'A new wildfire paradigm': Why California fires are growing larger and more destructive

In a state that averages more than 7,500 wildfires a year some California homeowners keep helmets and fire hoses handy.

However, the Los Angeles fires demonstrate a new reality: Wildfires in the state are growing larger and more ferocious and burning into suburbs and cities more often, experts told USA TODAY.

“We really are dealing with a new wildfire paradigm,” said Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire expert with the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.

People are used to thinking of fire in terms of either structure fires or wildfires in rural areas, but in recent decades, the lines have blurred. More intense wildfires burn into neighborhoods where flames quickly spread from cars and homes, Kearns said. "That becomes “a very, very different kind of fire to fight, and also a very difficult kind of fire to fight.”

Since 2014, the 10-year average number of acres burned by wildfires each year in California roughly doubled, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Not including the latest fires, the department reports that since 2017:

• Six fires rank among the top 10 in number of structures burned

• Three are among the top five deadliest, dating back to 1933

• All of the state's nine largest fires have burned

The rate of the fires and the destruction they wreak surprises even people who have studied fire for years, Kearns said. “It’s hard to put blame anywhere or think that people should have been better prepared.”

The biggest fires in Los Angeles County, the Palisades and Eaton fires, have burned over an area more than 37,000 acres in size as of Jan. 16.

At least 27 people have died, according to the LA County Medical Examiner's office. The fires have destroyed more than 10,600 structures and damaged more than 1,400, including homes, businesses, and sheds, Cal Fire reported. The Eaton Fire is now the state's fifth deadliest and second-most destructive, the agency reported, while the Palisades blaze is fourth-most destructive.

While the headlines are focused on Southern California this time, similarly extreme weather disasters such as droughts, floods and hurricanes are becoming more intense across the U.S., spurred by a combination of climate change and human activities.

“If there’s one point to make clear, it’s the worsening wildfires are not natural disasters, said Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale School of Environment. “Earthquakes are natural disasters."

"These wildfires are happening against a backdrop of hotter and drier conditions- worsened because of the heat-trapping gases produced by burning coal, oil, and gas," Marlon said. "Many other factors are of course at work, but we can't ignore the elephant in the room anymore."

The scope of disasters also is growing because development across previously rural landscapes puts more people at risk and increases the cost of losses, according to Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer and meteorologist at Villanova University.

The disasters have escalated insurance rates and prompted some insurers to leave Florida and California.

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‘A perfect fire storm’

A Hollywood script couldn’t have put together a more disastrous set of conditions than those in Los Angeles on the morning of Jan. 7.

It was “a worst-case scenario in terms of climactic collisions,” said Char Miller, professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College in California and author of Burn Scars, published in September.

An unusually extreme outbreak of Santa Ana winds, months of drought, low humidity and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees warmer than normal were a “recipe for the disaster,” Miller said.

The highest speed Santa Ana winds usually are isolated to the mountains, but this time unusually powerful winds expanded across the area, said Kristan Lund, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Los Angeles. Observations of 80-100 mph winds were reported from the foothills of Altadena and across the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley, both areas usually only minimally affected by the Sana Anas.

To make things worse, the drought and high temperatures followed two very wet years that promoted plant growth in the surrounding chaparral and coastal sage scrub, said Glen MacDonald, a professor of geography at University of California Los Angeles. All that extra plant growth had time to really dry out, leaving it primed to burn.

When the high-velocity winds arrived, all it took was a spark in just the wrong place, MacDonald said, and “a perfect fire storm” drove the fire into the Palisades. Flames raced westward until the fire reached the Pacific.

Fighting wildfires in urban settings

People in the suburbs tend to think they’re safe from wildfires as they see landscapes, sidewalks and gardens, not wildlands, MacDonald said. But homes and landscaping burn, and spread flaming embers.

Palm trees lining the streets become like “Roman candle fire starters,” he said. “Once the fire gets into that area, then it becomes very, very difficult (to fight).”

At a critical point in the LA fire fight, high winds grounded the flights providing crucial aerial support, typically used to fight wildland fires with massive buckets of water and clouds of retardants.

