A Cal Fire plan aimed at addressing Southern California’s wildfire crisis would actually make it worse, according to the San Diego Superior Court.
The court found the agency’s plan to reduce wildfire risk in the region by clearing vegetation would heighten wildfire risk, according to journalist Noah Haggerty with the Los Angeles Times. The judgment was delivered after a 5-year-long legal action filed by the California Chaparral Institute and the Endangered Habitats League against Cal Fire’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The agency’s Vegetation Management Program, in part, focuses on cutting fuel breaks in Southern California’s native chaparral ecosystems, according to the report. The court agreed with the plaintiffs that the plan would let non-native and fast-growing plants take chaparral grasses’ place.
Cal Fire argued that it addressed this issue in its environmental impact review, but the plaintiffs said the agency didn’t take into account that the invasive grasses that take chaparral’s place are much more flammable and subsequently increase fire risk.
The court ordered Cal Fire to address the potential for plant type conversion to worsen wildfire risk and, until it does, it won’t be able to rely on its blanket environmental review to comply with the state’s environmental quality act.
Difficult and dangerous wildfires can and do occur across a wide variety of fuel types, all over the globe. But many of the worst fires occur in the western United States. Nowhere in the world is firefighting capability and capacity greater, yet the impact of wildfires is becoming worse.
Despite enormous increases in funding for fire fighting, wildfires have become more destructive and more deadly since the United States government organized for wildfire protection in 1905. Civilian fatalities have not been higher since the turn of that last century. Take that in for a moment.
The convergence of uncharacteristically dense biomass, over-accumulated fuels, droughts, extreme weather, and unconstrained growth at the wildland-urban interface have brought the western United States to this crisis.
This opinion piece is dedicated to the memory of Robert (Bob) W. Mutch (1934-2024), proud smokejumper (1954, 1955), esteemed fire ecologist, friend. This article was drawn from the keynote address, at invitation, for the Zig Zag Hotshot crew’s 50th reunion in Zig Zag, Oregon, May 9-11, 2025. It is published in the latest edition of Wildfire Magazine.
Since 2000, more than 300 wildfires, each with reported suppression costs of $20 million or more, have burned over the 11 western states. The fires burned out of control until firefighters got some relief in weather or could exploit a break in fuels. These incidents blackened more than 25 million acres and cost more than $13 billion to suppress. As staggering as these costs were, they represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars in property losses, infrastructure destruction, natural resource damages, human health impacts from smoke and other wildfire related consequences that go mostly unaccounted.
The wildfire crisis in the western United States is defined by the scale and scope of present dangers and future threats. Mega-fires have deep and long-lasting social, economic, and ecological impacts and can no longer be dismissed as aberrations; they require actions that are more far-reaching and more comprehensive than we are accustomed to thinking about.
The crisis is not so much a fire-management crisis as it is a land-management crisis that traces to the deterioration of fire-adapted ecosystems and the vulnerable condition of fire-prone landscapes, including houses. Building resilience in these ecosystems will be key to reducing wildfire severity.
“Nowhere in the world is firefighting capability greater—yet nowhere are wildfires growing more destructive.”
An open Ponderosa forest of 1897 (left), frequently underburdened by lightning fires or tribal burning, and a changed Ponderosa pine forest circa early 1990s (right), where fire has been excluded. It is on these dense, dry sites that fire managers and communities have experienced some of the most dangerous, destructive and costly wildfires in the United States.
A recent assessment that I conducted with my colleague Matt Panunto, a GIS specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, found that while many of the worst wildfires in the western United States occurred in perennially dangerous chaparral brushlands, two-thirds of the highest cost incidents were in conifer forests within the natural distribution of Ponderosa pine. A century ago, these open forests were among the most benign in terms of potential wildfire severity. Today, these same forests are choked with laddered, overabundant biomass and over-accumulated fuels. These sites are high risk because they are commonly where people and development are most concentrated in the forested areas of the intermountain western United States.
Changes in species composition, stand structure, and ecological function underpin the wildfire crisis.
The most aggressive firefighting tactics, the largest airtankers, and the most novel re-organizations cannot buck these changes or ignore the ecologies involved. The biggest challenge confronting government is not continuing to build greater, faster firefighting capacity, but instead building a mitigation workforce and reconciling the myriad regulatory requirements, fiscal rules, land management policies, social disincentives, and other factors that impede restoring resilient conditions on fire-adapted, fire-prone landscapes.
