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NORMAL, Ill. (WCIA) — The area damaged by one major fire in Southern California is over two times larger than the size of the Town of Normal.
The most recent estimate of the Palisades fire shows over 31.2 square miles completely destroyed. That is approximately 2.4 times the size of Normal. The department provided an outline of the fire’s damage area, scaled and placed over a map of Normal on their Facebook page.
The department made this map to put into perspective just how devastating these fires have been to California.
“The systems needed to fight a fire on this scale do not exist,” the department said in their Facebook post. “No municipal water supply is designed to handle the kind of strain that the firefighting efforts in California are putting on it.”
Normal Fire also said that when a fire hydrant is used, it quickly takes a large amount of water out of the system, affecting the remaining supply. This also decreases the amount of available water pressure everywhere else.
The 80+ mile per hour winds have created a firestorm that have burned thousands of buildings in Southern California. Even the plane and helicopter aerial tankers had problems operating and assisting in the fire efforts as a result of the strong winds.
On top of that, the Palisades fire is only one of many major fires currently burning on the West Coast. This specific fire alone is eight times bigger than the Great Chicago Fire that devastated the city in 1871.
“We are thinking of all of the firefighters, and everyone trying to mitigate this disaster,” the department said. “And our sympathies go out to the lives lost, and those that have lost everything.”