LOS ANGELES – Southern California is grappling with a historic wave of wildfires, forcing the deployment of the National Guard to bolster firefighting efforts on Friday.

The arrival of the CalGuard brings the total number of personnel battling the blazes to a staggering 8,000, underscoring the sheer scale of the disaster.

"Thanks to the incredible work of our first responders and emergency personnel, we’re throwing everything at our disposal – including our National Guard servicemembers – to protect communities in the days to come," California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

HISTORIC CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES BLAMED FOR AT LEAST 10 DEATHS AS CREWS BATTLE OVER 35,000 BURNING ACRES

(Jill Connelly/Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Fueled by hurricane-force winds, these infernos have ravaged vast swathes of the landscape, pushing emergency responders to their limits.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images)

According to the state, more than 6,200 firefighters are working tirelessly to contain the flames and protect communities. These brave men and women are not only battling exhaustion but also intense heat, choking smoke, and unpredictable fire behavior as they stand as the first line of defense.

BEFORE AND AFTER IMAGES SHOW THE EXTENT OF WILDFIRE DAMAGE AROUND LOS ANGELES

(Barbara Davidson / Washington Post / Getty Images)

In addition, they are risking their lives building fire lines, evacuating residents, and working around the clock to protect critical infrastructure.

Other first responders, including paramedics, EMTs, and law enforcement officers, are working alongside firefighters, providing medical assistance to injured civilians and ensuring public safety.

CALIFORNIA MAN SCORCHED BY FLAMES TRYING TO SAVE NEIGHBORHOOD BURNING IN PALISADES FIRE

President Joe Biden has provided California with significant fire suppression support, including eight large air tankers,19 helicopters and dozens of engines. He also authorized increasing federal assistance to cover 100% of the state's fire management and debris removal costs for 180 days, up from the traditional 75%.

FOX CORPORATION DONATES $1 MILLION TO HELP VICTIMS OF CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES

As the fight against these historic wildfires continues, community support is more crucial than ever, state and local officials have stressed. Residents are urged to follow evacuation orders, conserve water and support local relief efforts to aid those impacted by the disaster.

The PGA Tour has informed its membership that it has not made a decision on the status of the Genesis Invitational, an annual signature event scheduled to take place Feb. 13-16 at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, near where a deadly wildfire has scorched numerous homes and forced thousands to flee.

Riviera was evacuated but has not been damaged by the Palisades fire, which has burned more than 5,000 structures and 20,000 acres as of Friday morning. The blaze was 8% contained, according to fire officials.

Options for the PGA Tour include postponing the tournament, holding it at a different location, or proceeding with it as planned. Considerations include getting players and fans into Pacific Palisades as recovery efforts are underway, a dearth of nearby lodging and the optics of playing a golf tournament amid one of the most horrific natural disasters in memory.

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The country club and golf course is wedged between the east end of Pacific Palisades and Brentwood, about two blocks east of West Sunset Boulevard and one block northwest of San Vicente Boulevard at 1250 Capri Drive. The course opened in 1927 as the Los Angeles Athletic Club Golf Course and the main clubhouse, built in a Spanish revival style, followed in 1928.

The PGA Tour event, originally known as the Los Angeles Open, was the site of Tiger Woods’ first PGA Tour event as an amateur when he was a high school sophomore in 1992. The Genesis Invitational has been hosted by Woods since 2019, with proceeds benefiting the nonprofit TGR Foundation.

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Over its history, Riviera has been the venue for the U.S. Open, PGA Championship, U.S. Amateur, U.S. Senior Open and the NCAA Championships. It is scheduled to play host to the men’s and women’s golf competitions at the 2028 Olympic Games in L.A.

In a letter to membership, the PGA Tour said it is “monitoring the devastating fires in Los Angeles County. At this point, it is premature to discuss the potential impact on the Genesis Invitational. Although the Riviera Country Club has not been directly affected by the fires, our immediate concern is the health and welfare of those in the affected communities, including all our members who have ties to Southern California.

“We will keep the membership updated as the situation develops.”

California

Jan. 10, 2025

The Palisades fire engulfed the upscale community, with huge portions of its residential district as well as businesses completely destroyed. At least one death has been reported as of Friday morning.

“The Palisades fire is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said.

The rapidly spreading wildfires are not only upending the lives of tens of thousands of Los Angeles County residents and business owners, but also stressing the region’s hospitals, health clinics, first responders and nursing homes.

At least one medical clinic burned down. Senior patients were evacuated by ambulance from nursing facilities as embers swirled around them and their providers. Medical offices have closed, and routine appointments have been canceled. Some providers have lost homes or had to evacuate their neighborhoods, keeping them from work in many cases and making it a challenge for some healthcare centers to maintain sufficient staffing.

