We checked in on people in California with Connecticut connections who are feeling the impacts of west coast wildfires.
The combination of wildfires and winds near 100 miles per hour is causing dangerous and frightening conditions in the Los Angeles area.
“It’s catastrophic,” said Steve Schwaid, former NBC Connecticut news director who now lives in Los Angeles. “You have a little bit of wind a little bit of fire and it starts moving. You get an 85 mile an hour gust of wind and it blows everywhere.”
Those powerful wind gusts are fueling three wildfires to the north, east, and west of LA County. Another fire, the Woodley fire, sparked Wednesday morning near Van Nuys west of the 405 Highway.
Schwaid described how quickly the fire can spread.
Get top local stories in Connecticut delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC Connecticut's News Headlines newsletter.
“You have an ember from a house half a mile away. It lands on your house and goes into an eave; your place is going up. It literally happens within minutes,” Schwaid said. “You can’t believe how fast the fire explodes. You take the wind and add that on top of it. It’s horrible.”
“Imagine Avon Mountain going up in flames,” he continued. “Then take that and look at all the homes going up around it. Just the horrors. They’ve lost more than a thousand homes out here.”
The strong wind gusts are also causing dangerous driving conditions, according to Monroe native Mike Bonomo.
Local
“There’s just debris and trees falling all over the neighborhoods,” Bonomo said.
Because of the location of the three fires on the edges of LA County, he says he’s not leaving unless there’s an evacuation order.
“I’m staying put because it’s the easiest to evacuate to go south where there aren’t any fires from where I am.”
The wind is hindering the firefighting efforts from above, says Ashley Jones, sister of NBC Connecticut’s Kyle Jones. Ashley has lived in North Hollywood for 11 years.
“We just can’t get the firefighters to go up in the helicopters to start making those drops,” she said.
Jones explained that she's known most wildfires to be northwest of Los Angeles along the coast, more toward Ventura County.
Her neighborhood lost power overnight due to the high winds. She says there’s concern about the smoke from the Woodley fire that’s burning about ten miles from her home.
“It’s pretty smoky,” Jones said. “They’re saying ‘the air quality is bad, stay inside. If you have to go outside wear a mask.’ So it’s again just very unprecedented. I’ve not seen it like this before.”
