More Gusty Winds in L.A. Threaten Firefighters’ Progress (2025)

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At least 24 people have been killed. Here’s the latest.

The rare and ominous forecast overnight into Wednesday, with wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour likely in parts of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, came after a moment of relative calm in the firefight.

Officials said on Monday that they had made progress in controlling the Eaton fire, which ravaged parts of Altadena and Pasadena, and the Palisades fire on the west side of Los Angeles County. But both have now grown to be among the most destructive wildfires in California history.

With tens of thousands of residents still barred from returning to their homes because of evacuation orders, the fires have exacerbated a housing crisis in one of the least affordable places in the country. Bidding wars have already started as people hunt for longer-term housing.

Here’s what we’re covering:

• Containment updates: Firefighters slowed the progress of the Eaton fire, near Altadena and Pasadena, over the weekend. The 14,000-acre blaze did not grow on Sunday and was 33 percent contained by Monday, according to Cal Fire, while the 23,700-acre Palisades fire on the west side of Los Angeles was 14 percent contained.

• Death toll: The Eaton fire has killed 16 people, making it one of the deadliest in California’s history, and at least eight people have died in the Palisades blaze. Another 23 people have been reported missing in the areas of the two fires, and officials have warned that the number of fatalities is likely to rise. Here’s what we know about the dead and the search for the missing.

• Early moments: It remains unclear what started the blazes, but power lines near the Eaton and Palisades fires might have played a role. Dominic Choi with the Los Angeles Police Department added on Monday that arson had not been ruled out as a cause. Take a look at the investigation of the Palisades fire.

• More arrests: Nathan Hochman, the Los Angeles County district attorney, announced several charges related to the fires on Monday, including for accusations of looting in the Altadena and Mandeville Canyon areas. Federal prosecutors said they were reviewing social media videos to investigate the illegal use of drones, which can interfere with aerial water drops.

• Safety advice: Here are some steps you can take to stay safe, including signing up for emergency alerts and packing a “go bag.”

Mitch Smith contributed reporting.

A day earlier, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that exempts rebuilding homeowners and businesses from the California Environmental Quality Act, a landmark law that can add years to new projects.

The area encompasses the San Gabriel Mountains, which tower over Los Angeles and include popular hiking trails, rivers and other attractions. The Eaton fire started on the edge of the forest.

Los Angeles residents have expressed concern that electrical infrastructure may have sparked at least one of the fires that ignited around the city last week.

On Monday, some victims of the Eaton fire blamed the power utility Southern California Edison for the blaze in separate lawsuits. The utility’s parent company said its preliminary review suggested that its equipment was not responsible.

Families struggle to get inside the Palisades fire evacuation zone.

They were all turned away, according to police officers at the scene.

“It’s just an overwhelming sadness,” said Yelena Entin, the woman who was looking for her turtle. “The uncertainty for the future — we don’t know when we will be able to get in.”

The Pacific Palisades neighborhood and parts of Santa Monica and Malibu remained under a mandatory evacuation order on Monday, nearly a week after the Palisades fire leveled hundreds of homes in the area and killed at least eight people.

Some residents re-entered the evacuation zone last week, when access was easier, but the only people being allowed inside on Monday were emergency responders, utility workers and journalists who are allowed to visit under California law.

It was not immediately clear if any homeowners were finding unofficial ways to pass through blockades around the zone. The barricades are staffed by local police officers and members of the National Guard.

People at the barricades on Monday expressed mounting frustration with what they said were shifting policies on access. Some residents said they had been allowed into the evacuated zone earlier in the week, but now were barred. Others said they had been promised police escorts to their homes that never materialized.

The Los Angeles Police Department said over the weekend that it would be halting police escorts into the zone because such trips were straining police resources. But some people in the area on Monday said they were trying to get inside anyway.

“I’ve been able to make my way in a few times — I’m just trying to figure out how to do that today,” said Matt Marquis, who was turned away at a checkpoint. He said he wanted to check on his goldfish and on his power and gas lines.

Brittaney Krebs said she was seeking a way into her father’s house in Malibu. She was hoping to salvage keepsakes — especially platinum vinyl records from the 1970s and 1980s — before winds in the area picked up again.

“Things that I would like to have, when he passes,” she said. “We all got out, everybody’s OK — it’s just sentimental things.”

Others simply stewed.

“They don’t give us answers,” said Ronen Malek, who wanted to see if anything could be salvaged from the office building she owns in the Palisades that was destroyed in the fire. “We are dealing with so much stress and anxiety.”

As a line of cars waited at his checkpoint on Monday afternoon, Steve Romero, an officer with the Santa Monica Police Department, was trying to be a calming presence. He directed people to pharmacies to find replacement medication and explained to evacuees which areas of the neighborhood had burned.