Amid the maelstrom, doctors, nurses and other caregivers did their jobs.

On Tuesday night, Dr. Ravi Salgia, an oncologist at City of Hope Duarte Cancer Center, saw the house above his Eaton Canyon home go up in flames. As debris and sparks fell, he, his wife and their older daughter estimated they had no more than seven minutes to get out. In the middle of the night, Salgia got a call that the hospital had become an emergency command center and was at risk of evacuation, meaning he needed to help evaluate patients and make discharge preparations.

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Salgia arrived at the hospital at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. He was joined by colleagues, many of whom had also evacuated their homes.

“We all felt very strongly that we needed to take care of our patients — no matter what’s happening to us physically and emotionally, what’s happening to our houses — that we need to make sure that the people we serve were taken care of,” Salgia said in an interview.

He doesn’t know whether his house is still standing.

In Pacific Palisades, St. John’s Physician Partners, a primary care and pediatric clinic affiliated with Providence Health & Services, burned down, said Patricia Aidem, a spokesperson for the large Catholic hospital chain based in Renton, Wash.

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Not far from the eastern edge of the Palisades Fire, Providence St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, one of the group’s major L.A.-area hospitals, was so close to evacuating that it called other hospitals in the area to find space for patients who would be displaced, Aidem said. USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, in Glendale, also faced potential evacuation, along with other hospitals in the region.

“All hospitals in close proximity to the fires remain on high alert and are prepared to evacuate if conditions worsen,” the Hospital Assn. of Southern California said in a statement. “The fires are creating significant operational hurdles,” the association added.

The association also said emergency services have been strained by high call volumes, while road closures have impeded the transport of patients, supplies and healthcare workers. Some health facilities have been hit by power outages, the association said, while “many staff members are directly impacted by evacuations and fire-related disruptions, further complicating operations.”

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California

Jan. 10, 2025

The California Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday ordered health plans to ensure enrollees affected by wildfires have access to all needed medical services, including prescription drug refills.

Aidem said some doctors and other health workers at Providence St. John’s in Santa Monica and Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley have lost homes or been evacuated, making them miss work and creating challenges to ensure adequate staffing.

Hospitals across the county said their emergency rooms had treated patients for burns, smoke inhalation and eye irritation.

More than 700 people — and possibly far more — have been evacuated from nursing homes and other care facilities, according to the California Department of Public Health.

On Wednesday, West Valley Health Center, operated by Los Angeles County’s Department of Health Services, closed because of a power outage, the department said. And UCLA Health said the closure of some of its clinics in Pasadena and on L.A.’s Westside was due partly to “utility shutoffs.”

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles said two of its specialty care clinics, in Encino and Santa Monica, were closed Thursday “due to the impacts from the wind storm, power outages and wild fires.”

Providence also has shut several clinics this week.

The two biggest blazes, the Palisades fire in the parched coastal hills of western L.A. County and the Eaton fire on the Eastside, have together torched more than 50 square miles, burned thousands of structures, reduced beloved cultural landmarks to ashes, killed at least 10 people and severely injured many more.

The monster winds that fueled the explosion of the fires on Tuesday and Wednesday have begun to quiet down, though significant gusts are still expected to complicate the task of firefighters for the next several days.

Routine medical care will likely be disrupted for thousands in the days ahead.

Kaiser Permanente, the giant HMO and medical provider, said it closed multiple medical sites Thursday because of the fires, including a pharmacy and laboratory and an eye clinic.

Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, close to the Eaton fire, said some of its outpatient offices were affected by evacuation notices and heavy smoke.

Dignity Health, another large health system, said some of its hospitals were operating on generator power because of high winds, and some, including Glendale Memorial Hospital, had canceled elective surgeries. Other hospitals, including USC Verdugo Hills and Providence St. John’s, temporarily halted nonemergency surgeries because of the impact of the wildfires.

Christine Kirmsse, a registered nurse, evacuated her Santa Monica home on Wednesday night and is staying at a hotel an hour away. But she said she feels strongly that she needs to come into work.

“There’s obviously so much help that’s needed,” Kirmsse said. “And it’s important to me because I have the skills to be able to help. In times like this, this is when community is the most powerful.”

Chaseedaw Giles and Tarena Lofton contributed to this report.

This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. KFF Health News is the publisher of California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

The Summary

Prolonged drought, an exceptionally dry winter and powerful Santa Ana winds set up a dangerous triple whammy of extreme conditions that have fueled several out-of-control wildfires in the Los Angeles area.

Fast-moving fires have engulfed the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, parts of Pasadena and Altadena, and Sylmar, north of San Fernando, with two deaths reported and more than 1,000 structures destroyed as of Wednesday.

Flames were fanned by ferocious winds whose gusts exceeded 100 mph in some places. The parched landscape across Southern California meant that any ignition was likely to become a monster blaze.