Some examples:
1. Under current environmental requirements, wildfires are treated as excepted events; their impacts are presumed to be unavoidable accidents of nature. Although man’s influence in predisposing many wildfire outcomes establishes an argument against this exception, the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1974), and other regulations do not anticipate, measure, or consider wildfire impacts with respect to the intent of the laws. Consequently, today’s wildfire impacts are often imperiling the very values these laws set out to save.
If this is a crisis, governing environmental regulations need to level the playing field. Proposed mitigation treatments should be weighed against probable wildfire outcomes in the absence of those treatments. A mechanism to comprehensively compile the cumulative impacts from wildfires needs to be established as the means to measure the consequences of avoiding mitigation treatments over the long term.
2. Under current fiscal rules, wildfires are considered emergency events, funded from unlimited reserve accounts. National shared resources (aviation assets, retardant bases, smokejumpers, hotshot crews, incident management teams, tool caches, dispatch centers, fire training facilities) and other firefighting assets are funded off the top, as a priority. A total mobility concept supports the firefighting effort. Resources from anywhere in the United States (and sometimes from the military and other countries) can be brought to bear in dealing with a wildfire emergency.
On the other hand, mitigation work operates from a constrained budget, often subject to several overhead cost deductions throughout the organization and dependent on whatever local resources can be obtained. Projects requiring the sequencing of selective harvest, understory thinning, and pile burning, followed by lower intensity prescribed burning are especially difficult to budget for. Although US Forest Service researcher Kimberly Davis and her team, in a recent 30-year meta-analysis, found this approach to be the most effective in reducing wildfire severity, it is seldom attempted in the western United States. Sequenced treatments have the added benefits of improving margins of safety, reducing prescribed burn intensities, lowering smoke impacts, and reducing the risks of escape.
Now, nearly always, a wildfire is a higher priority for funding, skilled personnel, and specialized assets than a prescribed burning or other mitigation work.
If this is a crisis, federal and state government needs to fully fund restoration work at scales commensurate with the wildfire threat, even if it requires multiple entries to mechanically thin or reduce fuels ahead of prescribed burning. The agencies need to mobilize for prescribed burning opportunities and other mitigation work the same way they now mobilize for wildfire emergencies with a dedicated workforce. It can no longer be “easier”’ to fight bad fires than it is to mitigate the hazards that fuel them.
3. The US Forest Service is a functionally oriented organization that operates from a budget arranged on line items. Budgets for wildlife habitat, timber production, watershed management, fuels reduction, and other activities are allocated with an expectation for acres treated or board-foot volume outputs. There is no line-item allocation or target that measures the health and resilience of fire-adapted ecosystems. Many natural resource objectives – by design or by default – aim for or result in undisturbed conditions. Ironically, under drought conditions, managing for undisturbed conditions in deteriorated fire disturbance regimes often threatens the resource aim.
If this is a crisis, the US Forest Service needs to better align natural-resource objectives with the dynamics of fire-adapted ecosystems and instead of attempting to maximize outputs, aim to optimize outcomes in the context of fire’s ecological role. (Across long-needle pine forests in the southern United States, foresters have successfully integrated frequent, low-intensity burning to optimize several goals, including those for wildlife, timber and wildfire protection; it has been a common practice since the early 1930s.)
4. Perhaps no place challenges wildfire protection more than the wildland-urban interface. Roles and responsibilities for protection are often confused or altogether abrogated. There are few incentives for homeowners to take precautions. In many places in the western United States, insurance companies have dropped coverages because they see the risks as too great.
Protecting lives and private property is almost always the priority, the vulnerability of the wildland-urban interface is told by the property losses and fatalities that continue to climb. Increasingly, this vulnerability has the federal government prioritizing the protection of private property at the expense of public values (air quality, watersheds, critical wildlife habitat, and others). The impacts to these public values are becoming more significant but are mostly overlooked.
“The solution isn’t more suppression— it’s restoration, resilience, and the courage to change how we manage fire.”
If this is a crisis, federal, state, local governments, and homeowners need to reconcile roles and responsibilities for wildfire protection. Government needs to find incentives for private property owners to reduce the flammability potential of their properties and their communities so governments can better redeem their responsibilities for protection of public values.
