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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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On rumors from fossil fuel insiders, the LA wind forecast, and Davos
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms brought transportation chaos to Sydney and left 120,000 homes without power • Greece may resort to filling hotel pools with seawater instead of fresh water due to extreme drought • A clipper storm will bring some snow to the Great Lakes and parts of Appalachia today and tomorrow.
Winds in fire-ravaged Los Angeles were weaker than expected yesterday, but are forecast to pick up again today as firefighters continue to battle ongoing blazes. The National Weather Service issued another “particularly dangerous situation” warning indicating extreme red flag fire weather in large parts of LA until 3 p.m. Wednesday. The Palisades fire is just 18% contained, and the Eaton fire is 35% contained. Some 88,000 people are under evacuation orders, and the death toll has reached 25. Conditions are expected to ease tomorrow, but another round of Santa Ana winds could emerge next week, the NWS said.
National Weather Service
Lobbyists for the oil and gas industry widely believe President-elect Donald Trump will issue a suite of executive orders targeting energy policy shortly after his inauguration. According toThe Wall Street Journal, Trump is expected to “instruct agencies to begin unwinding President Biden’s limits on drilling offshore and on federal land.” Other moves to watch for include:
Trump’s team has apparently discussed his plans with energy industry insiders, but these are not set in stone. “Energy clearly was on the ballot, and we’re going to make the case that energy won,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the Journal.
President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, is scheduled for his Senate confirmation hearing today at 10 a.m. EST. He will face questions from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Democrats had asked the panel’s chairman, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, to postpone the hearing due to missing paperwork from the Office of Government Ethics that includes financial disclosures. Lee postponed the hearing for Trump’s pick for interior secretary, Doug Burgum, for a similar reason. Wright is currently the CEO for fracking powerhouse Liberty Energy. The Sierra Club called him a “climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”
The World Economic Forum put out its annual report of global risks ahead of next week’s summit in Davos. Extreme weather events, which were at the top of the list last year, moved down a notch into the second position, below armed conflict. Twenty-three percent of the 900 or so expert respondents ranked state-based armed conflict as the number one risk facing the globe in 2025, whereas 14% chose extreme weather events:
WEF
Last year, 66% of respondents ranked extreme weather as the top risk, and 53% chose AI-generated misinformation. Looking ahead over the next 10 years, the climate crisis looms very large: Experts ranked extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems, and natural resource shortages as the top risks facing the globe through 2035. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting runs from January 20 - 25. President-elect Trump is expected to give a virtual address on the 23rd.
A group of more than 150 Nobel laureates composed an open letter calling on governments to support the development of “moonshot” innovations to avert a looming hunger crisis. The letter warns some 700 million people are already going hungry, and the problem will only worsen as the population grows. The global food shortage has many causes, but the letter cites climate change as a major challenge and calls for “planet-friendly” technologies to boost food production. “We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods, and economic development,” said Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate and outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. “We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today’s crisis will become tomorrow’s catastrophe.”
Global EV sales were up by 25% last year compared to 2023, according to research group Rho Motion. In the U.S. and Canada, sales rose by 9%, compared to a 40% jump in China.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the universe’s smallest molecule.
Hydrogen. What are you even supposed to think about it? If you’ve spent serious time focusing on climate policy, you’ve heard the hype about hydrogen — about the miraculous things that it might do to eliminate carbon pollution from cars, power plants, steel mills, or more. You’ve also seen that hype fizzle out — even as governments have poured billions of dollars into making it work.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse give you a rough guide for how to think about clean hydrogen, which could help decarbonize the industrial — even the molecular — side of the economy by storing energy and helping to make clean steel and chemicals. Do we really need hydrogen to fight climate change? Where would it be useful? And why has it failed to take off in the past? What will Trump and China mean for global hydrogen policy? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, 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:
Jesse Jenkins: This is the next crazy thing that I think is just starting to kind of bubble up to the public awareness: Basically, hydrogen itself is not a climate forcer. It doesn’t warm the planet the way methane or [hydrofluorocarbons] or CO2 does. But it does react in the atmosphere in ways that increase the concentration of greenhouse gases.
Robinson Meyer: I think specifically that right now, we talk about when methane leaks into the atmosphere. And it may apply to other greenhouse gases, too, but the big one that you tend to hear about is that when methane leaks into the atmosphere from natural gas — and of course, we’re very worried about methane leaks. Because the thing about methane is that it traps a lot of heat, but it breaks down really quickly, right? So it tends to break down, unlike carbon dioxide, which, when you release it into the atmosphere. sticks around for millennia. When you release it into the atmosphere, it captures a lot of heat, but then breaks down into a smaller amount of CO2 after about 20 years.
The issue, and why it breaks down, that — we never talk about this, or we had no need to talk about this until hydrogen — and it’s crazy because the world is a closed system, or a largely closed system, right? Why it breaks down is it reacts with the free hydroxyl radicals floating around in the atmosphere.
Jenkins: Right, OH molecules.
