Fire Update — January 10, 2025

I thought I would give a quick update to all on the fire impact. Let me start with we’re ok — but we know people that have lost their homes, are still evacuated, etc…

I was in Las Vegas for CES while much of this was going on, and I felt ok doing that because the fires were downwind for us.

But then yesterday, the “Kenneth” Fire started. It grew from nothing to 1000 acres in a matter of hours. The winds were gusting, and the terrain difficult. While initially in a more open area, if Kenneth progressed, it would have had Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Oak Park and, our town, Westlake Village in its path.   Many of these areas had already been without power for days, and now were elevated to “be ready to evacuate”.

Early on in the Kenneth Fire, I could see how fast it was growing. I bolted home, and my son (who had already evacuated from Pasadena) and my wife started to pack to be prepared to evacuate. Firefighters threw everything they could at Kenneth — fixed wing aircraft, a number of helicopters, and bulldozers at it … and with all those efforts, they stopped forward progression (as I was about 2/3 way home). Kenneth has had several multi-acre hotspots since, and they are jumping on them hard.

Even so, we were awoken multiple times last night by emergency evacuation alerts that turned out to be errors. While there was a human error a day or two ago that notified everyone in Los Angeles county to evacuate (almost 10 million people), the latest issues appear to be system errors causing these latest erroneous alerts. They have no idea why these are happening.  The result is that in addition to the confusion, it’s got everyone on edge, and with less sleep to boot.

At our house, we’re continuously (even now) hearing helicopters and fire trucks all around. In part, the aircraft are sometimes getting water from the 3 Billion gallon reservoir, other times, I suspect they are patrolling for hot spots of embers blowing.

ALL THAT SAID, no complaints here.  We are fine, and we are lucky … But so many are not.  We continue to be ready to evacuate.

We know directly of a number of people that have lost their homes in either Palisades or Eaton fires, and those that we do know are just completely wrecked. My son knows of at least 35 JPLers that have lost their home to Eaton.

To get an idea of how big and bad these fires are, let me put this in perspective. To fight these fires, they are using “Very Large Airtankers” … which are DC-10s. These can drop 9400 gallons of fire retardant or water at a shot (large is 2000-3000 gallons) … and as far as I can tell, have not been used in cities before because of their size.

In case you don’t know, the “Santa Ana” winds are something we’ve always had in the area.  They come from the desert areas, and are warm and very dry.  Humidity earlier this week was close to 10% (it’s now rising to the 20-25% level).  The warm air floods into lower pressure areas, and blows off shore. Combined with heavy brush growth after couple of years of heavy rain, followed by the driest winter we’ve had on record, it’s a recipe for disaster.

There’s concern about the winds turning “on shore” (reversing direction) that could put us in harms way.  And, there’s another Santa Ana “event” expected the middle of next week — hopefully, it won’t be as strong as the 100 mph gusts seen.

The worst of this is that at least some of these fires are arson — the “Red Flag Warnings” for wind are an unfortunate invitation to sick individuals. The Palisades fire they know was human started, but they don’t know if it was an accident or not. The Kenneth Fire is suspected arson, the Sheriff has him in custody [update, they didn’t have direct evidence to charge with arson — still investigating].  On top of it, looting has caused several cities to make use of the National Guard, and institute curfews.

Finally a shout out to an incredibly useful app that everyone should have on their phone — Watch Duty

Thank you to everyone for the concern.