Thousands flee homes as wildfire sweeps through Los Angeles hills
● Schwarzenegger and Dr Dre among stars forced out of evacuation zone
A wildfire has swept through the hills of Los Angeles, destroying several homes and forcing actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, rapper and record producer Dr Dre, basketball star Lebron James and thousands of others to flee.
The flames that roared up a steep hillside near the J Paul Getty Museum in the city’s Brentwood illustrated the danger the state faces as high winds batter both ends of California and threaten to turn any spark into an inferno.
“Man, these LA [fires] are no joke,” James tweeted, the Los Angeles Lakers star using an emoji for the word “fires”, and adding: “Crazy night”.
The Hollywood premiere of actor and former state governor Schwarzenegger’s Terminator: Dark Fate was cancelled on Monday.
Others who own homes in the evacuation zone include Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat running for president, who was not in her home at the time, and Walt Disney chief executive Bob Iger.
Anxious residents made their way down steep hillsides in the middle of the night in Range Rovers, Teslas and Maseratis.
They left behind homes decorated for Halloween – with skeletons hanging from homes, goblins sitting on doorsteps and cobwebs draped over bushes – as a plume of smoke glowed.
David Boyle, 78, awoke at 3am to his doorbell ringing and police pounding on the front door. They warned him the wildfire was advancing toward his house near the Getty complex.
He grabbed dog food and his wife’s jewellery and led his dogs out the door. They went to a recreation centre.
He said: “It’s a fact of life when you live in this area.”
Mr Boyle claimed: “Every place has some problem with disasters. People talk about earthquakes here, but I don’t think it’s as bad as hurricane season.”
The evacuation area extended west into Pacific Palisades, encompassing some of the most expensive properties in California, where celebrities and wealthy professionals live in estates nestled in canyons or on ridge-top retreats that cost tens of millions of pounds but are surrounded by tinder-dry vegetation.
At least eight homes were destroyed and six damaged in the blaze.
Meanwhile a fire in northstrong ern California wine country has exploded in size.
No deaths from either blaze were reported.
Some 2.2 million people were without electricity after California’s biggest utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, shut it off over the weekend in the northern part of the state to prevent its equipment from sparking blazes during windy weather.
The firm warned that more deliberate blackouts were possible in the coming days because another round of winds is expected. The company, which was driven into bankruptcy after its equipment ignited several deadly wildfires in recent years, admitted that, despite the outages, its power lines may have started two small fires at the weekend in the San Francisco Bay.
Pacific also said its transmission lines may have been responsible for the Sonoma County fire.
That blaze, which broke out last week amid the vineyards and wineries north of San Francisco, grew to at least 116 square miles, destroying 123 buildings including 57 homes, damaging another dozen homes and threatening 90,000 more structures.
Although some 30,000 people were allowed home on Monday, about 156,000 people were still under evacuation orders because of the fire, mostly from the city of Santa Rosa.
People on the eastern side of the fire and in neighbouring Lake County were also given evacuation warnings to be prepared to leave because of changing winds.