Between the winds, the dry conditions and the geography, there’s “very little you can do in the face of that, especially when you take aerial resources out of the equation initially,” MacDonald said. “Those firefighters did a heroic job and I'm not sure that more resources under these circumstances could do much.”

Urban departments and water systems with tanks and hydrants, “are not designed for this level of wildfire,” especially trying to pump water uphill, Kearns said. They’re designed to fight a single house fire or fires in a few structures, not thousands of homes during high winds.

For a typical house fire, a department may roll out five trucks, Miller said. “For one house, that’s great. If you have 100 homes, you now need 500 trucks. If you have 1,000 structures, as in the Palisades, there aren’t enough fire engines in the state of California.”

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'This is trouble'

Climate change is a threat multiplier, but it’s far from the only influence, Kearns said. "Even without it we would have a fire problem in California.”

Heather Alexander, an associate professor of forest ecology at Auburn University in Alabama, drove through Southern California over the summer, and marveled at the “scrubby, highly flammable” plant landscape she saw around her.

Considering the homes and power lines and dry, windy conditions, she thought to herself, “Man, this is trouble.”

The dangerous situation “created unprecedented opportunities for extreme fire behavior that's basically uncontrollable and cannot be effectively fought,” said Tamara Wall, a research professor at the Desert Research Institute. “It's just beyond the capacity of what we have, what we can do.”

Steep and rugged topography, especially like that in the Palisades, notoriously drives extreme fire behavior, Miller and others said.

One of Miller’s close friends, who lost a home, lived up a hill on a road so narrow and choked with chaparral and flammable and invasive eucalyptus that it could be difficult to get a car up there, much less a fire truck, he said.

The expansive and coveted views offered from hillside perches help explain why people build where they do, he said. “Look at the vistas in their back yards. They have nature everywhere. I totally get it, but we’re now seeing the dilemma.”

Political philosophies based on the premise that growth is essential have contributed to allowing more and more homes to be built “in places where fire is going to happen,” he said. And the reality of human development is that people bring fire with them, in electrical lines, cars and barbecue grills.

'Good fires' can help fight fires before they start

For eons, fires set by Indigenous Peoples and natural fires burned across landscapes every few years, reducing the amount of burnable material or “fuel” available to burn in wildfires. The “good fires” managed lands for crops, plants and animals.

A century of suppressing these kinds of fires helped create landscapes prone to devastating wildfires, Alexander said. She studies the benefits of “prescribed” fires, conducted under a set of pre-planned conditions, that mimic the long-ago fires. Burning such fires to reduce the load of underbrush that could feed wildfires can help reduce fire severity and protect nearby areas.

“There’s been a move to increase the amount of prescribed burning in California and other western states, it’s just much more complicated,” she said. As more homes appear in rural areas, those who manage wild lands face challenges, including from nearby residents who fear the fires and complain about nuisance wildfire smoke.

But restoring the original fires have to be a part of future planning, Alexander said. It’s far better to have controlled burns “under the right wind conditions and the right relative humidity,” than the conflagrations seen in LA.

‘A really thorny issue’

Since the LA fires started, Wall and other experts have listened in frustration as emotional residents and government leaders pointed fingers and blame.

“People have lost their homes. They’ve lost all their possessions,” Wall said. “It is traumatic and you're going to want to say who's to blame? … Cynically, I'm sure there's also people using this as a political thing.”

But unraveling the complicated factors that developed over decades, means coming up with different policies and politics, the experts told USA TODAY.

It's going to be "really thorny" moving forward to work out many difficult questions, such as deciding who's responsible for ensuring there's water pressure for the next fire and how residents can rebuild in more fire-resistant ways, Kearns said.

In the months to come, it will be crucial to do a dispassionate and objective review of what went wrong, what went right and what could be done better the next time, Wall said. "Because there will be a next time, unfortunately. This isn't like a one and done.”

Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for USA TODAY. She's been writing about wildfires since the Florida firestorm of 1998. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why California wildfires are growing larger, more destructive