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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwifers, Emily Kwong here.

So you may have been hearing about how the wildfires in Los Angeles are connected to the Santa Ana winds.

These winds blow every year.

But meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Los Angeles anticipated this week's windstorm would, quote, likely be the most destructive in over a decade.

The winds picked up Tuesday morning.

It is completely hazy, sparking several fires across L.A. County.

We've seen palm trees on fire.

Especially in canyon slopes where the wind dropped the humidity.

Basically, the moisture and rain gets squeezed out of

these systems right on those same slopes where the Santa Ana winds blow the hardest.

We talked to Alexander Gershenov about this. He's a research meteorologist at the Scripps

Institution of Oceanography, U.C. San Diego.

And he says that last winter was really wet and vegetation flourished,

but this year the L.A. area has received very little rain for months.

Specifically in that region where the wildfires are right now,

you have a lot of vegetation dry and ready to burn. And that's exactly where

you get the strongest sand and a wind. The largest and earliest of the fires was in the Pacific

Palisades neighborhood. Within hours, other fires began, including the Eaton, Hurst, Lydia, and

sunset fires. The battle against the deadly Eaton fire is now an around-the-clock fight.

The wind-driven blaze exploded to more than 10,000 acres by morning.

As of this taping Thursday afternoon, this patchwork of fires has claimed the lives of five people

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