Will LA Finally Learn Its Lesson?

It was the worst wildland-urban fire in California history up to that point. Hundreds of homes were incinerated despite every firefighter in Los Angeles being called up in an unsuccessful effort to fight the Santa Ana winds. Hydrants ran out of water as 50-mph “devil winds” drove fires fueled by “the fastest burning ground cover in the western hemisphere” across major highways that would normally provide sufficient fuel breaks. Famous movie stars, writers, and composers lost their homes and a former vice president of the United States was photographed spraying water from a garden hose on the cedar shake roof of his rented house to protect it from the flames.

Other than a ban on wooden roofs, little has changed since the Los Angeles Fire Department made this film after the Bel Air Fire of 1961.

Just two years before this fire, the National Fire Protection Association had studied Los Angeles and declared (according to the above film) that “combustible-roofed houses closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads” was a “design for disaster.” They were ignored, but the 1961 Bel Air Fire, which burned 6,000 acres and 484 homes, was something of a wake-up call. After the Los Angeles Fire Department made the above film, the city banned wood-shingled roofs and required some landowners to clear their properties of brush.

Banning flammable roofs was a good start but by itself it wasn’t enough to stop more destructive fires in Los Angeles County. As a fire chronology shows, the Wright and Clampitt fires burned 183 structures in 1970. The Agoura-Malibu firestorm burned more than 1,600 structures in 1978. In 1993, the Kinneloa and Old Topanga fires burned more than 500 structures. In 2003 the Curve and Williams fires burned nearly 250 structures. In 2008, the Sayre Fire burned 600 structures including nearly 500 homes. In 2017 the Rye and Creek fires burned 129 structures including 60 homes. At least 15 smaller fires collectively burned some 300 structures. This year, the Palisades and Eaton fires are so far officially reported to have burned 4,000 structures but unofficial reports put the number at more than 12,000.

Since the Bel Air Fire, the environmental movement promoted the preservation of hundreds of thousands of acres of chaparral in parks and open spaces, thus making permanent the danger to LA homeowners. This included the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area was created in 1978, and 83 percent of it burned in the Woolsey Fire of 2018. The state of California created the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in 1980, which has since protected another 72,000 acres of chaparral from development, at least some of which burned in this year’s fires. In addition, state parks created in the 1960s and 1970s cover around 20,000 acres of the Santa Monica Mountains. The trustees for these properties aren’t required to clear the “brush” on their land.

Not surprisingly, the LA fires have become as politicized as every other major news story. Contrary to claims, these fires aren’t evidence of climate change. As technology journalist Tristan Greene notes, “high severity fire in chaparral has been normal as far back as we can look.” The damage from such fires has increased mainly because more homes, and more valuable homes, have been built in fire-prone areas.

Nor were these fires worsened by DEI. Los Angeles’ fire chief may be gay, but she has solid credentials and has been warning of the negative effects of cuts to her department’s budget for months.

Even if the fire department had been fully funded, however, it wouldn’t have been able to do much about the chaparral-fueled fires spread by the Santa Ana winds. Firefighting standards call for 15 to 43 firefighters for each burning house. Los Angeles’ 9,000 firefighters is enough for 200 to 600 homes. With thousands of homes burning each day over the last few days, LA would need at least five times its current number of firefighters on call to be ready for fires that happen only once every few years.

The fires are also not the result of urban sprawl, at least not by what people typically mean by sprawl: housing densities that decline with distance from city centers. The low-density housing found at the edges of truly sprawling regions such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston are actually the ideal buffer strip protecting such regions from wildfire.

At more than 8,000 people per square mile, Los Angeles is the seventh-densest major city in the country. It covers a lot of land only because it houses a lot of people, but various greenbelts and growth boundaries prevent it from having much truly low-density housing. This lack of true sprawl is what makes LA neighborhoods so vulnerable as houses are crammed in relatively dense 5,000-square-foot lots right up against the chaparral. Those homes are built mainly of wood and when one house catches fire, the radiant heat from that fire will ignite other structures 20 to 40 feet away.

