Wildfires are burning across Los Angeles
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Fires are burning across the city of Los Angeles in the US state of California. The flames are threatening Hollywood's landmarks and destroying people's homes. These fires are the worst in LA's history. Smoke and ash fills the sky and on early mornings some residents wake up to a sun with a glowing red tint.

The city is blanketed in thick smoke. You can barely see the tops of the palm trees that line streets, meaning many residents have to wear heavy-duty masks. At least 10 people have died. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed. And more than 100,000 people have been evacuated. We're having to walk. This is crazy.

There's a fire right outside our car. In this episode, we're looking at what we know so far about the fires in Los Angeles and asking, how much does the climate have to do with it? I'm Ikra Farooq, and this is What's in the World from the BBC World Service. ♪

We'll talk about the climate side of things in a bit, but first let's paint a picture of what it's like for people in LA. There's been chaos on the streets near the fires. People have been using sweatshirts to cover their faces so they can breathe. One resident, Aaron, and his father-in-law were able to escape the largest fire, the Palisades. My father-in-law has Parkinson's. He can barely move. I went outside, I saw smoke and fire near my father-in-law's house.

and realized we need to go. The problem is we didn't have a car. Finally found a neighbor who was willing to swing by and pick us up. Most people had already gone at that point. We jumped in his car, this guy Jeff, a neighbor we'd never met before, but you know, salt of the earth, saved our lives. As we're driving down, there's fires on both sides of the car. We're driving, we're suddenly seeing fires, you could feel the heat. And then the fires were getting closer and closer.

And at that point, just being stuck there, surrounded by fire, the policemen started running up the street, get out of the car, get out of the car, and started screaming. You don't really realise how serious it is. You don't think this is a life-threatening situation. People have been returning to their burned-down homes just to see if they can save anything, but...

but lots have lost all of their belongings. We had everything, like the sentimental things, like my mom passed away. We had only a few things of hers left. We have just whatever we're wearing.

LA is known for Hollywood around the world and there have been fires near the Hollywood Hills, which is home to several award shows. So now three award ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed and this year's Oscar nominations has been delayed.

Lots of celebrities have mansions in the area and several have said they've lost their homes, including Paris Hilton. She said she saw her Malibu house burning to the ground on TV and posted this on Instagram, talking about a huge fire cloud. Literally looks like hell has taken over. It's so big, it's so red. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone tonight.

Brianna Sachs is a journalist for The Washington Post. She covers disasters and extreme weather for their climate team. She spoke to the BBC from LA. I am about to head back into the Palisades at the scene of the first fire, which is just really hard to process. Basically, the whole town is gone. 23,000 people live there, including my dad, who also lost his house. And there's

Not really much left standing. He did evacuate, you know, at first he didn't really want to go because it's a normal situation.

A lot of her job has been reporting on fires in the area.

like this. I can't remember a time when we had multiple major fires going on and that multiple major fires caused significant loss and death. You think about like, where are all these people going to live? Like, how are they going to rebuild? And we saw this with Lahaina on Maui, and that just seemed really hard to imagine. And yet,

Here it is again, but much bigger. LA police say they have detained someone suspected of trying to light a fire. But the local fire chief says there's currently no conclusive evidence that the wildfires were started deliberately. But we do know that a mix of weather conditions have fueled these fires, including high temperatures and strong wind gusts, sometimes called the devil winds, all signs of a changing climate.

Let's bring in Esme Sellard, the BBC's climate and science journalist. Hey, Esme. Hi there. Great to be with you. Tell me about the conditions in LA which have led to these wildfires. Why are they so bad?

