• Major fires in the Los Angeles area have leveled entire communities.
• Satellite images show flames wreaking havoc on houses, businesses, and other structures.
• At least 10 people have died, and the fires have destroyed about 10,000 structures.

Widespread fires have besieged the Los Angeles area for four days. At least 10 people have died and more than 150,000 have been ordered to evacuate their homes.

As of Friday afternoon, six separate fires were still burning in parts of the city and its surrounding areas, but firefighters were making progress during a reprieve from powerful winds.

Satellite and aerial images provided to Business Insider by Maxar Technologies and Nearmap show the trail of destruction the fires have left in Altadena, Pasadena, Malibu, and Pacific Palisades, some of the most heavily affected areas.

The Palisades and Eaton Fires

These two blazes spread for days with firefighters unable to stop their growth.

As of Friday at noon Pacific Time, the Palisades fire had consumed more than 20,400 acres and was 8% contained, and the Eaton Fire had burned more than 13,600 acres with 3% containment, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Together, they've destroyed about 10,000 structures, the agency estimates.

Entire neighborhoods burned to the ground

Charred, leveled communities like this are emerging in the paths of both fires.

A windstorm quickly spread the fires

Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles County, was the first to be devastated. The fire there broke out on Tuesday morning.

The blaze spread so far, so quickly in part because of a windstorm that the National Weather Service called "life-threatening and destructive."

Gusts up to 100 mph carried burning embers far into residential areas, igniting spot fires that grew into an urban conflagration.

In the above image, you can see where some of those spot fires began far from the initial brush fire.

Some of the world's most expensive homes burned

The Palisades Fire alone has become the most destructive fire ever to hit Los Angeles County, CNN reported Wednesday, citing Cal Fire data. Fire experts suspect it could be the costliest in California history, maybe even in US history.

The Altadena neighborhood also burned

These satellite images show houses burned down in the Altadena neighborhood, one of the areas most affected by the Eaton Fire.

The neighborhood was virtually destroyed

Houses and buildings on East Altadena Drive are glowing orange with flame and shrouded in smoke in this image from Wednesday.

Flying over the area after the flames subsided, the ABC7 helicopter pilot Scott Reiff said, "it looks basically like it was carpet-bombed."

In Pasadena, idyllic streets turned to ash

When houses are built this close together, one burning building can easily ignite its neighbors. A house fire burns much hotter than a forest fire because of the materials that are burning, according to Louis Gritzo, the chief science officer at the commercial property insurance company FM.

Many homes didn't stand a chance. They were under siege from "the high heat release from one burning structure combined with a continual ember attack," Gritzo said.

The road to Malibu burned

The Pacific Coast Highway and Tuna Canyon Road, which connects Malibu and Topanga, were covered in smoke Wednesday as fires burned through.

Many of the homes along the PCH have been incinerated.

Malibu did, too

The true scale of devastation and loss of life may not become clear for many days.

Fire conditions may continue for days

A red flag warning for critical fire weather is set to continue in Los Angeles and Ventura counties through 6 p.m. Friday.

The National Weather Service expects about 18 hours of reprieve before another round of "gusty" winds late Saturday into Sunday, with a stronger wind event possible Monday night through Wednesday.

"We're not out of the woods yet," said Courtney Carpenter, a warning-coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

Correction: January 9, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a warning-coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service. She's Courtney Carpenter, not Courtney Carpen.

• Firestorms in Los Angeles have burned nearly 27,000 acres, destroying homes and killing five people.
• One of the biggest blazes, the Palisades Fire, could be the costliest in US history.
• The fires have spread so fast in part because of a windstorm and flood-drought whiplash.

All was well in Los Angeles at around 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

Less than 24 hours later, 2,925 acres of the Pacific Palisades were ablaze in what is being called the worst wildfire in Southern California since 2011. It has grown by orders of magnitude since.

Several more blazes have ignited in the area, with one, the Eaton Fire, engulfing another 10,600 acres.

Firefighters had not contained the fires as of early Thursday morning, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN that five people were dead, and "likely more."

More than 1,000 structures have burned and the fires could get even worse.

California is no stranger to fires, but this situation is different and especially dangerous for a few reasons.

An 'urban firestorm' that could be the costliest in history

Few brush fires in California history have intruded into such vast areas of dense, urban housing.

The UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain called it an "urban firestorm" as he assessed live images of the developing Eaton Fire on Tuesday morning.

Perhaps the best historical comparison is the 1991 Tunnel Fire, which raged through more than 1,500 acres of Oakland, but it was smaller than either of the two giant blazes in Los Angeles. It killed 25 people and injured 150, and ranks as the third-deadliest and third-most-destructive fire in California history.

The true toll of this week's fires won't be clear until later.

Swain said that he and several colleagues have estimated that the Palisades Fire could be the costliest on record in the US because of the number of structures burning and the fact that those homes are some of the most expensive in the world.

"We are looking at what is, I think, likely to become the costliest wildfire disaster in California, if not national history, along with a number of other superlatives," Swain said.

A historic windstorm spread the fire fast

A powerful windstorm buffeted the flames throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, with gusts of wind reaching up to 90 miles an hour, according to the National Weather Service.

