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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.
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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”.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jan/18/la-fires-started-conditions-drought[/URL]
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