The costs of mitigation are high, contentious, and not without risk, but total wildfire costs, losses, and damages are much higher and are likely to go higher still.
The wildfire crisis is a systemic problem. Aspirations to mitigate wildfire threats and restore resilience are hamstrung by regulations, fiscal rules, institutional behaviors, behaviors at the wildland urban interface, and other factors. Until these factors are comprehensively confronted and reconciled by lawmakers and policymakers at all levels of government, it is difficult to see how the wildfire crisis will ever be brought to heel.
If this is a crisis , the nation’s political leadership needs to act on the factors that stifle mitigation work. The country’s wildland fire leadership needs to help them.
If this is a crisis, the United States needs to organize, staff, and fund for the scale of mitigation work needed much like the wildfire emergency response is now organized, staffed, and funded.
As a nation, the United States is asking much of its firefighters. Wildland firefighters represent the best of a can-do spirit. But there are narrow margins that separate can-do from make-do, and make do from tragedy. It is time to stop making do, get serious about mitigation, and do wildfire protection right.
To think the United States can meet greater wildfire threats with greater suppression force seems to miss the mark. In 1991, wildland fire researchers Stephen Arno and James Brown introduced the wildfire paradox; it holds that the better we get at putting fires out during moderate years, the worse wildfires become in extreme years. On the mitigation side, there is a corollary: The less we use prescribed fire and other mitigation work when we can, the harder it is to put fires out when we have to. Think Sun Tzu, not Clausewitz, where the least costly, least dangerous, most sustainable wildfire protection approach fights on favorable terms or avoids having to fight at all.
Jerry Williams’ career in the United States Forest Service (1969-2005) spanned the transition between the fire control model and the fire management concept. Williams began as a firefighter and smokejumper; he received his career appointment as a supervisory smokejumper. Following completion of his master’s degree in forest fire science (University of Washington, 1979), Williams went on to lead fire management programs at the district, forest, regional, and Washington-office levels. Williams worked toward bringing an ecological basis to fire management policies and programs. Williams retired from the senior executive service as the Forest Service national director of fire and aviation management.
Research is questioning the ability of California’s Sonoma County to allow its workers to continue to work in its wine and agricultural industries in evacuated areas during disasters such as wildfires at great risk to their personal health.
Hundreds of workers, most of whom lack health insurance, told researchers in a survey that they didn’t have a choice because they feared being fired if they didn’t work and that they needed money to cover basic needs such as housing and groceries. More than one-third of workers said their employers did not provide them with personal protective equipment, such as N95 respirators, during the hazardous conditions.
The study is the latest to cast doubt on the effectiveness of Sonoma County’s “Ag Pass” program, which allows farm bosses to continue worker harvests in active disaster evacuation zones, if approved by local deputies.
“We identified various gaps in the development and implementation of the Ag Pass that have implications for the health of farmworkers who may work inside fire evacuation zones under this program,” the researchers said. “This research also highlights the severe economic pressure many farmworkers face to continue working in potentially hazardous conditions due to fear of retaliation and the inability to pay for basic needs without wage replacement, underscoring the need for economic models such as comprehensive disaster pay and unemployment insurance, including for noncitizens.”
A separate study, published in 2024 by researchers from the University of California – Irvine and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, also questioned the county’s program and came to a similar conclusion.
That study found 96 Ag Pass program applications were submitted during 2020’s destructive Glass Fire, including 120 worksites and 633 workers. Another 370 permits were submitted during the LNU Lightning Complex that same year, which included 590 worksites and 1,603 workers.
Researchers said the exact number of workers for each permit is unreliable because of mismatches between permits and the absence of worker counts on some permits.
“Given the program’s lack of oversight, inconsistencies with state-level emergency protocols, and insufficient monitoring of hazardous air quality in the impacted regions, there is a need to further analyze the risks, health impacts, and structural inequalities the program imposes on farmworkers, in particular those who are undocumented,” the study said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law into effect on Friday, which lawmakers say will push back on “secretive” wildfire risk algorithms used by insurance companies.
The legislation, SB 429, requires all documentation, programs, data, and algorithms of the model relating to wildfire risk to be publicly available. The new regulations go against the state’s current rules that exempt insurance companies from disclosing that information, which they use to set insurance rates.
