The South Coast Air Quality Management District warned Thursday that air quality in the Los Angeles area remained “unhealthy” as a result of the multiple wildfires ravaging the region, and the agency has extended a smoke advisory at least through 5 p.m. Friday.

The smoke was expected to most heavily affect northwest coastal L.A. County, and in areas nearest the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst wildfires, the agency reported.

WEATHER: Strong winds forecasted Thursday as fires rage across LA County, and more expected next week

Smoke impacts will depend on fire activity, containment efforts and the weather, according to the AQMD.

Wildfire smoke is a mixture of small particles, gases and water vapor — with the small particles being the primary health concern, the AQMD reported. Those particles can cause burning eyes, a runny nose, scratchy throat, headaches and/or illnesses such as bronchitis.

AIR QUALITY DIVES: Monstrous wildfires blanket Southern California with smoky air, threatening the health of millions

As of 4:30 p.m. Thursday, the worst areas measured by the AQMD for air quality — where the air is deemed hazardous — were Malibu and Catalina Island, the latter presumably because Santa Ana winds are pushing the smoke and ash into the air over the ocean.

PALISADES FIRE: Wind-whipped blaze damages or destroys more than 5,300 structures

Areas where the air quality is unhealthy, according to AQMD, include much of Los Angeles, and all of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena. The air quality has also dipped into the unhealthy category in parts of Santa Monica, the Huntington Park and South Gate areas, as well as coastal portions of Long Beach and Huntington Beach.

EATON FIRE: Up to 5,000 structures damaged in uncontained wildfire, though winds slow

The agency noted that people at higher risk — including children, the elderly, those with respiratory or heart conditions and people with compromised immune systems — may experience more severe effects, including difficulty breathing, wheezing, coughing, fatigue and/or chest pain.

“Predicting where ash or soot from a fire will travel, or how winds will impact air quality, is difficult, so it’s important for everyone to stay aware of the air quality in your area, make plans, and take action to protect your health and your family’s health,” Dr. Muntu Davis, L.A. County’s health officer, said in a statement. “Smoke and ash can harm everyone, even those who are healthy.”

The health department urged people in areas where there is visible smoke or the smell of smoke or unhealthy air quality to avoid unnecessary outdoor exposure and limit physical exertion.

“Children, older adults and people who are pregnant or have other air quality sensitive conditions, such as heart disease, asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases, should follow these recommendations and stay indoors as much as possible even in areas where smoke, soot or ash cannot be seen or there is no smell of smoke,” according to the agency. “If your condition worsens, contact your health care provider immediately for medical advice.”

Pets can also be affected, the agency reported.

For real-time and forecasted air quality information, the AQMD Mobile App can be downloaded at aqmd.gov/mobileapp; information is also available at aqmd.gov/home/air-quality/air-quality-forecasts.

Southern California is fighting multiple major wildfires, exacerbated by hurricane-strength winds that have resulted in red flag warnings and evacuation orders in multiple zones. The current fires are the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades, the Eaton Fire, the Hurst Fire in the Sylmar area and the Tyler Fire in Riverside County.

These offshoots of Los Angeles are home to many cultural institutions renowned for everything from iconic Hollywood nightlife to groundbreaking scientific research.

Here’s where several of them stand as of Wednesday afternoon:

Will Rogers State Historic Park

The former home of actor, radio personality and humorist Will Rogers, a 186-acre ranch that was on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, was gutted by the Palisades fire.

People on social media posted photos and videos of the site, which showed only chimneys poking up through rubble.

The estate and historic park were home to many Western artifacts, as well as objects from Will Rogers’ daily life. In the 1930s, he was Hollywood’s highest-paid film star. His widow, Betty Rogers, had donated the house and stables to Californian in 1944.

According to the California State Parks website, horses and some of the cultural artifacts at the Will Rogers State Historic Park were safely evacuated ahead of the fire.

Topanga State Park

Parts of the Topanga State Park — a national park located within the city of Los Angeles that is known for its scenic hiking and mountain bike trails — were also devastated by the Palisades fire. The historic Topanga Ranch Motel, which was once owned by newspaper publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst, was destroyed.

Sunset Boulevard

The West Hollywood strip, known for its nightlife and restaurant scene, was gridlocked Tuesday by Los Angeles residents fleeing the Palisades area. Officials told those on Sunset Boulevard to abandon their cars and walk to safety. The Los Angeles Fire Department later moved the abandoned vehicles to make way for firefighters. The stretch of Sunset Boulevard between San Vicente and Crescent Heights remains closed.

