WATCH: LA News Copters Catch Massive Fire Tornado Live Reaching ‘Hundreds of Feet In The Air!’
A Los Angeles news chopper captured a “fire tornado” on the crest of a ridge Friday night as the deadly Pacific Palisades blaze continued to climb north and east toward the San Fernando Valley.
KTLA pilot Gil Leyvas joined the station’s 11 p.m. Friday night broadcast from the skies above LA County as the area struggled with a fourth straight day of devastating blazes.
Anchor Micah Ohlman started the newscast and tossed it to Leyvas to update KTLA’s audience on the latest developments before the pilot explained he had just captured video of a “fire tornado.”
“Let’s go to some video that we shot just a short time ago of what is known as a fire tornado,” the pilot explained. “It is quite a sight to see. It happens quite a bit.”
Leyvas explained that with the conditions of the fires consuming much of LA County, one such as the Palisades blaze “creates its own weather.” He explained:
It will eventually suck up flames up into what is a vortex, a vortex of smoke, of flames, of fire. And it will just whirl around like that and bring up a finger of fire. And we saw a truck, one of the fire trucks go by a fire road in the foreground when it was happening. And it is I could tell you it is hundreds of feet in the air as that spins up like that. It looks like it’s relatively small. But when you see a vehicle pass by it, it is hundreds of feet tall when that happens. So it’s quite a scene to see that happen. And it went on for quite a while. In fact, I’m going to try to go back to the area that we captured it to see if there’s any more activity like that. But yeah, it lasted for a good ten minutes.
Leyvas captured another LA County fire tornado in August 2022 in a clip that went viral on social media at the time:
Watch above via KTLA.
