January 7 2025 will long be remembered across southern California. It was on that day, beginning in the morning but extending into the afternoon and evening, that the two largest fires ever experienced within the urban fabric of Los Angeles started and spread: the Palisades and Eaton Fires. Several other smaller fires started in subsequent days, one in the Hollywood Hills and another in Calabasas, and a large fire later sprang up on the northern edge of the LA metropolitan area. It is the first two that proved to be the most difficult to suppress, left most damage, and will be most remembered (see Figure 1). All this unfolded in the second largest metropolitan area in the United States and in the shadow of “Hollywood,” the capital of the American film, television, and celebrity industries, so it quickly became a global news story, notwithstanding the fact that the fires collectively would have constituted a truly massive disaster wherever they had happened. Quickly, the houses lost or surviving the fires belonging to celebrities became one of the most noted features of the fires across regular and social media.
This essay cannot be the definitive account of what happened and why it did the way it did, but more an experiential perspective bringing together a personal experience with journalistic sources and scientific literature about California fires and the impact of climate change (Major sources are listed at the end). Beginning with a first-person account about January 7 and its aftermath, the essay then turns to brief discussions of the way in which the two major fires spread, the practical lessons that can be learned from what happened for future preparations, and the complex natural-human causal nexus that defined the disaster. A final section draws out some political-geographical implications relating to how climate change should be discussed in relation to fire hazards and the barriers to planning against future fires from the complex jurisdictional jumble that exists in Los Angeles and its vicinity.
I had intimate personal experience with the Palisades Fire. I live in Santa Monica about 3-4 kilometers south of the southern edge of the Pacific Palisades district. Warnings about the fire and the possible need for evacuation arrived by mobile phone in the late afternoon. I went out to bring home dinner from Benny’s Tacos on Wilshire Boulevard about 6 PM. On the return walk home I was nearly blown off my feet by a wind gust that almost made me levitate. Winds were reported as gusting up to 100 miles per hour just up the street in the Palisades. Back home I could see the fire burning in the distance beyond the reassuring concrete bulk of the Saint Monica’s Catholic School across the street from my building (Figure 2). My wife and I quickly decided to leave and go to her brother’s house in Long Beach, much further south, away from the imminent danger. I had visions of the wind blowing embers from palm fronds and other debris down the tree-lined streets in our vicinity. We had never experienced anything like this before, so we were speculating wildly about what might happen next. The impossibility, given the wind, of drenching the fire with water and fire-suppressant from planes and helicopters meant that this fire was likely to spread unhindered. Any ground assault would face limitations of hydrant water supplies designed for single-house fires and the inability to ever get ahead of a fire spread by arbitrarily blown embers (Figure 3).
We packed a car with a few days clothes and boxes with precious documents including passports and drove off. We stayed away for two nights and then ventured back once we thought the fire was reasonably contained. This proved mistaken because the air quality was terrible. An Air Quality Index of 310 on an iPhone app suggested we should retrace our steps. So we left again, returning finally on Saturday January 11. The air was still poor but the fire itself had been largely “contained,” if not put out by this time. Adding to the drama, on the evening of Thursday January 9, my elder daughter and family had evacuated their home in Calabasas as the Kenneth Fire spread near to their immediate neighborhood. Fortunately, the wind had dropped by then and helicopters came to the rescue by unloading on it and limiting its spread. They returned home relatively quickly. The same could not be said for the thousands of people affected by the Palisades and Eaton Fires (the latter in the mountainous fringe of Pasadena to the northeast of central Los Angeles). As of late July 2025 thousands were still living elsewhere without much hope of returning back home any time soon. At least 30 people were killed directly as a result of the fires, often because they were disabled, because warnings came too late (particularly in the western part of Altadena afflicted by the Eaton Fire), or from deciding to stay and fight the flames. More than 16000 buildings have been destroyed in the two major fires covering about 55,000 acres leaving behind 4.2 million tons of ash, debris, and contaminated soil that needed to be removed. Roads, sewers, and water mains were also radically disrupted and damaged as much by the rains that came two weeks after the fires as by the fires themselves. By one conservative estimate, the two major fires will cost at least $250 billion in lost incomes and tax revenue and take 4 to 10 years for a recovery. The city as a whole has also paid a price, at least in the short term, as even a major annual event in the city, the Oscars, failed to generate the usual income for local businesses.
