Most people I know only heard about the Palisades Fire after lunch on January 7th.

The initial response was not panic, but heavy concern. Everyone who grew up in Los Angeles knows about the Santa Ana winds—the legendary 1961 Bel Air Fire, up until now the worst fire in the city’s history, was caused by a Santa Ana wind. So when we heard about a fire caused by the winds it caught everyone’s attention. 

Santa Ana winds can move rapidly. It keeps natives of Los Angeles on a hair trigger. In an hour, everyone heard how suddenly the fire was growing by a thousand acres an hour. Then came the news that, like in the Bel Air Fire, the Palisades fire hydrants weren’t working just as the Eaton Fire, tens of miles away, was also blazing out of control. We knew, immediately then and there, that we were cooked.

Suddenly, panic and helplessness. Taking what we could before fleeing. Our family home in Malibu was rapidly evacuated. We weren’t taking chances. 

We were all looking for information but finding none. Everyone whispered something they’d heard, somewhere. The local news and the internet provided information far faster than the official sources. Cal FIRE’s website is supposed to update every twelve hours at the latest, but that sure wasn’t happening. You could look up the UC San Diego’s livestream cameras, but that only gave you limited information. 

We all waited anxiously throughout the night. We watched the dancing high flames from that UCSD feed, but you couldn’t tell from the video feed where the fire was exactly. Every Angeleno or former Angeleno was calling everyone they knew to make sure they were alright. I went to bed at 1 am, not knowing if our house was still there but knowing that, probably, this had become a lottery that promised few winners.

The next day, our neighbor snuck in and called us. His house was the only one on the entire street that survived. We learned later that of the 250 houses in the neighborhood, less than 30% remained. The next day, we learned that, tragically, someone’s mother was trapped in her house and died. I wondered if my family would have to flee; we preemptively had everyone pack their things.

Every day, there were at least two new fires. Was this arson? A terrorist attack? How did this failure happen? We heard that arsonists had already been arrested, including for the Griffith Fire. Everyone was awash in rumor. You could never truly rest until there was rain because though you might be safe from the current fires, what about the next, random 11 pm fire?

More acres have burned in Los Angeles than the entire area of Washington, D.C. or San Francisco. Two of the fires alone were larger than Manhattan with a third one nearly as large. The damage estimates keep going up, but AccuWeather puts the cost at over a quarter trillion dollars. Dozens have died, and more will be found; over the coming years, thousands more could die from having inhaled toxic smoke.

Our leaders fiddled and watched the state burn, of course. Seven of the ten worst fires have happened in California just in the past ten years. This is now the eighth. Governor Gavin Newsom, who previously overstated prevention efforts by a factor of eight, took days to bring in state troopers. We somehow don’t own any “super scooper” planes that take up water from the Pacific.

The head of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) said that diversity was her top priority while her deputy went to prison for corruption; the LA Fire chief, though a very brave and accomplished firefighter, put technology last on her list of priorities; Mayor Karen Bass said to find information at “URL;” someone arrested with a blowtorch was let go for insufficient probable cause—he said the blow torch was to light marijuana because he had no lighter. A perfect storm of California governance dysfunction. In Los Angeles, everyone knows that someone is to blame, but they don’t know who. And perhaps that opacity of accountability is the biggest common cause behind our state’s tragedy.

Air, Heat, and Fuel in the Urban Landscape

A fire, which requires air, heat, and fuel, typically starts with an ignition event, such as a falling power line, arson, or even friction caused by extremely strong winds. That ignition provides a spark, which specifically provides the heat. That spark must be near some type of fuel, like wood or dry brush, that can then catch fire. Once that is complete, it will then take up the open air. This is why, for example, break fires on airplanes are so dangerous; the magnesium fire creates its own oxygen, so water actually makes the situation worse.

Left to themselves, fires will typically expand radially until they are put out by a natural event, like rain, or burn themselves out by running out of fuel or hitting a natural barrier. The actual spread is a result of the flames themselves or embers, some of which get unfortunately dropped onto something that is just dry enough to react with the heat from the ember. Wind makes things much worse because it both makes the flames higher and allows the embers to go further than most people realize—in strong winds, embers can travel more than five miles.

Urban fires and wildfires are different in how they start and how you fight them. When we read about gigantic fires in California, they are usually wildfires in some type of forest. They don’t happen terribly often, but because they are in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by fuel, they are slow to detect and grow to be large. This is why you hear so much debate about brush clearance and “forest management.” For wildfires, to a significant degree, this is the name of the game. 

