How the inferno that reduced parts of LA to ashes was years in the making

As fires wreaked havoc across his city, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told reporters bluntly, “There are not enough firefighters in LA county to address four separate fires of this magnitude.”

Within hours a fifth fire had broken out; now the whole city seemed to be under siege. More than 100,000 residents of a city that sometimes seems to the rest of the world to be a dreamscape were under evacuation orders. Movie stars’ homes were incinerated, abandoned cars bulldozed from freeways. Palm trees exploded like Roman candles, a lifeguard station at Malibu was burnt.

A firefighting helicopter drops water as the Sunset fire burns in the Hollywood Hills.Credit: Getty Images

The fire was spreading so fast, observed the writer Rick Reilly, that some homes were lost “in the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer”.

How LA became dangerously combustible

The conditions that made this week’s conflagration in LA possible began years ago.

Like Australians, Californians are accustomed to living with fire but, as in Australia, the state’s fire season has been getting longer with climate change, which has also intensified the risks as the region becomes drier.

Despite this, recent seasons have been unusually wet due to El Nino conditions, which in turn allowed fuel loads to increase.

Then, in mid-2024, rain largely ceased over Southern California.

A person tries to hose down embers from the Palisades fire.Credit: AP

The region, which by now should be in the midst of its wet season, has received only about six millimetres of rain since July, its second driest such stretch in nearly 150 years of record keeping.

By the time the new year began, the fuel load in the canyons and ridges that creep into LA had become dangerously combustible.

The Santa Ana winds

This wet period is typically attended by powerful and erratic dry gusts known as the Santa Ana winds, which strike the region around Christmas.

The Santa Anas blow in from the desert, abandon most of the little moisture they contain as they cross the San Bernardino Mountains that divide the coastal plain from the interior of the state, and then blast down towards the Pacific coast.

The Santa Ana winds have long marked life along this coast, upending trees and choking crops with desert sands.

A ‘scary and horrendous’ combination

Combined with the recent drought, the Santa Ana winds became lethal.

“I’ve fought fires during Santa Anas, and it’s scary because the fires run downhill just as fast as they do uphill,” the former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner Greg Mullins, who has spent years studying and fighting fires alongside Californian firefighters, told this masthead as the fires spread this week.

“Those winds can be horrendous, and they are so dry that it does not matter if it is hot, you just get these incredible blast furnace fires.”

This year the winds blew faster than ever, with gusts peaking at over 120km/h on Wednesday.

The brush fire that spiralled out of control

At 10.30am on Tuesday a brush fire was reported on a mountainside close to the upmarket neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades.

Firefighters had little hope of containing the blaze fuelled by the dry scrub and accelerated by the Santa Anas.

At a press conference at 3.40pm fire chief Kristin Crowley said that more than 30,000 people were under evacuation orders, with more than 10,000 houses and 13,000 buildings under threat.

Two hours later California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, urging residents to heed evacuation orders and saying, “This is a highly dangerous windstorm creating extreme fire risk, and we’re not out of the woods.”

Where it spread next – with devastating speed

Over the coming hours the Palisades fire spread fast and others sprang up.

Just after 6pm on Tuesday, a fire sprang up in Eaton Canyon in Pasadena, north-east of downtown LA. By mid-morning the following day the Eaton fire had grown to almost 4500 hectares, with no prospect of containment.

On Wednesday CalFire was combating three significant fires around and through the west and north of LA, with The New York Times reporting that evacuation orders covered some of the city’s best-known venues such as the Hollywood Bowl and the TCL Chinese Theatre (also known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre) on the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Five people were reported to have been killed and more than 1000 structures burnt, with more than 100,000 people under mandatory evacuation orders.

Why firefighters ran out of water – and what’s next

Emergency workers in LA are now fighting multiple major fires in the most difficult conditions.

The strong Santa Ana winds are not only driving the fires in unpredictable surges, they have left the state’s air firefighting fleet stuck on the ground for long stretches.

Firefighters battling the Pacific Palisades blaze even found themselves short of water when three giant reservoirs were depleted on Wednesday morning.

A firefighter asks for more water as his hose goes dry along in Los Angeles.Credit: AP

“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told reporters.

“Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”

The winds are expected to present a threat until at least January 14 and there is no significant rainfall predicted.

Governor Gavin Newsom has cancelled a trip to Washington, DC, to attend former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, declaring the situation in LA remains dangerous and rapidly evolving.

The Eaton Canyon fire destroyed the neighbourhood.Credit: AP

With Tom McKendrick and Matthew Absalom-Wong

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