
Many of the fires in southern California remain active but there is no shortage of views on what went wrong or right, what could or couldn’t be done, who is to blame and what do we all do now?
Wildfire Today is keen to find the most important lessons to be learnt from these fires.
Terms like “unprecedented” and “unpredicted” are not helpful – especially when we have seen it before and knew it could happen again. Those term take away responsibility and action. They excuse the fact that things could have been done, by many.
Dr Marty Alexander, long time Canadian wildland fire researcher, has reminded Wildfire Today of the 1974 publication by Clive M. Countryman, “Can Southern California Wildland Conflagrations be Stopped?”.
Countryman was at the time of writing a wildland fire behavior scientist with the USDA Forest Service in southern California. His paper was a reflection of the 1970 fire season in California where 16 people died and more than 200 000 hectares of land burned, and around 700 homes lost.
His statement on The Fire Problem barely differs from today:
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- Climate, fuels, topography and people create fire problems
- Relatively few fires become conflagrations
- Conflagrations are most frequent during Santa Ana winds
- Suppression of Santa Ana fires is difficult
His other conclusions include:
- Fire prevention has limited value
- Firefighting techniques and equipment and not adequate
His solutions then rely on a range of fuel modification measures.
For more nostalgia, watch these 1971 newsreels – on the same topic, same problem:
Having looked back to see what we already know, Wildfire Today now turns to finding a way through new wildfire challenges.
Here are some tough questions for starters:
Evacuations
To have a large fire in such a heavily populated area with so few deaths or injuries is extraordinary. This suggests the evacuation process was largely successful – people were moved out of harms way. And yet we saw those abandoned vehicles on narrow mountainous roads that funnelled people onto Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard , panicked residents fleeing on foot, bulldozers shunting cars off the road to gain access for fire fighting vehicles – that’s not how an orderly evacuation is meant to work, that is last-minute, panicked fleeing. There are many international examples of disorderly evacuations going horribly wrong.
Is there are better way to get thousands of people out of the way of a fast moving wildfire? If evacuations occur well before the flames arrive that would help. But how early do you do early evacuations? When is it too late to leave? Where do 100,000 people evacuate to?
Suppression
As Carpenter noted in 1971 we need to all understand that once a fire gets to this size under these conditions all attempts to simply put it out are futile. The focus is on protecting people and strategic assets. The fire fighters on the ground and in the air understand this. Does the wider community understand this?? Does this explain all the anger that “someone should have done something”, and the thinking that if it wasn’t for a few empty hydrants and grounded aircraft (due to high winds) the fire would have been suppressed?
Fuel management
Many, many others since Carpenter have said you have got to better manage the fuels if you want to have any chance of managing the fire. What does good fuel management look like in southern California and when do we know that we have done enough? Would have it made a difference for these fires when it looks more like an urban conflagration with house to house burning?
Built environment
Are we living in the wrong places? If we know that wildfires are inevitable, why do we build homes in the middle of the highest wildfire risk areas? Any other day, it is clearly a wonderful place to live. But on days like 7 January 2025, this place was hell on earth. Do we place faith in the development of “fireproof” structures, or do we just accept that homes will burn?
Recovery
Once the emergency response phase settles and the debris is cleared, what does long term recovery look like? How do we build back better without just repeating the same mistakes? How does a community put aside the blame and divisions to work together on building long term resilience, and be ready for the next, inevitable, big fire?
There have been many articulate voices in the last few days with this Los Angeles Times article one of the better ones. It draws on wildfire researcher Jack Cohen, who encourages us to abandon our thoughts that this was a wildland fire and see it more as an urban fire that leapt from house to house, and fire historian Stephen Pyne who places today’s fire within a century of fires across a whole continent:
Lack of fuel management due to political agendas were 100% at fault for this disaster!
Change my mind.
As someone who grew up in the Southern California area in the 1970-2000’s, you really can’t understand the conditions that the Santa Ana winds create. 0 to 60 mph winds in the span of 10 minutes, the continuous winds that blow anything not tied down or deeply rooted, the ability these winds have to literally suck any moisture out of the environment create fuel for these fires that are literally out of control from the start.