The Getty Villa and Getty Center

Some trees and vegetation were burned on the site of the Getty Villa, a Greco-Roman art museum on the Pacific Coast Highway in the Pacific Palisades. The museum reported that collections and staff were so far unharmed and that fire and smoke mitigation plans were in place. Both the Getty Villa and the Getty Center, which is not in the current fire zone, will remain closed until at least Monday, Jan. 13.

Palisades Charter High School

A filming location for popular shows and films such as Teen Wolf, Carrie, and Freaky Friday, Palisades Charter High School has been severely damaged by the Palisades fire. Students and faculty are still on winter break, scheduled through Jan. 10. According to the high school’s website, they will provide updates for students and families prior to the start of the spring semester.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research hub for robotic space exploration, is included in the areas with evacuation orders due to the Eaton fire.

Universal Studios and CityWalk

Though not under mandatory evacuation, the Universal Studios theme park and the attached dining, shopping and entertainment plaza, Universal CityWalk, are closed Wednesday “as a result of the extreme winds and fire conditions,” the studios announced Wednesday morning.

The Hammer Museum at UCLA

The Hammer Museum at UCLA, a contemporary art museum, is also closed due to the nearby fires and severe weather warnings. The University of California, Los Angeles campus, where the museum is located, has canceled classes for undergraduates and moved graduate classes online as of Thursday morning.

The Rose Bowl

As of Wednesday morning, the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena is not considered at high risk of being impacted by the fires. The stadium is being used as a large animal evacuation center, according to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

The extensive collections in the library, museum, and gardens in San Marino, known as “The H,” remain safe as of early Thursday morning. The campus remains closed at least through Friday, Jan. 10. A few trees were lost and uprooted in the area due to high winds and the property sustained minor damage from falling debris, the Huntington shared on Instagram on Wednesday night.

Eames House

Located in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the architectural landmark, famously made with experimental industrial materials, is at risk in the Palisades fire. The property, also known as Case Study House No. 8, posted an update to its Instagram stories on Wednesday morning that the house remained unharmed.

Warner Bros.

The Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood, which offers tours — including backlots and sets from beloved television shows — is closed Wednesday due to the fire conditions and strong winds.

Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens

The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens, located in Griffith Park, closed to the public on Tuesday and remains closed Wednesday.

Griffith Observatory

The popular scientific observatory and planetarium located at the top of the Hollywood Hills is closed Wednesday due to the wind.

The Empire Polo Club

Home to the annual Coachella Music Festival, the Empire Polo Club in Indio has not reported any closures. The club is about seven miles away from the Tyler fire’s starting point.

Hollywood Landmarks

Hollywood Sign

Located in the Hollywood Hills, the iconic Hollywood sign remains closed as of Thursday morning, along with all of Griffith Park. The Hollywood Sign Trust’s official Instagram account posted an update to their stories on Wednesday night, saying that the sign was not on fire.

Hollywood Bowl

Host to many live music performances since it opened in 1922, the amphitheater received evacuation orders on Wednesday night. According to a post on their Instagram, all staff has evacuated the premises safely.

TCL Chinese Theatre and Dolby Theatre

The TCL Chinese Theatre, a movie palace more popularly called Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, has hosted premiers and film festivals since it opened in 1927. The landmark was included in an evacuation zone on Wednesday. The Dolby Theatre, where the Academy Awards are held, was also in that zone. Both theaters closed Wednesday night. There have been no reports of damage and the evacuation orders have been lifted.

The California Newsroom is following the extreme weather from across the region. Click through to LAist’s coverage for the latest. Jennifer Vanasco edited this story.

For many of us with family or friends in the Los Angeles area, it’s a scary time right now.

The major wildfires devastating L.A. County communities have already claimed at least two lives, destroyed more than a thousand homes and buildings and forced at least 70,000 people to evacuate. As the largest fires — the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst — continue to grow, fanned by strong Santa Ana winds, a fourth fire began on Wednesday morning, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency.

It’s easy to feel helpless when disaster hits the people you care about — especially if you’re far away. But if you’ve got loved ones in the L.A. area who have already been impacted by these fires or who you’re worried could be affected soon, we’ve collected these guides below to coping in a wildfire situation that you can send your family and friends in Southern California. You can also use these guides to familiarize yourself with what happens during an active wildfire situation so you can advise your loved ones if they’re in a tough spot right now.

Another thing you can do: Make sure your loved ones are signed up for their county’s emergency alerts right now. Our friends at LAist have a comprehensive list of emergency alert sign-up links in their guide to the wildfires raging in Los Angeles County right now. They can also download the free Watch Duty app to monitor where fires are burning near them.

