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Suspicions flew like fire. Wealthy and influential critics say the Palisades fire, which rages in the mountains along Los Angeles’ coast, could not have been so devastating if officials had done a better job of clearing brush from hillsides. He said that it would not have happened.
“We knew the wind was blowing. We’ve known for 20 years that there was brush that needed to be removed,” developer and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso told the Times. Ta. “This fire may have been mitigated, but it may not have been prevented.”
“The biggest factor, in my opinion, is the insane environmental regulations that prevent us from building firebreaks and clearing brush near our homes,” Elon Musk wrote in X. There is. And actress and producer Sarah Foster chimed in, writing: “Our plants are overgrown and the bushes are not cleared.”
Did these and other second-guessers have a point? Scientists, wildfire experts, and fire officials had different views. But some of these experts (including some of the biggest proponents of brush clearing) argue that the winds fanning the flames are so strong and the ground conditions so dry that no more brush should be cut down. He also said that there would have been no significant effect.
Orange County Fire Department Chief Brian Fennessy said, “It’s very effective for normal day-to-day tasks like clearing brush or taking fuel breaks.” “But what you’re talking about here is probably less than 1% of all the fires we respond to in Southern California.”
The Palisades Fire started on January 7th during hurricane-force winds, with wind gusts of up to 160 mph recorded in some areas.
“If we built a 10-lane highway before that fire, it wouldn’t have slowed it down at all,” Fennessy said.
Vegetation management efforts are typically most effective when firefighters can reduce the intensity of a fire and extinguish the flames.
In this case, the fire spread sideways from house to house, with the building itself providing fuel, Fennessy said. The fire plane was unable to land due to strong winds. Firefighters on the scene then focused on rescuing people from the path of a rapidly advancing blaze that had engulfed the community deeply.
Experts said strong wind gusts carried the embers miles away from the fire front, effectively spreading the flames through the air rather than through the brush. They also noted that landscape-level fuel reductions that clear large tracts of land are controversial in Southern California’s sensitive coastal ecosystems.
In the forests of Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, large fires are often caused by trees and brush that have accumulated over decades of firefighting efforts. Patrick T. Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team, said removing some vegetation can make ecosystems more sensitive to drought with abundant plants competing for finite resources. He said it could increase both the fire resistance and health of forests. at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank.
Modeling by the nonprofit organization suggests that clearing brush, and thus eliminating fuel, can reduce the intensity of wildfires in the Los Angeles Basin even under extreme weather conditions, but the Pacific Brown said it is unlikely the Palisades could have prevented the kind of destruction it is currently experiencing.
At the same time, he said that unlike in forested areas, fuel reductions in the area’s chaparral scrubland risk harming the ecosystem rather than making it healthier.
Fires are common in the Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu Valley and other wilderness areas near the Los Angeles coast, said Alexandra Shipherd, a senior research ecologist at the nonprofit Institute for Conservation Biology and an adjunct professor at San Diego State University. He said that.
As a result, native evergreen shrubs that take several years to mature and produce new seeds are being replaced by non-native annual grasses that die in early summer and become more susceptible to fire, said the Pepperdine University biology professor. Helen Holmland says.
“That promotes more frequent fires, which in turn leads to further loss of chaparral shrubs and invasive species,” she says.
Therefore, large-scale attempts to preemptively thin or burn these coastal areas could actually make the landscape more flammable in the long run, says the University of California, Santa Barbara Cooperative Extension Wildfire. said expert Max Moritz.
“These are trade-offs, and as a society we have to think about whether it’s worth it,” Moritz said.
Given the weather conditions, Moritz is skeptical that more brush removal at the landscape level would have had a significant effect on slowing the initial spread of the fire. He also pointed out that landscape-level brush management is different from brush removal around individual homes, which is generally the responsibility of property owners and helps give firefighters an opportunity to protect structures.
Still, says Jo ten Eyck, who coordinates the wildfire-urban interface program at the association, Firefighters say brush removal can become even more important in extreme weather conditions.
“The more we remove fuel from fires, the more we reduce the risk and the more resilient individual homes and communities become,” said Ten Eyck, also a former chief of operations for the California Forestry Department. And fire protection.
In fact, the Getty Villa credits pruned landscaping and irrigated grounds with saving the museum building from the Palisades Fire.
Ventura County fire officials also credited residents’ compliance with strictly enforced county ordinances requiring 100-foot brush gaps and other fire-resistant construction around buildings with the Kenneth Fire, which spread to the West Hills area. He said firefighters helped save the home. January 9th.
Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Scott Dettore said the winds were not as strong as the day before, but were still strong.
The city of Los Angeles has similar rules for homes in fire-prone areas, but Fire Chief Christine Crowley said in a Dec. 4 memo to the fire commission that a $7 million reduction in overtime costs It wrote that the fire department’s ability to conduct inspections to ensure safety was hampered. Residents also performed other duties.
But Jason Mogadas, a fire ecologist and registered professional forester at the Spatial Informatics Group think tank, and his colleague Carrie Levine, co-leader of the group’s forestry and agriculture practice, argue that these efforts He says it’s not very helpful in the most extreme cases.
When a fire reaches a group of buildings, the building itself becomes the fuel. Mogadas pointed to the Sunset Boulevard area where the Palisades fire destroyed fire-resistant structures, such as concrete commercial buildings surrounded by pavement.
“All of these probabilities occur in a cascading manner. You can increase your chances of survival, you can increase your chances of firefighters saving your home, you can increase your chance of a shorter flame length… but these All probabilities appear in the real world somewhere and the fire tests them,” he said. “And you find out, ‘There wasn’t enough that we did to change the outcome.'”
Times staff writers Matt Hamilton and David Zahnizer contributed to this report
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