At least 11 people have been killed and over 10,000 structures burned in and around Los Angeles since a series of wildfires erupted on Tuesday. Propelled by powerful Santa Ana winds and historically dry conditions, the fires quickly became among the most destructive in California history and among the costliest disasters ever seen in the U.S. Roughly 150,000 people remain under evacuation orders on Friday, with blazes just beginning to see containment.
No official cause has yet been identified. But what’s known is that climate change and other factors have made wildfire disasters ever more common in California, leading to widespread public health impacts, upheaval in housing and insurance markets and devastating loss for those affected. Below, UC Berkeley scholars offer their insights into the causes of and fallout from this week’s fires and the uncertainty ahead.
You study how environments are managed or mismanaged. What are the mismanaged issues that led to the catastrophe in Los Angeles?
Fire is a normal, recurring event in these ecosystems, and the north-south trending canyons around Malibu have experienced large fires many times in the past century. So these are not novel or unforeseeable events. However, climate change amplifies several of the conditions for fire: low fuel moisture content, high temperatures, extremes of both precipitation (which drives vegetation growth, producing fuels for fires) and longer/hotter dry seasons. With winds upwards of 60-70 mph, there’s basically no way to stop a fire under these conditions.
So the core issue is the presence of so many houses in these areas. Building them has been abetted for decades by zoning, market forces, misleading assurances of and misplaced confidence in fire protection, and the political clout of developers and homeowners. The continued willingness of insurers to write policies has been both a cause and an effect of these drivers, though this may be changing now. Stricter building codes could help reduce risks and impacts, but short of requiring completely fire-proof materials, no code could protect houses from the intensity of fire seen in the past week.
There’s nothing surprising about wealthier neighborhoods being highly exposed to climate change impacts in this case: As Mike Davis pointed out in his 1998 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” past fires have often worked like socio-economic ratchets, pushing out middle-class residents and replacing them with wealthier newcomers who can afford to (re)build.
As far as politics and science, the science around fire in landscapes such as these has been clear for half a century: It is a question of when and how, not if they will burn. A vigorous and proactive program of fuels management (prescribed burning, mechanical thinning, and managed livestock grazing) would be the most scientifically robust management strategy, but existing homes and public sentiments are major obstacles to any such program. These are especially acute in the LA region, with its politically empowered property owners, chaparral vegetation, air quality rules, and Santa Ana winds.
One can be quite confident that the fire conditions of the past week will recur, and very likely get worse. It will be interesting to see if not rebuilding, at least in some of the burned areas, receives any serious public consideration and debate in the months ahead.
—Nathan Sayre, professor of geography