In 1993 the Laguna Fire swept through and destroyed the canyon homes during Santa Ana winds and the same questions were raised. In the aftermath of that fire, Laguna Beach and the county revised building codes to attempt to mitigate some of the issues that are raised EVERY TIME there are fires of this magnitude.
As long as there are people willing to live in these areas, they should be aware of the risks involved. People being people, they ignore them and tend to try to blame the ones doing the work to migitate the consequences.
I am glad to hear that there were so few lives lost, and honor those that are fighting the fires.
Very good summary of the problem that was identified in the early 70s Mr Countryman should have been more closely listened to and he was but people listen only for a few years after an event that occurs with great losses as the years pass so do concerns for the losses to bad that a sustained effort to solve the problem goes away as the fuels continue to grow and the hazards as well grow and populations that didn’t live through the losses grow older or are no longer with us and new folks have no interest until it affects them.
It has been sometime since I posted a comment here, but after reading this article I feel compelled to do so now.
I was amazed to see how quickly the blame game began, how so very rediculous.
I also feel that using statements like unprecedented and unexpected are disingenuous to say ther least.
I sincerly hope that state officials use this tragedy to look at real meaningful and realistic ways to rebuild this areas in such a way that would greatly reduce the chance of this ever happening again (Stringent Building Codes), it is unrealistic to keep putting our FF’s in harms in areas that have no chance of survival, and just think about the expousure that resources were sujected to for hours, absolutly toxic.
All the talk about inadequate water supplies, really, come on let’s be real, there is no water sytem on earth that could handle the supply and demand required to fight this (these) fires, too many homes stacked in a very small foot print, lets not do this again, I know land is so very valuable near or on the coast, but putting 4 homes on one acre is rediculous, the fire transitioned from veg to structures, the homes (structures) were the prymary fuel type that carried the fire down the the PCH.
Maybe it’s time to conduct evac drills with some of these communities that are at risk, the debacle of citizens freaking out and abandoning their vehicles and blocking ingress/egress is inexcusable, oh I get it, its horrifying to go thru something like this, there is very little that prepares us for something like this, but we do need to do better, we have to.
And lets all agree that this is not the last time this is going to occur, the next time is just around the corner.
Oh sure there were things that could have been done better, I spent 25 years of my 38 year in so cal and its my opinion the best FF’s in the world are found there, I know I am a bit biased. If you spend enough time in Calif Wildland fire you will see a few fires like these most recent fires, that is waht santa anna winds do, they wreak havoc on ouir communities, every time we have one of these fires we soon forget the last, just human nature I guess. Do we still talk about the Old fire Cedar fire, lessoned learned applications. just asking, do we, Im not sure, I hope we do…..
Lastly the cost 250 billion, who pays for this, how do we pay for this, going to take decades…..let’s do it better, lets learn from our past.
There is so much more to be said and in the ensuing month there will be much said on this topioc there always is…..I wish all those that lost so much all my thought and prayers as they begin the rebuilding, this is a national tradegy to be suere……END
Countryman’s research stands to this day. Anyone believing it’s out-of-date, might want to re-read ANY of his writings and apply it today.
Any objections by non-believers, well, you know who you are
i may well be way off base here. but why do “we” always try to find a bad guy? sure there were some arson fires here, but was the first fire arson? does anyone yet know? the celebrity homes that burned is going to make things worse in my opinion. that brit reporter at the airport grilling the LA mayor was way outta line. im 90% certain she did not have an aircraft equipped with all the comms she would need to monitor the fire from her flight. yet he just pushed, then he said why did you pick this time to take a trip?. imsorry, but that guy is an idiot,, he also asked her, why did you drain all the reservoirs at this time?it seemed like he wanted to have her hung. then all the right wingers started saying thing like,, she’s a dem, wouldnt have happened under a republican.. the camp fire fire was in 2018.. under trump, these fires in socal together still dont equal the deaths or acreage in paradise.