[speeder]

It's awful. I do not live in the affected area but I have close friends who have almost certainly lost their homes. The winds are almost unbelievable right now...there are huge trees down on my block and the freeway was covered in leaves and trash blowing around. About the strongest winds I've ever seen in 40+ years of living here.

The Palisades are an incredibly beautiful area with mountains and hills everywhere, homes are on bluffs over the ocean. I first heard of the area back in the '70s, before I moved to California, because Reagan lived there. I just thought that the name sounded like a gorgeous place and it is. Santa Monica canyon and Rustic Canyon in between the Palisades and SM are some of the nicest RE in the USA and it's completely torched. It's where I lived back in the '80s.

To pour salt on it, a new fire has just started in Altadena, (near Pasadena in the NE part of LA), in a heavily wooded mountain area. With the wind as it is, any fire has all of the elements to be quickly out of control. The air quality is seriously dangerous.