On Friday, Angelenos awoke to their first good news in three days: that the battle against the city’s unprecedented fires had finally turned in firefighters’ favor. Though the two biggest blazes — the Palisades and the Eaton — were still only single-digit contained, at 8% and 3%, respectively, it was the first sign of progress since the fires ignited and roared out of control on Tuesday.
The days ahead, though, won’t be easy. Though the Santa Ana winds dipped enough on Thursday and Friday for firefighters to establish a foothold, two upcoming wind events have forecasters and emergency management officials worried. The first will be shorter-lived, beginning on Saturday afternoon and continuing through Sunday, but “it does look significant enough where we might need additional red flag warnings,” Ryan Kittel, an L.A.-based meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. NOAA is anticipating gusts of between 35 and 50 miles per hour during that event, and at those speeds, aerial firefighting support will likely be grounded again.
A second wind event will follow that one, which is tracking to hit Monday night into Tuesday. “We’re still figuring out the exact details as far as the strength, but we’re very confident that it won’t be nearly as strong as the winds we saw on Tuesday this week,” Kittel said. “But it could be number two in the ranks of wind events that we’ve had over the last seven days.”
The associated concerns are twofold. The first is that the return of strong wind gusts will fan the blazes that firefighters are only now getting a handle on, potentially pushing the fires into new areas. But there’s another concern, too: that new fires will start.
“What we’re trying to communicate is that the environment is favorable for a fire to get really big, really fast, if one starts. We just don’t know if or where,” Kittel said.
Though the L.A. fires flared up as big as they have because of the Santa Anas, the wind’s cessation creates new risks. The Santa Anas “blow the fires towards the ocean,” Dan Reese, a veteran firefighter and the founder and president of the International Wildfire Consulting Group, told me. But when the Santa Anas subside and L.A.’s normal west-to-east winds return, they’ll push the fires back in the other direction and potentially into neighborhoods that haven’t burned yet.
“Right now, [firefighters’] challenge is what we call closing the back door, making sure that what was once the heel of the fire, or the back side of the fire, does not get up and all of a sudden become a running head the other direction,” Reese explained.
The weather is one problem, and it’s a big one. But there are other challenges, too. Firefighters are only human, and many are completely exhausted after working double shifts and doing the grueling work of defending people and structures for days on end.
There are also logistics-related challenges. Aerial firefighting is exceedingly complex and dangerous, and pilots are only allowed to fly a certain number of hours, which varies depending on whether operations are conducted during the day or at night. “Rotating those crews and keeping those crew hours balanced becomes critical, especially when you’ve got ongoing, continuous fires,” Reese pointed out.
There’s one more bit of bad news. Putting out the fires is only the first challenge. A second will come close on its heels: the mop-up.
“Maybe the fire went through a community but the houses were left standing,” Reese said. “Now all those structures and properties are at the mercy of mudslides and rain, because all of the holding capacity keeping the soil in place has now been burned off.” Soil can even become hydrophobic after exposure to intense heat, repelling water instead of absorbing it, making runoff even more severe.
But there is no rain in the forecast, and the fight against the L.A. County fires — while it’s taken a turn for the better — is far from over. Firefighters “have to deal with the disaster they’ve got right now,” Reese said. “And then they’ll deal with the secondary disasters when those occur.”
