Why Los Angeles was unprepared for fire

Author of the article:

Washington Post

Anna Phillips, Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Evan Halper, Joshua Partlow, The Washington Post

Published Jan 11, 2025  •  9 minute read

Businesses and homes destroyed by wildfire along Pacific Coast Highway within the Palisades Fire zone in Los Angeles. MUST CREDIT: Melina Mara/The Washington Post Photo by Melina Mara /The Washington Post

In Los Angeles’s chaparral-covered ecosystem, wildfires in the mountains are an annual ritual. But when those fires leaped into residential neighbourhoods earlier this week, killing 11 people and destroying thousands of homes, the city suddenly found itself in survival mode.

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A critical question became why the largest city in California, a state that has spent years fortifying itself against wildfires, couldn’t stop the fires this time. State regulations required residents in high-risk neighbourhoods to create vegetation-free buffers around their homes. California had invested billions of dollars to reduce the amount of woody fuel for fires to burn. It boasted the largest firefighting force in the nation.

Yet within a few days, decades-old communities and beloved landmarks were gone, and residents are left asking why.

Experts said several key factors – including urban sprawl, a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes, and a water system that’s not designed to combat multiple major blazes at once – left L.A. exposed to disaster. As climate change fuels record heat, leaving the hillsides primed for wildfires to grow swiftly into massive conflagrations, these factors led to catastrophe.

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“There was a lot that could have and should have been done,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “Decades before we knew about climate change, we knew this kind of urban sprawl was a big risk.”

Sprawling risk

The planning flaws that exacerbated the wildfires have long plagued Southern California. The two communities decimated by fires, Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, were built decades ago at the foothills of mountains that frequently burn. Dotted with single-family homes lining narrow, winding streets, they are difficult to defend and difficult to evacuate.

What was a risky move then is now far more dangerous, as drought, increasing heat and decades of fire suppression fuel larger wildfires, experts say. Researchers studying the effects of climate change have found that fire severity increased in California by 30 percent between the 1980s and the 2010s. The odds that a home sitting on or near the wildlands around and adjacent to Los Angeles County will catch fire are rising along with the intensity of extreme weather.

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As of Saturday morning, more than 70 percent of the burned areas in Los Angeles County fell in zones the state determined had very high fire risk, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the National Interagency Fire Center. The Palisades Fire spread across an area that was almost entirely deemed high risk.

Zeke Lunder, a wildfire mapping expert in Chico, California, and director of an online outlet devoted to information about fires called the Lookout, said the location and design of the Palisades neighborhood, tucked between Topanga State Park and the Pacific Ocean, made it especially vulnerable to fire – and almost impossible to protect.

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Some of the most desirable homes in the Palisades were built high on bluffs or in steep canyons that run from the mountains to the ocean. “The houses are perfectly aligned with the direction of the prevailing Santa Ana winds,” Lunder said, referring to the warm northeast winds that blow from Southern California’s interior toward the coast. “It is too late after the city is built to think about this stuff.”

Managing the grasses, bushes and shrubs on these hillsides is “physically impossible” Lunder said “You would have to send someone down on rope with a chainsaw like an African honey collector to cut the brush.”

Molly Mowery, an author of a 2020 report for Los Angeles County on how to reduce wildfire risk, said that the county now takes wildfire into account when reviewing new housing development plans. The problem, she said, is that nearly 90 percent of the county’s housing stock was built before 1990, before many subdivision or building code requirements for wildfire hazards took effect. Once fire enters these communities, the homes are the fuel.

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“We’re just seeing the culmination of factors of decades of development,” Mowery said.

Nic Arnzen, a town council member in Altadena, where thousands of homes, businesses, restaurants and parks were lost in the Eaton Fire, said the unincorporated community in Los Angeles County was trying to address fire risks. Less than a month ago, the town council chair wrote a letter to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, recommending she adopt a controversial land-use plan that would direct development away from the Altadena foothills “and other high fire hazard zones.”

It had been a subject of debate for months. Residents concerned about the community’s vulnerability to an inferno roaring off the slope of the San Gabriel Mountains favoured the plan. But others didn’t want to lose the ability to develop their properties in the hills. Arnzen and the other council members recommended minimizing how much they could build per acre and increase it further downslope. It was a significant fire protection step, in his mind, that came too late.

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“We knew prior to this event, if a fire starts, it’s pretty much impossible to stop,” said Arnzen, who lost his home in the blaze. “We were trying to address it, and we just missed it.”

Vegetation clearing warnings ignored

Before a home is threatened, experts say one of the few steps homeowners can take to make their property more fire resistant is clearing it of grass and shrubs, removing fuel. In California, people living in risky areas are required to maintain a buffer around their homes – a five-foot perimeter free of vegetation known as “defensible space.”

