Thousands of people have fled their homes as a brush fire in the Pacific Palisades has grown to more than 17,000 acres Wednesday.

The blaze began shortly after the start of a Santa Ana windstorm that the National Weather service warned could be the strongest to hit Southern California in more than a decade.

Thousands of firefighters were battling at least four separate blazes on Wednesday, from the Pacific Coast inland to Pasadena. One of the fires was the most destructive in the modern history of the city of Los Angeles and another led to five deaths.