Crypto News: How LA residents are tracking fires

Firefighters are making some progress on controlling the deadly blazes that have scorched Los Angeles, as the toll of destruction rises with entire neighborhoods reduced to ash. You can read the latest updates and all of our coverage on the fires on Bloomberg.com.

Meanwhile, millions of Los Angeles County residents were rattled on Thursday by a false evacuation alert sent to their phones. The mistake comes as unfounded conspiracy theories and spam have spread on social media. Today's newsletter looks at a free phone app that has become a popular source of reliable information for tracking wildfires.

Also, read why more people are living in risky wildfire areas, and the challenges piling up for firefighters tackling blazes. In some areas of the city, hydrants have run dry. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe.

Los Angeles residents are depending on this app

By Laura Bliss

Fraser Hammersly was finishing a workout at a 24-Hour Fitness on Sunset Boulevard on Wednesday evening when her phone pinged. Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app she'd downloaded hours earlier, alerted her that a blaze had broken out in the hills about a mile from the gym.

She and her husband raced to their apartment in a densely populated section of Hollywood while evacuation orders were issued nearby. As a bright orange plume overtook the nearby hills, Hammersly stayed put, monitoring Watch Duty for live updates on the fire's size and location, as well as the evacuation perimeter.

The minute-to-minute relay made her feel safer deciding to remain at home. By Thursday morning, emergency responders had stopped the Sunset Fire's forward progress and evacuation orders were lifted, with all the details catalogued by the app.

Embers shoot into the sky from a burning house during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California. Photographer: Michael Nigro/Bloomberg

"It's actually quite hard to find up-to-date, accurate information on social media these days," Hammersly says. "Having something that is specific to this disaster was very helpful, especially to have it in one centralized place."

As multiple catastrophic fires burn across the Los Angeles area, throngs of residents and far-flung loved ones have taken to Watch Duty for both critical information and comfort. The nonprofit app shot to the top of Apple's free app store by Thursday, amassing some 1.4 million downloads over the past 48 hours, according to chief executive officer and co-founder John Mills.

"The servers are taking a beating and the engineers are working around the clock," Mills says. "We're just keeping it up and haven't gone down yet, knock on wood."

Watch Duty's servers aren't likely to get a rest anytime soon. The Palisades fire is barely contained and the Eaton fire is still out of control. And with the powerful Santa Ana winds set to pick up again in the coming days, Southern California remains on high alert.

Read the full story on Bloomberg.com. For weather insights sent straight to your inbox, subscribe to the Weather Watch newsletter.

A big hit

$150 billion

This is the potential cost of the Los Angeles fires, according to the latest estimates for economic loss from AccuWeather Inc., which currently sees a range between $135 billion to $150 billion.

Troubling forecast

"The good news is that the winds have been slow to develop. The bad news is that they will develop."

National Weather Service

Los Angeles is hoping the Santa Ana winds that have fanned the flames will ease to enable firefighters to tackle the blazes. The National Weather Service said in a notice late Thursday local time that wind gusts are set continue across the region on Friday, though likely weakening by late morning or early afternoon.

More on the Los Angeles fires

Cat bond funds say they'll dodge losses. The wildfires sweeping through Los Angeles are unlikely to trigger significant losses for catastrophe bonds designed to capture such risks. Roughly 12% of the $50 billion cat-bond market is currently exposed to wildfire risk, according to Florian Steiger, chief executive officer of Icosa Investments AG, a Swiss-based investment firm. Even in an "extreme scenario," many of these bonds are likely to be minimally or not affected at all by the Los Angeles fires, he said.

Population growth on LA's fringe has increased fire danger. A growing number of people around the US live in areas known as wildland-urban interface, or WUI, which are zones where open lands meet human development. Pacific Palisades is a prime example of what happens when a fire ignites in a WUI. What began as a brush fire on Tuesday became a major blaze destroying at least 1,000 structures in and around the Los Angeles neighborhood nestled between Malibu and Santa Monica.

LA's water systems aren't designed to handle fires like this. Hydrants are part of municipal water systems and many of those in California are gravity-fed. That means water is pumped uphill to a tank or reservoir, then fed down to homes and hydrants. The setup provides enough water pressure to meet daily needs like showers and watering gardens or fighting individual structure fires. But the fires that have scorched Southern California are different, burning through open space and urban areas. Read the full story on Bloomberg.com.

A fire hydrant burns during the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, on Jan. 8. Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

For an overview of what has made the Los Angeles fires so devastating, read Bloomberg's QuickTake explainer.

More from Green

Earth's warming exceeded 1.5C on an annual basis for the first time in 2024, according to two major climate science agencies. It's the most potent evidence yet that countries are failing to meet a Paris Agreement goal of limiting global heating to that level as a decades-long average.

Scientists sounded the alarm long before last year ended that 2024 would become the hottest year on record and almost certainly the first to surpass the 1.5C limit. Now both of those milestones have been confirmed in official statistical releases from two independent scientific agencies.

The EU's Copernicus Climate Service measured the 2024 global average temperature to be 1.6C above the pre-industrial average, and the UK Met Office to be 1.53C above it. (Three other groups are expected to report Friday.)

The hottest day ever recorded happened on July 21, 2024 — a record that held until July 22. The planetary heatspike was made 2.5 times more likely by greenhouse gases, according to researchers.

Typhoon Gaemi in Asia and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US, similarly juiced by climate change, killed hundreds of people and caused colossal damage. There was flooding across Africa's Sahel and in southeastern Spain; drought in southern Italy and the Amazon River basin; wildfires in central Chile; and landslides in northern India. Read more here.

Typhoon Gaemi approaches China's Fujian Province in July. Photographer: Jiang Kehong/Xinhua/Getty Images

Negative power prices are a climate risk. Europe is on track to miss its 2030 targets for clean energy as increasingly frequent bouts of negative prices discourage investors from backing new projects, according to analytics firm Aurora Energy.

Wall Street continues its exodus from a major climate group. BlackRock Inc. is parting ways with one of the world's biggest climate-investor groups after being targeted by Republican politicians for its efforts on global warming.

Scientists seek to control climate-driven disease spread. A team in Singapore believe they've found a way to significantly reduce mosquito populations, which is one way to curb the spread of certain diseases. Dengue is chief among the group of mosquito-borne sicknesses like malaria, chikungunya and Zika that are soaring as places once too cold or dry to keep them alive become warmer and wetter.

Tune in

In December, Europe's Copernicus weather service announced that it was "virtually certain" that 2024 would be the hottest year ever. What's more, the global average temperature last year appears to have surpassed 1.5C for the first time, blowing past a threshold that's taken on enormous significance in the fight against climate change. Does that mean governments, corporations, and activists recalibrate their climate goals? Akshat Rathi speaks with reporters Eric Roston and Zahra Hirji about what this new reality means. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Worth your time

Carbon offsets — a controversial tool companies use to try and make up for emissions — could be worth as much as $1 trillion by 2050, according to Bloomberg NEF. But this lucrative sector has problems. Already plagued by dubious claims known as greenwashing, it faces new challenges like those at Indonesia's Rimba Raya, one of the largest carbon offset projects in the world. Watch the latest video from Bloomberg Originals on the fight for a share of this $1 trillion market in Borneo's jungle.