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Dr Edith de Guzman watched the flames of the Palisades fire rolling through the Santa Monica mountains out of the windows of her University of California, Los Angeles, classroom last week.
First, on Tuesday, flames surged toward the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the affluent community overlooking the ocean from the canyons in west LA. Then overnight, they tore through parts of Altadena, a diverse town in the city’s east that had served as a refuge for Black Angelenos.
By Wednesday evening, fires were burning in the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando valley. Twenty-five people would lose their lives. Thousands had lost their homes. LA, and much of the United States, was asking how wildfires could rage out of control in one of the richest cities in the world – a city with a long history of dealing with fire. What could have, what should have, been done? And who was to blame?
“There is an element of human hubris in this to think we can have full control,” de Guzman, an adaptation policy specialist who has closely studied impacts from the climate crisis on communities, said.
“Nobody would blame officials for not stopping a hurricane – when a hurricane comes, it comes.”
What hit LA last week was a perfect storm – a combination of extreme weather, a warming climate, human hubris and and safety measures that have been delayed or disregarded for decades.
Climate and conditions
Hurricane-force winds howled across Los Angeles’ hillsides on Tuesday, sweeping flames through dry and dead vegetation that had gone months without measurable rain. Separately, the conditions might not have been as notable. Together, they created a tragedy. Cascades of embers rained on to communities nestled in the canyons, creating firestorms that left full neighborhoods in ruin.
“We are not strangers to fire. We are not strangers to Santa Anas,” de Guzman said, referring to the strong gusts typical in southern California this time of year. “But we had a trifecta of factors that came together that supercharged the event.”
California has always been prone to extremes, quickly shifting between wet and dry, and its landscapes have evolved alongside boom-and-bust cycles of moisture. But the climate crisis has intensified these events, deepening droughts and periods of wetness, causing climate whiplash that can do more damage at both ends.
Last year, Los Angeles recorded roughly 12in of rain in a single 24-hour period, nearly the average amount the area gets in a full year. Fast forward to this winter and “it is the driest start to the rainy season on record”, de Guzman said.
The plants that grow and thrive during the wet years quickly dry and die when the moisture disappears, leaving overgrown parched landscapes that are primed to burn.
“These new extremes are increasingly converging with an age-old phenomenon,” de Guzman said: “those strong dry winds that happen this time of year.”
Gusts reaching up to 90mph thrashed trees and pulled at power lines in the mountains last week, as strong and sustained winds roared for days. The wind event created impossible conditions for firefighting crews, limiting aerial intervention and adding dangers for firefighters on the ground.
“When you have a high wind blowing a fire, the fire is not on the ground, it is in the air,” said Hugh Safford, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Davis, and the regional director for the California Fire Science Consortium. Embers can cast flames miles ahead of the fire front, “exploding the entire landscape at once as this whole thing rolls down the mountain”.
Embers help push fire footprints over larger swaths of land but they also pose particularly high risks to homes. They can land in decorative landscaping, waft into uncovered air vents or settle on eaves, quickly turning a wildfire into an urban conflagration that moves from house to house.
While the wind adds erratic elements to the fires, carrying these embers farther, the parched plants also play a role.
“Dead fuels get turned into embers really easily,” Safford said.
In the face of these extreme and overlapping elements, the fire storms simply became impossible to stop.
Firefighters faced an enormous task, both Safford and de Guzman said. And the homes they were defending were built in absolutely untenable places.
Housing and land use
For more than a century, new housing developments have popped up in the fire-prone hills around Los Angeles. The new homes have beautiful views, surrounding greenery and proximity to hiking trails. It’s part of the city’s distinctive charm that rugged hills and canyons break up the endless urban sprawl, with pockets of homes hidden in the majestic landscape.
But that majestic landscape “needs to burn, and has burned for millennia”, said Char Miller, an environmental historian at Pomona College.
Add power lines, cars and humans to this beautiful yet fire-prone landscape, and the same thing happens decade after decade: neighborhoods go up in flames.
Periodic massive blazes – like the 1961 wildfire in Bel Air that destroyed nearly 500 homes and left future Republican president Richard Nixon standing with a hose on the roof of his house – have prompted warnings that Los Angeles needs to tackle “the very real problem of how a house is constructed, and where”, as the city’s fire department put it in a 1962 film.
But the repeated conflagrations have done little to stop the constant push of development into high-risk areas.
Local politicians of both parties have continued to sign off on new homes in wildfire zones, mortgage companies have helped people buy them, and, until recently, insurance companies have insured them, Miller said.