The law also calls on the California Department of Insurance and the state’s universities to create a wildfire safety and risk mitigation program to assess risks and drive mitigation efforts across federal, state, and local partners, according to the law’s text.
“Most of California’s buildings are not properly mitigated against wildfires,” a report from the California Department of Insurance said earlier this year. “Extreme weather-fueled wildfires are also expanding or intensifying the wildfire risk map. This is a problem at the intersection of fire science, climate science, wildland firefighting, home hardening, fire risk mitigation efforts, and the economics of risk, loss, and the cost of recovery. As a multifaceted problem, this crisis demands a collaborative, multisector solution.”
The move was applauded by consumer protection organizations in the state, who say the new model will give homeowners, renters, and small businesses access to information they need to understand their own wildfire risk and the ability to make their communities safer.
“Homeowners are fed up with insurance companies’ black-box models that penalize consumers for fire risk but refuse to explain how they calculate it,” Consumer Watchdog Executive Director Carmen Balber said in a press release on Monday. “Even when they do everything to protect their homes from wildfires homeowners face extreme price hikes or lose their insurance completely. A fully transparent wildfire model will level the playing field and empower consumers to keep their insurance and make their homes and communities safer.”
Wildland firefighters are facing a formidable battle, coping with labor shortages during one of the most intense fire seasons in recent years. As a California firefighter for over 45 years — including 15 years as Ventura County Fire Protection District chief and Nevada State Forester — I know firsthand that when it comes to stopping the spread of wildfires, there is no replacement for a well-trained and equipped firefighting force.
But it takes more than a quick and skilled response to prevent a wildfire catastrophe. We also need to prioritize wise management of federal lands.
As Californians in San Luis Obispo County are currently witnessing this summer, wildfires that start on state/federal lands can quickly spread to surrounding areas, threatening many lives, damaging health, destroying homes and businesses, and devastating communities. While wildfires on federal lands only make up approximately one-fifth of the total wildfires recorded across the country, they are typically responsible for nearly half the acres burned.
I applaud the lawmakers who are working to address the workforce gaps by ensuring adequate funding for hiring, training, and support. As they do so, I ask them to make it part of a holistic approach to wildfire prevention and response. This is paramount if we want to truly address the worsening wildfire crisis.
Why are wildfires burning so much of our federal land? One reason is that under current regulations, federal land management policies and environmental clearances make wildfire prevention arduous and sometimes impracticable. For example, formulating and conducting prescribed burns takes time, and needed labor resources are in short supply. Additionally, electric grid operators and electrical workers cannot easily gain access to powerlines and other infrastructure on federal lands. We need to reduce the unnecessary challenges to perform vegetation management and other wildfire risk management activities. Without success, this means that our federal lands — and our people — are left more vulnerable.
These fires cause enormous human suffering. Clouds of harmful smoke can travel thousands of miles to neighboring states and linger in the air for weeks. This contaminated air can be dangerous for Americans with pre-existing health issues and can even trigger cardiovascular and lung health issues. It also impacts the health of our first responders who are battling these wildfires. As policymakers look to improve our wildfire preparedness and response, protecting firefighters from the adverse health risks of wildfire smoke needs to be a part of effective policy solutions.
Along with the health impacts, we are all too familiar with the financial cost. Wildfires already cost the United States between $394 and $893 billion annually due to property and capital losses along with insurance and liability costs. A new report from Gallagher estimated that the two wildfires that impacted much of Los Angeles County in January will cost $65 billion in economic losses. During my years as a firefighter, I’ve seen businesses crumble from wildfires and struggle to get back on their feet and cope with the combined property and wage losses.
With more than 4,000 wildfires already recorded and 3.7 million acres burned this year alone, we need Congress and federal agencies to take action and help address this crisis. For starters, the President’s June Executive Order aims to create a more effective wildfire response through the U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS). It is encouraging to see the Administration take actions to increase collaboration and efficiency, but sufficient resources for first responders will be crucial to the success of USWFS.
Additionally, the House and Senate should pass the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act. This much-needed step from Congress will help improve federal land management and coordination across federal, state, and local authorities. But this legislation is just one piece of a much larger, national wildfire strategy. We also need to address labor shortages among wildland firefighters and ensure that state and local partners have the resources needed to train and recruit skilled individuals.