Yeah. So, it's quite a unique event. This is only really the second time the region's had very extreme wildfires at this time of year. And that's because there's kind of been a year of conditions that kind of led up to this point. So, in spring last year within California, there was a lot of rain and that was to do with El Nino, which basically is a natural climate event and it's brought a lot of rain. And that meant the vegetation in the region really blossomed. But then what happened was

in kind of October, September time, the rainfall dramatically reduced. And so actually the whole region was experiencing a drought and all of that vegetation dried up. And effectively that provided the perfect fuel for a wildfire. We've got really dry conditions and all that vegetation is perfect fuel. But then also what we've got is we've got this localised weather phenomenon called the Santa Ana winds. And they're really strong winds which blow inland to offshore. And that's enabling the fire sparks to effectively jump areas and

which is really difficult for firefighters to control. And these winds also take a lot of the humidity out of the air. Some of that moisture can kind of help to control the fires. That's not there as well. So really, it's just been a melting pot of conditions creating the idealized scenario for these wildfires to start. And are wildfires like these becoming more common in LA around the world as well?

So it's kind of difficult to say. I mean, what the satellite data shows is that it doesn't look like there's more fire activity around the world. But that's because fires are typically used to kind of as part of efforts to control forests.

So it looks like there isn't. But actually, if we look specifically at wildfires made worse by climate change or induced by these dry conditions, it does seem to be getting worse. There was a study actually published not long ago in Nature in October, which looked at the amount of land burnt between 2003 and 2019. And it saw there was 16% more land burnt because of climate change. And the way they figured that out is they used something called a counterfactual model. Effectively,

what would happen if climate change wasn't here and then what has actually happened? And the reason they have to do that is wildfires, as I explained with this one, are caused by lots of different factors. So they have to use those types of models to be able to understand the impact of climate change. So it certainly seems that climate change are driving or creating the conditions which lead to these types of fires more. The background to this is climate change, right? And the conditions are something separate as well. So

are parts of the world going to become kind of unable to live in because of wildfire risk?

It's a really good question, actually. It's something that came up in the sort of amongst the climate journalists of my team earlier this morning. We were talking about this, about how people recover from these types of events. You know, extreme weather hits people all over the world. And normally what happens is people rebuild their lives. But there is a question whether people want to return to those areas if it keeps happening time and time again. And certainly we've seen this.

this question of is an area uninhabitable with other types of extreme weather. So, Florida is a prime example of that. They've been experiencing issues, obviously, back-to-back hurricanes. It was a really intense hurricane season that they experienced at the end of last year. And some of the people living there have struggled to get their houses reinsured

It's the same issue in the UK with flooding, also issues in terms of businesses and farmers getting areas insured, particularly in areas of Southern Europe where it's very dry. So this, it's less about can people survive, but actually economically, can they survive in those areas? And obviously, remember, it's about how vulnerable people are. Obviously, the area where these fires have occurred, although tragic, are very wealthy. And it might be that people feel that they can afford to return and to rebuild their homes.

But for some people, economically, they just might not be able to do that. And they might not be able to cover the cost time and time again of recovering from extreme weather events. I think that is more likely when we talk about an area becoming uninhabitable. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've seen the pictures of the fires spreading. We've seen them on our timelines, the videos that people are taking and losing their homes as a result. Why is it so hard to contain fires like this?

I think there's a few reasons. I mean, I spoke earlier about those Santa Ana winds kind of making the sparks jump. The reason that is so important is because often in preparing for wildfires, you know, they're not unusual in that part of the world. So often what the emergency services do and what communities do to prepare is they effectively remove the fuel for these fires. So they remove the vegetation, trying to create gaps in the vegetation so that it doesn't spread as easily. But where you're getting a situation where the winds are kind of picking up

almost these sparks enabling them to jump, that makes it really difficult to get them under control. So the other thing is the topography. So it's very hilly around there, which makes it really difficult for firefighters to access those areas. They are using things called super scoopers, which effectively are types of planes that pick up water from lakes and other areas and drop water over, which does help. But again, water is another issue.

In the area that they're fighting, we know reports on Wednesday evening local time that they'd actually were running out of water to be able to fight the fires because the water tanks in those areas are a lot smaller. Typically, they're expecting to fight fires further uplands or in their kind of hills. They're not expecting to fight them lower down closer to the coast. So there's lots of different things that are making it really, really difficult for local fire services to get on top of the issue. Yeah.