“We’ve had people crying and yelling,” he said. But “as long as you understand their state of mind and show them compassion, you’re able to get through it.”

A Father and Son Called for Help Escaping as Flames Approached. None Came.

Then Mr. Mitchell noticed something out the window.

“Baby, I got to go,” he said. “The fire just got in the yard.”

Mr. Mitchell lived on Terrace Street in Altadena with two sons, both in their 30s. It was a modest white house with a green front gate and green trim. Trees towered above the home’s carefully tended garden. The edge of a woods climbing up into the San Gabriel Mountains was just 10 blocks away.

Mr. Mitchell used a wheelchair after his leg was amputated last year, a complication of his diabetes. One of his sons, Justin, was born with cerebral palsy and was “bedridden,” according to Mr. Mitchell’s daughter, Hajime White.

Usually, Mr. Mitchell’s other son, Jordan, cared for both of them alongside a rotating team of professionals. But Jordan was not there that day. He had gone to the hospital earlier in the week with a case of sepsis. There were several cars in the driveway, but Mr. Mitchell could not drive them. As the fire came closer, whipped by strong winds barreling down the mountains, no ambulance appeared.

That night, Mr. Mitchell and Justin were both found dead.

Ms. White said that her family had been trying to piece together what happened to them.

“Where was the ambulance?” she said. “Where were the caregivers? Where was everyone at?”

The Mitchells’ address is one of several that emergency dispatchers discussed as they deployed crews in the early hours of the fire, according to a recording of the calls that was reviewed by The New York Times. They were among several people who had called saying they were trapped.

One of the responders confirmed they had the address, according to the recording.

Several government agencies involved in the response said they did not have records of 911 calls, and they referred questions to the Los Angeles County sheriff. The sheriff’s office did not respond to several requests for comment about the response.

Carlos Herrera, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, one of the other agencies, said that by the time the Eaton fire had broken out on Tuesday, all resources were already dedicated to the raging Palisades fire across town.

When personnel arrived to respond to the new fire, he added, the immediate priority was evacuating residents. Fire crews worked with law enforcement agencies to respond to calls for help and went door to door looking for people, Mr. Herrera said. In all, as of Monday, 24 people had been reported dead, according to the county medical examiner’s office.

The Mitchell family was certain of one thing about the hours before the two died: Mr. Mitchell would have been by his son’s side.

In all, Mr. Mitchell had four children — a daughter, Hajime, and three sons, Justin, Jordan and Anthony Jr. He also had nine grandchildren and a number of great-grandchildren.

“He wasn’t going to leave my brother,” Anthony Mitchell Jr., 46, said. “He would never leave his kids. We were his legacy. We were his diamonds.”

Ms. White said that her children had called him “Fafa” instead of “Papa” because they lived far away from him in Arkansas. But though they were far, they stayed in close touch. In November, they had all gathered for Mr. Mitchell’s 68th birthday.

It was a bright spot in a difficult year. His wife died in October, and his first wife died just last month. He struggled with both deaths, his son said.

“My dad was going through a lot, but he always held on,” Anthony Jr. said.

Ms. White, 50, said that her father was 17 years old when she was born, the child of two high school sweethearts. Ms. White’s mother moved to Arkansas not long after she found out that she was pregnant, but Mr. Mitchell always kept in contact with his daughter while she was growing up.

“He would call me a lot of times, and he would ask me, ‘Baby, what do you want for Christmas?’” Ms. White recalled. “He would sometimes start in June and July.”

Her father would ask around about what the latest trends were. Big boxes of presents would then show up on Ms. White’s doorstep, filled with the latest fashionable clothes and in-demand items, such as Air Jordan shoes, Reeboks and, once, a keyboard.

Ms. White first visited Altadena when she was 10 years old, in 1986, the first time she met her father and the extended family in person. It felt like home, she said.

“The first time that I laid eyes on my dad, it was the most happiest moment of my life,” Ms. White said.

Altadena, though minutes away from a large city, had a small-town feel, Anthony Jr. said. The neighborhood was full of families whose homes had been passed down through generations. It had been a magnet for Black families in particular. The houses were in a picturesque spot, surrounded by hills and forest on three sides, but they were still affordable.

Mr. Mitchell’s house had been handed down on his wife’s side. Her grandfather built five or six houses on neighboring lots, which had been inherited by the younger generations.

Mr. Mitchell himself was a fixture in the community — always checking in with the neighborhood children to see how they were getting on in school and giving them advice, his family said.

“My dad was just one of those people, you would meet him and he would make friends with you real quick,” Anthony Jr. said. “He was an old-school guy.”

He worked in sales at Radio Shack and then studied to become a respiratory therapist. But the work was sad — many of his patients, including children and older people, died. He quit and went back to sales.

