The eerie fire whirl spotted spinning as the Palisades Fire swept through Los Angeles neighborhoods Friday night was a “firenado,” a common yet chilling phenomenon.
These flaming twisters result from “a spin at the ground level as winds start to converge together,” Fox Weather meteorologist Cody Braud told The Post Saturday afternoon.
Commonly mistaken for a tornado, which forms from a cloud to the ground, a firenado forms from the ground up.
An eerie fire whirl was spotted spinning amid the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles on Friday night. foxweather
The vortices can be as small as under one foot wide to over 500 feet wide, the NWCG said. foxweatherFriday’s firenado did not cause any reported damage. It caught attention because it was visible as it towered over the perimeter of the fire.
This one in particular was very picturesque and was in an area where people could actually see it,” Baud said.
“Sometimes it’s hard to capture them because sometimes they spin well into the fire.”
In fact, there’s no telling if it was the only one spawned by the massive blaze, which had torched roughly 23,000 acres at that point and has since grown. There “very well could have been more” firenados in the area that weren’t spotted, he said.
Baud added that “this one looked relatively small,” based on photos.
“They can get extremely big, sometimes as wide as several hundreds of feet,” he said. “This one looked like tens of feet, if that.”
The heat from the Los Angeles fires make a conducive environment for firenados to form.
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The three fires still burning in LA as of Tuesday — Hurst, Palisades and Eaton — and the acreage they have burned. New York Post“These super intense fires are obviously generating a lot of heat, and the hotter it is, the quicker air rises, because heat naturally rises,” he said.
“You get a little bit of wind mixed in with that, you get these isolated instances of a firenado.”
When the air and gases rise, they also carry up smoke, debris, and even fire, as seen in the video, which was captured by KTLA in Los Angeles.
Firenados can pose even more challenges to firefighters “because if you get something spinning violently like that, they could cause additional damage,” Braud said.
The fires have killed at least 11 people, destroyed at least 10,000 homes and businesses, according to officials. APIn 2018, during the Carr Fire in Redding, CA, a firenado was reported with 143 mph winds, according to USA Today.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my career,” Dan Keeton, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service told the outlet at the time.
The historic Los Angeles wildfires have destroyed at least 10,000 homes and businesses, and incinerated more than 29,000 acres of land.
