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At least five people have died after multiple large, fast-moving wildfires, began burning across Los Angeles County, California, since Tuesday, with first responders saying the fires are 0% contained and are burning at a rate of five football fields per minute.The Hurst Fire, Eaton Fire, Woodley Fire and Pacific Palisades Fire, began burning much of the Los Angeles area on Tuesday afternoon.On Wednesday, another wildfire, the Lidia Fire, broke out.Additionally, the Pacific Palisades Fire, which has grown to 16,000 acres between Malibu and Santa Monica, is now the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles city history; having destroyed over 1,000 structures so far.Thousands of people across Los Angeles County have evacuated.Some people drove just feet from the flames as they left their neighborhoods, while other left their cars behind all together.The Eaton Fire, burning in Altadena, has claimed two lives and burned over 10,000 acres.Aircrafts in the area have just been cleared to return to the sky on Wednesday, after they were grounded earlier because of high winds.First responders are being given priority in the airspace and are dumping water on the wildfires. On the ground, hundreds of firefighters are trying to attack the flames.The Los Angeles County fire chief said they just don’t have enough people to handle the fires. Firefighters briefed President Joe Biden on the situation earlier in the day on Wednesday.They explained how the wind is making the situation worse.People have had no time to escape and in some cases they abandoned their cars.NewsCenter 5 spoke with some Massachusetts natives who are currently in the Los Angeles area and asked them to describe what they have been witnessing from the fires.Many have described the scenes in California as apocalyptic.Some said they can smell the smoke and see ash in the air, saying it is unlike anything they have experienced before.Newton native Michael Duggan lives on the border of the suggested evacuation zone near the Pacific Palisades fire and voluntarily evacuated his home Tuesday night, as the wildfires continue to grow larger and claim lives. “It just was unclear of how much they might be escalating,” Duggan said. “Especially with how windy it was.”The threat seemed even greater while Duggan was at work, as a resident doctor at UCLA Hospital.”Certainly, kind of getting bigger and bigger along the mountain ridge here,” Duggan said. “The emergency department here has had an uptick in patients coming in and are diverting patients to different hospitals.”Anthony Amorello, a Worcester native who now lives in Hollywood for almost nine years, was about ten miles from the flames of the Palisades fire at one point.He said he could see the giant plume of smoke from his home, describing how quickly the fire’s direction has been changing.”People that woke up yesterday and thought they were fine, an hour, two hours, three hours later, they have to be evacuated and are watching their dream homes and their lives burn to the ground,” Amorello said. “It’s scary, it looks like the apocalypse outside. You go outside right now and it feels like you are in the middle of a bonfire.”Chelsea Valente from Tewksbury and her colleague, flew into Los Angeles for work, capturing video from the window of their plane over the wildfire burning below, as well as video of the fire from out their hotel room window.”You could see ash in the air, it almost looked like snow,” Valente said. “You could smell it in our hotel rooms. It was definitely eerie. It had that orange glow. You wake up in the morning thinking it’s going to be a bright, sunny day in Los Angeles, you know 70 degrees. But it was just dark. You could see the smoke just roiling through.”WCVB Chronicle field producer Jon Rineman is waiting it out at LAX Airport. He is hoping to catch the next flight back to Boston after his week-long program with Emerson College was cancelled because of the fire.”The sky was totally gray, you could kind of see the sun rise in one direction,” Rineman said. “The best way I could describe it is, it kind of looked like a scene out of Mad Max movie.”Meanwhile, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are studying how wildfire flames behave.”In this particular scenario, I’m using the tunnel to study how the fire vents are generated,” researchers said.Inside the fire protection engineering lab, they’re studying fire and embers in real time. Research that could help cities and communities prepare.”Wildfires are more frequent, they’re more severe and they’re more expensive,” researchers said. “Research on how to prevent them, how to deal with them when they’re happening and how to make the built infrastructure more resilient, all that is so necessary to improve people’s lives.”The tunnels in the fire protection engineering lab simulate wind conditions, fire and the materials, like wood and grass, that burn during a wildfire.In the large tunnel, researchers are studying embers, how they generate and where they land, hoping to develop data that could save lives.”Are we able to predict how things are going to spread, so people know when they have to evacuate,” researchers said.The fire protection engineering lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute is the largest academic research facility in the country studying wildfires.It had operated for 45 years and researchers describe their work as “purpose-driven.”Those who wish to support wildfire victims through WCVB’s ReliefFund 5 program with Red Cross, can donate at wcvb.com/wildfires or wcvb.com/relieffund5.