In his neighborhood, Mr. Mitchell was known for his skills at the barbecue and was often recruited to cook for a crowd. In the charred remains of his backyard on Friday, next to several blackened cars, were the tools of Mr. Mitchell’s craft — a gas grill, a charcoal grill and a smoker.

His son Justin loved to read, particularly books ordered from Amazon. Whenever someone asked if he wanted a present, he answered simply, “Amazon.” But he also liked reading the newspaper with Mr. Mitchell.

“They would both sit there, reading the paper,” Ms. White said. “My brother was phenomenal, too, just like my dad.”

As the fires continued to rage across the city this week, many of Altadena’s neat 1950s houses and towering trees had been reduced to charcoal. On Terrace Street, where the Mitchells lived for decades, debris was piled waist-high inside the remains of the white house with the green trim. In the front garden, two metal chairs, one green and one yellow, had been flipped upside down.

Until the end, Ms. White said, her father remained confident that help would arrive.

“They’ll get me and your brother,” Mr. Mitchell reassured her as flames spread through his yard. “Hopefully they should come soon.”

Mimi Dwyer contributed reporting.

Curry's granddaughter, Dalyce Kelley, said her grandmother’s home, in Altadena, had been her safe place. “It’s unfortunate that her safe place became a nightmare,” she said.

A vast trove of scores by the 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg was destroyed in the fire.

Belmont’s catalog offered a wide range of Schoenberg’s music, from the lush, hyper-Romantic pieces of his youth to the challenging works he wrote after breaking from conventional tonal harmony and developing his 12-tone technique.

No original Schoenberg manuscripts were destroyed in the fire. But the loss of Belmont’s collection could create problems for orchestras, chamber music groups and soloists planning performances of Schoenberg’s works in the months ahead. Other Schoenberg memorabilia were also destroyed in the fire, including photographs, letters, posters, books and arrangements by other composers of Schoenberg pieces.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, said that Belmont played an essential role in making Schoenberg’s music available to the public. The American Symphony Orchestra got its scores for a performance of Schoenberg’s oratorio “Gurrelieder,” which it performed last year at Carnegie Hall, from Belmont.

“It’s a catastrophe,” Mr. Botstein said. “It was an indispensable resource.”

He added that some ensembles could be forced to make changes to their upcoming programs because the scores they need will not be available from Belmont.

“They were the lenders, they were the ones who helped you out,” he said. “They made it as easy as possible.”

While Belmont, established in 1965, is not the only publisher of Schoenberg’s works, the firm was revered for the authority of its scores and its connection to the composer, who was born in Vienna, fled the Nazis and moved to America. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he lived until his death in 1951.

Belmont said it would work on creating digital versions of its scores, based on manuscripts by the composer, which are kept at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna. Belmont kept digital backups of scores at its offices, but they also burned in the fire.

“There’s a finality here which is astonishing,” said Larry Schoenberg. “There’s no hope left that you’re going to find or retrieve anything. And that’s a different kind of grief.”

Musicians said they were devastated by the loss of Belmont.

The cellist Fred Sherry, a noted Schoenberg interpreter, was a regular visitor to the outbuilding that became known as Belmont’s “garage.” He recalled perusing hundreds of scores, including some with old-school cover art and type. He took home as much music as he could carry.

“The loss of those beautiful scores is a tragedy,” Sherry said, “but meanwhile the music will last for as long as we have concerts.”

Larry Schoenberg, whose home was also destroyed in the fire, said he was still coming to terms with the scale of the loss. He recalled the example of his father.

“Whenever there was a difficulty, he would express his frustration, then get to work on a solution,” he said.

“Despite all that has happened, we are trying to be very positive,” he added. “There are no tears here.”

L.A. wildfire evacuees are scrambling to find shelter, exacerbating a housing shortage.

The hunt for longer-term housing already has sparked bidding wars in some neighborhoods on the edges of the fires. In the ritzy Brentwood neighborhood adjacent to the Palisades fire, one real-estate agent suddenly got 1,000 applicants for a new rental listing. In Pasadena, a family whose home burned in the Eaton fire in Altadena said they were about to lose their emergency short-term rental where they have been staying since the fires to a family willing to pay $8,000 a month.

Some evacuees, like Lila King, have ended up staying in their vehicles.

Ms. King, 75, has been bouncing between motels and sleeping in her truck with her 40-year-old son since they were displaced by the Eaton fire.

Ms. King recently had surgery after she broke several ribs in a fall, and the nights sleeping in her truck have left her aching. She said she has been living off tacos from a nearby gas station, and wondering when, if ever, she will be able to return to her mobile home in Altadena, the unincorporated community at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains that was devastated by the Eaton Fire.

“We’re trying to get some help to get a place,” she said. “I’m worried.”

