Judson Jones
Appearances
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
At one point in time, the Palisades Fire was increasing at a rate of three football fields every minute. So that's just really how quickly these fires can expand.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
Right. I mean, just imagine 100 miles per hour is stronger than a Category 1 hurricane. A Category 1 hurricane starts at 74 miles per hour. So you're getting gusts near these fires that are reaching 100 miles per hour. So, I mean, you can just imagine that already creates destruction and downed trees and power lines, but it also is going to push this wildfire faster and faster.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
Yeah. I mean, when you have winds that are gusting to 50, 60, even 100 miles per hour, homes are no match to this wildfire. In fact, they are like a matchbox.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
I mean, the reason people move to Southern California a lot of times is because of the weather. This is a beautiful area. It's this interface with wild landscape and mountainous terrain down to the beaches. Like it's a beautiful area and there is vegetation. There is stuff that does burn.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
And when you have this large population in a mountainous terrain against these national forests, the potential for wildfires is there. Especially when we're seeing these ebbs and flows from really, really extreme wet years to really, really extreme drought, like we're seeing this year.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
As the winds ease, the threat isn't over. Until they get rain, this is going to continue to be a problem through the winter months. And as of right now, another, although weaker, Santa Ana event is likely. And then we're looking at potentially another event next week.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
You know, a lot of this actually begins all the way back in the summer. Usually, in this area of the world, the summer months, it's typically drier in Southern California. By the fall and into the winter, you start to kind of get these patterns where you get a little bit more rain. But it's been parched. Like, the vegetation is crisp, and that's because they have... seen hardly any rain.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
This winter, we haven't seen this precipitation in Southern California. So it's basically like kindling for a fire. And then you get the Santa Ana winds. These are winds that, you know, Hollywood has romanticized, you know, in movies from the past, and they happen every winter. But when you have these dry conditions and you haven't had that rainfall in the fall,
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
Yeah, the Santa Ana winds are really winds that kind of come out of the north-northeast. And it happens because the atmosphere has this thing called high pressure. You've probably all seen the H's and the L's on weather maps historically. With wind, wind moves towards low pressure.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
And so you get this higher pressure in the western part of the U.S., and then you have some lower pressure off the ocean. And so that high pressure is sitting there, and it's trying to get to the low pressure. And so what it does is it actually pushes through the mountains. And in this case, it was...
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
the pressure difference was so strong that it was actually, the wind is crashing into the mountains. So kind of like how a wave hits a rock and crashes over, we're seeing that wind, you know, 50 miles per hour or even higher, crash into the mountains and come up over the other sides.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
Well, initially, you needed ignition. And that's what we saw Tuesday morning. There was some kind of spark somewhere by somebody or something, right? Like these things can happen because someone just flicked a cigarette out their window and it caught on fire by grass. You can also get this just because someone's chain connected to their trailer going down the highway creates a spark.
The Daily
L.A. on Fire
it doesn't take much with these dry conditions to get a fire going. And then when the winds, as we saw yesterday, started to increase in intensity, these little sparks turned into raging fires. The Eaton Fire exploded Wednesday morning in size, and that had a lot to do with because there were wind gusts near that area of 100 miles per hour. Wow.