Urban wildfires are quite different. While cities exist in nature, of course, they are an oasis of concrete and steel where fires happen more frequently but do not grow as large. Ignition increases nonlinearly with human density because of the large number of sparks, but even the Great Chicago Fire and Great San Francisco Fire were both under 2600 acres, making them smaller than even several of the Los Angeles fires last week. And more importantly, because they are dense, rapid detection and response is easier. The trade-off, however, is that the human devastation is much worse than in nature because there are so many more people. 

Over a century ago, people started to live together in more density than they ever experienced before. We never really “solved” wildfires, but they didn’t impact people, so they hardly mattered. But the increased density of urbanism and power-heavy industrial activity (often at mills) transformed fires from an unfortunate incident for a barn on a farm into a conflagration that destroyed entire cities. By the 1870s, “great” fires were happening several times a decade and viewed as a normal part of life in cities. 

And then, by the 1920s, it stopped. Why? After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, we finally got serious as a civilization about stopping urban fires. We rewrote building codes to require fire-resistant materials and metal escape ladders; we built professional firefighting forces instead of relying on local fire brigades with, literally, buckets; and we invented new technologies, like automatic sprinkler systems in 1872, motorized fire trucks with powered pumps and engines in 1910, and CTC fire extinguishers in 1912. Chicago never burned down again. 

Today, urban fires are treated as a largely-solved problem. Modern urban firefighting forces and infrastructure are designed for putting out fires in homes. In fact, firefighting is so solved that only 4% of firefighting calls are fire-related—the vast majority are medical. Yet, this model of firefighting is not adapted to the challenges we face today.

The Evolution of the Palisades Fire

The Palisades Fire started just southeast of Palisades Drive, seemingly in a backyard. At least one arsonist has been arrested so far, though we don’t yet know how this fire, which has been the most destructive, was started. The first fire report came in the morning with a call to 911. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) had a 45 minute delay in its response and only sent five engines, refusing a 1000-firefighter and 35-truck request. 

All 114 water storage tanks were full, including three backup firefighting tanks of one million gallons apiece. But these tanks are not fast to refill, and they work by using gravity to move the water downhill to the Palisades. On top of that, LAFD stupidly canceled a critical fire hydrant test just a few weeks before the fire, with no newly-planned test date. Therefore, with the massive demand on the system, water pressure dropped precipitously. 

The water pumps failed within hours. During that critical hour when the fire could have perhaps been kept from exploding, the firefighters had no water.

The Santa Ynez reservoir—built after the 1961 Bel Air Fire to prevent exactly this type of catastrophe, with a capacity 117 million gallons—was offline for maintenance. Somehow, fixing a lid has taken nearly a year and required emptying the reservoir, likely contributing to the critical drop in the Palisades hydrant pressure and, of course, meaning less water. Oh, and LADWP never told the fire department they had emptied Santa Ynez.

Oops.

Once the Palisades Fire spread to a ridge, it rapidly became uncontainable. With the dry conditions following no rain and winds at times exceeding 120 miles per hour, nothing could be done beyond damage control, at least for the first night. Ditto the Eaton Fire near Pasadena and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory housed at Caltech.

By that point, no fire department could handle two gigantic fires growing rapidly, especially when they were over twenty miles apart. Once flames exceed four feet in height, non-water solutions become impossible. At the height of the Santa Ana winds during the Palisades Fire, flame heights exceeded thirty feet. It was unsafe to use water aerial vehicles, which on the fateful first night would have been the only viable way to put out the fires. 

In my own neighborhood, there were not even any firefighters that Tuesday night. The question of why it took so long to get help, with the Point Mugu National Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) only arriving days later, will require a serious investigation. There are many questions to ask.

Yes, you can ask why they weren’t testing fire hydrants, though you should really be asking why we tolerated fire hydrant failures for years. We can ask why Governor Newsom disbanded a rapid fire firefighting force last year instead of doubling its size. We can ask why Mayor Bass has had more corruption scandals than fires she’s put out or why the head of LADWP hired a chief executive with no water experience. All of these acts of brute stupidity represent a short-term governance failure. 

But there is a long-term governance failure too, and that is an unwillingness to adapt firefighting to the changed urban landscape this century.

The Modern City Offers No Off Season

Over the past fifty years, people all throughout developed nations have moved into suburban areas, which fire experts refer to as the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI). As far as fire risk is concerned, these areas combine the worst aspects of wildland and urban environments. Because of humans living in density, you have frequent ignition events. But because they are near nature, you are surrounded by kindling. The environment is furthermore relatively sparse, so you can’t have the same firefighting density as in a city. Taken together this means fires can reach wildfire scale with urban frequency.

