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With the ongoing disaster approaching its second week, here’s where things stand.
A week ago, forecasters in Southern California warned residents of Los Angeles that conditions would be dry, windy, and conducive to wildfires. How bad things have gotten, though, has taken everyone by surprise. As of Monday morning, almost 40,000 acres of Los Angeles County have burned in six separate fires, the biggest of which, Palisades and Eaton, have yet to be fully contained. The latest red flag warning, indicating fire weather, won’t expire until Wednesday.
Many have questions about how the second-biggest city in the country is facing such unbelievable devastation (some of these questions, perhaps, being more politically motivated than others). Below, we’ve tried to collect as many answers as possible — including a bit of good news about what lies ahead.
A second Santa Ana wind event is due to set in Monday afternoon. “We’re expecting moderate Santa Ana winds over the next few days, generally in the 20 to 30 [mile per hour] range, gusting to 50, across the mountains and through the canyons,” Eric Drewitz, a meteorologist with the Forest Service, told me on Sunday. Drewitz noted that the winds will be less severe than last week’s, when the fires flared up, but he also anticipates they’ll be “more easterly,” which could blow the fires into new areas. A new red flag warning has been issued through Wednesday, signaling increased fire potential due to low humidity and high winds for several days yet.
If firefighters can prevent new flare-ups and hold back the fires through that wind event, they might be in good shape. By Friday of this week, “it looks like we could have some moderate onshore flow,” Drewitz said, when wet ocean air blows inland, which would help “build back the marine layer” and increase the relative humidity in the region, decreasing the chances of more fires. Information about the Santa Anas at that time is still uncertain — the models have been changing, and the wind is tricky to predict the strength of so far out — but an increase in humidity will at least offer some relief for the battered Ventura and Orange Counties.
The Palisades Fire, the biggest in L.A., ripped through the hilly and affluent area between Santa Monica and Malibu, including the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the second-most expensive zip code in Los Angeles and home to many celebrities. Structures in Big Rock, a neighborhood in Malibu, have also burned. The fire has also encroached on the I-405 and the Getty Villa, and destroyed at least two homes in Mandeville Canyon, a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes. Students at nearby University of California, Los Angeles, were told on Friday to prepare for a possible evacuation.
The Eaton Fire, the second biggest blaze in the area, has killed 16 people in Altadena, a neighborhood near Pasadena, according to the Los Angeles Times, making it one of the deadliest fires in the modern history of California.
The 1,000-acre Kenneth fire is 100% contained but still burning near Calabasas and the gated community of Hidden Hills. The Hurst Fire has burned nearly 800 acres and is 89% contained and is still burning near Sylmar, the northernmost neighborhood in L.A. Though there are no evacuation notices for either the Kenneth or the Hurst fires, residents in the L.A. area should monitor the current conditions as the situation continues to be fluid and develop.
The 43-acre Sunset Fire, which triggered evacuations last week in Hollywood and Hollywood Hills, burned no homes and is 100% contained.
The Lidia Fire, which ignited in a remote area south of Acton, California, on Wednesday afternoon, burned 350 acres of brush and is 100% contained.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire, and investigations typically don’t begin until after the fire is under control and the area is safe to reenter, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. He also noted, however, that urban fires are typically easier to pinpoint the cause of than wildland fires due to the availability of witnesses and surveillance footage.
The vast majority of wildfires, 85%, are caused by humans.So far, investigators have ruled out lightning — another common fire-starter — because there were no electrical storms in the area when the fires started. In the case of the Palisades Fire, there were no power lines in the area of the ignition, though investigators are now looking into an electrical transmission tower in Eaton Canyon as the possible cause of the deadly fire in Altadena. There have been rumors that arsonists started the fires, but investigators say that scenario is also pretty unlikely due to the spread of the fires and how remote the ignition areas are.
Officially, 24 people have died, but that tally is likely to rise. California Governor Gavin Newsom said Sunday that he expects “a lot more” deaths will be added to the total in the coming days as search efforts continue.
Incoming President Donald Trump slammed the response to the L.A. fires in a Truth Social post on Sunday morning: “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country,” he wrote. “They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?”
Though there is much blame going around — not all of it founded in reality — the challenges facing firefighters are immense. Last week, because of strong Santa Ana winds, fire crews could not drop suppressants like water or chemical retardant on the initial blazes. (In strong winds, water and retardant will blow away before they reach the flames on the ground.)
Fighting a fire in an urban or suburban area is also different from fighting one in a remote, wild area. In a true wildfire, crews don’t use much water; firefighters typically contain the blazes by creating breaks — areas cleared of vegetation that starve a fire of fuel and keep it from spreading. In an urban or suburban event, however, firefighters can’t simply hack through a neighborhood, and typically have to use water to fight structure fires. Their priority also shifts from stopping the fire to evacuating and saving people, which means putting out the fire itself has to wait.
What’s more, the L.A. area faced dangerous fire weather going into last week — with wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour and dry air — and the persistence of the Santa Ana winds during firefighting operations through the weekend made it extremely difficult for emergency managers to gain a foothold.
Trump and others have criticized Los Angeles for being unprepared for the fires, given reports that some fire hydrants ran dry or had low pressure during operations in Pacific Palisades. According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, about 20% of hydrants were affected, mostly at higher elevations.
The problem isn’t a lack of preparation, however. It’s that the L.A. wildfires are so large and widespread, the county’s preparations were quickly overwhelmed. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference last week. When houses burn down, water mains can break open. Civilians also put a strain on the system when they use hoses or sprinkler systems to try to protect their homes.
On Sunday, Judy Chu, the Democratic lawmaker representing Altadena, confirmed that fire officials had told her there was enough water to continue the battle in the days ahead. “I believe that we're in a good place right now,” she told reporters. Newsom, meanwhile, has responded to criticism over the water failure by ordering an investigation into the weak or dry hydrants.