As a country, we cannot continue to approach wildfires with the same patchwork of solutions that have been in place for decades. Let’s take decisive and comprehensive actions to keep our families and our communities safe from the growing wildfire threat.
Bob Roper is the Senior Wildfire Policy Advisor for the Western Fire Chiefs Association. He has been in the fire service for over 45 years, starting as a volunteer firefighter and then rising to executive positions. He served in the Ventura County Fire District for 34 years, the last 15 as Fire Chief and as the Nevada State Forester.
A 29-year-old man has been arrested and is facing charges for allegedly starting Los Angeles’ historic Palisades Fire in January.
Acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli, in a post on social media on Wednesday, said authorities arrested Melbourne, Florida, resident Jonathan Rinderknecht for maliciously starting the fire on New Year’s Day.
“Investigators determined that the Palisades Fire reported on Jan. 7 was caused by an intentionally set fire near a viewpoint along the Temescal Ridge Trail in Topanga State Park on Jan. 1,” Acting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Agent in Charge Kenny Cooper said at a press conference on Wednesday. “We know this arrest cannot erase the pain or grief or losses endured, but we hope it is a step forward.”
Authorities believe Rinderknecht set the fire on Jan. 1, and it continued to burn in dry brush before eventually evolving into one of the region’s deadliest and most destructive wildfires on record. Investigators reportedly identified Rinderknecht on Jan. 24 as a potential suspect.
During his interview with authorities, Rinderknecht allegedly lied, telling investigators he wasn’t near the fire. Geolocation data for a 911 call he made about the fire allegedly showed he was standing 30 feet away from the fire after he dropped someone off there while driving for Uber around midnight.
Investigators also said Rinderknecht previously lived in the area and they allegedly found numerous ChatGPT-generated images depicting burning cities among the evidence collected from Rinderknecht’s possessions.
His initial court appearance is scheduled for the U.S. District Court in Orlando at 1:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday. Rinderknecht has no previous criminal history.
Credit:
Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli
The Palisades Fire killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes and buildings in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles. A recent Redfin analysis estimated that the fire caused $51.7 billion worth of damage by damaging over 11,000 residential properties in the region.
“The council shared a list of 11,125 residential parcels in the city of Los Angeles that were inspected by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety after the wildfires,” the company said. “Redfin was able to match nearly 11,000 of those parcels with Redfin property value estimates as of December 2024—the month before the fires. Many, but not all, were completely destroyed by the fires.”
The U.S. government has filed two lawsuits against a utility company in California, blaming it for starting two deadly wildfires in the state, including the Eaton Fire in 2025 and the Fairview Fire in 2022.
The Department of Justice sued Southern California Edison (SCE) in Los Angeles federal court on Thursday, alleging the company caused the wildfires through negligence. The department demanded over $77 million in damages for violating California’s public safety laws.
“The lawsuits filed today allege a troubling pattern of negligence resulting in death, destruction, and tens of millions of federal taxpayer dollars spent to clean up one utility company’s mistakes,” Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli said in a press release. “We hope that today’s filings are the first step in causing the beginnings of a culture change at Southern California Edison, one that will make it a responsible, conscientious company that helps – not harms – our community. Hardworking Californians should not pick up the tab for Edison’s negligence.”
No official cause for the Eaton Fire has been determined, but federal officials alleged that “faulty power infrastructure” owned by the utility ignited the fire. The utility previously reported that it operates transmission towers in the Eaton Canyon area where the fire ignited and admitted that it detected a “fault” on one of its transmission lines around the time the fire started, according to the lawsuit.
“SCE negligently failed to properly maintain its power and transmission lines and infrastructure in the area where the Eaton Fire ignited,” Essayli said. “In a July 31 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, SCE reported that it was ‘not aware of evidence pointing to another possible source of ignition’.”
The lawsuit also blamed the 2022 Fairview Fire on a sagging power line owned by the utility company that came into contact with a communications messenger cable, creating sparks and igniting nearby vegetation. Officials said the utility failed to properly maintain its power and transmission lines in the area where the wildfire ignited and failed to ensure the minimum clearance between the lines.