But in practice, the rules haven’t been followed uniformly. Many homeowners are reluctant to remove wooden fences, replant their gardens and trim the lower limbs on pine trees. Aerial images of the Palisades neighborhood taken before the fire show homes surrounded by greenery, a common sight in wealthy areas where residents put a premium on privacy.

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California’s five-foot rule “has been very controversial,” said Ken Pimlott, a former Cal Fire chief and firefighter for 30 years. “People are very upset about ‘What do I do about my fence, my plants I like,'” he said.

For nearly two decades, volunteers in Altadena have come together each spring to cut the grass and clear invasive weeds from around their neighbourhood, tucked into the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. They share a profound sense of their vulnerability to wildfire.

But not everyone around them did. William Ramseyer, one of the leaders of the Meadows Fire Safe Council, said the group’s offers to help residents create fire buffers around their homes were often ignored. Last spring, the group’s mowing and weeding led to contentious exchanges with neighbours upset over the weed whackers’ noise, he said.

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“People just don’t seem to be interested in doing the minimum to keep the house from burning down,” said Ramseyer, whose home survived the fire. “Maybe the work we did made a difference.”

Yet even among those who did keep their property clear, the fires put the limits of that approach on stark display.

Haldis Toppel, who moved to her hillside home in the Pacific Palisades in 1973, said she and her immediate neighbors tried to protect themselves from wildfire, to varying degrees.

“I cleared my space,” she said. “My home still burned.”

“The vegetation is the issue. It’s always the issue,” said Toppel, who serves on the community council. “We live in the area because we so enjoy the greenery.” Local officials had largely left it up to residents to comply with wildfire regulations, she said. Although Toppel’s property had been cleared, the canyon next to her had accumulated a layer of brush, she said. When it caught fire, so did a nearby palm tree, and then her house, a 1958 five-bedroom ranch with cedar shingles, eaves and deck that fed the fire.

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“I had everything that you shouldn’t have,” she said, noting that her house was built long before codes took effect requiring fire-resistant building materials. “I did abide by the fire clearance, and it didn’t help.”

‘California cannot wait’

Researchers say that while climate change is making fires larger and more destructive, there’s another contributing factor: more than a century of federal policies that called for all fires to be extinguished, no matter how small, which contributed to the buildup of dead vegetation. Federal and California land managers no longer embrace that approach – they now use thinning and intentionally set fires to clear away fuel.

But this work is expensive and, at the federal level, is underfunded. In 2022, the Biden administration announced a plan to reduce the fire risk on 50 million acres of land, an effort it estimated would cost around $50 billion. But it was only partially funded, with $3 billion from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

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Michael Wara, a climate and energy expert at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, said Angeles National Forest, where a massive fire broke out Tuesday night, has been using prescribed fire – where officials proactively burn fires in a controlled way – to protect risky areas. But forest managers are also contending with an “enormous backlog” of projects, he said, and decades of insufficient funding. Forest officials did not respond to a request for comment.

“I frankly think California cannot wait for the federal government,” Wara said. “If Cal Fire wanted to do prescribed fire on national forest lands, they could partner with the Forest Service and get it done,” he said.

Water runs short

L.A.’s water system was never designed to combat wildfire. When multiple fires erupted, it couldn’t keep up.

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As firefighters raced to fight the flames, the storage tanks that hold water for certain parts of the city and the pumping systems that move it around were overwhelmed.

“There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighbourhoods at once. “The tanks were not able to refill fast enough to meet the overwhelming demand from the enormous firefighting response,” he said.

As homes burned, water continued to flow through their pipes even as they ruptured or melted. Pools of water were spilling out of destroyed properties. The system was “hemorrhaging,” McNutt said.

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After the fire began, some Palisades residents and local leaders expressed outrage when they learned that a large reservoir supplying water to local hydrants had been out of commission. On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) ordered an investigation into the loss of water pressure to fire hydrants and the reservoir’s closure.

“We need answers to how that happened,” he wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and L.A. County Public Works.

The 117 million-gallon Santa Ynez reservoir had been closed for months to repair its cover, said Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the LADWP, which runs the reservoir and water system. The reservoir is one of several operated by the DWP across L.A., with a combined capacity of more than 4.1 billion gallons. Santa Ynez is among several local water sources, including Stone Canyon Reservoir, which was open at the time of the fire, and Palisades Reservoir, which was closed and had been off and on for years, Adams said.

DWP officials have said that demand for water in the Pacific Palisades quadrupled during the fire, dropping water pressure and leaving hydrants empty.

“If Santa Ynez had water in it, it would have helped with some of the pressure issues, but probably it would have ended up in the same place,” Adams said. “It’s not an infinite source of water.”

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