On January 8 this year a film crew was on the ground in the LA firestorm capturing footage that is, in the aftermath of the tragedy, helping to explain the fire behavior and sheer destruction of the event.
Their work is now ready for viewing as an hour documentary on PBS. The program has interviews with fire officials who were there on the day, scientists, residents, and a volunteer fire brigade, who discuss the challenges of urban firestorms and the need to better protect communities.
Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm is out of filmmaker Trip Jennings and Balance Media, who produced Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire two years ago.
Camera operator, Josh Finbow films the aftermath of the Eaton Fire from a fire helicopter, Altadena, CA. Photo: Connor Nelson
Watch the television premiere of Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm on Wednesday, March 19 and online thereafter:
Television broadcast PBS Member Stations – 10PM Pacific and Eastern/9PM Central, online at that link from 5.30pm Pacific.
PBS Terra YouTube – Join director Trip Jennings, PBS host Maiya May and crew for a live chat at 5:30 PM Pacific Time
PBS host Maiya May surveys the destruction of a home in the Eaton Fire, Altadena, CA. Photo: Josh Finbow
Produced as a special edition of PBS Weathered, host Maiya May explains a play-by-play of the fires with first-person footage, cinematic fire footage, and animations created in collaboration with NASA.
The show will be available after the premiere at the link above so please share with anyone you believe would be interested in this program.
But please note – for those outside of the United States access to PBS may be denied, but the YouTube links should work everywhere.
Connor Nelson, while filming the Palisades Fire. Photo: Josh Finbow
Remains found late last year in the San Bernardino Mountains in California have been positively identified as Carlos Baltazar, a US Forest Service firefighter who went missing during the El Dorado Fire in 2020, county officials have confirmed.
An investigation began in October last year when a hunter discovered a human remains in a remote part of the mountains near Highway 18.
As reported by Wildfire Today at the time, Baltazar was a member of the Big Bear Interagency Hotshot Crew in September 2020 that fought the El Dorado Fire, sparked after a gender reveal party gone wrong. Charles Morton, serving as the squad boss for the crew, died in the fire, and Baltazar’s family told local media that Baltazar had seemed depressed in the days after Morton’s death and went missing the week after.
The deadly El Dorado Fire scorched nearly 23,000 acres after erupting in September 2020.
A California couple pleaded guilty after accepting a plea deal to take responsibility for the blaze that was sparked by the gender reveal. The male pleaded guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of recklessly causing a fire to an inhabited structure, while the female pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors. He was sentenced to one year in a county jail, two years felony probation and 200 hours of community service. In addition, the family was ordered to pay victims’ restitution of $1,789,972.
When the fires started burning in Los Angeles this month, firefighters from around the country streamed into California to help, including Kelly Martin.
Kelly has been fighting wildfires and advocating for the health of firefighters for years. She co-founded the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, was Chief of Fire and Aviation at Yosemite National Park, has chaired two National Wildfire Coordinating Group programs and has just completed a six-year term as a Board Member of the International Association of Wildland Fire with her final two years as President.
She has spent many years fighting fires in California but, she admits, she has never seen anything like this. “It is really beyond anything that I have seen in my career…it looks almost apocalyptic is some areas, I think that is a fair assessment.”
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) Leadership Committee has announced the recipients of the Paul Gleason “Lead By Example” award.
The award was created by the NWCG to remember Paul Gleason’s contributions to the wildland fire service and as a pioneer in wildfire safety. The intent of this award is to recognize individuals or groups who exhibit this same spirit and who exemplify the wildland fire leadership values and principles.
This year’s recipients are:
• Sam Bowen, Mark Twain Veteran Crew Superintendent, U.S. Forest
Service (Initiative & Innovation)
• Greg Titus, St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge Zone Fire Management
Officer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Mentoring & Teamwork)
• Renae Crippen, Blue Mountain Interagency Dispatch Center Manager,
U.S. Forest Service (Motivation & Vision)
• Eric Carlson, OMNA International Instructor (Lifetime Achievement)
Congratulations to all!
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group was established in 1976 to provide national leadership in the US to enable interoperable wildland fire operations among federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial partners.
For more information about the winners and more about the NWCG go to: Lead by Example Awards
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:
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:
As if we didn’t need more evidence of overlapping wildfire seasons, fire activity is competing for headlines with snow and ice warnings in both northern and southern hemispheres around the globe.
Today a fast-moving fire is threatening residents in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles and has closed parts of the Pacific Coast Highway between Malibu and Santa Monica. The situation is developing fast with the Los Angeles Fire Department issuing mandatory evacuation orders and traffic alerts:
Palisades fire 7 Jan 2025, Los Angeles Fire Department
CAL FIRE Incident Management Team 2 has been activated to the #PalisadesFire in Los Angeles County and will assume command on Wednesday morning, January 8. As of this evening (1/7), the fire has burned over 1,200 acres. #CritcalFireWeather is expected over southern California… pic.twitter.com/owTjHPkokJ
High winds and low relative humidity will produce critical to extremely critical fire weather in southern California through Thursday.
Critical fire weather conditions and damaging downslope winds expected through Thursday across portions of Southern California with extremely critical fire weather likely for parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties on Wednesday…
A Particularly Dangerous Situation is expected for the highlighted portion of our area from 7AM – 1PM on Wednesday. Very strong gusts and low relative humidity will allow any fires that develop to spread VERY rapidly! Wind damage including downed trees expected in some spots! pic.twitter.com/cL0Ct4ZeR5
California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday that these could be some of the worst fire conditions the region had seen for many years with the wind forecast combined with the extremely dry conditions with low humidity.
Meanwhile after three weeks and a disrupted Christmas, the long-running bushfire in the Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park in Victoria Australia is now contained. The fire began on 17 December after dry lightning started multiple fires in the southern part of the national park.
With a fire footprint circumference of 262 miles (422 kms), more than 188,000 acres (76,000 hectares) of national park and agricultural land was burned with smoke covering most of south-west Victoria and parts of Melbourne.
With most of fire in dense forest property losses were relatively small and there were no serious personal injuries. Early data indicates livestock losses include 775 sheep, one horse, one beef cattle and 1,285 beehives, plus 335 miles (540 kms) of fencing.
New South Wales this week contended with more than 70 fire outbreaks across the state, many started by lightning strikes as summer storms passed over. The firegrounds are now seeing welcome rain. Earlier, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service showed how to get the water to a dry fireground:
A multi-agency firefighting effort continues as crews work to contain several fires burning in isolated bushland throughout the Hunter Valley. Due to their remoteness, bulk water tankers from the #RFS & contractors are moving a staggering 1.2 million litres of water each day. pic.twitter.com/OglNDPT9Pj
