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Hey, everyone. It's Instead Herndon, political reporter for the New York Times. When I became a journalist, I made a promise to my readers, like the way the doctors take an oath to their patients. I committed to make sure I'm getting to the truth, no matter which party, business, organization, or person I'm reporting on. That's what the New York Times has been doing for more than a century. We believe the public deserves the right to make up their mind based on the facts. If you want to support this work, you can subscribe to the New York Times at nytimes. Com/subscri.

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Com.cribe. My name is Orly Israel. I live with my family in the Pacific Basis. I found out about the fire. It must have been 10:00 AM when someone texted me, Is everything okay? To which I said, About what? And I said, The fire. And I looked at the window and there's this huge plume of smoke just coming over the mountains. It's big. And, like being in Los Angeles, in our fire around, fairly often. Seeing smoke is not an unusual thing. But this was really close. We start getting automatic evacuation warnings, and the fire was getting closer and closer, and you could see it from the bedroom window. You could see the flames, the waterfall down this hill towards of town. The embers were just flying to the sky like a rain of fire. And the sound of a fire, I never would have thought the sound It sounds like an airport, just busy and blazing. We had these two garden hoses, and a bush would catch on fire, and we'd spray the bush, and then another bush would catch on fire. And eventually, the fence got on fire, the wooden fence between our house and the next house.

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And it was just too hot and too many embers, and couldn't get close enough to it to spray it with the hose without getting burned. And I went, Oh, should we fight this? We were wearing swimming pool goggles and N95 mask, and we just couldn't do it. So we got out of there. I'm thinking about my family. I'm thinking about any future plans I had or totally Out the window, it really makes me think about... That's when I packed my value goals. I thought, Well, these are the most important things to me. Now I get to live with knowing that I chose those things, and I don't think I'm aware enough of the consequences of this to be heartbroken yet. But I think it's just wait for the bad news that the house is completely gone, and then wait until they let us come take through the rubble.

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From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kytrowaf, and this is the Daily In the last 48 hours, devastating wildfires have consumed more than 25,000 acres in Los Angeles, with more than 100,000 households being told to evacuate. As flames surround the city, thousands of structures have burned to the ground, and at least five people have died. Today, my colleague, LA Bureau Chief Karina Noel, on the fire's path of destruction, and our staff meteorologist, Judson Jones, on the conditions that have made them so hard to contain. It's Thursday, January ninth. Karina, we're talking to you at 4:30 PM Eastern on Wednesday, a day after these extraordinary fires broke out. You're in Los Angeles. Starting at the beginning, can you tell us what this has all looked like from the ground?

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We knew that there was going to be really high winds in our area. It's something that we're a little bit used to down here, and it's not something that I think we get too worried about, but we were hearing from forecasters that it was going to be pretty extreme. So Tuesday morning, I was just trying to prep a story about the wind and working with reporters in the field who were telling me that, Oh, okay, people are at hardware stores prepping buying candles, generators in case the power goes out. Then everything changed at about 10:30 AM. That's when a fire broke out in this neighborhood called the Pacific Palisades. It just suddenly became a fire story.

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Karina, help orient us a little bit. Where is that? Where is this area of the Pacific Palisades? What's it like there?

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The Pacific Palisades is a neighborhood that's out on the west side. It's partially coastal. It's very hilly. It's in the Santa Monica Mountains. It has about 24,000 residents. It's considered more affluent. I think what struck us is that, of course, we're used to wildfires here in Southern California, but it breaking out in the Pacific Palisades because it's such a heavily populated area, that's when we get really nervous about fires here.

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It sounds like this is a place where potentially a lot of people, you said 20,000 residents, are in danger.

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When we started hearing about the evacuation orders, I pulled up a map and looked at the neighborhood. It's a hillside neighborhood, and you have all of these winding roads, and a lot of them are cul-de-sacs or dead ends. I remember just thinking, it's going to be really terrible for there to be a mass evacuation right now.

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Can you take us through what it looks like when people start to flee that area?

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People were getting in their cars, but getting trapped on certain streets. Legendary Sunset Boulevard is a nightmarish scene today. A graveyard- And they were trying to make their way down to what's called Pacific Coast Highway or PCH.

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The iconic street was the main route for tens of thousands of residents escaping the fires fueled by lashing 80 miles.

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So there was only a small section of it that people could get to, and that was really clogged. So people had just abandoned their cars.

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Yeah, what happened? Why did you have to get out and go?

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We thought everything was going to be fine. We were just going to go down Sunset to ECH, you just get out of there. But the flames started like palm trees near us started catching on fire, and either a fireman or a policeman started telling everybody, get out of your car if you want to live.

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There's even this moment when a local news anchor is interviewing somebody in the Pacific Palisades.

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There's an important announcement I wonder if I could just make.