The American Red Cross and other agencies have opened eight shelters in Los Angeles County capable of holding almost 800 evacuees combined; the largest, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium Exhibition Hall, had almost 500 people. Evacuees flooded the convention center immediately after the fire, sleeping on cots or even the floor. By Monday, the shelter was quieter, and many appeared to have cleared out.

Some displaced by the fires are crashing on couches and spare bedrooms with families and friends. Others are posted up for now in hotels and vacation rentals, anxiously counting the days before they have to find other housing.

“We’re scattered all over,” said Nic Arnzen, the vice chairman of the town council of Altadena.

Mr. Arnzen’s home was one of the more than 6,500 buildings in Altadena that burned down. Since the fire, he and his husband, their 18-year-old daughter and a family friend have squeezed into an Airbnb rental with their two dogs, cat and rabbit.

He said that nearly all of Altadena’s approximately 45,000 residents were displaced, and that the water contamination and toxic debris left by the fire would complicate efforts to return even for those whose homes survived. Some of his neighbors have moved in with family, friends and strangers nearby. Others have moved out of state, at least for now.

For many, the emotions and adrenaline of the initial aftermath have given way to the reality that longer-term accommodations must be found.

“We were already in a housing crisis,” Mr. Arnzen said. “Everybody’s scrambling for homes.”

Price gouging on rental housing and other goods and services is prohibited in California under an emergency declaration issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom. That means rents cannot be increased more than 10 percent compared with what they were at the start of the state of emergency.

But a review of active rental listings found some had risen anywhere from 15 percent to 64 percent since the fires.

Several families whose homes burned said they had been so immersed in the work of dealing with their insurance companies and trying to return home to assess the damage that they had not even started to look beyond the horizon of the next day.

“It’s like being lost in a fog,” said Godwin Amafa, 69, whose home of 25 years in Altadena burned down. He and his wife have been staying at a hotel in Pasadena and said the $140 nightly rate seemed reasonable, even with the surge of evacuees.

“I can be here as long as I can afford it,” he said.

Julio Partida, 58, and his family have spent a few days at an Airbnb in City Terrace, just east of downtown Los Angeles. Family and friends have offered space in their homes after that, but Mr. Partida said he did not know where his family would end up. It is still difficult, he said, to think about life beyond the short term.

“These aren’t things you prepare for,” he said.

Closer to the Rose Bowl Stadium, Paul and Jane Coleman were among the few evacuees left in the parking lot. About a dozen families had sought shelter there after the fire erupted, but many have left with the expansion of an adjacent operations center that offers firefighters and other law enforcement officials a chance to refuel and sleep.

On Monday, one family near the Colemans had also been sleeping in a van since Wednesday. And the Colemans stuck to their trailer.

The Colemans’ home in Altadena was spared, and for now, the couple said they were waiting for the fire risk to abate and an all-clear to re-enter their neighborhood. To pass the time, they’ve been checking their phones for news on the fires, and taking their three dogs — Trixie, Molly and Waldo — on walks.

“We’re just going to wait it out,” Ms. Coleman, 80, said.

Finn-Olaf Jones contributed reporting from Pacific Palisades, Mimi Dwyer from Pasadena, Ken Bensinger from Altadena and Christopher Flavelle contributed from Washington.

Victims of the Eaton fire sue Southern California Edison.

“All of those things together, I think, are pretty powerful,” said Gerald Singleton, a lawyer for Mr. Kreiner. “It looks like there was a fire that was started by their lines.”

In addition to the witness accounts, Ms. Iglesias’s lawsuit also cites data from Whisker Labs, a Maryland technology company that maintains sensors that can detect abnormal activity on power lines. Her lawsuit says the data showed “an alarming number” of grid faults in the hours before the fire started.

An Edison spokesman said the utility was aware of the lawsuits, which were filed in Superior Court in Los Angeles County, but had not seen them by Monday afternoon.

Pedro Pizarro, the president and chief executive of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, said in an interview on Monday that the utility was investigating the origin of the Eaton and Hurst fires, which were burning in areas where the company operates electrical equipment. The company’s preliminary review, he said, suggested that its equipment was not responsible for the fires.

“It’s just heartbreaking to see all the loss,” Mr. Pizarro said. “It’s just tragic.”

He said the electric system reflected an “electrical anomaly” a minute after the reported start of the Hurst fire. With the Eaton fire, he said, Edison had cut power to distribution lines west of the area where the fire started, and no problems with the grid were registered until an hour after the reported start of the blaze.

“Clearly we recognize that there might be something that we just don’t understand right now,” Mr. Pizarro said. “We’ll be transparent with the public as we know more.”

Here’s what the various fire alerts mean.

