On the menu today: As noted in Wednesday’s edition of this newsletter, the combination of intense Santa Ana winds and an ongoing drought ensured that Los Angeles County was destined to face an unprecedented wildfire risk. There is no policy, at the federal, state, or local level, that can eliminate the threat of wildfires. But policy choices can mitigate or exacerbate those risks and the consequences of those fires, and unfortunately, the bad decisions of Southern California have piled up, year by year, decade by decade. Today’s newsletter takes a deep dive into those policy decisions.
As of this writing, at least ten are dead from the fires, 10,000 buildings are feared destroyed, and at least 400,000 Angelenos are under evacuation orders or evacuation warnings. No policy decision could have prevented the entirety of the disaster. But different ones could have altered the outcome, at least at the margins.
A Failure of Planning
Clearing Brush
One of the biggest factors in Southern California’s perpetual problem with wildfires is that the hillsides throughout the region are covered with “chaparral.” The county’s fire department explains:
Chaparral is the vegetative ecosystem present on most watersheds in Los Angeles County. The term applies to the shrubby vegetation seen on both coastal and inland hillsides. Chaparral can be separated into two types; soft chaparral (usually called coastal sage scrub) and the taller hard chaparral. It is dominated by evergreen and drought deciduous shrubs 1 to 15 feet tall. Most of these plants are recognized by tough, leathery leaves that reduce water loss in dry conditions. Many chaparral plants contain volatile oils which produce a strong odor and increase flammability.
Chaparral plant communities depend on fire as an integral part of their life cycle, and periodic burning is essential for these communities to rejuvenate. As unburned plants grow older, the amount of dead material increases dramatically. By age 50 as much as 50 percent of an individual plant may be dead. Where chaparral plants cover a broad area and are uniformly old and senescent, fires tend to be large and devastating.
The National Park Service notes, “Southern California chaparral and coastal sage scrub often grow as continuous, closed canopies and have the perfect fuels characteristics to ignite easily, burn intensely and spread rapidly.”
Earlier in the week, billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso contended during a live television appearance, “The brush up in these hills, that are controlled by the city and the county, I would bet you that they haven’t been handled, mitigated, pruned, removed for maybe 30 or 40 years. This is a disaster waiting to happen.”
Los Angeles County Fire Department does have extensive brush mitigation and hazard reduction programs, although in light of the scale of the ongoing disaster, it is fair to ask if those programs were commensurate with the threat and the consequences.
This summer, the county fire department held a demonstration of how they use goats and sheep to chew away at dry vegetation, part of the Fire Fuel Reduction Initiative, which is funded by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Los Angeles has fairly strict requirements for property owners in “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone” to clear all native brush, weeds, grass, trees and hazardous vegetation within 200 feet of any structures/buildings and within 10 feet of any combustible fence or roadway/driveway used for vehicular travel.” Numerous companies offer brush clearance services.
But that’s for privately owned land. One big problem is that there’s just an enormous amount of public land to cover. You may recall earlier in the week, noting that Los Angeles County is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. The county has roughly 900,000 acres of protected public lands, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island — 34 percent of the total land area. In fact, more than 64 percent of the county’s land is classified as a “natural area,” meaning there are few structures on it. It is a vast county of densely packed valleys and towering hills and mountains covered in chaparral, alongside sizable state parks and national forests.
Controlled Burns
In August 2020, Elizabeth Weil wrote an article in ProPublica headlined, “They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?”
We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” [wildland firefighter] Tim Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.
As noted earlier this week, in October, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” citing the need to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed. The Angeles National Forest, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, covers more than 650,000 acres, about one-quarter of Los Angeles County. The entire Angeles National Forest was closed for public safety January 8 and will remain closed until at least January 15.
The National Park Service of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area contends that controlled burns are not an effective tool in their particular ecosystem. “Prescribed burning is not effective in limiting the spread of wildfires under the conditions that burn the largest amount of land and cause the most home losses. Native shrublands are being burned too frequently because of human ignited wildfires. Prescribed fire does not fulfill any identified ecological need in chaparral or coastal sage scrub and would increase the probability of a damaging short fire interval following a prescribed burn.”
