LOS ANGELES:
Two massive wildfires that engulfed whole neighborhoods and displaced thousands in Los Angeles were totally uncontained on Thursday, authorities said, as shell-shocked residents began to pick through the charred wreckage of their homes.
Swaths of the United States’ second-largest city lay eerily deserted due to the fires’ destruction and sweeping evacuation orders, with smoke blanketing the sky and its acrid smell pervading almost every building.
A vast firefighting operation continued for a third day, bolstered by water-dropping helicopters thanks to a temporary lull in winds.
Amid the chaos, looting broke out, with at least 20 arrests made so far, officials said.
The biggest fire, which has ripped through 17,000 acres (6,900 hectares) of the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood, is “one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles,” city fire chief Kristin Crowley told a press conference.
Another 10,000-acre fire in Altadena in which at least five people died was also at “zero-percent containment,” although spreading had “significantly stopped” as wind gusts reduced, county fire chief Anthony Marrone said.
Kalen Astoor, a 36-year-old paralegal, was among those returning to the scorched remains of residential streets Thursday morning.
Her mother’s home had been spared by the inferno’s seemingly random and chaotic destruction. Some neighbors’ houses, often side-by-side with those razed to the ground, had similarly survived.
Through the blackened remains of devastated homes, gloomy vistas of the surrounding fire-ravaged mountains could be glimpsed through the smoke.
“The view now is of death and destruction,” she told AFP. “I don’t know if anyone can come back for a while.”
The same fire flared up again near the summit of Mount Wilson, home to a historic observatory and vital communication towers and equipment.
But there was some good news for Hollywood, the historic home of the US movie industry, after evacuation orders prompted by the nearby “Sunset Fire” on Wednesday were lifted.
Fast-moving flames fanned by powerful winds of up to 100 miles (160 kilometers) an hour since Tuesday have leveled more than 2,000 structures across the city, many of them multi-million dollar homes.
Aerial views on Thursday showed whole neighborhoods burnt to the ground, in scenes watched in horror by millions in Los Angeles and around the world.
Crowley said a preliminary estimate of destroyed structures in Pacific Palisades was “in the thousands.”