Watches and Warnings

Fire watches and warnings are issued by the 122 local National Weather Service forecast offices across the United States. Forecast offices maintain criteria specific to their areas of coverage that are developed in consultation with land and fire managers, the federal, state or other bodies — such as the U.S. Forest Service — that study a particular place’s vulnerability to fire.

The criteria used to determine whether a local forecast office issues a watch or a warning can include, among other factors, the likelihood of lightning (which can ignite a fire), high winds and low humidity.

Watches and warnings don’t predict wildfires, but they do predict the conditions that are conducive to their formation or spread. They can take two forms:

• Fire weather watch: This alert is issued when there is a “high potential for the development of a Red Flag event” in 18 to 96 hours. “The overall intent of a fire weather watch is to alert users at least a day in advance for the purpose of resource allocation and firefighter safety,” according to Weather Service policy.

• Red flag warning: This more serious alert describes an “impending, or occurring Red Flag Event,” indicating “a high degree of confidence that weather and fuel conditions consistent with local red flag event criteria will occur in 48 hours or less.” The term has been used by the Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since the 1960s, according to a NOAA fact sheet.

Fire weather watches and red flag warnings can be issued several times a year, in some cases in quick succession during a single weather event, in fire-prone areas, said Robyn Heffernan, a fire weather services senior adviser at the National Interagency Fire Center.

Much more rarely, forecasters can advise of a “particularly dangerous situation” within a forecast, she added. This kind of description is made “if an office feels like this is an extreme event where the criteria for issuance is greatly exceeded, or we’re near record levels or at record levels,” Ms. Heffernan said.

Before this fire season, the Weather Service’s Los Angeles office had used that designation only twice, both for warnings in 2020. Since November, it has issued them four times.

Fire Weather Outlooks

The Storm Prediction Center, a part of the National Weather Service that monitors for severe weather events like thunderstorms, tornadoes and winter weather, also identifies areas where there is a “significant threat for the ignition and/or spread of wildfires” in the near future, according to a description of its products published by NOAA. Fire weather outlooks are broader in scope and are intended to provide guidance for forecasters and to “aid land management agencies in determining large-scale areas of fire danger risk,” according to Weather Service policy. They are not warning products, Ms. Heffernan said.

The Storm Prediction Center describes five kinds of fire risk. For the center to label an area with a given risk level, the area must satisfy several criteria for weather and the potential for fueling fires. The first three pertain to how actively a fire may burn:

• Fire weather risk is described as “elevated” when “we know that the fuels are dry and that the weather is conducive for fire activity,” Ms. Heffernan said.

• Fire weather risk is described as “critical” when “we know that if a fire starts in that area, it is going to be difficult to contain,” she said.

• Fire weather risk is described as “extremely critical” when “there are going to be very limited fire tactics that are going to be able to be employed on that fire because the weather is so overwhelming,” such as during a Santa Ana wind event, she said.

There are also two risk levels that pertain to the potential for a new fire to be ignited (it would be rare, though not impossible, for the two types of fire risk to coincide, Ms. Heffernan said):

• An outlook of “isolated dry thunderstorms” is issued based on the whether a potential fire has fuel to spread (determined through drought, rainfall and vegetation data, for example) and the presence of isolated cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, according to Weather Service directives. This is equivalent to an elevated fire weather threat.

• An outlook of “scattered (critical) dry thunderstorms” is issued based on a potential fire’s fuel conditions and the presence of scattered-to-numerous cloud-to-ground lightning strikes. This is equivalent to a critical fire weather threat.

Moving the Rams’ playoff game because of the fires was a logistical challenge.

Giachelli’s company, World Class Athletic Surfaces in tiny Leland, Miss., provides paint to most N.F.L. and top college teams. Within hours, he and his co-workers had loaded five-gallon buckets of nine custom paint colors, as well as stencils for the N.F.L. playoff logos, onto a truck that left Thursday afternoon on a 1,500-mile journey to Arizona.

“I definitely regret what’s going on in California, but I’m glad we could meet their needs,” said Giachelli, the vice president of production and distribution.

Getting the right paint was just one of hundreds of details that the league, the Rams, the Vikings, the host Arizona Cardinals and ASM Global, which operates State Farm Stadium, had to juggle after the N.F.L. decided to move the wild-card round game.

The N.F.L. has canceled preseason games and postponed and moved regular-season games over the years because of hurricanes, snowstorms and other calamities. But it had not moved a winner-take-all playoff showdown since 1936, when the site of its championship game was changed from Boston to New York to drum up ticket sales.

A battalion of people — from the front-office workers to the training staffs to the thousands of game-day workers — were mobilized on short notice. Each game, particularly in the playoffs, generates tens of millions of dollars for television networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and with the season coming down to its last few weeks, there was little margin for error.

“We’ve got to have a contingency for everything,” Michael Bidwill, the owner of the Cardinals, said in an interview. “There’s a huge ripple effect” if games aren’t played.