Entire neighborhoods, with a few random houses or groups of houses miraculously left standing, have been reduced to rubble (see Figures 4 and 5). Chimneys, made with bricks for houses largely made of wood, were all that were left on some lots. They stood like headstones in graveyards. Concrete stairs to nowhere stood next to where doorways used to be in these places of mainly single-household houses along with the odd apartment block here and there. Many trees, scarred by burning but still standing, testified to the fact that these fires were not simply vegetation ones. The fires had finally been contained if not completely extinguished by full-on air assault once the wind had dropped. Fear of a resurgence of the winds remained. This did happen for several days in the second week, but fortunately at nothing like the force of the previous ones. About two weeks later heavy rains finally arrived and brought with them mudslides in the burned-over areas with some of the Palisades debris washing into the Pacific Ocean where much of it polluted the beaches between the Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica.
Aerial views of the damage were compared on widely distributed social media to the destruction visited on Gaza. I think this analogy is problematic for several reasons—its scale, duration, and key geophysical and geopolitical conditions. One reason is that this was a disaster precipitated by dry vegetation and high winds and not by aerial bombardment. Here, people were living in biophysical settings vulnerable to fire and in house-types more suitable to the US Midwest. Both the Palisades and the Eaton Fires were in essence urban fires, fueled by wood and plastic once under way from flying embers, more than just wildfires fueled by trees and other vegetation. But it was the combination of dry vegetation with no rainfall since May 2024 and incredibly high winds outside of the usual season of so-called Santa Ana Winds from September to November blowing from the continental interior that ignited the fires once a spark from an electric transformer (in the Eaton case) or the resurgence of a small wildfire seemingly put out a week previously (as in the Palisades case) that seemingly started the blazes.
Despite difficulties, an incredibly effective cooperative firefighting system had quickly come to life, even while some people--particularly far-right national anti-California politicians with long histories of being confused about the causes of California’s and other western states’ vulnerability to fire--cast around for people to blame (for example, the Black female Mayor of Los Angeles was away on a trip to Ghana when the fires started and the lesbian Fire Chief were both indicted as villains because of who they were). “Mutual aid” among fire departments both local and statewide, establishing fire lines and bringing in planes and helicopters, prevented the fires from spreading further once the winds died down. This is not to say that there were no complications in the response or that more equipment and personnel deployed sooner might not have helped. It is to say that unlike in Gaza there was a cooperative response to a disaster and in this case made it much less awful than it could have been. Living down the street from one of the fires made me very much aware of how the firefighting response mattered, however much one wished that the fire had never happened or could find some convenient scapegoat to blame.
Although the Los Angeles region is no stranger to summer and autumn wildfires, the latter associated with the so-called Santa Ana winds that blow southwesterly from inland towards the sea, this January 2025 outbreak was a surprise. Wildfire season is typically from September through November, the classic dry season. Later in the year and into January the annual rains arrive and keep fire activity in check. Not only were these fires “later;” they came with extremely high winds so that once ignition had started flying tree and house debris became the main way in which the fires actually spread. So, these were not just the same old wildfires as in the past. Over 200 fire alerts were registered in Los Angeles County between January 7 and January 22 2025, more than 130 times the average for the month of January from 2012-2024. Most years, in fact, no fire alerts are raised for the entirety of the first three months of the year, let alone in the first three weeks. Only in one other recent year (2021) were there 10+ fire alerts between January and March.
