Smoke from the Palisades Fire rising behind the downtown Los Angeles skyline as the city is covered in a haze from wildfires raging around Los Angeles, California. Photo: AFP / PATRICK T. FALLON
A New Zealand firefighter, who spent several weeks battling one of the deadliest wildfires ever seen in California, says crews in Los Angeles are right now facing an impossible task.
It comes as America's second biggest city continues to be ravaged by ongoing catastrophic wildfires that have killed at least 10 and obliterated whole neighbourhoods.
Fire and Emergency's Northland district manager Wipari Henwood was one of dozens of New Zealand firefighters deployed in 2018 to help tackle a string of destructive wildfires in Northern California.
The Carr Fire, between July and August 2018, scorched about 93,000 hectares across the state's Shasta and Trinity counties, destroying more than a thousand homes.
Eight people were killed, including three firefighters.
The New Zealand crew of 34 was also tasked with bolstering firefighting efforts against the Mendocino Complex wildfires that burned for three months, searing about 186,000 hectares combined.
One firefighter was a further casualty in what turned out to be the most destructive wildfire season ever in California's history.
More than six years later, the Los Angeles County is now reeling with the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire already ranking as the most devastating in Los Angeles' history.
Henwood said there was little firefighters could do when faced with an "embers storm".
Fire and Emergency's Northland district manager Wipari Henwood. Photo: RNZ / Lois Williams
"I've got no doubt that's what they're facing," Henwood said.
"All you can do is get out of the road because you cannot stop a wide front of embers
"You haven't got enough people, you haven't got enough hoses, you haven't got enough of everything.
"It doesn't stop just because it's out of the vegetation, it will just burn anything."
Fire and Emergency said although it had "established processes" in place for requesting assistance, it still has not received any appeals for help from their Los Angeles counterparts.
California's unique topography mixed with particular weather conditions meant wildfires could raze urban environments as rapidly as they could vegetation, Henwood said.
"A forest fire for example, the material starts to dry out, the moisture in the air reduces and all you need is an ignition source and vegetation will start to burn and it will burn rapidly and it will spread at the rate the wind's blowing.
"But the material that houses are built out of dry out as well.
"So when you get high density buildings, the likelihood is fire will spread through those just as fast as it will spread through a forest."
Henwood was based in Redding, in the Shasta County for six weeks during his 2018 deployment to Northern California.
Underlining the magnitude of the Carr fire, he was part of a camp of 4700 firefighting personnel.
"It's just on a scale you can't imagine," he said.
The region's extremly low humidity was another challenge he had to grapple with.
As a result, each firefighter was allocated a slab of bottled water daily during his six week assignment, Henwood said.
"The relative humidity is like 28 percent every day.
"I think the air temperature was 40 degrees and would only drop down to the low 30s at night and you were living there for six weeks."
"Staying hydrated in that sort of environment (was challenging)."
