Photo credit: Sergio Solorzano

(WENY) -- Wildfires in the greater Los Angeles area have already taken at least five lives and are causing over 150,000 people to evacuate their homes. Two residents near an evacuation zone share what they are seeing and experiencing as the blazes spread.

At least three major blazes are causing these mass evacuations. The Palisades and Eaton fires have quickly spread to over 25,000 acres of land in Southern California due to dry conditions and wind gusts nearing 100 miles per hour, now threatening around 13,000 buildings.

Some residents are under orders and warnings and others are seeing effects while waiting to hear from officials.

WENY's Alecia Solorzano reached out to her brother, Sergio, and his wife Elizabeth who live in Los Angeles County. They are waiting to see what their next steps are as neighborhoods and buildings are being wiped out in the region by wildfires that began on Tuesday morning.

"Yeah, I got a phone call from the city," said Elizabeth Teemley, a Southern California resident. "I knew about the Eaton fire, but it was over in Pasadena...the message is pretty unclear; like it just says Chevy Chase Canyon is being evacuated, and it doesn't say like you are being evacuated or you are on standby or anything. It just said like Chevy Chase Canyon is being evacuated. I'm like 'Are we in that canyon? I don't know.' So we had to look it up and we're not being evacuated, but we're very near the standby zone."

At the time of this writing, the Eaton fire has spread across 10,600 acres and is zero percent contained thus far. Solorzano and Teemley say this is not the first time they've seen a California wildfire but this time is different, they say, as it is the first to threaten their home.

"It's bizarre too, because looking at our other window right now and like on that side, toward Pasadena, is like the black smoke and the fiery, like red sky," said Solorzano. "Then the other way, toward the other cities, so Burbank, toward the coast, it's a typical blue, cloudless California day and it's like literally looking at like a video game scene or something, where it's like the two sides like it's almost split down the middle by this, this line of smoke."

Firefighters are working aggressively to contain the blazes but some effects are making their way out of the fire's path too. Officials say winds causing spreads in fire zones have lessened but, the gusts haven't gone away entirely.

"Yeah, I don't think I really touched on air quality in all of this," said Solorzano."I went to the grocery store to get some supplies and that five-minute trip, literally leaving my door, going down to the garage and my car, to the grocery store, get out, go to the door, see it's closed, come back. like a total of five minutes and even then as I'm coming back to the garage to my front door, I can taste the smoke in the air as I'm breathing."

Some local news outlets on the West Coast are already reporting that the Palisades and other Southern California fires may come to be the most costly wildfires in United States history.

Live updates on the fires can be found on California's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection website.