Los Angeles Wildfires

What We’re Missing About the Los Angeles Wildfires

A scientist explains the role of climate change, infrastructure, power lines—and goats.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County caught fire. Driven by unusually strong Santa Ana winds, as my colleagues report, five fires have ignited some 27,000 acres of land (and counting), and forced state officials to issue evacuation orders for more than 100,000 residents. Five people have already died in the fires, authorities say.

The Palisades Fire, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, and the Eaton Fire, impacting Altadena and Pasadena to the east, are the largest. While it’s unclear how exactly the fires started, experts point to a combination of factors that have made conditions ripe for disaster. The entire region has seen extremely low autumn and winter rainfall, with downtown Los Angeles, the LA Times reports, seeing less than a quarter of an inch of rain since October 1—compared to an average 4.64 inches in a typical season.

“You combine that with the high winds, and you really have the perfect storm in terms of a big fire event,” said Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To better understand how this happened and what anyone can do about it, I spoke to Keeley, who explained what the Santa Ana winds are, how climate change comes into play, what homeowners can do to protect themselves, and how goats—yes, goats—can help.

What’s going on with the Santa Ana winds? Why are they so strong?

When you get high pressure in the east, and low pressure off the coast, you get winds moving from east to west. Normally, winds blow from the ocean onto the land. That’s a normal wind flow. When we get a Santa Ana wind, everything reverses. And because the pressure system is often very high, you get very severe winds.

I saw reports of 60-to-70-mile-per-hour winds. Typically, it’s more likely to be half that speed. If you have fires being blown at 60 miles per hour, it’s extremely dangerous because people often don’t have time to get out. But it’s obvious from the Eaton Fire that they didn’t. Not everybody got out.

Scientists have warned that with climate change, fires and fire seasons will get worse. But can we attribute these fires to climate change?

Well, there’s really no way to ascribe a particular fire event to climate change. Climate change involves data that show climate trends over time. No question, though, that climate change is exacerbating our fire regime and affecting fires, making them potentially worse.

Understandably, much of the focus right now is on the loss of life and property. What about impacts to the ecosystem?

In a nutshell, these high-severity fires are not a problem. These ecosystems are well adapted to high-severity fires. Where the fire started in Pacific Palisades, for example, is chaparral vegetation. It’s a shrubland vegetation. We have good evidence that this vegetation has evolved along with fire for at least 20 million years.

In California, we have perhaps 100 herbaceous species—like wildflowers—that are only seen after a fire. They come up in abundance after a fire, they persist for maybe a year or two, and then they disappear, remaining as dormant seeds.

But what we’re seeing now is more of these severe fire events. With more frequent fires, we’re seeing large expanses of our native shrublands being eliminated and replaced by weeds. And so there’s large portions of native, California vegetation that have been totally lost.

So what does that mean for controlled burning? Should we be doing more controlled burns to prevent this kind of fire? Less?

With these fires, controlled burning would likely have had no impact whatsoever. With forests in California, we’ve caused fuels [shrubs, leaves, and other plant material] to accumulate, so we have to do prescription burning to keep those fuels down. I’m very much an advocate of burning in these forests.

But when you get to Southern California and chaparral, it’s totally different. Fires, first off, were never very frequent there. And with more people in the landscape starting more and more fires, we have no unusual fuel accumulation. And so doing prescription burning isn’t going to change the fuel structure.

Plus, when you have Santa Ana winds, it doesn’t matter what the fuel structure looks like. It doesn’t matter if you have done prescription burning. When you have these high winds, even if they run into a prescribed burn, the embers are just blown right over that burned area and ignite on the other side.

Firefighters do need space to fight a fire, so doing fuel treatments around homes makes sense if you want to defend homes. However, prescription burning can be dangerous in Southern California, so [officials] often use animals like goats to reduce the fuels.

So goats could be one part of the solution for preventing the worst fire damage—what about other solutions?

Just doing a “fuel break”—that’s what they call these areas—doesn’t stop these fires from burning homes. It’s not the flames from the fire that ignite homes. Most homes are ignited by embers that blow in the wind and land on the house.

And to stop that, there’s a lot that homeowners can do in terms of what is called “hardening” your home, basically making it more fire-safe.

In the last 20 years, we’ve had five times more area burn due to power lines than in the previous 20.

For example, just the types of vents in your roof can have a big impact. A lot of construction is done with “open eaves,” with attic vents parallel to the ground, so when the embers are blown, they blow right in and ignite the home. But the home I live in now, we have “closed eaves,” where the vents are covered and point down towards the ground, so there’s less chance for embers to get in the attic.

As a scientist who’s watching all of this happen, do you think there is any context that’s been missing from the coverage?

It’s important to recognize where the fire started. The Eaton Fire started right in the middle of a developed area. It’s not one of these fires that started off in the mountains east of LA and then burned down into LA so that people had a chance to plan. This started right within the urban environment. That’s the primary reason why it was so destructive.

We don’t know what the [direct] causes are, but there’s reason to believe they may have been driven by power line failures. In the last 20 years, we’ve had five times more area burn due to power line failure–ignited fires than in the previous 20 years.

So the big message is, climate change may be exacerbating all this, but population growth is another factor that we have to keep in mind. In the last 20 years, we’ve added something like 6 million people to California. You add that many people, and they end up having to live further and further out from the urban environment—and oftentimes, in areas of extreme risk.