Jump straight to:

Having to evacuate your home due to the threat of wildfire is a scary prospect — especially if you’ve never had to do it before. Tens of thousands have already evacuated their homes in L.A. County, but fire can travel in highly unpredictable ways, affecting communities that would never have suspected themselves to be under threat of wildfires or evacuation.

Even if your loved ones in L.A. haven’t yet had to evacuate or think they’re too far away to be affected, it’s really important that they still know the best procedures for safely leaving their home and to be prepared ahead of time to actually do it. According to L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone, there have already been “a high number of significant injuries to residents who did not evacuate.”

Some of the takeaways:

Read the full guide to how to evacuate from a wildfire.

A map of wildfires currently burning in the Los Angeles area

A crucial part of being ready to evacuate is having a “go bag” ready. Experts advise keeping such a bag by the front door — or inside a car — so a person can easily grab it and go. If your L.A.-based loved ones do wind up evacuating, they may have to walk to safety and should so choose a bag that’s durable and easy to carry, such as a backpack or duffle bag. For heavier items, such as food and water, using a tub or chest on wheels may make it easier to transport — but they should make sure it’s still light enough to lift.

We have comprehensive checklists for an emergency bag — including medications, food and items for pets — in this story, but the personal safety essential items include:

Read the full guide to preparing an emergency evacuation bag.

Even brief exposure to wildfire smoke can cause potentially serious health problems for everyone. What we call “wildfire smoke” is actually an ever-changing mix of particles and gasses and many of these compounds are toxic. But the most dangerous thing for your health in wildfire smoke is the fine particulate matter: that is, the tiny pieces of soot and ash that are invisible to the naked eye. These particles — also known as PM 2.5 — are so small and light that they can travel huge distances from a raging wildfire and then cause damage to your body just by entering it, setting off inflammatory reactions that can make breathing difficult.

In serious cases, these reactions can even trigger a heart attack or stroke in people already at risk of those events. The particles can travel deep into your lungs, and within a few days, the damage they cause can result in bronchitis or pneumonia. So it’s crucial for your loved ones in L.A. to protect themselves against smoke right now, even if they’re not super close to the fire areas.

Some of the takeaways:

Read the full guide to protecting yourself against wildfire smoke.

GUIDE: Why our phones can stop working during wildfires — and how to communicate when they do

Phone service can be reduced or vanish altogether during emergencies, as cell towers go down amid power shutoffs or when overhead fiber lines on utility poles are damaged by fire itself.

You may have already encountered these kinds of phone blackouts with your loved ones in L.A., and it’s scary when that happens. Service interruptions like these stop people from being able to get in touch with family and friends to confirm their safety and also prevent them from receiving the very emergency alerts they’re relying on for evacuation updates.

Some of the takeaways:

Read the full guide to how to make your phone work during a wildfire.

Firefighters scrambled to corral a fast-moving wildfire in the Los Angeles hillsides dotted with celebrity homes as a fierce windstorm hit Southern California on Tuesday, fanning the blaze seen for miles as scores of residents abandoned their cars and fled on foot to safety with roads blocked.

About 30,000 residents are under evacuation orders and more than 13,000 structures are under threat, said Kristin Crowley, fire chief of the LA Fire Department.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he saw “many structures already destroyed.” Officials did not give an exact number of structures damaged or destroyed in the blaze.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known, and no injuries had been reported, officials said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

Newsom warned residents across Southern California not to assume they are out of danger, saying the worst of the winds are expected between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 5 a.m. Wednesday.

Forecasters predicted the windstorm would last for days, producing isolated gusts that could top 100 mph (160 kph) in mountains and foothills — including in areas that haven’t seen substantial rain in months. The National Weather service said it could be the strongest Santa Ana windstorm in more than a decade across Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Roughly half a million utility customers were at risk of having their power shut off to reduce the risk of equipment sparking blazes.

In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles, a fire swiftly consumed nearly 2 square miles (just over 5 square kilometers) of land, sending up a dramatic plume of smoke visible across the city. Residents in Venice Beach, some 6 miles (10 kilometers) away, reported seeing the flames. It was one of several blazes across the area.

Sections of Interstate 10 and the scenic Pacific Coast Highway were closed to all non-essential traffic to aid in evacuation efforts. But other roads were blocked. Some residents jumped out of their vehicles to get out of danger and waited to be picked up.

Resident Kelsey Trainor said the only road in and out of her neighborhood was completely blocked. Ash fell all around them while fires burned on both sides of the road.

“We looked across and the fire had jumped from one side of the road to the other side of the road,” Trainor said. “People were getting out of the cars with their dogs and babies and bags, they were crying and screaming. The road was just blocked, like full-on blocked for an hour.”