Simply put, urban firefighting forces are using an old playbook on a new, unsolved problem. 29% of the United States lives in the WUI now, and California has the highest such percentage of any state. Add to that increased dryness in Los Angeles, which is 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. The population moving to such zones over the last few decades, just as California turned itself into a tinderbox, was an obvious recipe for disaster.

Perhaps this could be addressed with contemporary techniques on its own, but modern firefighting doctrine evolved in an era where fires have an “on” and “off” season with a methodological divide between urban and wild firefighting. This is the core, fundamental problem for California: there is no “off” season anymore. Every season is fire season. Yes, there will be a high and low cycle, but the presence of material risk is now a constant.

The paradigm of seasonal firefighting extends to everything, from staffing to infrastructure to preventative maintenance schedules. 

The off season means that personnel are largely part-time. Only 35% of firefighters nationwide are career firefighters; 13% are paid-per-call and 52% are volunteers with normal jobs. Though California numbers are not readily available, on a departmental basis, California has more career fire departments than average. Despite that, California firefighters now work on a 66-hour work week—amazingly, this is a reduction from 72 hours—which includes extremely expensive overtime pay. During the off-season, firefighters work in EMS, security, train, or just take a break.

Infrastructure is also built under an assumption of an off-season. Take the unconscionable draining of the Santa Ynez reservoir. There is nothing in itself wrong with taking a reservoir offline for maintenance; after all, maintenance is a normal part of any infrastructure. And yes, it was stupid to do so during a very dry year instead of, say, last year, when there was more rain than in the past quarter century. But if your model assumes an off season, then even during a dry year, there is a rational time to do it, and that would be the off season when fire risk is low. Certainly, there is no reason to spend money on an extra reservoir if you have an off season. 

And environmental maintenance? Well, who needs that if there’s an “on” season and fires will happen anyways? California’s annual timber harvest has fallen from 6 billion board feet in the 1990s to 1.5 billion now, a 75% decrease. California’s forests are now anywhere from 80% to as much as 600% denser than historical averages, according to scientists at UC Davis. Trees are sharing more resources than they have evolved to support, in part thanks to a decades-old policy of absolute fire suppression. What this means is that there is more kindling than ever, which both makes ignition more likely to start a fire and means that when a fire takes off, it is more likely to become huge. Despite the fact that Southern California is known to be a high-risk area, there is not much currently planned thinning, and amazingly, the federal government canceled many of its controlled burns this year. Somehow, even after these fires, California’s legislature rejected a $1 billion fire prevention package.

If we say that there is no more fire season, what would it mean to take that seriously? It means that responses must be instantaneous and that every preventative tool must be utilized constantly. When it comes to stopping ignition, we cannot stop the sparks that come from civilized life; this primarily leaves us with indirect action through environmental management. When it comes to “brush clearance,” the solution must be tightly tailored to each biome. 

The most important tool, especially for high-risk areas, is usually controlled burns, which reduce wildfire risk by 60%. If you want to see the value of controlled burns, look no further than the Palisades fire, which spread into Malibu—but stopped around the Malibu Pier, which had experienced a fire just a few weeks earlier. However, it is not the case that all thinning must be controlled burns. 

Mechanical means such as cutting down trees work just as well in low-to-moderate risk areas, and will allow for more pruning near residential areas especially near power lines. In fact, in places like the Pacific Palisades, burning is the wrong strategy because the chaparral gets replaced with grass, which is more flammable, even though it is generally high-risk. Mechanical thinning has other benefits too. Unlike controlled burns, timber can be used to support Californian industry. On top of that, reducing forest cover adds 9% to California’s available runoff water, adding potentially millions of acre-feet of water to California’s water supply for free.

To allow for more preventative maintenance, there must be reform to both the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The environmental impact statement of a controlled burn takes 7.2 years to complete, which is longer than most fire cycles. Amazingly, under Sierra Club v. Bosworth, a 2007 Ninth Circuit case, there is no categorical exclusion for controlled burns. 

Congress should exempt firefighting measures like this entirely from NEPA. The federal and state governments will need to work together because 46% of California’s 100 million acres of land are owned by the federal government. These are not just rural areas, like Yosemite, since the federal government owns land directly in urban areas, like the Presidio in San Francisco.

