As the California wildfires continue to blaze out of control due to strong winds, nearby residents are evacuating; however, even those who have evacuated and remained in California continue to shudder at the ongoing developments.

This was the insight detailed to this newsroom by Maltese UCLA student, Glen William Spiteri, this week while recounting his personal experience dealing with the fatal infernos.

"Right now, our only hope is that this ends," Spiteri said.

Spiteri, 26, is a PhD student in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His campus is located in the Westwood commercial neighbourhood, and is right on the periphery of the most devastating wildfire in the state - the Palisades Fire. It is only mainly separated by the fire's eastern border via a main interstate freeway (I-405).

The Palisades Fire has presently burned around 25,000 acres of land and has continued to sustain its sheer size. This equates to around a third of the size of the entire Maltese islands. For visualisation's sake, one football pitch covers 1.6 acres, making the approximate size of the main Fire about the size of over 15,500 pitches.

The Maltese youth narrated that everyone within the Westwood area is on red alert and that Westwood was partly under red flag warning, which indicates that there is a heightened threat of wildfires in general. Nearby neighbourhoods are reportedly under either evacuation orders or evacuation warnings.

"On one side you literally have the campus, and on the other side you have the fire," he described, "last week on campus was really stressful."

Due to the Fire's close proximity, Spiteri is one of many UCLA students who have evacuated the Bruins' campus, effectively turning the 680-acre campus into "a complete ghost town." Prior to its mass desertion, students and lecturers alike were able to see the fires and its giant smoke clouds from their buildings.

He added that even before he himself evacuated to safety, "the numbers were diminishing by the minute," and that many students were either driving to family or friends or seeking the first flight out of the U.S. state.

While Los Angeles is a traffic-dense county, traffic hasn't deterred people's ability to evacuate, Spiteri shared, since "there hasn't been a massive rush of people." This has allowed some people to escape to safer areas by bus, albeit through a nine-to-twelve-hour bus ride.

As a result, his first semester of 2025 has shifted online for the foreseeable future.

Spiteri drove out of the UCLA area this past weekend with his fiancée after the Fire's closeness began to give them respiratory issues through the worsened air quality that came with it.

"Thank God we left. While we were there, I wasn't well - I was struggling to breathe and we couldn't even open our windows; the situation was horrible," Spiteri told this newsroom, "My fiancée was having headaches because of the powerful smells."

According to air quality indexes, good air quality is marked as less than 50, though in Spiteri's opinion, good levels are marked 30 and below. Prior to his and his fiancée's evacuation, they were going outside wearing an N95 face mask to withstand the polluted air and safeguard their personal health.

The nearby Palisades Fire exposed UCLA residents, i.e., Bruins, like Spiteri to air quality levels ranging from 130 to 150. According to the young Maltese man, the fires have also hindered rail services.

"As far as we know, we weren't under imminent threat of fire itself, but the air quality was horrible," he recounted.

For the time being, they are staying at an apartment approximately three hours away from Los Angeles, within a rural part of central California. However, since arriving, the Palisades Fire has continued to spread, and is just four miles away from Spiteri's temporary residence, as the crow flies.

He is now hoping for the fires to die out or, at the very least, for the situation to calm down.

Spiteri narrated that some of his own professors were residents in the Palisades area and have unfortunately lost their houses and all of their belongings through the out-of-control infernos. He described that to make matters worse, "there is no financial compensation whatsoever" for such people "unless you're lucky enough to be in a very well-paid job, so people are resorting to their home insurances which also don't cover much."

As an example, the PhD student said that one of his unlucky professors lost their home, which was valued at $2.5 million, yet she their insurance only covered some $700,000 in losses.

Spiteri speculated that there is a mixed bag of reasons and factors behind the cause of these January wildfires. He also observed that his large community has been experiencing a long drought and has not had sustained rainfall in approximately nine months.

These intense fires have even altered the view of the night sky, Spiteri said.

Amongst the things he's witnessed this past week were a red sky, the abundant scent of charred wood, the sight of rising clouds of smoke, the remains of ashes on his car's windscreen, and several burnt, dry, black palm trees. While he was driving to safety, away from his university campus, Spiteri gazed upon smoke-covered hills, hilltops, and pockets of burning flora in the valleys between them along the side of the main freeway.

He has not observed the destroyed areas within the urban city.

"The night sky was almost partly red at 7pm," he noted, "We could see a huge red ball with smoke rising into the sky. It's something I thought I would never have to witness or experience."

He also stated that, in his view, it is "very strange" to see a region that is responsible for a huge chunk of California's GDP to be struggling to this extent.

Spiteri wished to tell Maltese readers that despite his experience so far, people should not worry for him at all - partly because of the American region's massive size and wealth. He detailed that metropolitan Los Angeles is roughly triple the size of Sicily.

"The resources that are available in L.A. are just completely unimaginable," Spiteri said, "UCLA's budget is probably equivalent to the Maltese government's budget."

"I don't want to downplay the situation - it's horrific, it's terrifying, and it's sometimes worrisome that it's taking so long - but on the other end, this is a place that is ready to bounce back. I am more than confident that the city and the region will bounce back in no time." Spiteri said.

On this point, the Maltese LSE alumni recalled that just six years ago, in 2018, the Los Angeles County withstood the Woolsey Fire, which began just further north to Palisades and was over triple the size of the current Palisades Fire. The Woolsey Fire burned down nearly 100,000 acres of land.

Spiteri also pointed out that Los Angeles is set to host two of the largest sporting events in the world over the next three years: the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.

As of writing, the death toll from these wildfires has risen to 25 people.