Image via effspot/YouTube
While we’re sure you’ve heard about the wildfires in Southern California, one car YouTuber gives a personal view of the Palisades and Eaton Fires in two impactful videos. From his footage you get a sense of the scope of the damage, the confusion of the situation, and just how devastating the blazes have been to these communities.
Semi-truck jackknives on an icy road right in the middle of traffic.
Because he’s a car YouTuber, effspot of course focused at least some on the vehicles in the chaos. For example, he stopped to check out a completely burned out Mazda Miata and he exclaimed in agony that someone left a beautiful older Mercedes E-Class sitting in their driveway as the fire neared ever closer.
Some desperate car owners left some of their rides under covers, we guess hoping those would stop them from catching fire? One guy even left his Dodge Viper under a cover for a Corvette Z06, so some choices were made in the moment.
He spotted plenty of other notable cars, including some classics, just burned out, leaving them almost useless even for scrap. However, a Volkswagen Jetta sat unburned outside a home that was destroyed. Many other odd things like that are scattered throughout the videos.
By far the most chaotic of the two videos is the Pacific Palisades one. Effspot and his friends drove into the belly of the beast as people were fleeing the rapidly moving wildfire, getting caught in a traffic jams similar to ones where people got out and ran, abandoning their cars. Thankfully that didn’t happen to him, but there are some tense moments in the footage.
As he drove through to survey the Eaton Fire damage in the second video, the evidence was everywhere. Not only was a thick plume of smoke hanging in the air, houses and commercial buildings were gutted, some of them leveled, the remnants still smoking and in some cases continuing to burn.
“Sounds pretty cliché, but it looks like a warzone,” he remarked.
Power lines were down in the roads, another hazard we keep hearing about in these fires, and down tree limbs as well as trees themselves were everywhere, even before the fire zone. Some of the destruction was purely from the high winds, adding to the chaos.
Ultimately, we hate seeing this kind of destruction and the suffering that accompanies it. People have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases their lives.
Images via effspot/YouTube