But the huge increase in fire alerts was not just because of being outside the usual calendar and the unusually high winds. The summer of 2024 had record-breaking high temperatures, and rainfall was way below normal between October and January. This dried out the ample vegetation that had grown in the previous two wet seasons. Forest and brush fires can be ascribed largely to these factors and the fact that rainy periods have become increasingly separated by periods of drought. This changing climatic pattern can be attributed to the regional effects of broader climate change. Tree cover loss and wildfires have increased in intensity as average global temperatures have increased. Particularly important in and around Los Angeles, is increased hydro-climatic volatility (large and/or frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions) plus extended droughts in the immediate continental interior sparking high winds in unpredictable patterns that will probably contribute to lengthened fire seasons.
The Los Angeles Fires, however, cannot be put down just to these forces, important undoubtedly as they were and will continue to be. Critical has been the spread of settlement into areas appealing partly because of the integration of physical attractions (such as views of the sea or the mountains), relatively dense vegetation (often of species of grass and trees, such as palms and eucalyptus not native to the localities) and house styles brought by settlers from “back east” that are based largely on wood-framing and wooden-asphalt roofing. Most of the areas afflicted by the January 2025 fires had this combination of elements.
So, not all so-called wildfires are the same. Indeed, arguably the January 2025 fires spread in a very different manner from typical forest and brush fires. Clearing undergrowth can mitigate forest and brush fires but removing the chaparral that is the dominant vegetation in the hills around Los Angeles would probably lead to the invasion of even more flammable plants and grasses. Clearing vegetation from the immediate environs of buildings could still help. “Fuel breaks” around groups of houses and buildings could also help in access for firefighting as well as limiting the ground-spread of fires. The problem is that at the urban-rural interface there are now too many rather than too few fires. As a result the density of vegetation is much reduced. So, the surrounding vegetation is not then the main problem. This brings us, first, to the problem of ignition. Before the European settlers arrived, it was lightning strikes every 30-100 years that set off conflagrations. Now it is humans, their behavior, and technologies. Most fires today are ignited by: downed overhead power-lines, faulty transformers, cars, fireworks, heavy equipment, and arson. The recent Los Angeles Fires are cases in point. Second, embers are the primary way in which the fires spread, so houses need to be adapted to that potential fire dynamic. In the Palisades Fire it was glowing palm fronds and roofing debris that spread the blaze far and wide before firefighting on any scale became even possible. If the houses had been made of concrete and other fire-resisting materials, the toll would also have been much less. Taking out the palm trees and other highly flammable and ember-driving trees might not then be necessary. Once the fires start, particularly under windy conditions, questions about how many firefighters and fire engines, water pressure, and who was or was not “in charge” appear of utterly secondary importance. Concrete buildings can also be vulnerable, not the least if their roofs and other features are not also concrete or fireproof (Figure 6).
The physical and emotional effects of the fires lingered well into February and beyond. If as air quality, particularly of airborne particles, improved, many locals worried about all of the asbestos, lead, plastic and other contaminants produced by the large-scale burning of buildings. Several other issues became as important. One issue heard repeatedly was the worry that many of the victims would find that insurance coverage would be insufficient to rebuild at the same time that they were unsure about exactly what government could do to help them. This discussion was often framed in terms of the long-term sustainability of the house insurance market in California and other regions with histories of disasters such as the fires and the increase in rents in an already tight metropolitan-area housing market with the influx of “fire refugees.” Years ago, Mike Davis, possibly the best known historian of contemporary Los Angeles, had pointed out that the owners of houses in the parts of California most vulnerable to fires (such as Malibu) were effectively subsidized in their insurance by people living in less hazardous areas. His writings were suddenly rediscovered in January 2025 even as critics noted that the fire danger was now much increased and widespread because of so much new building at the “urban-rural interface” and that the negative externalities from fires, such as ash and bad air, now afflict people at some distance from the actual fires.
A second issue concerned the use of language such as “wildfires” to describe all the various types of fire that currently affect California and other US states as if they were all alike. Fires in deep forests, for example, should be distinguished in their dynamics from brushfires and what are essentially urban conflagrations such as the Palisades and Eaton Fires. Many people, not the least leading national politicians, have been confused about the origins and course of fires, often attributing all of them to single factors such as a lack of clearance of forest undergrowth when the waves of fire across tree canopies in many forest fires are very different from the ember fires such as those in the Palisades and Eaton Fires. “Forest management” (largely on federal lands in California) is something different from managing the urban-rural interface with its chaparral bushes, palm trees, and flammable houses.