The deaths of numerous people who died from the fires’ effects in the immediate aftermath, however, would raise the fires’ death toll to 440, according to the recently published study. Researchers from Helsinki, Finland, and Boston, Massachusetts, looked into all deaths within Los Angeles County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to find how many excess deaths the wildfires caused.
The researchers included partially attributable deaths, like those from lung or heart conditions worsened by smoke or stress, and indirect deaths, like disruptions to health systems and mental health impacts. They then compared those deaths to data from 2018, 2019, and 2024, excluding the years from 2020 to 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The researchers found there were 6,371 deaths observed during the fires and in the immediate aftermath of the fires, compared with the 5,931 expected deaths based on previous years.
Eugenio Paglino, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Demography and Population Health, told Wildfire Today that part of the reason why excess deaths aren’t included in the death tolls of wildfires or other natural disasters is because of the numerous difficulties associated with calculating excess deaths, specifically the variability in weekly deaths.
“While observed deaths can be obtained from public data repositories, expected deaths have to be modeled based on pre-disaster mortality trends,” Paglino said. “This modeling is subject to uncertainty and in the case of elevated temporal frequency (e.g. weekly data) and relatively small populations (even in LA weekly deaths are around 1,000) the week-to-week variability can be elevated. This variability makes statistical modeling challenging.”
However, Paglino and the other researchers are hopeful that their research will act as a framework to guide future efforts in the aftermath of disasters. Click here to read the full study.
A Redfin analysis based on data from the Los Angeles City Council found January’s historic Palisades Fire caused $51.7 billion worth of damage.
The fire damaged roughly 11,000 residential properties, most of which were single-family homes, according to the analysis. The analysis does not include the financial damages caused by the Eaton Fire that burned through Altadena.
“The council shared a list of 11,125 residential parcels in the city of Los Angeles that were inspected by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety after the wildfires,” the company said. “Redfin was able to match nearly 11,000 of those parcels with Redfin property value estimates as of December 2024—the month before the fires. Many, but not all, were completely destroyed by the fires.”
The typical impacted home had a value of $3.7 million before the fires, with nearly 100 properties valued at over $20 million. Other similarities shared by impacted properties include having a construction date of 1957, having 2,916 finished square feet, and having a First Street Fire Factor risk score of 5, or “major.”
The Palisades Fire ignited near Skull Rock in the Summit neighborhood at 10:30am, when gusts were reaching up to 60 mph, relative humidity was falling, and severe Santa Ana winds created a highly volatile environment for rapid fire spread, according to a timeline published in April. The fire quickly spread downhill and eastward, spreading 771 acres in 4 hours, 2,920 acres in 8 hours, and 15,832 acres in nearly 27 hours, which accounted for 70% of the fire’s total growth, despite it going on to burn for 43 more days. The Palisades Fire was fully contained on February 20 after burning over 23,000 acres, destroying 6,833 structures, and claiming 12 lives.
“A lot of people who lost their homes are renting while they work through the insurance claim process, and haven’t figured out whether, when or where they’ll buy again,” LA Redfin Premier real estate agent Greg Eubanks said in the analysis. “Some people whose homes burned in the Palisades have put their vacant lots up for sale, but those aren’t selling as quickly as the lots in Altadena because the price point in the Palisades is so much higher, which is a barrier for investors. It’s also a bit of a tough sell because infrastructure hasn’t been rebuilt yet—there are still no grocery stores.”
The County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner on Tuesday announced that the death toll from the Palisades and Eaton Fires has risen, more than six months after the fires burned.
Officials were called to the scene near the 10 block of La Venezia Court in Altadena on Monday to investigate possible human remains found there, the department said in a press release. There, the department’s Special Operations Response Team determined the remains were human and linked to the January wildfires.
“The death toll related to the wildfires is now 31 – 19 in the Eaton Fire and 12 in the Palisades,” the department said. “The latest Medical Examiner case number is 2025-11669 and is Unidentified Doe #431.”
Officials said case information will be added once the remains are identified and legal next of kin have been notified.
Most of the deaths connected to the Palisades and Eaton Fires were confirmed in January, with the exception of this death and a death confirmed on April 2. Then, officials found the body of 54-year-old Kevin Devine at a residence in the 900 block of Boston Street in Altadena. The cause of death was listed as inhalation of products from combustion and thermal injuries.