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If anybody has a car and they leave their car, leave the keys in the car. He's pleading with viewers and residents, Hey, leave your keys in your car if you do abandon it, because then he and others could help move the cars out of the way for the fire department. Then I think at one point, a reporter asks him his name. My name is Steve Gutenberg.

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Steve, do you live in this area? I live in the area.

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I live right up He replies, Steve Gutenberg, which is a famous actor.

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You're an actor? Yeah, I'm an actor. Okay, now you look familiar. You look familiar to me now.

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It's this very LA moment where you have a Hollywood actor trying to help clear the roads.

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That is just so surreal, and it really gives you a sense of how trapped everyone in the path of this fire felt. What How do we know about the scale of the damage at this point?

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Oh, man.

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We just arrived here in what is left of downtown Pacific Palisades, and I am overwhelmed by the scale of loss.

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People are trying to save their homes before they're completely engulfed. Then moments later, the flames have taken it over.

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I mean, there's just fire everywhere. You can see flames jumping up above the tree line there.

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Near the fire, the sky is a very deep orange. There are burned-out carcasses of cars that have just been left behind.

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The grocery stores are gone, both of them. The gas stations are gone. Doctors' offices are gone.

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The public library where I grew up going as a child and have brought my own children, gone.

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It all feels like dramatic, cinematic scene pieces, but they're real.

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Wow.

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That is a Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church or what is left of it. Those are-And From everything we've heard, the Pacific Palisades has just been ravaged and iconic businesses, places that have been around for decades, had just burned to the ground. It's still spreading. All of these other wildfires keep cropping up. Some of them are very manageable and not a big deal, but there are two that also start to threaten areas around the city and in the city. One is an Eaton Canyon. It's called Eaton Fire, which I think it's already up to more than 10,000 acres. Then there's one called the Hearst Fire, which is in Sylmar, which is still in the city of Los Angeles, but it's in the San Fernando Valley, so it's more up north.

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Okay, so now there are multiple fires encroaching on Los Angeles. What does that feel like?

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It's surreal. You look at a map of the fires and you see them dotting all around our city. It feels a bit like a ring of fire, which is terrifying. The The fact that they are encroaching more on the city of Los Angeles makes it feel like this is one of the most major events that people here have ever experienced.

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It honestly sounds incredibly scary, Karina. What can you tell us about the efforts to fight these fires so far?

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The fires are far from being contained, and it's a precarious situation. Now, firefighters are really just facing these terrible conditions, and they need more manpower. They have a lack of water supply, apparently, from hydrants. The federal government is also sending helicopters, but because of the winds, those helicopters that are meant to drop water on the flames from above, they've been grounded. They haven't been able to fly because it's unsafe. So these extreme conditions are just going to continue I think overall, it just means a huge devastating loss for the city of Los Angeles.

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Karina, you mentioned that people in LA and in some of these areas are used to the idea of having wildfires in the area. Climate change has turned it into a a hotbed for these kinds of blazes year after year. And yet it seems like the scale of this fire and the location means that people aren't just near a wildfire. They are in a wildfire, and an enormous one. I wonder if that's going to change how people who live in these communities see their home.

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Yeah, I think this is a It's a weird wake-up call for us. We do get wildfires in Southern California, even ones that are in our county. But I think ones that really encroach upon our city or even devastate portions of our city, that's something new that we're feeling. What's unique about Los Angeles is how sprawling it is. It's a huge, spread out city, and we have 4 million people, I think in a city like LA, which we're very disconnected from other neighborhoods, usually we live a really localized life, and it's really about just your area. But this is something that I feel like the entire city is feeling something about.

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This fire, it sounds like, was just big enough and violent enough, fast enough to make everyone in LA feel like they were living in one place that is threatened by the same forces.

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I mean, this event is really historic for Los Angeles. It's something you can't ignore here, no matter where you live, no matter where your neighborhood is.

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Karina, thank you.

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Thank you for having me.

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After the break, Times meteorologist Judson Jones on how these fires started and why they're so hard to control. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Robert Vinlo, and I'm from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to people about Wurtl and the Wurtl Archive. Do you all play Wurtle? Yeah. I have something exciting to show you. It's the Wurtl Archive. Oh. If I miss it, I can go back. A hundred %. Oh, that's sick. Now you can play every Wurtle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles. Oh my God, I love it. Amazing. New York Times Game subscribers can now access the entire Wurtle archive. Find out more at nytimes. Com/games. Judson, we just heard from our colleague, Karina, who's on the ground in LA and who described the devastation caused by these fires encircling Los Angeles. You're staff meteorologist. We want to ask you to help us understand how these fires started and why they spread so quickly.

