Tonight we're turning again to the greater Los Angeles area where firefighters are now fighting five wildfires at once.

Collectively, those fires have burned more than 25,000 acres in just the past 36 hours, completely destroying at least 1,000 buildings.

Just before we got on air tonight,ials announced two schools have been completely destroyed by

these fires. Officials also announced that all schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District,

which is the second biggest school district in the United States, that they will be closed

tomorrow because of the crisis playing out in Los Angeles. These fires are all happening in

relatively dense urban areas,

and they have forced more than 100,000 residents to evacuate their homes, to cut off power

for hundreds of thousands of customers, and they have left at least five people dead.

And to understand how these fires got so bad, experts are pointing to wind and water.

In cold months, California faces a unique topographical threat. That's the Santa Ana winds.

High pressure pockets of air from dry desert regions in the east, race down the mountains toward lower pressure pockets of air

by the coast, the west. That air gets faster and warmer as it literally races downhill,

which is how the wind has created gusts of up to 100 miles per hour around these fires.

Now, these Santa Ana winds are abnormally strong, the strongest

in more than a decade, but experts do not think that they alone would have caused fires this

destructive. Those hurricane force winds were made extra dangerous by the rain and the lack

thereof in Southern California over the past few years.

2022 and 2023 were some of the wettest rainy seasons ever recorded in Southern California.

But in the past eight months, a lot of the region has seen less than a quarter inch of rain.

And that comes after a summer of record-breaking heat. Now, all of that

means that the vegetation of Southern California, the trees and the bushes and the grass,

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