attacks — whether truthful or not — could nonetheless cause damage. 

A Labour cabinet minister appeared to respond to Musk’s recent accusations by announcing that people who fail to report child sexual abuse could face criminal prosecution as part of a new law to be introduced later in 2025 — one of the recommendations in Prof. Jay’s report.

For Starmer, and other European politicians, attacking Musk comes with risks, says Bale of Saint Mary’s.  

“They know that Musk is really close to Trump, and by offending Musk, they may well turn Trump against them.”

Published at Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000