And you touched on the dry conditions around LA and how those have been building for weeks. And I've also seen how that's been linked to this term called hydroclimate whiplash. What is that? Can you explain that? It's quite a fun term, isn't it? Effectively, what it's describing is the ability of the atmosphere to hold water and release water. So we know that with increasing global temperatures,

the atmosphere can hold more water. Now, that means I mentioned before earlier in the year that there was a lot of rain. There was these things called atmospheric rivers that California was experiencing that enabled vegetation to bloom. But that's fully swung about the other way now where there is hardly any moisture in the atmosphere because of

drought and the ongoing high temperatures they experienced at the end of last year. So that whiplash is kind of that swinging between very moist conditions, very wet conditions to very dry conditions. And that's kind of created the perfect scenario where you've got a lot of vegetation, but it's very dry. It's effectively a tinderbox of fuel ready to

to be lit. And we've got the west coast of the US on fire, you know, with these extreme conditions, and then the east coast is freezing at the moment. So is this reflective of climate change getting worse?

Well, we certainly know that global temperatures are continuing to increase. We actually got data this morning on Friday from the EU Climate Service, Copernicus, confirming that 2024 was the hottest year on record. And it's the first time we've seen a full calendar year breach that 1.5 degree threshold, which we talk about a lot in terms of

that's where we're going to start to see climate change impacts worsen quite significantly. In terms of is climate change getting worse, I mean, I guess our measure of that is extreme weather events like these wildfires and actually looking at the impact

Now, humans are very good at adapting to scenarios and we are seeing the death toll overall from extreme weather events not increasing because people are preparing for them. But nonetheless, it seems like this specific, I guess, qualities of these events are getting worse. So, for example, if we look at hurricanes, it certainly seems that the ones that we are getting are bigger, more intense category 5 hurricanes overall.

With wildfires, there is areas that are getting burned more significantly. We are seeing more extreme temperatures. So last year in April, we saw a huge area from Lebanon over to East Asia be experiencing heat waves. So we can certainly see that with these increments, continued increase in emissions and global temperature rise, they are exacerbating those existing weather conditions. So whatever part of the world you're from where you experience extreme weather, it's

that is likely to be getting worse. So for the East Coast, where they do get cold weather events, they seem to be getting more extreme. On the West Coast, where it's dry and it's hot, of the US, they seem to be getting more extreme. So it suddenly seems that nowhere is being untouched by the impacts of rising temperatures. Just finally, thinking of the solutions to all of this, maybe people are listening and thinking, gosh, it sounds like such a horrible picture. Is there anything we can do to stop wildfires happening?

I mean, I guess the overall ambition is obviously to stop greenhouse gas emissions increasing, but that's not something that's going to happen overnight. I mean, in terms of trying to tackle this on sort of an annual basis, I mentioned before about trying to clear areas of vegetation. You can use controlled burning, but again, there's concerns that that could lead to runaway burning in these areas, so maybe not doing that as much. Also, building houses that have more fire-resistant materials. But of course, all of this

costs money. And particularly for those countries which are low-income countries, that can be difficult to get hold of. And we know at the sort of annual Global Climate Summit, certainly the one in November, that is a key area of discussion about how much money we can get into this

and of course also increasing the amount of capacity and training so we know the fire services in California are very stretched at the moment they have about 2,000 firefighters they've actually brought on board those people who are in prison so they're trained to be able to also fight those wildfires there's about 400 of them that have been brought on board so increasing the local capacity as well to kind of deal with these more extreme events and learning from those but no doubt I think they'll

once you know the wildfires have been contained hopefully this week I think you know the local authorities will be sort of going away and thinking about how they could have responded better in the future to this despite it being quite an unusual event we know those conditions may get worse and we might see more of them absolutely thank you so much for coming on Esme thanks for having me

Thanks for listening to today's episode of What's in the World from the BBC World Service. There's so much more about the LA wildfires on the BBC website, so head there to check all of that out. I'm Ikra Farooq. We'll see you next time. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space. After the yoga classes, I felt amazing. But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders.

I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.

You just get sucked in so gradually.

And it's done so skillfully that you don't realize. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me,

was for some spiritual reason that i couldn't understand revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network i feel that i have no other choice the only thing i can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line i want truth and justice

And for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.