“This is really about capital, not government,” he said. Insurance companies have continued to sign off on risky developments, “because, at least until recently, their calculation was they’d still make profits if the houses burned”.
City council members and county supervisors, meanwhile, have typically seen their job as growing the economy, he said: “Since world war two, housing starts have been a key metric to defining how well an economy is growing … The political calculation is short-term political gain.”
Since 1990, more than 1.4m new housing units in California have been built in wildlife-urban interface areas, which have a higher fire risk, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As of 2020, they found, there were more than 5m housing units in these areas across the state. In Los Angeles, a real estate data company identified nearly 250,000 homes “with a moderate or greater wildfire risk”, according to a 2024 report.
In 1988, California voters imposed strict regulations on how insurance companies in the state could raise their rates, a move that some argue created “artificially low premiums [that] encouraged more Californians to live in the state’s most dangerous areas”.
Attempts to block developments in very high-risk areas have met with resistance. Henry Stern, a state senator whose home burned in the 2018 Woolsey fire, has repeatedly tried to pass legislation that would put limits on building housing in the most fire-prone regions.
“Many, many advocates have opposed developments in those areas. They have not been successful,” said Stephanie Pincetl, the director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California, Los Angeles. The developers’ lobby is extremely strong, said Pincetl. But so is the pressure on local governments to greenlight projects amid a state-wide, decades-long housing shortage.
Notorious across the US, California’s housing crisis, which combines a booming economy with an ongoing lack of affordable housing, creates political pressure to build wherever possible. While some of the homes in high-risk wildfire areas are “the most expensive real estate in the world”, other parts of these areas offer working families a way to find a home on a budget, said Miriam Greenberg, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“Living in dense urban areas – which are safer in relation to fire and many other climate hazards – has become out of reach for many people, so they’re moving to areas that are ones they can afford,” she said.
Even in the wake of a wildfire, she said, some survivors who want to get out of a high-risk area cannot move to a safer area because the rents there are too high.
“There are folks who are remaining on the land of the house that burned in yurts, in trailers, with multigenerational families, who cannot afford to relocate their family,” she said.
Even though the risks of maintaining Los Angeles’ “firebelt suburbs”, as historian Mike Davis called them, are obvious, when buildings in high-risk neighborhoods burn, they are typically rebuilt – sometimes over and over again. Between 1930 and the early 1990s, Davis wrote, certain areas of Malibu had been “incinerated” as many as eight different times.
This cycle of predictable disaster is traumatic and expensive – both in terms of the cost of the emergency response, and the cost of rebuilding the homes, schools and businesses that are destroyed, Davis warned in his famous 1995 essay The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.
“‘Safety’ for the Malibu and Laguna coasts, as well as hundreds of other luxury enclaves and gated hilltop suburbs, is becoming one of the state’s major social expenditures, although – unlike welfare or immigration – it is almost never debated in terms of trade-offs or alternatives,” he wrote.
California politicians do not appear to be breaking with this old tradition: Los Angeles’ mayor, Karen Bass, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, have both pledged to help residents rebuild as fast as possible – including by suspending environmental laws and permitting requirements.
Preparation is key, if not always possible
With wildfire risk part of the region’s history and homes and neighborhoods here to stay, the question turns to whether Los Angeles could have been better prepared.
Should LA’s fire department have positioned more units in high risk areas ahead of the dangerous winds? Should the mayor have increased the fire departments’ budget in previous budget negotiations? Should the mayor have deferred her trip overseas knowing there was a high risk of fires in the days ahead?
Some experts said the political fights over relatively small shifts in the Los Angeles fire department budget missed the point: “You think 100 more fire fighters would have made a difference, and 50 more fire trucks? In that inferno? Let’s be serious,” Pincetl said.
Lost in the local political sparring are large and complicated debates about government agencies ill-prepared to confront the enormous challenges posed by the climate crisis.
The initial response to the Eaton fire in Altadena was in part handled by federal firefighters, a workforce so underpaid that staff have been leaving it in droves.
The urban water system in the Pacific Palisades was not equipped to handle the firefighting effort needed to battle such an intense blaze. Experts said that any urban water system in the US was likely to fail under the conditions – they are built for battling smaller fires.
“I’m not sure any level of preparedness from the water side would’ve stopped the fire,” said UCLA water researcher Dr Gregory Pierce in an email. The systems in place were designed to “save buildings not mountains”, he said. “They were just overwhelmed because they aren’t built for wildfires, and this was a very quick and ferocious start to a wildfire.”
Images of cars abandoned by the side of the road in the Pacific Palisades during a frantic evacuation highlighted some of the longstanding problems with evacuating people from some of LA’s most fire-prone neighborhoods.
