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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A year after twin infernos tore across opposite ends of Los Angeles County, the scars are still visible. Thousands of homes were reduced to rubble, with rebuilding slow, and the death toll showed how a wildfire under extreme weather conditions can turn catastrophic.

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The Palisades and Eaton fires exploded in size within hours of each other on Jan. 7, 2025. These figures show how fast the disaster unfolded and the toll it left behind:

90 miles per hour

The speed of predicted wind gusts in mountain areas, equivalent to 145 kilometers per hour. Red Flag warnings were issued Jan. 6 for severe wildfire danger as Southern California was buffeted by the region’s notorious Santa Ana winds. Grass and brush were tinder dry after months with little or no rain. The National Weather Service warned it could be a life-threatening wind event. Firefighting assets were pre-positioned in areas deemed to be at especially high risk for fires.

4 hours FILE – A lone sunbather sits and watches a large plume of smoke from a wildfire rise over the Pacific Palisades, in Santa Monica, Calif., Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)

How long it took for a small wildfire to explode in size. At 10:30 a.m. reports began coming in about a small blaze on a ridge in LA’s upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood, in the same area where crews had responded to a fire on New Year’s Day. Before long, a large plume of dark smoke was visible from miles away. Shortly after 11 a.m. on Jan. 7, the revived fire was reported to be about 10 acres (4 hectares), located near Palisades Drive on the coastal neighborhood’s western edge.

Over the next two hours, roads were jammed with motorists trying to flee as flames roared down streets and decimated homes. Officials issued an evacuation order for the Palisades while warning residents of surrounding areas that they should also get ready to leave. Within hours, the blaze had rapidly grown.

FILE – A woman cries as the Palisades Fire advances in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent, File)

As firefighting resources were focused on the Palisades, another blaze was sparked about 30 miles to the east in Altadena, on the other end of Los Angeles County. The Eaton Fire started at 6:17 p.m. and all firefighting aircraft in the county were soon grounded because of high winds. By 8 p.m. it had doubled in size.

59 square miles FILE – The Palisades Fire burns a Christmas tree inside a residence in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope, File)

The amount of land charred by the two infernos, equivalent to 155 square kilometers. That’s roughly the size of the entire city of San Francisco.

31 lives

The number of people who died — 19 in the Eaton Fire and 12 in the Palisades Fire.

31 days

How long the Palisades Fire burned before it was extinguished. Investigators determined the 37-square-mile blaze had actually grown out of the earlier fire that started on Jan. 1.

25 days FILE – Melissa Young, center right, gets a hug from a well-wisher at her fire-ravaged home in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire, Jan. 9, 2025, in Altadena, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer, File)

The number of days it took for the Eaton Fire to be extinguished. It burned 22 square miles.

$33.9 billion

The amount of federal disaster aid requested by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Trump administration and Congress have yet to approve it.

45 years in prison

The maximum sentence faced by a 29-year-old man charged with sparking the Palisades Fire. He has pleaded not guilty. The cause of the Eaton Fire remains under investigation.

16,246 structures FILE – A bus sits among burned out homes, Jan. 9, 2025, in Malibu, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)

The number of structures destroyed in both blazes, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. In Altadena, 9,413 homes, businesses and other buildings were razed. In Pacific Palisades and neighboring areas including Malibu, 6,833 buildings, mostly homes, were gone.

10 houses

The number of homes rebuilt so far, according to city and county data. Most are in the Altadena area, with one in Pasadena and two in Pacific Palisades. None are finished in Malibu. Hundreds more are under construction across the region.

$970 million

The total charitable commitments to LA fire relief is between at least $860 million to $970 million, according to a study by the Milken Institute. Most was raised in the first month after the fires, and individual donations through GoFundMe brought in $265 million.

This story has been updated to correct the date the two fires erupted to Jan. 7, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2024.

WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, who betrayed Western intelligence assets to the Soviet Union and Russia in one of the most damaging intelligence breaches in U.S. history, has died in a Maryland prison. He was 84.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Ames died Monday.

Ames admitted being paid $2.5 million by Moscow for U.S. secrets from 1985 until his arrest in 1994. He admitted disclosing the identities of 10 Russian officials and one East European who were spying for the United States or Great Britain. His betrayals are blamed for the executions of Western agents working behind the Iron Curtain and were a major setback to the CIA.

He pleaded guilty without a trial to espionage and tax evasion and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors said he deprived the United States of valuable intelligence material for years.

He professed “profound shame and guilt” for “this betrayal of trust, done for the basest motives,” money to pay debts. But he downplayed the damage he caused, telling the court he did not believe he had “noticeably damaged” the United States or “noticeably aided” Moscow.

“These spy wars are a sideshow which have had no real impact on our significant security interests over the years,” he told the court in a matter-of-fact tone.

In a jailhouse interview with The Washington Post the day before he was sentenced, Ames said he was motivated to spy by “financial troubles, immediate and continuing.”

By MICHAEL CASEY

BOSTON (AP) — Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison for orchestrating the murder of her husband by her teenage student in 1990, is seeking to overturn her conviction over what her lawyers claim were several constitutional violations.

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The petition for habeas corpus relief was filed Monday in New York, where she is being held at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and, in New Hampshire, where the murder happened.

“Ms. Smart’s trial unfolded in an environment that no court had previously confronted — wall-to-wall media coverage that blurred the line between allegation and evidence,” Jason Ott, who is part of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition challenges whether a fair adversarial process took place.”

The move comes about seven months after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte rejected a request for a sentence reduction hearing. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and decided it was not deserving of a hearing.

A spokesman for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said it would have no comment about the petition.

A spokeman for New Hampshire’s attorney general said it would not comment on pending litigation “other than to note that the State maintains Ms. Smart received a fair trial and that her convictions were lawfully obtained and upheld on appeal.”

In their petition, lawyers for the 57-year-old Smart argue that prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations of Ms. Smart that included words that were not audible on the recordings. Among the words they claim weren’t audible but in the transcript were the word killed in the sentence “you had your husband killed,” the word busted in the sentence “I’m gonna be busted” and the word murder in the sentence “this would have been the perfect murder.”

“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: when people are handed a script, they inevitably hear the words they are shown,” Smart’s attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement. “Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently — they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict.”

Lawyers also argued the conviction should be overturned because the verdict was tainted by the media attention and due to faulty instructions to the jury. They argued jurors were told they must find that Smart acted with premeditation, not told they must consider only evidence presented at trial.

They also argued the trial court gave her a mandatory life sentence without parole for being an accomplice to first-degree murder, despite New Hampshire not mandating that sentence for the charge.

Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry. The shooter was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Although Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.

It took until 2024 for Smart to take full responsibility for her husband’s death. In a video released in June, she said she spent years deflecting blame “almost as if it was a coping mechanism.”

Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of America’s first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between a school employee and a student. The student, William Flynn, testified that Smart told him she needed her husband killed because she feared she would lose everything if they divorced and that she threatened to break up with him if he didn’t kill her husband. Flynn and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors and all have since been released.

Flynn and 17-year-old Patrick Randall entered the Smarts’ Derry condominium and forced Gregory Smart to his knees in the foyer. As Randall held a knife to the man’s throat, Flynn fired a hollow-point bullet into his head. Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to 28 years to life. They were granted parole in 2015. Two other teenagers served prison sentences and have been released.

The case inspired Joyce Maynard’s 1992 book “To Die For” and the 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.