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A lot of this actually begins all the way back in the summer. Usually in this area of the world, the summer months, it's typically drier in Southern California. By the fall and into the winter, you start to get these patterns where you get a little bit more rain. But it's been parched. The vegetation is crisp, and that's because they have seen hardly any rain. This winter, we haven't seen this precipitation in Tether, California. So it's basically like kindling for a fire. Then you get these Santa Ana winds. These are winds that Hollywood has romanticized in movies from the past, and they happen every winter. But when you have these dry conditions conditions and you haven't had that rainfall in the fall, these winds can create havoc.

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Judson, I want to just pause for a minute on the Santa Ana winds. I think generally people may have a vague idea of what these winds are. But help us understand what this actually looks like.

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Yeah, the Santa Ana winds are really winds that come out of the North-North east. It happens because the atmosphere has this thing called high pressure. You've We've probably all seen the Hs and the Ls on weather maps historically. With wind, wind moves towards low pressure. You get this higher pressure in the western part of the US, and then you have some lower pressure off the ocean. That high pressure is sitting there and it's trying to get to the low pressure. What it does is it actually pushes through the mountains. In this case, the pressure difference was so strong that it was Actually, the wind is crashing into the mountains. So like how a wave hits a rock and crashes over, we're seeing that wind 50 miles per hour or even higher crash into the mountains and come up over the other sides.

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Okay, so how does all of this, these parched conditions, the Santa Ana winds, come together over the past 48 hours or so to create these fires?

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Well, initially, you needed an ignition, and that's what we saw Tuesday morning. There was some spark somewhere by somebody or something. These things can happen because someone just flicked a cigarette out their window and it caught on fire by grass. You can also get this just because someone's chain connected to their trailer going down the highway creates a spark. It doesn't take much with these dry conditions to get a fire going. Then when the winds, as we saw yesterday, started to increase in intensity, these little sparks turned into raging fires. The Eaton fire exploded Wednesday morning in size. That had a lot to do with because there were wind gusts near that area of 100 miles per hour. At one point in time, the Palisades fire was increasing at a rate of three football fields every minute. That's just really how quickly these fires can expand.

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It's amazing to hear the actual 100-mile-an-hour wind figure. What does that do to a spark, to a number?

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Just imagine, 100 miles per hour is stronger than a Category I hurricane. A Category I hurricane starts at 74 miles per hour. You're getting gust near these fires that are reaching 100 miles per hour. You can just imagine that already creates destruction and down trees and power lines, but it also is going to push this wildfire faster and faster.

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We're talking about a hurricane of a fire here, basically.

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Yeah. When you have winds that are gusting to 50, 60, even 100 miles per hour, homes are no match to this wildfire. In fact, they are like a matchbox.

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I have to ask Judson just about how fire prone this area is in general. I mean, there are places across Southern California that we've come to think of as places that just burn based on these recurring conditions. Is that the case here?

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I mean, the reason people move to Southern California, a lot of times, is because of the weather. This is a beautiful area. It's this interface with wild landscape and mountainous terrain down to the beaches. It's a beautiful area, and there is vegetation. There is stuff that does burn. When you have this large population in a mountainous terrain against these national forests, the potential for wildfires is there, especially when we're seeing these ebbs and flows from really, really extreme wet years to really, really extreme drought like we're seeing this year.

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Finally, Judson, if wind is really at the center of this fire, does that mean the fire only ends when the winds die down? Do we know when that might be?

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As the winds ease, the threat isn't over. Until they get rain, this is going to continue to be a problem through the winter months. As right now, another Although weaker, Santa Ana event is likely, and then we're looking at potentially another event next week.

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It sounds like this fire, which hasn't been contained thus far, is really not over.

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It's far from over, unfortunately.

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Jetson, thank you so much.

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Thanks, Natalie.

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On Wednesday evening, officials continued to expand evacuation warnings further and further throughout the Los Angeles region, including into the densely populated areas of Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Hollywood. High winds as fast as 70 miles an hour are expected to return Thursday afternoon and continue into Friday morning. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In an emergency application filed late Tuesday, Donald Trump's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to prevent the sentencing of the President-elect for his criminal conviction in New York. The sentencing is scheduled for Friday, just 10 days before the inauguration, and stems from the case against the President-Elect for a hush money payment made in 2016 to a porn star who was threatening to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. While the trial judge in the case has indicated that he would spare Trump jail time, his sentencing would be symbolically important because it would formalize his status as a felon. Trump has argued he's entitled to full immunity from sentencing now that he's President-elect, based on a Supreme Court ruling last year that gave President's broad immunity for official acts. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Shannon Lynn, and Rochelle Bohnja, with help from Alex Stern.

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It was edited by Mark George and MJ Davis Lynn. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Alisha Baetup, Sophia Landman, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYRLE. Special thanks to Isabella Quai. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrowff. See you tomorrow.