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The Summary
- The Los Angeles-area fires are a worst-case scenario caused by powerful winds that struck after months without rain.
- Fire experts, past reports and risk assessments had all anticipated a wildfire catastrophe to some degree.
- The affected region’s geography and weather, paired with climate change and suburban sprawl in fire-prone areas, created a vulnerable situation.
For the Los Angeles area, the recent string of wildfires represents a worst-case scenario — unusually powerful and prolonged Santa Ana winds struck after months without significant rain. But the steep consequences of the blazes are not a surprise, according to an NBC News review of after-action reports following previous fires, wildfire risk maps, public meetings about wildfire risk and interviews with fire experts.
“Entirely foreseeable,” said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College.
The fires have forced nearly 180,000 people to evacuate, cut power to nearly half a million customers and burned thousands of homes.
“We have been building homes deep into the fire zones. We know they’re fire zones, we know they’re dangerous, and yet City Hall and county government has constantly greenlit development in places of greater and greater risks,” Miller said. “All of the factors you don’t want to see combined combined.”
The risk of wildfire to homes in Los Angeles County is higher than in 99% of counties in the United States, according to a federal analysis. Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills and Altadena, three areas where blazes are burning, have “very high fire hazard severity,” according to mapping from the the Los Angeles Fire Department and the state.
“It was not if, it was when” said Joe Scott, the chief fire scientist at Pyrologix, a wildfire risk consultancy that worked on the federal analysis. “But this is at the high end of what could have happened.”
After the Woolsey Fire in November 2018, an after-action review described problems that resemble those firefighters face today.
That blaze raced across the Santa Monica Mountains toward homes on the Malibu coast, casting embers up to a mile from its front line and forcing 250,000 people to evacuate. More than 1,000 homes in Ventura and Los Angeles counties were destroyed.
The report described it as a “perfect storm.”
The fire’s speed and intensity “overwhelmed the resources on the scene,” it said, noting that dead-end canyon roads made for challenging evacuations and firefighting access. Given the weather and the fire department’s limitations, the review said, the initial response in Malibu and along Pacific Coast Highway had to focus on preserving lives and providing safety — not protecting property. But the public and policymakers did not fully grasp that reality, it said.
“The public has a perception that public agencies can always protect them. As an incident the size of the Woolsey Fire shows, this is not always possible,” the report said, lauding first responders for limiting the number of deaths to three.
Even adding more fire engines and taking steps to better prepare homes for potential fires, it concluded, may not be enough to protect new developments in fire-prone areas.
“Even if the current fire weather cycle stops, it will return,” it said.
The predictions were borne out this week: Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said Wednesday that there simply were not enough firefighters to handle the situation, given the weather conditions.
“L.A. County and all 29 fire departments in our county are not prepared for this type of widespread disaster. There are not enough firefighters in L.A. County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,” Marrone said, noting that firefighters had been pre-positioned in the Santa Monica Mountains ahead of the blazes. “This is not a normal red flag alert.”
Part of the difficulty of fighting fires in the areas affected by the Woolsey Fire and the current blazes has to do with geography.
Pacific Palisades is a meeting point between suburbs and wildland hillsides often battered by winds. High-end homes — median values in the ZIP code were over $3.4 million last year, according to data provided by Zillow — are nestled into an ecosystem with fire-prone chaparral plants like manzanita, scrub oak and chamise, which is sometimes called greasewood.
Before European settlement, those ecosystems could be expected to burn once every 30 to 130 years. Today, blazes are expected in populated areas every 20 years or less because of ignitions caused by human activity, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.
Chaparral ecosystems are known for intense, wind-whipped fires, said Robert Gray, a Canadian wildfire ecologist and former wildland firefighter.
“There’s just a long list of these chaparral-driven fires, causing immense damage to built-up areas,” Gray said, adding that the plants contain volatile chemicals that can increase the height of flames.
In Los Angeles County, sprawl in the foothills now means that “when a fire roars through, as it does, it is leaping from one roof to another,” Miller said.
At the city, county and state levels, California has invested in programs to decrease fire risk and devoted more resources and staffing to fight fires year-round. The Legislature in July extended the peak firefighting staffing season from five to nine months.
The city and county of Los Angeles have implemented brush removal programs designed to ensure homeowners have “defensible space” for firefighting. Because Pacific Palisades and the Hollywood Hills are in areas considered “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones,” homeowners are required to clear brush, trim trees and maintain clean roofs. State code also requires an inspection before a house can be sold.
Those interventions and others, like installing fire-resistant roofs, can work, Gray said — if everyone in the neighborhood is committed.
“If your neighbor doesn’t do it and your neighbor’s house catches on fire, the radiant heat alone will negate it,” he said.
Insurers have become increasingly leery given the high risk. In March, State Farm did not renew coverage for about 30,000 property insurance policyholders in California, including more than 1,600 in Pacific Palisades. As of September, more than 1,400 homeowners in Pacific Palisades had policies from California’s FAIR plan, an insurer of last resort.
To that already vulnerable situation, add exceptionally dry conditions — Los Angeles had not had significant rain since July — and a dangerous windstorm. That is the cocktail behind this week’s fires, a confluence of dangers that fire officials had voiced fears about for months.
“Right now, Southern California — especially that coastal part — has not received much rain, so it was very vulnerable with those low humidities and fast winds to be receptive to a wildfire,” Anale Burlew, chief deputy of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said at a meeting of California’s wildfire task force after the Franklin Fire scorched more than 4,000 acres near Malibu last month.
Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary, said at the meeting that the state’s “fire season has turned into the fire year.”
“We now face wildfire conditions across the state that really never relent through 12 months,” he said.
Winter wildfires in California are often driven by the Santa Ana winds, which sweep down mountain slopes and draw moisture out of coastal areas. The winds can rapidly push any fires that start, particularly when the landscape is dry.
Typically, the San Gabriel Mountains trap high pressure, so the Santa Ana winds are produced as the pressure leaks through canyons and passes. But on Tuesday, the Santa Anas were able to surmount the mountains and send a downslope windstorm toward Pacific Palisades and Pasadena.
“These are areas that are usually better protected,” said Robert Fovell, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University of Albany.
He added that forecasters accurately predicted the wind event: “It would be fair to characterize this as well-anticipated from a meteorological standpoint.”
Once the Santa Ana winds reach high speeds, options to protect property are limited, said Miller, the Pomona College professor.
“When that happens and a fire is ignited, there is no stopping it,” he said. “When it’s being driven by winds 40, 50, 60, 70 miles an hour, there’s almost nothing that a firefighter can do.”
Research does not suggest that Santa Ana wind events are becoming likelier because of climate change. But rising temperatures and longer droughts mean a higher likelihood of conditions ripe for fire when the winds strike, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
“Climate change is increasing the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions later in the season and the occurrence of these wind events,” he said in a recent YouTube address.
Swain was the lead author of a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Reviews, which suggests that “hydroclimate whiplash” — a term for quick swings between intensely wet and dry weather — has accelerated around the globe. California offers a prime example, since it experienced major flooding during the past two winters.
“This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold,” Swain said in a news release. “First, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”
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