Meyer: Well, what else reacts with OH molecules? Hydrogen. And so if we leak too much industrially produced hydrogen into the atmosphere, it could mess with the rate of breakdown of all methane in the global atmosphere, and thus increase the global warming potential of natural gas.
Jenkins: It makes the methane last, traps more heat, yeah. So let the record show that Robinson Meyer, the journalist, accurately captured the atmospheric chemistry of this process better than Jesse Jenkins, professor at Princeton. Nicely done.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
California passed a new fire safety law more than four years ago. It still isn’t in force.
For more than four years, California has had a law on the books meant to protect homes and buildings during an urban firestorm like the Palisade and Eaton fires. But it’s never gone into effect.
In theory, the policy was simple. It directed state officials to develop new rules for buildings in areas with high fire risk, which would govern what people were allowed to put within the five-foot perimeter immediately surrounding their homes. A large body of evidence shows that clearing this area, known in the fire mitigation world as “zone zero,” of combustible materials can be the difference between a building that alights during a wildfire and one that can weather the blaze.
The new rules — essentially just a list of items allowed in that five-foot zone — were due two years ago, by January 1, 2023. But the California Natural Resources Agency, which is drafting the rules for the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to consider, has yet to even present a proposal. Ask anyone who’s been following this thread what’s taking so long, and they’ll almost certainly point to one thing: politics.
“There’s a ton of science about what to do, but the science has run into challenges with social acceptance, and therefore political acceptance,” Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. People do not want to be told how they can or can’t landscape or furnish or otherwise adorn the outside of their homes. Inevitably, when the rules do come out, you’ll hear about Gavin Newsom coming to take away people’s decks and policing gardens.
No one thinks that zone zero rules, if enacted and adhered to, could have prevented fires in the Pacific Palisades or Altadena or saved every structure in the recent fires’ path. But alongside other fire mitigation strategies, zone zero design can significantly lower the chances of a given building burning, and therefore the chances that a fire will spread to neighboring buildings, and ultimately reduce the risk of fires becoming compounding, devastating disasters. Wara likened it to car safety rules like seatbelts and airbags — people still die in car accidents, but far fewer than would otherwise.
The question now is whether the record-breaking destruction in Los Angeles will be enough to convince people that zone zero rules are effective and worthwhile. Past experience shows the answer is not an obvious yes.
There are three ways buildings ignite during a wildfire, Yana Valachovic, a forest scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network who specializes in community resilience and the built environment, told me. They are either exposed to burning embers, direct flames, or radiant heat, though most often a combination.
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Embers — hot, hard debris of burned material from a fire — can be carried miles away from their origin by the wind and create new spot fires next to homes. “What happens with those embers is they get thrown at the building, they hit the walls, the siding, and then drop to the base and collect at the base,” Valachovic said, “so you can have not just one, but thousands of embers at the base of our structures.”
Embers can also penetrate buildings through open windows and ventilation systems. If radiant heat from nearby burning structures causes windows to shatter or fall out, that can also create new vectors for embers to enter the home. “Embers find their way,” Valachovic said.
Fire mitigation experts promote two strategies for reducing vulnerability, and they go hand in hand. The first is home hardening, which could mean building with fire-resistant materials but also includes smaller but effective actions like covering air vents with fine mesh screens and sealing gaps to try to block embers. The second is creating so-called “defensible space,” or a buffer around the building, where any vegetation is carefully selected and managed to slow the spread of fire to and from the building. California divides defensible space into three different zones: Zone one extends from 5 feet away from the structure to 30 feet, and zone two goes out to 100 feet away. Then, of course, there’s zone zero.
The state has had regulations on the books to require at least 30 feet of defensible space in high-risk areas since 1965, and it updated the standards to establish a two-zone system in 2006. In both cases, the rules were “really framed around, how do you interrupt flames running at the building?” said Valachovic. The regulations included thinning trees and removing lower branches, clearing some trees that were closer to homes, clearing dead wood and litter, and pruning branches that hang over buildings. But they still allowed for vegetation right up against the house.
Since then, wildfire post-mortems have found that this scenario of flames burning a path to a building is not a primary driver of structure loss. “It was missing the point,” Valachovic told me of the previous rule structure. “What we’ve seen now for the last decade is that embers are really driving our home loss issue, and so we’re basically allowing all this vegetation and combustible material to be present in the zone that is really very vulnerable.”
In August 2020, after Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California due to an explosion of wildfires, the state legislature passed AB 3074, which finally sought to bridge the gap by creating a new, “ember-resistant zone” — zone zero. Had the rules been implemented under the timeline mandated by the law, new homes would have had to comply beginning in 2023, and existing homes would have had to comply beginning in 2024. Like the earlier defensible space rules, they would have applied to homes located in parts of the state designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones. These are generally areas that you might think of as the “wildland-urban interface,” where homes abut wildland vegetation like forests or scrublands, but others extend into more urban areas. Almost all of the burned area in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, would have been subject to the rules, while only a small portion of the homes in Altadena are in the zone.
When I reached out to the California Natural Resources Agency to ask if there was an updated timeline for the regulations, one of the first things that Tony Andersen, the Deputy Secretary for Communications, told me, was not about the timeline but about the ultimate cost of compliance.