The Cardinals helped out the Rams beyond just lending their stadium. Bidwill sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams get their 300-person entourage and equipment to Arizona. Babysitters, doctors and even an ice cream shop were identified for the players’ families.

Tickets had to be sold. Starting Friday morning, Rams season-ticket holders were given the first chance to buy seats, followed one hour later by Cardinals ticket holders. (Those who had tickets for the game at SoFi Stadium could get a refund or have the tickets applied as a credit toward their 2025 season tickets. Tickets for Glendale had to be bought separately.)

After two hours, 52,000 seats were sold. The general public then scooped up the remaining tickets.

Kathy and Kevin Page, a couple who live in Lake Elsinore, east of Los Angeles, bought their seats in the first wave, paying upward of $500 for two seats in the stadium’s lower bowl, plus parking passes. They met up with friends they tailgate with at Rams home games.

Called Melon Heads because they wear carved-out watermelons at games, the Pages were glad the game could still be played.

“Having the game here gives people a reprieve from what’s going on,” Kevin Page said. “With all the reports coming out about the fires, this gives us a chance to reboot ourselves.”

Page and his friends hung a banner on their tent that read, “Thank you Arizona Cardinals.”

Manuel Moreno, who goes by the nickname “Suspect, the Masked Ram,” rode on one of the several dozen buses that ferried hundreds of Rams fans from SoFi Stadium to Glendale. “We appreciate the hospitality,” he said. “It’s a stress relief from the 24-hour news about the fires.”

A big reason the N.F.L. is the world’s most valuable league is scarcity. There are just 272 regular-season games and 13 playoff games, so each one is of critical importance to the 32 teams. (By contrast, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games every month during the season.) They are also critical to the owners of those teams and the league, as well as broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars a year to attach their businesses and brands to the N.F.L.

It has not escaped notice that one of those businesses, State Farm, had its name attached to Monday night’s broadcast less than a year after it announced that it would not renew 30,000 homeowner policies and 42,000 policies for commercial apartments in California. (The N.F.L. has donated $5 million to Los Angeles relief efforts.)

With so much riding on each contest, the N.F.L. does everything it can to play every game every year. When the league creates its season schedule each spring, it prepares contingency plans including an alternate site for each game. In 2022, when a massive snowstorm hit western New York, the Buffalo Bills played a home game at Ford Field in Detroit.

During the pandemic, outbreaks in locker rooms forced the league to postpone several games, though none were canceled. When pandemic conditions in Santa Clara County, Calif., deteriorated, the San Francisco 49ers moved to Arizona for a month, playing three home games in State Farm Stadium. Arizona was also a backstop in 2003 when the Chargers moved their home game against the Miami Dolphins because of fires in San Diego.

This time, the fires spread so quickly, the league decided to move the game five days before kickoff. Kevin Demoff, the president of the Rams, said the team had been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially thought the game could be held at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which was unaffected by the fires.

But that changed midweek, when fires broke out close to the team’s training facility in Woodland Hills, forcing some players and staff to evacuate their homes and for one practice to be cut short. Demoff said he did not want the players and staff to be distracted, nor did he want city and county resources to be diverted for the game when they could be used to help others in need.

Moving the game was “just a recognition that there’s some things bigger than football and we owe this to our community to make sure that this game can be played safely and not be a distraction,” Demoff said Friday.

ESPN was on hold as well. Four of its production trucks were en route to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh when the league told the network on Wednesday night that the game could be moved to Glendale. The crews spent the night in Kingman, Ariz. On Thursday, the plan was to set up in both stadiums in case the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued on to Los Angeles while another set of trucks left for Glendale. When the N.F.L. said Thursday that the game had been moved, the first set of trucks, which had reached Ontario, Calif., turned around and arrived in Glendale with time to spare.

“If it can be played, they play it, and in this case, it can be played in Glendale,” said Joe Buck, who called the game for ESPN. “We’re in the playoffs now, and you’ve got all this pressure to get this first round finished before Kansas City and Detroit,” which had first-round byes, “get back in.”

Searches continue for nearly two dozen missing in the fires.

As of Monday morning, the official number of missing persons included 17 in the area of the Eaton fire near Pasadena and six in the Malibu area, near the Palisades fire.

“That number is expected to fluctuate as we get more information,” Nicole Nishida, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles sheriff’s office, said in an email. The sheriff’s office did not cite specific numbers of people who are reporting their loved ones missing. But, Ms. Nishida added, “unfortunately, the number increases every day.”

People are also searching for loved ones online.

Among them were the friends of Kim Winiecki, a 77-year-old Altadena resident who had not been seen or heard from since the Eaton fire erupted. After days of sharing posts, and increasingly losing hope, Ms. Winiecki’s friends learned on Monday that she had died in her home, according to Jeannette McMahon, a friend who lived six minutes away.