Reservoirs
When it was needed most, certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles had their water run out:
The longtime Cal Fire volunteer said he encountered at least four dry hydrants as he tried to battle the Eaton Fire in Altadena on Wednesday. Fellow firefighters had to drive to neighboring Pasadena to fill their trucks.
“How do you fight a fire with no water?” Babroff said.
As wildfires tore through greater Los Angeles this week, one of the most exasperating obstacles firefighters have come up against are hydrants with no water. In Pacific Palisades, hydrants failed after three tanks each holding a million gallons of water went dry within a span of 12 hours, officials said. Across the city in Altadena, residents said they futilely tried to extinguish flames with water from pools and garden hoses.
Some experts pointed out that most municipal water systems are designed to handle the water flow required to fight a house fire or building fire — not simultaneous high-level demand all over the neighborhood.
What is not disputable is that the state of California should have a lot more water in its reservoirs, in large part because it doesn’t have all the reservoirs it was supposed to have by now. In 2014, California voters approved Proposition 1, a water bond that authorized $2.7 billion for new storage projects. That was now more than a decade ago; those projects have been tied up in absurdly slow-moving environmental reviews and planning processes.
It took four years for the California Water Commission to set the level of funding available for eight projects. In October 2024 — nearly ten years after Californians voted to spend the money — Chris Austin, a journalist specializing in California water issues, offered an update on the progress of those projects, now reduced to seven:
- The Harvest Water Program has already received its final funding award and is under construction; it is comparably “fast moving” (that’s sarcasm, folks) because it is expected to be operational sometime in 2027.
- The Willow Springs Water Bank Conjunctive Use Project is expected to begin construction in mid-2026, and begin operations shortly before 2028.
- The project proponent for the Kern Fan Groundwater Storage Project is “expected to start construction in 2025,” and begin operations close to 2030.
- The Los Vaqueros Reservoir Expansion Project is expected to conclude its permitting process in 2027, and begin operations sometime after 2031.
- According to the California Water Commission, the Chino Basin Program is expected to be operational sometime after 2032.
- Construction on Sites Reservoir is expected to begin sometime between 2026 and 2027. It is expected to begin operations sometime around 2033.
- The Pacheco Reservoir Expansion Project is expected to begin construction sometime in 2028 and begin operations sometime after 2035.
For perspective on those dates, when the creative team of the Blade Runner sequel needed a year for their far-off dystopian future, they picked 2049, just 14 years after the Pacheco Reservoir Expansion Project is slated to begin operations.
Fire Department Budget Cuts
Los Angeles Fire Department chief Kristin M. Crowley, to the Los Angeles City Fire Board, in a memo dated December 4, 2024:
The Los Angeles City Fire Department is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours (V-Hours). These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.
In addition to these impacts, the reduction in v-hours has severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events. Specialized programs and resources, such as Air Operations, Tactical EMS Units, Disaster Response, and Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), which rely heavily on v-hours, are now at risk of reduced effectiveness.
The Fire Board forwarded the memo to Mayor Karen Bass and the members of the City Council on December 17.
CBS News reported, “Funding for the city’s fire department decreased by $17.6 million, or 2 percent, between the 2024-25 fiscal year and the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to city budget documents. However, the city council in November approved a four-year $203 million contract with the firefighter’s union to help boost wages and health benefits for staff, drawing from the budget’s general fund.”
Finally, there are those who continue to contend that it is somehow mean, or inappropriate, to report on the travels of Mayor Bass and the warnings from the National Weather Service that preceded her departure. I would note that there is no indication so far that the mayor cut short her trip or contemplated skipping the inauguration of Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama. We can argue about whether Bass’s physical presence in the city would have made that much of a difference; surely someone else could have just as easily informed city residents, “If you need help, emergency information, resources and shelter, all of this can be found at URL.”
But this is probably the largest and worst disaster in the history of Los Angeles — and there was once fierce competition for that title — and a particularly ignoble chapter of this story will be that the mayor didn’t even try to get back in time to man her post.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, I write that the Senate should pass the Laken Riley Act, which it is thankfully expected. (I keep getting told that I’ve turned into such a liberal squish since I started writing for the Post, and yet I keep telling liberal Post readers things they don’t want to hear.)