Thanks to the weakening of the Santa Ana wind, firefighters can also use airplanes to fight forest fires in the US state of California from Thursday. A few of them were also sent by Canada, to which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered other forms of assistance, NBC News reported, writes TASR.
About 400 prisoners will also help with field work and firefighting, the Washington Post wrote. He added that these are firefighters sentenced to prison terms for minor offenses.
At least five victims
According to the Los Angeles Times, much of Los Angeles County is under a fire danger alert that will remain in effect until at least Friday evening local time.
Unprecedented wildfires in the Los Angeles metropolitan area have claimed at least five lives. At the same time, the authorities fear that more bodies of victims will be found in the burnt ruins of the buildings, reported the AFP agency.
More than 130,000 residents of the Los Angeles area were ordered to evacuate. In addition to the Red Cross and other volunteer organizations, several companies offered to help: Uber offers free transportation of evacuees to safe areas, and Airbnb offers free temporary housing.
Firefighters are still trying to get several fires under control, to which they have given different names in the meantime.
Without electricity
The largest of them – called the Palisades – stretches between Malibu and Santa Monica along the Pacific coast. It’s burning 40 square miles (70 square kilometers) and firefighters are struggling to contain it, just like the Eaton County fire, which burned 25 square miles (42 square kilometers), and the Sunset Fire, which is spreading through the affluent Hollywood Hills neighborhood. The Hurst Fire on an area of 3.4 km2 is ten percent under control by firefighters. They are the most successful in extinguishing the Lidia Fire – they destroyed 40 percent of its area of 1.4 km2.
There are currently more than 200,000 households without electricity in California. The authorities’ warnings of significantly worsened air quality and combustion emissions concern about 17 million residents of California, added the AP agency. The city of Pasadena, located near Los Angeles, warned that drinking water could be dangerous due to the fires. They recommended using tap water only after it has been filtered or boiled.
President Joe Biden, after returning from funeral services in honor of the late former US president Jimmy Carter, called a meeting of his administration to the White House to coordinate federal support for authorities in California, the AP reported.
In this situation, Biden’s successor in the White House, Republican Donald Trump, on the social network Truth Social, attributed the responsibility for the fires around Los Angeles to the California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and his allegedly flawed decisions in the field of the environment.
Trump claimed that firefighters in California are running out of water as a result of the Democrats’ environmental policy, which consists of diverting rainwater to protect “useless crayfish”. However, according to US media, most of the water used in Los Angeles comes from the Colorado River and uses primarily the agricultural sector.
The fire in Los Angeles County was also commented on by billionaire Elon Musk, who in statuses on the X network questioned the claims of scientists that climate change is caused by human activity. In addition, he argued that the failure to control fires in Los Angeles County was also to blame for the minority inclusion policy in firefighter recruitment.