In general, the legislature has resisted CEQA exemptions that would allow projects to proceed at a normal pace. SB 1003, which would have provided an exemption for burying power lines, died in committee. SB 1159, which would exempt vegetation clearance projects, did too, as did AB 1554, which would have exempted fire prevention methods like controlled burns from CEQA. The governor’s programs meant to run-around this regulation were so ineffective that groups were told to just use CEQA instead. There have been other legislative failures, too. For example, Governor Newsom vetoed AB 2538, which would have allowed Cal FIRE to retain seasonal firefighters. 

Similarly, California must plan for much more water accessibility, both in terms of surge capability and a higher baseline water availability. Major urban centers should not just have one reservoir, but at least two for redundancy. All fire infrastructure must go through an audit and, if need be, rebuilt. California throws 21 million acre-feet of water away each year, which is more than enough to fill firefighting reservoirs and use for irrigation to wet our forests. The money is already there—California voters already approved $2.7 billion for reservoirs with Prop. 1 back in 2014, none of which have been built a decade later. All that is missing is the state capacity to do so. 

Unfortunately, you can’t just take water from the San Joaquin Delta arbitrarily. For example, 15% of the environmental outflows are done to allow water used for urban and agricultural uses to remain at acceptable quality, like salinity control against inflows from the San Francisco Bay. However, technology can save the day here. Desalination will be required to meet some of these needs so that residential and farm uses can come from desalinated water and the remaining water can be used for irrigation and firefighting. At-scale filtering can also help make sure that water is used appropriately. This can not only be used to double California’s number of reservoirs, ensuring that major urban centers have redundant options, but also be used for irrigation, which can help fight fires by reducing the dryness of potential kindling. 

Beyond that, other than regular PSAs about cigarette disposal and not smoking in nature, the only clear way to reduce ignition directly is to deal with homelessness. The homeless cause 54% of all fires in Los Angeles. That number jumps to 80% for downtown fires. In San Francisco, such fires have doubled in the past five years. Throughout California, the homeless plague highway underpasses with fires, some from cooking and some from derangement. Many of the arsonists arrested during these fires were homeless. Unfortunately, the eternal summer of endless fire season means the time for tolerance is over.

Staffing Shortages Can Be Overcome With Technology  

The problem with all of this is personnel. If we are going to embrace the death of the off season, we need more people, but we already struggle to meet our current needs. The U.S. Forest Service has lost 20% of its firefighting manpower in recent years. Attrition for firefighters is terrible. Currently, 35% of firefighting jobs are vacant in California. Overtime pay is nearly a third of firefighter pay. 

Among America’s largest cities, Los Angeles has the second-fewest firefighters per capita. Only San Diego—which was battling its own major fires at the same time—has fewer. Astoundingly, despite a larger budget than ever, Los Angeles now has fewer firefighters than it did 36 years ago despite serving four times more calls, and was facing budget cuts that might have “impacted” its ability to respond to catastrophe. And it isn’t just firefighters: when the LA fires broke out, fire trucks were simply out of service for want of sufficient maintenance staff. 

If there is no more fire season, then a workforce that is only 35% professional and built around fire season surge capacity from volunteers isn’t going to work. The maintenance, repair, and system monitoring needed will require a surge of staff. Ditto environmental management, like brush clearance and forest management. While this is something that the firefighters can do during the low season—and it is safer than firefighting, which should make it easier to recruit for—the math is difficult to square. This is leaving aside the question of whether dysfunctional organizations can even make use of increased staff effectively.

But thankfully, through using software, automation, and electronics, we can make up for this shortfall. Technology must become every fire department’s highest priority, not its lowest, and technology cannot just mean IT.

The first, most important priority must be rapid detection and response. The Palisades Fire started around 10:30 am, but it was not detected by a plane using infrared until the afternoon, by which point the fire was over 770 acres in size. The Cal FIRE website, which could have provided critical real-time information to volunteer firefighters and concerned residents alike, was updated infrequently, requiring dependence on independent apps like Watch Duty. This is mind-boggling, particularly since the analytics for predicting which blocks should be on a red-flag warning are so accurate.

Sensors are now incredibly cheap. A camera with a machine learning algorithm written by a high schooler can detect smoke. There are more sophisticated sensors now that integrate cameras with other sensors, like gas and spectral sensors, made by companies like Torch and Pano. These should be all over urban areas. While a mass distributed sensor system may not be entirely practical for 100 million acres of wildfire prevention, it may be more practical to use satellites and pole-mounted cameras with wider ranges and less sensitivity. Today, fire detection is almost universally a human-triggered endeavor. Urban fire response is triggered by a 911 call, while in forests “fire lookout” is an actual job where park rangers sit in tree houses and look for smoke with their eyes. A ludicrous arrangement given that labor could be freed up with cheap, solar-powered cameras on poles installed every 100 acres.