Those who say that the solution is more thinnings and prescribed burnings don’t understand chaparral ecology. Prescribed burning can reduce fire hazards in the ponderosa pine forests of the Sierras. But chaparral is a completely different kind of ecosystem in which natural fires took place much more rarely. Frequent prescribed fires can actually make chaparral more fire-prone by inviting non-native species.

Those who think that more water tanks and reservoirs would have solved the problem ignore the fact that water isn’t really the right tool for dealing with landscape-sized firestorms. Plus, when thousands of homes are burning at once, even the most generous water supplies will get overwhelmed.

The most sensible suggestions have come from retired Forest Service fire researcher Jack Cohen and fire historian Stephen Pyne and from chaparral ecologist Richard Halsey. Instead of permanently staffing the fire departments with enough people and providing enough water supplies to deal with once-a-decade events, they say, people need to take responsibility for fireproofing their own property. As Halsey says, we need to fireproof communities “from the house out rather than from the wildland in.”

This means building homes with materials that will not ignite even if a neighbor’s home is burning furiously. It also means surrounding those homes with largely non-flammable landscapes: grass lawns are okay; eucalyptus trees and other flammable plants are definitely not.

It would help if the insurance companies that abandoned southern California came back to insure only properties that are built to fireproof standards. Unfortunately, when those companies left, California started its own insurance program, signaling homeowners that the government would take care of them even if they continued to fail to protect their properties from wildfire.

Even if insurance companies only covered firewise properties, regulation in the form of strict building and property management codes will be needed if only because some people won’t get insurance and thus won’t have an incentive to build responsibly. As the above video notes, “you are only as safe as your neighbor,” and based on that principle, even many libertarians would agree that some regulation is needed.

If Pacific Palisades homes had all been built of concrete blocks or other fireproof materials, it wouldn’t matter how many firefighters LA had as few of the homes would have caught fire. Nor would the lack of multiple escape routes from places like the Summit have mattered as many people could have stayed in their homes during the fires since the only threat to them would be smoke. Los Angeles should quickly write new building codes to ensure that homes built to replace those destroyed in the 2025 fires will be safe from future fires.

It is also important that owners make changes to existing unburned homes remaining in fire-prone areas. The city should require that yards of homes located downwind of chaparral hills be designed and managed to firewise standards. That means cutting down trees that are clustered together, removing trees and brush that are up against homes and other structures, and trimming the lower branches from any trees left behind. Gravel, concrete, or pavers should be installed in a five-foot perimeter around all structures.

While it might be too much to demand that existing homes be completely rebuilt with fireproof materials, the city should require property owners to take relatively low-cost steps to protect their homes from ignition. Roofs are already supposed to be non-flammable, but plenty of other parts of homes can still be vulnerable to fires, including vents, eaves, decks, porches, and windows.

As described in this report, vents and soffits “can be weak links in a fire,” allowing burning embers to enter the home. Homeowners should shield all vents with wire screens with one-quarter-inch or smaller openings and install fireproof soffits in all eaves. Wooden decks and porches should be rebuilt with Trex or other non-flammable materials. Ordinary glass windows should be replaced with tempered glass.

California and Los Angeles could offer homeowners grants covering, say, half the costs of these changes. This would be less expensive in the long run than fighting more firestorms and paying out insurance to homeowners who didn’t bother to fireproof their properties.

Millions of people in the West live in a fireplain. We can’t prevent wildfires in such areas and it is futile to try. What we can do is protect ourselves and our homes from those fires. Those of us who live in fire-prone areas owe it to our neighbors as well as ourselves to make our homes and properties as fire resistant as possible.

Despite more than a century of wildland fires spreading into its neighborhoods, Los Angeles has so far failed to ask its residents to do that. As the ash settles from the 2025 fires, local taxpayers should press the city to fix this.