An Associated Press journalist saw a roof and chimney of one home in flames and another residence where the walls were burning. The neighborhood that borders Malibu about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of downtown LA includes hillside streets of tightly packed homes along winding roads nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains and stretches down to beaches along the Pacific Ocean.

Long-time Palisades resident Will Adams said he was down in town when the fires started and immediately went to pick his two kids up from St. Matthews Parish’s school, which is now in the line of the fire.

His wife, who was at home, was driving down the main evacuation road for residents in the upper part of the neighborhood when embers flew into her car.

“She vacated her car and left it running,” Adams said. She and many other residents walked down toward the ocean until it was safe.

Adams said he had never seen a fire this low into the neighborhood in the 56 years he’s lived there.

“It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades. One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames,” Adams said.

He watched as the sky turned brown and then black as homes started burning. He could hear loud popping and bangs “like small explosions,” which he said he believes were the transformers exploding on the electric poles.

Actor James Woods posted footage of flames burning through bushes and past palm trees on a hill near his home. The towering orange flames billowed among the landscaped yards between the homes.

“Standing in my driveway, getting ready to evacuate,” Woods said in the short video on X.

Actor Steve Guttenberg, who lives in the Pacific Palisades, urged people who abandoned their cars to leave their keys behind so they could be moved to make way for fire trucks.

“This is not a parking lot,” Guttenberg told KTLA. “I have friends up there and they can’t evacuate … I’m walking up there as far as I can moving cars.”

The erratic weather caused President Joe Biden to cancel plans to travel to inland Riverside County, California, where he was to announce the establishment of two new national monuments in the state. Biden will deliver his remarks in Los Angeles instead.

The Los Angeles Unified School District said it was temporarily relocating students from three campuses in the Pacific Palisades area due to the fire.

Amazon and MGM Studios canceled a premiere of Jennifer Lopez’s new film “Unstoppable” due to the fires and high winds.

The winds will act as an “atmospheric blow-dryer” for vegetation, bringing a long period of fire risk, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“We really haven’t seen a season as dry as this one follow a season as wet as the previous one,” Swain said Monday.

Recent dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas, have contributed to warmer-than-average temperatures in Southern California, where there’s been very little rain so far this season.

Southern California hasn’t seen more than 0.1 inches (0.25 centimeters) of rain since early May. Much of the region has fallen into moderate drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Meanwhile, up north, there have been multiple drenching storms.

Areas where gusts could create extreme fire conditions include the charred footprint of last month’s wind-driven Franklin Fire, which damaged or destroyed 48 structures, mostly homes, in and around Malibu.

Associated Press writers Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles contributed to this report, Julie Watson in San Diego, and videojournalist Eugene Garcia in Los Angeles contributed.

Much of the Bay Area will be hit by strong winds this week.

While the swift gusts could cause power outages and damage trees, fire risk isn’t on the radar of local first responders. As Southern California prepares for dangerous fire conditions, Northern California will almost certainly be spared any late-season blazes, thanks to rainy months at the end of 2024.

“Because of a series of rainfall events just back to back, and then we had our atmospheric over a while ago … even though we are going into a drier weather pattern, the fuels aren’t of concern right now,” said Crystal Oudit, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office.

While this week’s winds pose a significant fire risk in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, “there is virtually zero risk of a dangerous wildfire in Northern California,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said during his YouTube livestream Monday.

“It’s just too damp,” he continued. “In fact, Northern California will benefit from a period of finally sunny and drier conditions after a very wet spell.”

That’s thanks to the “precipitation dipole,” which has affected the state since the fall. Northern California has had multiple rainy weeks, while in Southern California, “conditions have been bone dry,” Swain said.

The impacts of the winds there will likely affect people as much as a big rainstorm, Swain said.

“Certain roads will be closed to public access to prevent potential fire ignitions. Hundreds of thousands, if not perhaps over a million people, could end up seeing power outages through a combination of preemptive safety shut-offs to reduce risk or actual unintended power outages,” Swain said. “There will be a lot of downed trees. Hopefully, not too many downed power lines, but that’s a real risk.

“All in all, a pretty challenging situation for Southern California.”

In the Bay Area, 20- to 30-mph winds blowing north to northeast will likely bring a welcome temperature hike and could clear up some of the dense fog many people woke up to Monday morning.

Still, the NWS is urging people in the Bay Area to prepare. A wind advisory has been issued for Tuesday and early Wednesday for the higher-elevation areas of the North, East, and South Bays, as well as the San Francisco Peninsula, where gusts could reach 50 mph and cause power outages or traffic disruptions.

Oudit recommends that people secure outdoor objects, such as umbrellas and outdoor furniture; charge electronic devices; and check social media and the National Weather Service website for updates.