So-called “super soaker” planes have had no problem with water access; they’re scooping directly from the ocean.
Yes. Although aerial support was grounded in the early stages of the wildfires due to severe Santa Ana winds, flights resumed during lulls in the storms last week.
There is a misconception, though, that water and retardant drops “put out” fires; they don’t. Instead, aerial support suppresses a fire so crews can get in close and use traditional methods, like cutting a fire break or spraying water. “All that up in the air, all that’s doing is allowing the firefighters [on the ground] a chance to get in,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me last week.
With winds expected to pick up early this week, aerial firefighting operations may be grounded again. “If you have erratic, unpredictable winds to where you’ve got a gust spread of like 20 to 30 knots,” i.e. 23 to 35 miles per hour, “that becomes dangerous,” Dan Reese, a veteran firefighter and the founder and president of the International Wildfire Consulting Group, told me on Friday.
Because of the direction of the Santa Ana winds, wildfire smoke should mostly blow out to sea. But as winds shift, unhealthy air can blow into populated areas, affecting the health of residents.
Wildfire smoke is unhealthy, period, but urban and suburban smoke like that from the L.A. fires can be particularly detrimental. It’s not just trees and brush immolating in an urban fire, it’s also cars, and batteries, and gas tanks, and plastics, and insulation, and other nasty, chemical-filled things catching fire and sending fumes into the air. PM2.5, the inhalable particulates from wildfire smoke, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the U.S.
You can read Heatmap’s guide to staying safe during extreme smoke events here.
“The bad news is, I’m not seeing any rain chances,” Drewitz, the Forest Service meteorologist, told me on Sunday. Though the marine layer will bring wetter air to the Los Angeles area on Friday, his models showed it’ll be unlikely to form precipitation.
Though some forecasters have signaled potential rain at the end of next week, the general consensus is that the odds for that are low, and that any rain there may be will be too light or short-lived to contribute meaningfully to extinguishing the fires.
The chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles are supposed to burn every 30 to 130 years. “There are high concentrations of terpenes — very flammable oils — in that vegetation; it’s made to burn,” Scopa, the veteran firefighter, told me.
What isn’t normal, though, is the amount of rain Los Angeles got ahead of this past spring — 52.46 inches in the preceding two years, the wettest period in the city’s history since the late 1800s — which was followed by a blisteringly hot summer and a delayed start to this year’s rainy season. Since October, parts of Southern California have received just 10% of their normal rainfall
This “weather whiplash” is caused by a warmer atmosphere, which means that plants will grow explosively due to the influx of rain and then dry out when the drought returns, leaving lots of dry fuels ready and waiting for a spark. “This is really, I would argue, a signature of climate change that is going to be experienced almost everywhere people actually live on Earth,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who authored a new study on the pattern, told The Washington Post.
We know less about how climate change may affect the Santa Anas, though experts have some theories.
At least 12,000 structures have burned so far in the fires, which is already exacerbating the strain on the Los Angeles housing market — one of the country’s tightest even before the fires — as thousands of displaced people look for new places to live. “Dozens and dozens of people are going after the same properties,” one real estate agent told the Los Angeles Times. The city has reminded businesses that price gouging — including raising rental prices more than 10% — during an emergency is against the law.
Los Angeles had a shortage of about 370,000 homes before the fires, and between 2021 and 2023, the county added fewer than 30,000 new units per year. Recovery grants and federal aid can lag, and it often takes more than two years for even the first Housing and Urban Development Disaster Recovery Grants’ expenditures to go out.
My colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote for Heatmap that the economic impact of the Los Angeles fire is already much higher than that of other fires, such as the 2018 Camp fire, partly because of the value of the Pacific Palisades real estate.
The wildfires may “deal a devastating blow to [California’s] fragile home insurance market,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week. In recent years, home insurers have left California or declined to write new policies, at least partially due to the increased risk of wildfires in the state.
Depending on the extent of the damage from the fires, the coffers of California’s FAIR Plan — which insures homeowners who can’t get insurance otherwise, including many in Pacific Palisades and Altadena — could empty, causing it to seek money from insurers, according to the state’s regulations. As Zeitlin writes, “This would mean that Californians who were able to buy private insurance — because they don’t live in a region of the state that insurers have abandoned — could be on the hook for massive wildfire losses.”
First and foremost, sign up for all relevant emergency alerts. Make sure to turn on the sound on your phone and keep it near you in case of a change in conditions. Pack a “go bag” with essentials and consider filling your gas tank now so that you can evacuate at a moment’s notice if needed. Read our guide on what to do if you get a pre-evacuation or an evacuation notice ahead of time so that you’re not scrambling for information if you get an alert.
The free Watch Duty app has become a go-to resource for people affected by the fires, including friends and family of Angelenos who may themselves be thousands of miles away. The app provides information on fire perimeters, evacuation notices, and power outages. Its employees pull information directly from emergency responders’ radio broadcasts and sometimes beat official sources to disseminating it. If you need an endorsement: Emergency responders rely on the app, too.
There are many scams in the wake of disasters as crooks look to take advantage of desperate people — and those who want to help them. To play it safe, you can use a hub like the one established by GoFundMe, which is actively vetting campaigns related to the L.A. fires. If you’re looking to volunteer your time, make a donation of clothing or food, or if you’re able to foster animals the fire has displaced, you can use this handy database from the Mutual Aid Network L.A. There are also many national organizations, such as the Red Cross, that you can connect with if you want to help.
The City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Fire Department have asked that do-gooders not bring donations directly to fire stations or shelters; such actions can interfere with emergency operations. Their website provides more information about how you can help — productively — on their website.
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Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.