Finally, and not least, what to do with all the very hazardous waste left by the fires became a major problem, not least for those living near the landfills or waste-disposal sites chosen for removal? The US Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, and FEMA (the latter two US federal government agencies charged, respectively, with environmental protection and disaster recovery) declined to test soil at any depth after the fires, even though they were officially charged with this responsibility, and this decision made it seem as if removed material was of unknown toxicity. This and the absolute amount of material to be disposed of led to NIMBY protests by local residents in such spots as the Calabasas Landfill even as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to keep dumping hazardous waste from the fires in those places.
Two questions have arisen in scientific commentary about the fires in light of these issues. How could the calamity have been less disastrous under the natural conditions that produced it? How should the fires change America’s second largest metropolitan area?
Fires are not going away, however much you prepare for them in terms of investing in firefighters and equipment. Indeed, changing weather patterns are increasing fire risk. Several seasons of heavy rain from atmospheric rivers coming in across the Pacific Ocean had increased vegetation density. This was followed by a long dry season that primed plants to burn. Obviously, in clear forest and brushfire zones prescribed burns and clearing flammable vegetation could lead to dramatic drops in fire intensity if not necessarily in frequency.
More fundamental in urban areas, however, is building better fireproof houses and insisting on upgrading older buildings to conform to new building codes that are already in place for new construction. Notoriously, current inhabitants balk at changing the landscape that they have come to love, even if it is increasingly dysfunctional in terms of the fire hazard. The diminution in local revenues from the lid on property taxes established in 1978 statewide has led by way of substitution to the imposition of fees on new construction. This has discouraged building that might come closer to making neighborhoods more fireproof even with high winds. State limits on raising fire insurance rates have also discouraged property owners from upgrading their buildings to reflect the increased fire risks. In the more specific firefighting domain, reasonable questions arise about the budgets of fire services, the availability of equipment, and the impact of the jurisdictional jumble that constitutes the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It seems clear that although there had not been net reductions in the budget of the LAFD (Los Angeles City Fire Department) in particular, requested increases had not been forthcoming. This combined with the increased cost of fire engines (due to a national oligopoly in building them), and a lack of necessary maintenance because of a shortage of mechanics, could have reduced the immediate response to the fires, particularly those such as the Palisades Fire within the borders of the city of Los Angeles. But it was the Los Angeles County Fire Department that was running the response to the Eaton Fire and they ended up in much the same situation, destruction wise, so it is hard to identify firefighting budgets and so on as key factors in the overall outcomes of the fires. Indeed, across all of the fires the high level of organized cooperation among firefighting units from different counties and cities suggests that the jurisdictional jumble critique actually has limited substance to it--at least as far as firefighting is concerned.
So, what of the future LA? If jurisdictional centralization is probably not the panacea for firefighting, it might be to a certain extent in terms of planning a city more resilient in the face of fires. Here what is probably needed is twofold. The first is to discourage construction in the most obviously fire prone areas such as Malibu and the Palisades and if done it should be to the highest standards of fireproofing. Yet, across California and the country as a whole relatively more construction is in hazardous zones. Much of this is down to places with superior “vistas,” access to beaches and so, that might in the past have been less problematic but with increased hurricane and fire hazards have become dysfunctional settings for residential development. Some people may choose to leave if they cannot just reproduce what they have lost, perhaps by moving away from southern California. Although two months after the fires most LA county residents sampled in a poll reported that they planned on staying put.