During a 2 ½ hour period overnight, the Palisades Fire's size more than doubled, per the fire service's reports.

The winds were so powerful on Tuesday evening that water- and retardant-dropping aircraft could not fly.

It's a phenomenon that scientists have warned about: a deadly combination of high winds and dry, open land — such as the brushland now being swept by flames in Los Angeles — amounting to fires that move faster than emergency responders can keep up with.

"It's certainly unusual how fast it's grown," Douglas Kelley, a researcher at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told Business Insider. "It's definitely a lot faster than I guess a lot of people were expecting in the area at the time."

A study published in Science in October found that while only about 3% of US fires over a nearly two-decade period could be considered "fast fires," they caused disproportionate damage.

"The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast," wrote the study's authors, led by University of Colorado Boulder's Jennifer Balch.

Between 2001 and 2020, fast fires accounted for 78% of fire-destroyed buildings and a full 61% of suppression costs — or $18.9 billion, the scientists wrote. And they are getting more frequent, the study said.

The windstorm was bad luck. But the other primary factor in the fires' rapid explosions — the fuel — is strongly linked to the climate crisis.

Weather whiplash made abundant fire fuel

Southern California has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding the past two winters — which is a huge part of the problem.

Abundant rainfall spurred an explosion of grasses and brush, the primary fire fuel in Southern California. Then, with very little rainfall in the past few months, all that vegetation was flash-dried.

Kelley said those dry conditions made the Palisades especially susceptible to a fast-spreading fire.

This is part of a growing phenomenon that Swain calls "hydroclimate whiplash," or weather whiplash. As global temperatures rise, many parts of the world, especially California, are seeing more violent swings between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions.

The same confluence of weather whiplash and extreme winds was behind the Camp Fire, Swain said. That November 2018 blaze in Paradise, California, was the deadliest and most destructive in the state's history, destroying 18,804 structures and killing 85 people.

• Parts of the US are being battered by Winter Storm Blair, with states of emergency declared.
• The frigid conditions are impacting travel, with icy Midwest roads and flights and trains canceled.
• Snow hit Washington, DC, on Monday as the area prepares for the Trump administration transition.

Ice-storm warnings and unpleasantly cold conditions are expected to continue in much of the northern US.

The Arctic outbreak, dubbed Winter Storm Blair by the Weather Channel, has disrupted travel and resulted in at least five deaths.

The storm is bringing heavy snow to areas in the mid-Atlantic region that haven't seen such weather in a decade, the National Weather Service warned.

Heavy snowfall has occurred in places such as Kansas City, Missouri, where local media reported 10 inches of snow on Sunday night, and Louisville, Kentucky, which saw its largest single-day snowfall in about 25 years.

On Tuesday, snow is expected to dwindle in most of the areas blanketed by it as the storm moves south.

Two people have died in a weather-related crash in Wichita, Kansas, a Missouri public works employee was fatally injured during snow removal operations, and a person in Houston, Texas, died due to cold weather, NBC reported on Monday afternoon.

As of 3 a.m. ET Tuesday, about 207,063 utility customers were without power across Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia, Illinois, and Missouri, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks power outages across the US. That was down from about 254,000 customers on Monday afternoon.

Travel delays and cancellations

More than 2,900 flights were canceled and over 9,300 flights within, into, or out of the US were delayed on Monday, according to FlightAware.

More than half of Monday flights were canceled at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, while the nearby Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport saw 125 flights, or 43% of those scheduled Monday, canceled.

Chicago O'Hare and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airports are leading the country in delays.

Amtrak, the US national rail operator, also announced a series of cancellations in the Northeast and the Midwest on Monday.

The numbers of impacted flights are expected to continue to rise.

Airlines including American, Delta, Southwest, and United have said they're waiving change fees for flights impacted by the storm.

Meanwhile, freezing temperatures led to icy roads and dangerous driving conditions in the Midwest on Sunday. The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported 436 crashes and 1,788 stranded motorists by 3 p.m. on Monday.

Heavy snow and cold to continue

The NWS Weather Prediction Center said Monday that the adverse weather would move toward the mid-Atlantic throughout the day, bringing up to 12 inches of snow and dangerously cold temperatures.

Snow — possibly mixed with sleet and freezing rain — reached about 8 inches in Washington, DC, where preparations are underway for Donald Trump's incoming administration.

Additional cold weather warnings have also been issued in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis, with officials warning to limit travel in the impacted areas, The Weather Channel reported.

The Baltimore-Washington National Weather Service said on Monday afternoon that heavy snow would continue through 11 p.m., dropping up to 3 more inches before the snow system exits the area.

On Monday night, it predicted light snow to continue into the night with an extra 1 to 2 inches near urban areas and in the mountains, and low temperatures in the single digits in the west to upper teens elsewhere.

In an X post in the early hours of Tuesday, the mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser, said more than 200 snow plows would work through the night, and that school would be closed Tuesday.

Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Arkansas have declared states of emergency, with Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey declaring a state of emergency for several counties.

In all, about half the US population is expected to experience freezing temperatures over the next week, Axios reported.