“We recognize there are costs associated with doing this work around homes and structures,” Andersen told me via email, “and we are focused on identifying options for financial assistance as well as education and outreach to help owners prepare and prioritize mitigations.” He then noted that the rulemaking was a “complex process” that the agency wanted to get right, and said it aimed to present a draft proposal to the Board “as soon as is feasible, most likely in the coming months.”
Andersen’s response illustrates one of several tensions that have made it difficult to write the zone zero rules — and will ultimately make them difficult to implement. If the rules say you can’t have a wooden deck, for example, or you can’t have a fence that touches the building, homeowners could face costly retrofits. And despite witnessing the horror of destructive wildfires, many homeowners don’t want to switch their wooden fence for a metal one, or replace their bushes with gravel.
Five feet might sound like a negligible amount of space, but people are attached to the aesthetics of this zone. Homeowners have become used to “softening” the line where the walls meet the ground by filling it in with vegetation, Valachovic told me. “We really developed this idea that we don’t visually want to see our foundations,” she said. “From a fire defense perspective, this idea that we have combustible material basically ringing our houses and our structures, that is problematic.”
Several people I interviewed for this story asked if I had seen a documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California called Bring Your Own Brigade. The film captures a series of city council meetings in 2019, when officials were considering updating local building standards. They weigh a number of ideas that would reduce the risk of embers collecting on top of, inside, or next to homes, including eliminating gutters and requiring roof overhangs and a five-foot setback for any combustible material.
At the time, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures. But during a public hearing, community members lashed out at the potential cost, warned that new standards would prevent displaced residents from moving back, and decried the aesthetic implications.
“Paradise is an individualistic town,” one person says. “That’s part of the charm and the quirkiness. We don’t need consistency and uniformity.”
In another scene, a city councilmember asks Paradise Fire Chief John Messina to narrow down the list to just one rule that would make the community more fire resistant. “That five-foot barrier around your house is extremely important,” he replies. “That would be the No. 1 thing out of all of this that I would say would defend your home the best and have the most impact.” Shortly after, the council votes down the measure.
Michael Wara, who recalled the scene to me over the phone, said a similar thing happened when the fire chief in his community in Mill Valley tried to get the city council to adopt zone zero rules. “The word got out in the community that this crazy fire chief was going to make us rip up our front yards,” he said. When the council convened for a vote, more than a thousand people showed up to oppose it. The council ended up passing it as a voluntary measure.
To Wara, part of the problem is the language used to communicate these ideas with the public. “Zone zero” and “hardening” conjure a bunker mentality, he said. “I do not want my family to live in a bunker that is hardened to attack. I want my family to live in a home that is welcoming.”
He also thinks the state can reach a compromise, like allowing succulents and other fire-resistant greenery in zone zero. The rules don’t have to turn these areas into gravel and concrete wastelands to be effective.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently included photos in a notice to homeowners about defensible space rules and the upcoming zone zero regulations that illustrate how landscapes might strike that balance. The images feature stone walkways immediately next to homes, followed by raised beds made of metal and concrete containing attractive landscaping. Not quite “quirky” and “charming,” but far from a barren dystopia.
Despite the delay in implementing zone zero, California has tried to pitch it as part of a strategy to solve the state’s insurance crisis. In 2022, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted new rules requiring insurance companies to provide discounts to homeowners who do home hardening retrofits and create defensible space.
“That’s terrific,” Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lara’s predecessor as insurance commissioner, told me. “But you don’t get the discount if they won’t write you the insurance.”
Jones said the bigger issue is that the models insurance companies use to decide whether or not to write a policy do not account for fire mitigation efforts. A homeowner could take every action on the list for home hardening, create a zone zero, live in a community that’s investing in aggressive fuels reduction, and so on, and insurance companies could still deny them coverage. Last year, Jones wrote a bill that would have required companies to change the models they use to determine coverage to account for mitigation. Several insurance industry trade groups opposed the bill, arguing that it was “premature and impossible to implement given the real-world data constraints,” and that it was “inconsistent” with the state’s efforts to “restore a healthy and competitive insurance market.” It didn’t pass.
If following zone zero guidelines meant having a shot at getting insurance, maybe people would be more open to doing it, Jones argued to me. But as things stand, that’s not the case. “I don’t think the failure is so much in the state developing the standards as it is in the lack of political courage to stand up to the insurance industry and say, hey, look, enough is enough. We’re going to pass a law to require your models to account for this.”
This past year, the California legislature passed a law giving existing homes three years, instead of just one, to comply with zone zero rules once they are finalized, whenever that is. And if the regulations are finalized this year, it’s possible that some of the rebuilt structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have to meet them.
Ultimately, Valachovic sees hope in fire mitigation work. The narrative that climate change is driving these destructive wildfires can make people feel helpless. But there are so many low-cost, simple things people can do to reduce their exposure. “I just feel like we have a moral imperative to share practical, reasonable actions that people can take to make a difference, and to know that with that, the odds improve substantially.”