Ms. Winiecki had moved to the area about 35 years ago, Ms. McMahon said. “Her home was her security. Her everything,” she said.

Officials have warned that the number of missing people and the death toll could rise further. In addition to those reported missing to the Sheriff’s Department, the American Red Cross said over the weekend that it had received almost 400 family reunification requests through online form submissions and phone calls.

The organization added that roughly 900 people impacted by the fires have sought refuge in one of the Red Cross shelters in Los Angeles.

Officials are still searching thousands of structures that have been damaged or destroyed in the fires, including with cadaver dogs, and are continuing to find remains, Robert Luna, the Los Angeles County sheriff, said during a news conference on Monday.

That is also partly why many people are not yet able to return to survey their homes inside the mandatory evacuation zones, Mr. Luna said, saying: “We have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors.”

Ventura County is one area that might see stronger winds than last week’s first Santa Ana wind event because Tuesday's winds may come more from the east, while last week’s were more out of the north.

What caused the Palisades fire? The site where it ignited holds clues.

Investigators have zeroed in on these rocky bluffs with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean as the ignition point of the Palisades fire, the inferno that has destroyed at least 5,000 homes and businesses and killed at least eight people.

A recent visit by New York Times reporters to the site — near the “crime scene,” as officers for the Los Angeles Police Department who were posted nearby described it — suggested a range of possibilities, some of them contradictory, for the origin of the fire.

Charred wooden utility poles litter the ground. One plot of scorched chaparral is from a previous fire that firefighters thought they had extinguished on New Year’s Day, nearly a week before the Palisades fire broke out. And there is evidence of recent visitors to the area around Skull Rock, the eerily shaped boulder that draws hikers and teenage partyers whose discarded beer bottles remain in a heap of shattered glass.

For now, the answer to what caused one of Los Angeles’ most destructive firestorms may be elusive even to the investigators. The yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the wind near Skull Rock is hundreds of yards across a steep slope from the zone where a New York Times analysis of satellite images and witness photographs suggests the ignition point may have been.

The area is desolate today. The slopes of sand and rock are colorless and moon-like, as if the fire had incinerated every trace of chlorophyll. It’s a far cry from before the fire, when hiking trails in the area were framed by reedy green plants and drought-tolerant bushes.

The fire tore through the steep hillsides on either side of the Temescal Ridge Trail, which runs north-south, roughly the same direction as the fierce winds that propelled the Palisades fire soon after it ignited on Tuesday, Jan. 7, just before 10:30 a.m.

An hour earlier, Ron Giller, a lawyer who lives in The Enclave, an area of Pacific Palisades near where the fire started, hiked with a friend through a patch of ground that had caught fire New Year’s Day. Residents think errant fireworks may have set that one off.

The New Year’s fire was reported just after midnight and burned eight acres before fire crews got it fully contained. Some crew members stayed to monitor for flare-ups.

The burn site from the New Year’s fire, still scarred and blackened, lies less than 100 feet from homes to the west — some of them now destroyed.

On the morning the Jan. 7 fire ignited, Mr. Giller said he saw what resembled smoke or dust wafting in the area. “It had the appearance of smoke around there, but there were no flames,” he said in an interview. “It just raised a question in my mind. What is it? I was thinking, could this thing still be active? But it seemed unlikely, you know — could there still be smoke from a fire that happened six days ago? That didn’t make sense to me.”

Some of the deadliest wildfires of the past century were blazes that firefighters believed they had extinguished, only to have the remnants flare up into an inferno. They include the 1991 firestorm in Oakland that killed 25 people and the 2023 wildfire on the Hawaiian Island of Maui that killed 102 people.

Investigators concluded that the Maui blaze emerged from the smoldering remnants of a fire near a residential area several hours earlier, perhaps from burning material that was buried under dirt until the wind uncovered it again.

Researchers have found that fires can smolder in plant roots or other organic material for days before conditions let them re-emerge.

Mr. Giller and his friend, Alan Feld, were not the only ones exploring the hills of the Palisades before the fire last week. The panoramic views from the ridge often draw hikers from the neighborhood and beyond.

During their walk that day, Mr. Feld said, they saw a few people sitting on Skull Rock.

“And one of us even said, ‘I hope they’re not smoking or anything, with these winds,’” Mr. Feld said.

Video posted on social media from that morning show one group of young men near Skull Rock, dressed largely in sneakers and athletic shorts, one carrying a portable speaker. Clips posted by one member of the group begin with the men running along a trail next to a rock, with a faint cloud of smoke coming from the hillside above them. The men, still running, express alarm about smelling smoke and then seeing a fire moving quickly toward them.

Another clip shows the same men a few minutes later, looking back as the fire continued to grow and smoke billowed into the sky.

