LA begins to contain largest blazes as false alarms rattle city

LOS ANGELES — Firefighters made some small progress Friday in their fight to corral deadly wind-driven wildfires that have burned for days across the Los Angeles area, bringing a sliver of hope to a shaken region even as the threat of additional fires loomed with more dry, windy weather ahead.

At least 11 people have been killed and thousands of homes, businesses and other structures have been destroyed as the fires have ripped across more than 35,000 acres in and around Los Angeles, consuming an area larger than San Francisco. Hundreds of thousands of residents have been forced to evacuate under smoky skies littered with ash.

President Joe Biden said Friday that the death toll was expected to rise as authorities search through neighborhoods of blackened rubble.

“Whether it’s significantly or not, we don’t know yet,” he said. “There are still a lot of people who are unaccounted for. We don’t know where they are.”

On Friday, the two largest and most destructive blazes, the Palisades fire, between Santa Monica and Malibu, and the Eaton fire, near Altadena and Pasadena, were still burning largely out of control. But officials said that crews had made some headway, with 8% of the Palisades fire and 3% of the Eaton fire now contained.

The hope is that firefighters can gain more control of the blazes Saturday as conditions improve before more Santa Ana winds blow through again Sunday morning, raising the risk of the existing fires spreading and more fires igniting. Strong winds are likely again Monday and could peak Tuesday, extending the dangerous fire conditions into a second week.

“We are doing everything we can to bring the situation under control, and success has been reported,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said at a news conference Friday, where she faced pointed questions about the city’s response. “We know that we’re going to have a possible increase in the force of the winds at the beginning of next week, and getting Los Angeles prepared, doing everything we can to save lives — that is our No. 1 job.”

The Palisades fire has already burned more than 20,000 acres and more than 5,000 structures, including vehicles and trailers as well as homes. Much of the destruction has been in Pacific Palisades, an affluent neighborhood where the fire has devoured street after street of houses and shops.

The Eaton fire has burned more than 13,600 acres and as many as 7,000 structures. Altadena, a racially diverse, mixed-income community, has been hit hard. Residents there have returned to their homes to find only chimneys, as well as charred washing machines and barbecue grills.

Rosa Bugarín said she had managed to save some personal documents but little else when she and her two children evacuated their 800-square-foot bungalow Wednesday. The family had lived in the home for 20 years.

“I thought I was going to come back to my house very ashy and maybe trees fallen down,” she said, “but not burned down.”

Even as thousands of firefighters battle the fires, new blazes have been cropping up, prompting more evacuation orders and stretching resources.

Officials said Friday that one of those fires, the Kenneth fire, which broke out Thursday in the West Hills neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, north of Calabasas, had been 35% contained after it consumed 1,000 acres. Evacuation orders for the fire were lifted, but it showed “we are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” said Kristin M. Crowley, the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

With the region on high alert, many residents panicked when erroneous evacuation warnings from the Los Angeles County emergency alert system were sent to cellphones across the county this week, with some people receiving the false alert multiple times, including on Friday.

It was not immediately clear how many people had received the false alerts, which said that an “evacuation warning has been issued in your area” and told people to “gather loved ones, pets, and supplies.” About 20 minutes later, many received a second notification instructing them to disregard the warning.

But by then, many had already called relatives or started to pack.

“It was horrible, for those 20 minutes, as I was gathering my life together,” said Brittney Mendez, 27, who had collected her three dogs and prepared to flee her home in the Reseda neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley.

Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said officials were “drilling down right now” to find out what went wrong.

“It’s unacceptable, and it is frustrating, because we are asking people to trust us, to believe us when we say evacuate,” she said. “So if we’re going to tell them to evacuate, we better make darn sure we’re targeting the right people.”

Kevin McGowan, the director of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, apologized for the false alarms and said officials were investigating the cause. He said the false alerts had been triggered by unknown technical issues and had not been “activated or initiated by a person.” He implored residents not to disable alerts on their phones.

“This is extremely frustrating, painful and scary,” McGowan said, “but these alert tools have saved lives during this emergency.”

Officials also warned residents that it is illegal to fly drones in fire zones after a civilian drone collided with a firefighting plane over the Palisades fire Thursday afternoon, puncturing a wing and grounding the aircraft at a time when firefighting resources have been stretched thin. The plane, which can drop 1,600 gallons of water and refill in about five minutes, is not expected to be ready to fly again until Monday.

The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed temporary flight restrictions. Nonetheless, many videos of wildfire areas that appear to be from drones have been posted on social media this week.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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