Better, more highly proliferated sensors can also allow for better analytics. Weather systems are already highly accurate—in fact, Mayor Bass received warning of high-risk Santa Ana winds last Thursday, nearly a week before the Palisades Fire. (She still chose to go to Ghana instead.) The by-the-minute predictions are less accurate because there is not enough data; firefighters must rely on visual analysis or infrared planes, which must be flown. This can not only allow more data to be provided to citizens but also to firefighters, so they can more accurately get ahead of a blaze. This will allow for better planning and maintenance—imagine if, instead of testing fire hydrants on a set schedule, there was 24/7, by-the-hydrant analytics through water pressure sensors, for example; this would reduce the need for more bodies. 

It would also allow for better surge provisioning. When Florida had its most recent hurricane, Governor Ron DeSantis was able to prepare 42,000 linemen—that is not a typo—to restore power. While a hurricane is more predictable than a fire, better analytics could make that type of action a new possibility for fire.

Sensors must be met with a rapid response. For that, sensors can be used not only to coordinate people but also drones. There are simply not enough firefighters to verify and respond to every call, especially in an emergency situation like the Los Angeles fires. But drones can cheaply respond to an almost infinite number of fires. They can be specialized firefighting drones from companies like Rain or modified commodity drones. They can provide direct video feeds and even autonomously drop water to put out spot fires. For ignitions that are growing rapidly, even more drones can come and spray fire retardant to slow the growth of the fire in time for firefighters to arrive. Instead of using an error-prone manual evacuation alert system, why not use an instantaneous, automated system to lower false alarms? Drones from companies like Kodama can also be used to help cut the cost of thinning forests. On the more experimental side, fire departments should investigate cloud seeding, both to increase background moisture and potentially for firefighting when containment becomes impossible.

More must be done to spur the firefighting technology category–firefighting tech has only attracted $100 million in venture capital and is less than five years old as a category. There is already an effort underway with the XPRIZE Wildfire Prize, but there should be more such prizes. Firefighting departments committing to buying the solutions of the winners of such prizes, and putting out rapid competitive requests for proposal, will help a lot. On the regulatory side, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) should consider an immediate Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) exemption to the FAA regulation that restricts drones, Part 107, for firefighting drones, and explicitly allow them in the upcoming Part 108 regulation when it is issued, which will allow things like delivery drones. 

What this will ultimately mean is a massive increase in capital spending and effective procurement processes, which is a change from the way firefighting institutions work today. Today, the LAFD budget is 93% salaries. LADWP spends less than 10% of its budget on capital. Every institution must assume it will have to invest in major projects. SoCal Edison, the utility company, will need to invest dramatically in undergrounding cables, which can cost seven times more than fire-resistant pole techniques, but it will have to be done. The LAFD will have to make nine-figure investments in sensor blankets and drones and maintain an ongoing line item in its budget. The LADWP has known about issues with the firefighting water system and put off a pumping system for a decade; it will have to overhaul its process to react quickly and boost the number of projects. Every place with a fire hazard will have to undergo a similar analysis and invest in projects like these.

This will require a more predictable budget, though we must audit our current spending. The current cuts are counterproductive. Yet for all the money we spend—LAFD’s 2024-2025 budget is approximately $819 million with over $100 million in requested additional spending while Cal FIRE has a $4 billion budget—we still have crumbling fire stations and secret budget cut negotiations that would cut sixteen stations. How can a city that spends nearly a billion dollars per year have fire hydrants that fail? How can it have 1960s technology instead of modern tooling? We need to invest in a top-to-bottom review of water and firefighting infrastructure and audit the finances of every major fire department. Just because the firefighters are incredibly brave does not mean that the fire departments themselves are blame-free.

Yes, California needs to throw the bums out, and even put some of them in jail. And yes, we will learn over the coming weeks about many operational and logistical failures, not to mention arsons. But with sufficient technology and planning this should have never happened. However a fire starts, California should be able to rapidly contain and extinguish it. 

We are investing more and more money and getting worse and worse results. It is not just incompetence and corruption. Even the right managers and staff would not be effective with the wrong tools. California is not the only state at risk. All of the Western United States, from Colorado to Texas, faces the same issue. In fact, the same can be said of other countries with similar patterns of urban development, like Australia, Canada, and even Mexico. 

After the 1871 fire, every city in the world marveled at Chicago’s practices and copied them. Let’s do the same with California in 2025.