“Dude, that’s right where we were standing,” one says. “We were literally right there,” says another.

The man who posted the video initially agreed to speak with The Times, but then stopped responding to messages. His account on X appears to have been removed. There is no indication at this point that any of the men were responsible for starting the fire; the videos do not show them smoking.

When the latest fire began to spread on Jan. 7, nearby residents watched in horror as it took hold in the parched grassland and then jumped down the hillside, stoked by rising winds. They called 911 and packed evacuation supplies in case they needed to flee. By then — around 10:30 a.m. — flames were towering over the landscape, according to photos from one resident. Just half an hour later, the fire had already sped down much of the hillside toward houses below.

Fire crews rushed to the scene by ground and air, and one firefighter reported to dispatchers that the blaze had started “just below the old burn scar” — from the New Year’s blaze — and might reach nearby houses within minutes.

“It is pushing directly toward Palisades,” he said on the radio. “This thing is going to make a good run.”

At least one lawyer investigating the fire was looking at whether a downed utility line could have sparked it, since power lines run north and south along much of the Temescal Ridge Trail. California has a long history of catastrophic blazes caused by downed power lines, and early images from the other deadly fire that began last week in the Los Angeles area — the Eaton fire — show flames roaring below electrical transmission lines.

Along the trail near where the Palisades fire began, The Times found bits of power-line debris, including what appeared to be part of a lightning arrester device. But the nearest overhead power line was about a third of a mile to the north. That line, which curves down from the trail and into the neighborhood,was extensively damaged from fire, but witness photographs show it was still intact soon after the fire began.

The poles along that route have a tumultuous recent history. Many of them date from the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power initiated a project in 2019 to replace some of them with stronger metal structures.

The project stalled after environmental regulators said the department had damaged 183 small bushes known as Braunton’s milkvetch, an endangered species.

The department agreed in 2020 to pay a fine, and won approval to resume work, saying the project was “essential in regards to our wildfire mitigation plan.” But the project does not appear to have proceeded.

The Times’s review of the ridgetop showed many damaged and fallen utility poles along the trail heading north — an area that was consumed by fire, but not until a day after the blaze began.

Investigators have made it clear that it could take time to reach firm conclusions about the cause of the fire.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is taking the lead, took more than a year to report conclusions about the Maui fire.

“We are looking at every angle,” Dominic Choi, the assistant Los Angeles police chief, said on Monday about the fires burning across the region. He said that arson had not been ruled out for any of them. In the case of the Palisades fire, he added, “there has been no definitive determination that it is arson.”

For now, the entire area around the investigation site is eerily empty. The neighborhoods near the trail are evacuated and dozens of houses were leveled; — the only signs of life there are a few fire trucks and an occasional police patrol.

Further down the hillsides, toward the ocean, there is utter devastation. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, their subdivisions now just a grid of ash.

Rachel Nostrant, Christiaan Triebert, Ivan Penn, Danny Hakim and Claire Moses contributed reporting.

Some in the music industry had pushed for the ceremony to be cancelled or moved to Las Vegas. Among their concerns: Would it be ethical for people flying in to take up hotel rooms that evacuees might need? “Release your hotel blocks or donate them,” Lucas Keller, the president and founder of Milk & Honey, a management company for songwriters, record producers and other music artists, wrote on Instagram.

Biden said that he was receiving frequent briefings on the firefighting efforts and that he had directed his administration to respond promptly to requests for assistance. “Our hearts ache for the 24 innocent souls we have lost in the wildfires across Los Angeles,” he said. “Jill and I pray for them and their loved ones.”

The Oscar nominations have been postponed again.

“We are all devastated by the impact of the fires and the profound losses experienced by so many in our community,” the academy chief executive, Bill Kramer, and president, Janet Yang, said in a statement.

“Due to the still-active fires in the Los Angeles area, we feel it is necessary to extend our voting period and move the date of our nominations announcement to allow additional time for our members.,” the statement continued.

The academy luncheon, where the annual class picture of the year’s nominees are taken, will be canceled for the second time since it was implemented in 1982. (The first time was in 2021, because of the pandemic.) The Scientific and Technical Awards, scheduled for Feb. 18, will be rescheduled to a yet undetermined later date.

Additionally, read the statement, “As we want to be sensitive to the infrastructure and lodging needs of the region in these next few weeks, it is imperative that we make some changes to our schedule of events, which we believe will have the support of our industry.”

The Oscar telecast will still be held on March 2.

The academy added, that it looks forward “to honoring our frontline workers who have aided with the fires, recognizing those impacted, and encouraging people to join the academy in supporting the relief efforts.”

Separately, the Recording Academy announced Monday that the Grammys would be held as planned, on Feb. 2, and that the telecast, on CBS, would also honor first responders.