AMN / WEB DESK
Officials in the US state of California say the death toll from the wildfires devastating Los Angeles has risen to 24.
The fires that began in the city’s Pacific Palisades area on Tuesday last week have damaged more than 12,000 buildings.
Relief efforts for affected people are scaling up. A donation center set up at a horseracing track has been inundated with clothes, bottled water and diapers. Volunteers came to sort out the items on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the US National Weather Service forecasts that winds will become stronger again in the Los Angeles area through Wednesday.
It warns of a “particularly dangerous situation” from early Tuesday morning to Wednesday noon.
Roaring flames continued to ravage the West Coast state of California as the top U.S. emergency official warned that increasing winds could pose new threats in the coming days.
“The winds are potentially getting stronger and dangerous,” Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “You never know which way they’re going.”
Local officials expressed fears that as the fires spread, they could endanger more highly populated areas and threaten some of the city’s key landmarks, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, which houses renowned art works, and the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the top public U.S. universities.
California Senator Adam Schiff told CNN that driving through the devastated communities “frankly reminded me of visiting war zones. There are whole neighborhoods that are gone. We haven’t seen this before.”
“The heartbreak is just overwhelming,” he said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the wildfires could be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, “in terms of just the costs associated with it, in terms of the scale and scope.”
A preliminary estimate by AccuWeather put the damage and economic losses so far between $135 billion and $150 billion. The damages are so high in part because much of the housing that has burned to the ground is among the costliest in the country.