A giant fireball might have engulfed the northern suburbs of Los Angeles — creating a mushroom cloud that can be seen from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills — but officials yesterday complained that fire-weary locals were not taking it seriously enough.
According to the latest estimates, the fires have now burnt through a 122,000-acre (49,000-hectare) area, covering parked cars with ash, leaving a bitter, smoky taste in the air and threatening the city’s television transmitters along with Edwin Hubble’s historic Mount Wilson Observatory.
Two firefighters have died, more than 50 houses and other structures have been razed, another 12,000 buildings are threatened and thousands of homes been evacuated from around the Angeles National Forest.
“As terrible as the fires are for people who live near them, they’re 15 miles away from here,” said Jade Chang, 33, a magazine editor who went to work as usual at a high-rise building on Wilshire Boulevard yesterday.
She said that she became used to such apocalyptic infernos while growing up in the San Fernando Valley. At school, her classmates would sometimes have to take days off to water the roofs of their houses when a wildfire was approaching.
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“We choose to live in a place that goes up in flames every summer,” said Ms Chang. “It’s not that we don’t take it seriously, it’s just that you usually have plenty of warning to get out the way in time, so it’s not the same as worrying about, say, a terrorist blowing up your Tube train in London.”
Officials are concerned that residents who live close to the fires are not worried enough — such as the six residents of Gold Canyon who refused to evacuate and insisted on staying at home to defend their property with fire extinguishers and hoses.
Many such people holding out believe that they can survive a wildfire by jumping into a swimming pool if it passes over them, although there have been horror stories of people being boiled alive because of the intense heat.
Michael Antonovich, the Los Angeles County Supervisor, yesterday suggested that the lack of urgency was the media’s fault.
“I’m upset,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “The media [has] let people down during a horrendous fire, one of the worst in the county’s history. People know more about the coroner report on Michael Jackson or the problems with Britney Spears’s children than they knew about this fire.”
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Local television stations, including KNBC-TV said that they had given the fire adequate coverage, and pointed out that for much of last week, the flames were burning away from populated areas.
By yesterday, however, local television stations were deeply concerned about the fires as the flames approached their transmitters atop Mount Wilson.
Aside from the danger of television screens turning blank, Los Angeles officials were increasingly concerned by the growing pollution. Smoke from the fires has already triggered several air quality alerts, with residents warned to stay indoors as much as possible, and avoid outdoor exercise. But at popular exercise destinations such as Runyon Canyon — which yesterday provided spectacular views of smoke rising from behind the Hollywood sign — the advice went largely unheeded.
Although a breeze was helping to clear the air, many schools and gyms remained closed. Weather forecasters said the conditions would improve further, with increasing humidity and falling temperatures.
Nevertheless, as of last night, the fires remained only five per cent contained.