California wildfires: What is the scale of the fires?

LA County Sheriff said close to 200,000 people were now under evacuation orders as 27,000 acres of land is in flames across the state.

Transcript

00:00The intensity of these fires on the ground is terrifying to see and even

00:04more so when you realize just how huge the area consumed by these flames is.

00:08Now this is the situation in Los Angeles as its residents woke up on Thursday

00:13morning. Thousands of acres ablaze. Now some of these like Woodley are under

00:17control but that is only 30 acres whereas the Palisades fire, the big one,

00:20is still classified as an active firefight and that covers more than

00:2417,000 acres and the devastation is on an epic scale. Now this is Altadena, an

00:30area in North LA. This is what it looked like before but the firestorm has come

00:35and it has gutted entire neighborhoods. Have a look at that and this is a

00:39different view captured by satellites again but now we're looking at infrared.

00:42What this is measuring is how hot and intense these fires have been burning.

00:46If we go to the Pacific Coast Highway over to the west, now again this is what

00:51it looked like before the recent fires there on the beach and this is what it

00:55looks like afterwards. Buildings burn, the smoke still billowing or we can take

01:00the view from the street. We're going back to the Palisades, again this is what

01:04it looked like before the fires, the view from the street and this is what it

01:08looks like after the fires have ripped through. It is utter devastation. Now part

01:13of that is how quickly these fires have spread. What we have here is Sky News

01:17analysis of infrared imagery. So effectively we're looking at heat again

01:21you can see how these fires grew at the same time in two separate locations for

01:25those really big ones. Now LA is of course home to the stars but fire is

01:29sweeping through whole areas no matter how exclusive the neighborhood. So in

01:33Malibu the homes of Paris Hilton, Billy Crystal and James Woods have been

01:37destroyed along with hundreds of others and other celebrities live close to the

01:41zones. Here in the hills you've got George Lucas, Beyonce and Jay-Z and

01:44Jennifer Aniston. Or in the area of another fire in Sunset, the home of

01:49Winona Ryder, Charli XCX and Charlize Theron under threat as is the Hollywood

01:54sign itself as are many many more houses. Because there really is nowhere these

01:58fires do not touch. For comparison this is a map of London and this is what it

02:03looks like if we take the combined fire areas and superimpose those on top. You

02:07can see just how big it is. So in all we've got 27,000 acres that have burned

02:12so far in LA, around 118 square kilometers and the fires still continue

02:18to rage.