Second, to the extent that fire ravaged areas are rebuilt they should be with respect to higher density of housing, fire resistant building, buffer zones, and fire walls to keep brushfires at bay. More broadly, however, the fires offer an opportunity to both make the region as a whole more fire resistant and provide more housing by insisting on higher density development (such as apartment buildings) so that those who work in neighborhoods can also live in them rather than commuting long distances on crammed roadways. A denser and less sprawling Los Angeles might then slowly emerge. Whether this will happen is open to doubt. Already plots are being sold in the Palisades and Altadena “above expectations” in price and this will probably lead to a simple reproduction of housing patterns similar to those before the fires. There is already resistance to the idea of building at higher densities and for a range of income groups. Lessons are not always easily learned (Figure 7).
There are at least two specifically geographical implications of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires. The first concerns how we talk about and invoke climate change in relation to localized disasters like the fires. The second is how local political-jurisdictional organization can be improved to address the practical lessons of the fires noted previously.
The first matters because it is both important in conceptualizing the fire risks in ways that lead away from to the simple “blame game” about the identity of the fire chief and so on and in serious discussions of factors that produce more and more intense fires in settings such as Los Angeles. Unfortunately climate change is often portrayed by politicians (including those who think it is happening) and in the media in overly global and abstract terms. So, much was made of how January 2025 has been the hottest one globally on record, the “tipping point” to a much warmer future approaching faster than previously thought, and because of this the bill for the fires should be charged to fossil fuel companies. This discourse can come over as both deterministic in the classic sense of climatic determinism and without much causal linkage to the local conditions (housing and vegetation) as described previously. This misses the fact that alarmism about climate change could actually undermine doing much at the local-regional scale to limit its impacts. Rather than playing into the hands of climate-change deniers by engaging in abstract alarmism, tying climate change to visible local and regional challenges (such as fires, hurricanes, and sea-level rise) makes the case most practically. Emphasizing the mediating role of local places thus matters in addressing the impacts of climate change.
The second point matters because the fires have revealed serious deficiencies in the way in which the housing, road, water and power patterns and infrastructure are currently managed and regulated in Los Angeles and its wider region. If only these elements of the city were as well managed as the cooperative firefighting finally turned out to be. But notoriously weak urban planning and the dominant role of real estate interests in the city have made making the city more fireproof next to impossible. Working with nature by attempting to accommodate the built environment to natural-human processes, such as fires, should be the objective. At the center of the dilemma is the “peculiar American definition of ‘freedom’ – allowing anyone to do anything anytime and anyplace they please,” as the urban planning critic Martin Filler has put it (New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025). Currently, the insurance industry, if allowed to accurately price risk, may be the only solution, albeit leading to other harms such as pricing people out of their longstanding homes and upending socially functioning neighborhoods
The aftermath of the fires in terms of cohesive efforts at addressing the various issues raised earlier (the character of rebuilding, fireproofing, etc.) does not encourage optimism. Initial promises from local politicians across jurisdictions and local power brokers to work together have foundered on differences over financing, ambitions, and agendas. Instead of one united voice, there have been many dissonant ones. Some of this is the outcome of different interests, and some of the extreme contemporary partisan polarization in the United States more generally, but much reflects the diffuse system of governance that has long decentralized power to multiple municipalities, unlike in many eastern US metropolitan areas. There are 87 other municipalities besides the city of Los Angeles in the County of Los Angeles and a patchwork of so-called unincorporated communities (such as Altadena). This reflects the historic dominance of real estate developers and brokers who have profited from this fragmentation and the massive residential segregation by class and ethnicity it has engendered. Many of the local governments, particularly the city of Los Angeles, also have serious financial shortfalls. On top of this is a pattern of utility companies and state agencies (such as CalTrans responsible for major roads) that are ill coordinated. Fires spread irrespective of jurisdictional boundaries, but preparations for them are divided. In years to come the region is scheduled to host World Cup football/soccer games (in 2026), the Super Bowl (in 2027), and the Summer Olympics (in 2028), however ill prepared. Much will have to change if these mega-events and more regular threats, such as fires, remain hostage to such a diffuse and combative governmental system. Coordination locally between county and municipalities and with state and federal governments will be vital to their success. The experience from the fires is not encouraging.
The Experience
Fire Dynamics
Practical Lessons to Learn
Geographical Implications of the LA Fires