Transcript of California wildfire rips through LA suburbs as 30,000 told to evacuate | BBC News

A huge wildfire is burning through thousands of acres in California, with tens of thousands of people evacuated from their homes. This is the scene live in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood in the hills near Santa Monica in Los Angeles, where we've seen pictures of burning cars, destroyed buildings as the fire swept through. Local firefighters say the conditions are as bad as they get, with gusts of winds of up to more than 100 kilometers per hour, fanning the flames from 10 acres to almost 3,000 in a matter of hours. The White House says President Biden is being briefed on the situation, whilst the governor of California has warned, fires there no longer are seasonal, but a year-round threat. With more, here's our LA correspondent, Emma Vardy.

The fire exploded at astonishing speed. The combination of dry conditions and strong winds causing the fire's rapid spread. People evacuating began to leave their cars and escape on foot. Emergency services eventually bulldozed some 200 abandoned vehicles to clear the roads. The Pacific Palisades area is home to luxury properties and celebrity homes. At least 30,000 residents were told to leave.

My heart is in my throat, but we're okay as long as the firefighter said there's a ambulance to take us out, but this is right at my doorstep.

We've been watching these huge plumes of smoke rising and the flames flickering over the mountains behind us. Now, people in California are used to wildfires and strong winds at this time of year, but this one is more unusual because of how quickly it spread and the fact it's so close to a densely populated area. Thousands of buildings were in danger of being engulfed by flames as emergency services tried to keep people safe. It's not yet clear how widespread the damage is to properties, but some homes have been destroyed and several other fires have also been burning. While the strong winds continue, there's warnings across California that more wildfires may start. Emma Vardy, BBC News, Los Angeles.

This here is live film footage we're receiving right now here at BBC News from Alter Dina, which is in Los Angeles. You can see there a building on on fire. Firefighters are just outside of this shot where they're trying to get control. It gives you a sense of the scale of this and the ferocity of the flames as firefighters desperately try to bring an end to these wildfires which are just raging through the whole of Los Angeles at the moment. I talked to David Latt. He was forced to evacuate his home. He lives in Pacific Palisades. He told us what happened to him.

This morning early, my wife and I were very unaware of what was happening, and a neighbor called and said, Get out. This was about 10:00 AM, and I went outside and saw what he was reacting to, which was a huge plume of black smoke about four blocks away from our house. I took out a ladder and I went up on the roof because I saw that there was fallen leaves and other debris. I wanted to make sure that the fire, if it spread in our direction, didn't have combustibles on the roof, so I quickly swept that off. Then over the next 30 to 40 minutes, I watched as the fire got larger and moved in our direction. As your reporter indicated, the problem here is extreme wind, coupled with no rain for half a year. The conditions are primed for a very difficult situation. We were ordered to evacuate, and the communication was extremely good. We received text messages saying, You must evacuate immediately. I have to say our mayor, Karen Bass, had prepared for the situation by assembling material and personnel. They were in the area, so the response was very quick. Even as I was watching in some video that I shot, you can see first observation educational helicopters analyzing the area from the air or the situation from the air.

Then you saw, I think they're called super scoopers, fixed wing airplanes that go close to the surface of the ocean, pick up water and then drop it along with fire retardants to slow down the fire. The attack by the city officials was very aggressive. The problem was, and continues to be, the wind. Again, as your reporter mentioned, the concern now is what's going to happen tonight, where the expectation is not hurricane force, but extremely high winds. And even though the personnel have been very aggressive in putting out the fires they can find, with the wind, it's very hard to know where the fires are going to be as they're spread, embers are picked up, and they can go across the street or a mile away. So all of LA is on alert. You hear sirens. Excuse me. And you can tell there's a lot of smoke in the air. But we're happily safe at a friend's house in the middle of LA, an area called Larchmont. The problem in Pacific Palestine is that it's a relatively isolated area with just one road in and out. So the traffic jam, it took us two hours to get out of the area.

And while you were speaking there, David, we were looking at the videos that you sent us that you shot before you left your home. Just talk us through what goes through your mind when you know you've got to evacuate your home, you don't know what you will return to. I mean, What do you grab? And what's the pressure? The time pressure, I assume you really had to act quickly.

Yeah, you really... Well, first of all, I'm a native Los Angelesian. This, like earthquakes, is just a natural fact of living in the area. You're taught over and over again to have what they call a grab and go box, which means with your passport, tax records as you're preparing your tax returns, especially prized videos or still photographs and albums. We already had part of that packed. We were also ready to go out of town. We actually had suitcases packed, but clothing, so we just knew to grab those. But you're right. The hard thing is we have paintings, some done by my wife's father, who's no longer with us. They're wonderful, but they're large, some of them. And by other artists, which we've collected over the years, and we knew we had to walk away from them. And that's hard. I mean, it's just hard to do.

So that there was David Matt, who I spoke to earlier, who lives in Pacific Palisades. These pictures we're receiving now are the Pacific Palisades, which is the area where he lives, where everyone has been ordered to evacuate their homes because, of course, it's extremely dangerous, as you can see here. 30,000 people are under evacuation orders at the moment across the state of Los Angeles, which is declared a state of emergency as the wildfires spread rapidly, the winds that are extremely high and the dry lands, as we were hearing from our correspondence, Emma Vardy, earlier, making it very, very difficult to bring this under control. Millions of people in California across the state are under a red flag warning, meaning there is an extreme fire danger. We've We've got a live page up and running at the moment on our website and on the BBC News app, which is following all our coverage and all the updates as they happen. So do stay with us here on BBC News as we keep you across this developing story.