The Los Angeles Fires Accelerated the Looming Natural Gas Crisis

The fires that have swept greater Los Angeles over the past two weeks have shattered long-held assumptions about wildfire risk. Unlike many of the catastrophic, climate-intensified wildfires that have burned various swaths of California over the past decade, the Palisades and Eaton fires have blazed past the wildland-urban interface to devastate a wide variety of neighborhoods – some of the region’s oldest and some of its newest; gridded city blocks as well as winding mountainside subdivisions; apartments, duplexes, and bungalow courts as well as stand-alone suburban houses.

In other words, the places that have burned represent a far wider swath of the American urban landscape than most burn zones. Likewise, rebuilding these places is going to raise not only locally-specific questions of wildfire safety, adaptation, and retreat, but also universally-applicable questions about energy provision and decarbonization that every American city will eventually be forced to confront. In particular, greater Los Angeles’ burned neighborhoods are already revealing a looming natural gas crisis, decades before most American cities will face it.

In greater Los Angeles’ grim collection of leveled neighborhoods, gas meters protruding from the rubble serve as stark reminders of the elaborate buried pipeline network that powered homes and businesses. As communities begin to rebuild, California’s building code, state resiliency grants, and federal Inflation Reduction Act incentives together make it highly likely that the majority of new structures will go electric, cutting their dependence on the outmoded and dangerous gas connections that may have complicated firefighting efforts. This same transition to all-electric buildings is unfolding more slowly across the rest of the country, where many residents are just beginning to embrace the ease, efficiency, and quality of heat pumps and induction stoves, or to recognize the health risks of burning gas indoors.

In even the most thoroughly devastated neighborhoods, though, a few incongruous buildings have survived. As the rebuilding effort reaches its conclusion, these grizzled veterans will become solitary consumers of gas in a soon-to-be-electrified landscape. But the cost of maintaining the branching networks that provide gas won’t shrink along with the gas customer base. With maintenance costs fixed but revenue decimated, the gas system could begin to crumble. Remaining gas users could see their bills spiral higher as greater Los Angeles’ leading gas utility, SoCalGas, attempts to meet its costs and more customers flee the system. Worse still, declining revenue could pressure the utility to cut back on repairs, leading to neglected pipelines that leak, corrode, and even spark future fires.

A version of this crisis will come for every American neighborhood eventually. Gas networks only work economically and safely when costs are shared across a broad user base. Without coordination, maintaining the gas network in electrifying neighborhoods will rapidly become an unsustainable risk borne most by those least able to transition away from gas. The best solution to this approaching crisis is both bold and simple: act proactively.Prune back the branching gas pipeline network to protect both the system as a whole and the burned neighborhoods themselves.

Local government, state regulators, and our gas and electric utilities can together support the transition of burned neighborhoods’ remaining buildings off of gas so that entire branches of the system can be shut off, leaving safer and cleaner all-electric neighborhoods in their place. This is the only way Angelenos can begin to avoid the post-fire catastrophe of skyrocketing costs and collapsing safety.

By removing an entire branch of the gas distribution network, greater Los Angeles can simultaneously make the electric grid safer and more resilient. Over the past decade, overhead power lines have become famous as one of the leading causes of wildfire ignition – but burying them usually imposes an eye-watering cost that the electric system cannot afford. Much of that cost, though, stems from the need to dig by hand around existing gas lines. By shutting down their local gas networks for good, burned and high-fire-risk neighborhoods can eliminate the greatest risk and biggest expense of burying electric lines – and in some cases, might even be able to run electric lines through the decommissioned pipes themselves.

In one sweep, greater Los Angeles’ burn zones and high-fire-risk neighborhoods like them elsewhere can eliminate two major sources of fire danger and chart a path away from the looming threat of unmanaged gas system collapse. In the midst of the state’s intensifying insurance crisis, systematically reducing the risk of new fires at the neighborhood level would also offer insurers provable risk mitigation. Pulling off this transformation, though, will require quick action — before rebuilding begins. So far, state and local leaders have focused on promising the return of normalcy, in part by attempting to suspend all-electric building requirements. Given that all-electric construction is both faster and cheaper, this rollback makes little practical sense. At a broader level, these early rollbacks constitute an attempt to avoid the hard questions of how to rebuild more safely and resiliently – and when it has become too dangerous to rebuild at all. The win-win of systematic gas decommissioning and electric undergrounding offers an onramp to those more difficult conversations.

Just how to negotiate an entire neighborhood’s simultaneous transition away from natural gas remains an unsolved problem of political will and neighborly cooperation, but greater Los Angeles’ burned zones are suddenly forcing the question. Creating a clear, affordable path to electrification for the surviving buildings will require pairing increased financial support with coordinated planning and clear deadlines to help homeowners and businesses understand the urgency of the switch.

Amidst the incalculable losses of these fires, greater Los Angeles is being confronted not only with the painful challenges of recovery, but also with the looming specter of new crises accelerated by the fires’ devastation. The risk of gas system collapse has come to greater Los Angeles decades before it will reach most other American communities. Confronting it before it becomes a disaster of its own can help secure the region’s devastated neighborhoods against future fires, while blazing a trail for other high-fire-risk neighborhoods across the country to follow.