“We haven’t had any substantial rain for hundreds of days,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

With climate change altering rainfall patterns and making droughts both more likely and more intense, destructive wildfires like the ones in the Los Angeles area will continue to threaten people's lives and livelihoods, Moritz said.

December to February is typically the rainy season in California, but unlike the northern part of the state, which has had its share of soakings, Southern California has been abnormally dry for the past eight months. The last time Los Angeles logged more than one-tenth of an inch of rain was in early May.

That means the entire southern part of the state is in moderate to severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Parts of San Diego County are experiencing their driest start to the winter season in more than 150 years, according to the Weather West blog by Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.

The addition of the winds was like an “atmospheric blowdryer,” Swain wrote.

Combined, the conditions primed the region for destructive wildfires.

"Gusty winds and very dry conditions will continue to fuel fire starts and existing fires" through Friday, the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service said Wednesday on X.

A resurgence in offshore wind is expected to keep fire risk high across the region through Friday morning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center.

Santa Ana winds, which gain speed as they blow west and downslope from the Great Basin, are typical at this time of year. But conditions are not normally bone-dry when the winds gust through the mountains of Southern California toward the Pacific coast.

“Normally everything would be wet by now, which means there would be much less of a chance of an ignition leading to a big fire that gets out of control like what we’re seeing now,” Moritz said.

More than 15,000 acres have already burned in the Palisades Fire. The Eaton fire, which sparked Tuesday evening in the Pasadena and Altadena area, has engulfed over 10,000 acres. In Sylmar, the Hurst Fire has also grown to 500 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

All three fires are at 0% containment, and firefighting efforts have faced challenging conditions with ongoing high winds.

Such devastating blazes are expected to become more frequent as climate change amplifies the ingredients that help wildfires ignite and spread. Almost all of California's largest wildfires have occurred in the last decade, according to Cal Fire.

Fires are typically fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions. Moritz said there is not enough research yet to know whether if climate change is altering winds in any significant way, but he said global warming is already having an impact on rainfall and drought.

“Climate change is leading to more erratic and extreme precipitation patterns,” he said. “That effect on precipitation is very important, because we’re having wetter wet periods and drier dry periods, and overall, we're seeing this very erratic timing of precipitation.”

That means a region like Southern California could be hammered by severe flooding at one point, as it was in March, and then months later descend into drought. Lurching between those extremes puts people and their communities at heightened risk, Moritz said.

“That’s the climate signal in all of this — that we’ve opened this window where we can get these big, devastating extreme events now,” he said.

Denise Chow

Denise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.

Insurance and utility stocks with California exposure took a hit Friday as Los Angeles firefighters continued to attempt to contain wildfires that have destroyed thousands of structures and left at least 10 people dead.

Shares of Allstate (ALL), the Travelers Companies (TRV), Chubb (CB), Mercury (MCY), and American International Group (AIG) — some of the top commercial property and private market homeowner insurers in the state — sank in early trading Friday.

Mercury stock suffered the steepest decline, dropping nearly 17%. Roughly one-fifth of the homeowners’ insurance premiums the company collects in the US come from California, according to Moody’s. Meanwhile, Chubb and Allstate fell around 2% and 4%, respectively. AIG and Travelers dropped roughly 2%.

“It will take weeks or months to determine the magnitude of the insured damages, but the Los Angeles wildfires are likely among the most costly wildfires in the state's history,” Moody’s insurance analysts said in a note Thursday.

The analysts said they expect insured losses to run "well into the billions of dollars, given the high value of homes and businesses in the affected areas, and to cause large losses for P&C insurers with significant homeowners and commercial property market share in Los Angeles.”

The losses come just as the state tries to lure insurers back amid more frequent, intense wildfires thanks to climate change.

JPMorgan doubled its estimate of insured losses from the fires Thursday to $20 billion from its prior estimate of $10 billion the day before. That estimate could climb as the fires continued to rage Friday.

Utility stocks also came under pressure. Shares of Edison International (EIX) — the parent company of Southern California Edison, which serves Los Angeles — were on track to record a weekly loss of 13%. SCE said its equipment was not responsible for sparking the fires.

In the case that SCE was found responsible for sparking the fire, its liability would be capped at $4 billion, JPMorgan insurance analysts wrote in a note Thursday.

As of Friday, some 246,000 Californians were without power, with about 173,000 of those residents having power shut off by Southern California Edison for safety reasons (to avoid the spread of the wildfires).

Fellow utility stock Pacific Gas and Electric (PCG) stock, which serves northern California, was down more than 8%.

PG&E has faced over $30 billion in legal claims for its role in past California wildfires, prompting the utility to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019 — dubbed by Harvard researchers as "the first climate change bankruptcy."