The Palisades fire has decimated Malibu, destroying around a third of the coastal city’s eastern flank and much of a picturesque stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, officials said late Saturday.
“What you see is extraordinary,” Jacqui Irwin, a member of the California State Assembly representing the Malibu district, told a community meeting. “It is nothing like I have ever seen before.” Entire segments of the city remained without power, water, gas or communications, she said.
The Palisades blaze, the largest of the wildfires ravaging Southern California, has ripped through dense residential areas around Malibu since Tuesday. By Sunday morning, it had burned through more than 23,600 acres and was only 11 percent contained, according to Cal Fire.
“It has hit us hard,” said the mayor, Doug Stewart. “Malibu has lost approximately one-third of its eastern edge of the city.”
Entire neighborhoods were gone, Mr. Stewart said. Among them are Big Rock, Carbon Mesa and a stretch of homes along Pacific Coast Highway — which forms Malibu’s southern edge — running about three miles from Topanga Beach to the popular Duke’s Malibu restaurant.
“They’re gone,” Mr. Stewart said. “For the most part, they’re gone.”
The fire so swiftly descended on Malibu, Mr. Stewart said, that its communications were almost entirely cut off, seriously hampering officials’ abilities to mobilize evacuations.
“We were a city that, quite often during the start of the fire, had no utility communications to the outside world. We had almost no way to talk to our residents to warn them of the fire,” he said.
At least three city residents who stayed behind despite evacuation orders had died in the fire, he said. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office has so far attributed five deaths to the Palisades fire.
Large parts of Malibu remained without power, Mr. Stewart said, and residents should expect electricity cutoffs this week as utility companies try to curb the blaze’s spread. Winds were expected to pick up again on Sunday and Monday, leading to a new round of severe fire risk in the area.
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