But widening roads to make it easier for firetrucks to serve them would be hugely expensive and logistically difficult, Pincetl said. It would also require using large quantities of asphalt, which is made with oil – thus furthering the use of fossil fuels, which is driving the broader climate crisis. “A lot of the calls for those kinds of band-aid changes are not wrong, but I think that they’re insufficient, and not addressing the structural problems,” she said.
The intensity of wildfires in the west is increasing so quickly “that we have to change from year to year. We add personnel. We add equipment. We change equipment,” said David Torgerson, the executive chairman of Wildfire Defense Companies, which does wildfire loss prevention and response for major insurance companies. “The fires have grown so fast, nobody can keep pace just by adding people and engines.”
“The ultimate solution to this entire issue is not trying to continue to keep up with fire, but allowing an opportunity to live with fire,” Torgerson said. That comes down to “building code, backed by engineering”.
Prescribed burns and preparing the landscape
Similar questions are being asked on a regional level. Should California have done more to fireproof its landscapes?
Northern California forests are healthiest when cleared by frequent, low-intensity fires. Forest management techniques that tried to tamp out fire at all costs have instead contributed to more catastrophic blazes during which years of accumulated fuel burns at once. There are calls to return to indigenous practices of carefully and regularly bringing flames back into the forests that need them to thrive.
But southern California ridges are covered in a rich tapestry of shrubs, such as sage, scrub oak and manzanita. These chaparral landscapes burn less frequently, at a natural cycle of 15 to 20 years, and more intensely.
Safford said the landscape around Los Angeles simply burns, and should burn, differently than the forests to the north.
The climate crisis and human ignitions have made fires in the region become far more frequent, weakening the native plant species and replacing them by invasive grasses that ignite easily. It’s a vicious cycle that’s increasingly put communities at risk.
Hardened homes and fire defense
Already in its 1962 film, the Los Angeles fire department warned Angelenos that other fires were “sure to come” and that the city’s current structure was “a design for disaster”. LA, the department said, needed “a definite plan of fire defense”.
Over the decades, Los Angeles, and California as a whole, have made some progress in this kind of preparation. California’s building regulations are now considered some of the toughest in the country. In 1989, Los Angeles became the first city in the US to ban new wood-shingle roofs, despite “fierce opposition” from the wood-shingle industry, who called the ban “a great injustice”. In 2008, California implemented tougher building codes. In 2020, lawmakers passed new requirements for homeowners in high-risk areas to maintain “defensible space” around their residences.
The implementation of some of those laws has been slow and challenging. But there’s evidence that the new building guidelines could make a meaningful difference. Among the rubble, there were homes that were spared, many of them exhibiting the hallmarks of good practice: double-paned windows, covered vents and fire-resistant materials, including metal roofs and concrete siding.
But nearly 90% of Los Angeles county’s housing stock was built before 1990, pre-dating many requirements for wildfire hazard, according to Molly Mowery, the author of several reports about wildfire preparedness in Los Angeles.
“The older the home, the less likely it will be properly protected,” David Barrett, executive director of Mysafe: LA, a non-profit organization dedicated to building disaster readiness and resilience in communities, said.
Barrett said that the city’s first-ever community wildfire protection plan – a comprehensive project set to include extensive mapping, resources and guides and interactive tools – is nearly completed. But his teams have spent decades working in LA neighborhoods with officials and first responders to get residents ready.
There’s still plenty that residents can do to protect their homes, he said, from broader retrofits to making smaller landscape changes such as clearing brush, creating “defensible space” or empty spots between vegetation, and cutting plants back so they don’t climb or fall against buildings.
But there are challenges that come with preparing structures for a multitude of risks posed by the region, which along with wildfires include earthquakes, floods, extreme heat and mudslides. Sometimes, best construction practices clash. Seismically safer wood frames may more easily burn.
That’s why the best thing Barrett said people in danger should do is leave early, long before the fire reaches them. His teams advise communities to practice collecting the things they need – including for their pets – making sure their cars are filled with gas at all times, and that each resident knows as many ways out as possible with contingency plans for when conditions change.
“All those things have nothing to do with hardening your home,” he said. “They have to do with staying alive.”
His teams have spent decades working in LA neighborhoods with officials and first responders to get residents ready.
The Pacific Palisades, he said, had just signed on to be part of the program last November. Now, instead of helping prepare, Barrett’s team will help the community recover.
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Graphics by Aliya Uteuova , Will Craft, Nick Evershed and Andrew Witherspoon
