Pacific Palisades Ordered Evacuated Over Wildfire

More than 30,000 people in the Los Angeles area are under mandatory evacuation orders due to a fast-moving, wind-driven wildfire in Pacific Palisades.

The Pacific Palisades fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday in the 1100 block of North Piedra Morada Drive. By 3:30 p.m., it had grown to more than 2,900 acres and was expected to spread further due to strong Santa Ana winds.

CalFire ordered evacuations for the entire Palisades community, including the Pacific Ocean. During a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, officials said the evacuation order affected over 10,000 Pacific Palisades and Malibu homes.

Evacuees were advised to travel south toward Pacific Coast Highway via Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard. An evacuation shelter at the Westwood Recreation Centre, 1350 S. Sepulveda Boulevard, accepts small animals.

Pacific Palisades forest management

Cal Fire, or the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, is also in charge of forest management in the state.

Since 2011, Cal Fire has spent over $600 million on fire prevention efforts, removing or felling nearly 2 million dead trees. In 2018, California set a goal of treating 500,000 acres of wildland per year, including slashing, burning, sawing, or thinning trees, but Cal Fire is still far from meeting that target.

The state’s policy of extinguishing fires as soon as they started resulted in a backlog of trees in forests choked with brush and other dry fuels.

According to the United States Forest Service, a researcher studying the Stanislaus National Forest in Northern California discovered records from 1911 that showed only 19 trees per acre in one section of the forest. More than a century later, the researcher and his team found 260 trees per acre.

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