Why wildfires are becoming faster and more furious
It was terrible timing. In the late morning of Tuesday 6 January, a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm was heading for the northern suburbs of Los Angeles. The local office of the US National Weather Service published a strongly worded alert at roughly 10:30am local time. At almost that exact moment, a fire erupted in the Palisades neighbourhood of LA.
“The fire was able to get started, get a foothold, and then the wind came in and pushed it really, really hard,” says Ellie Graeden, co-chief executive of RedZone Analytics, which makes wildfire modelling products for the insurance industry. “This is really as bad as it can get.”
The fire exploded, followed by other wildfires in nearby areas. Thousands of homes and other buildings have been razed. Sunset Boulevard is in ruins. At the time of writing, LA’s fires have killed at least 10 people. Officials have ordered nearly 180,000 people to evacuate.
The fires now rank as the most destructive in LA’s history, with losses already expected to exceed $250bn (£206.2bn).
We still don’t know why they started, however. It might have been a lightning strike, downed power lines, a carelessly discarded cigarette. There could be a more nefarious reason, arson. Most wildfires are caused by humans.
But as the LA authorities begin to piece together what initially sparked the blazes, the speed with which those first flames became raging, rapidly spreading infernos is symptomatic of something happening far more widely.
‘A really explosive situation’
In this case, a confluence of environmental conditions came together with devastating timing. A combination of long-term drought and heavy rainfall in the days before provided the fuel, while powerful – and at times hurricane-force – winds fanned the fires into raging infernos.
At the outset, the Santa Ana winds as they are known – strong and gusty winds that blow from inland towards the coast – reached speeds of 80mph (129km/h), supercharging the inferno.
Disastrously, the high winds prevented some firefighting helicopters and planes from taking to the skies in order to dump water on the burning areas.
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‘Entirely foreseeable’: The L.A. fires are the worst-case scenario experts feared
The blazes are the result of a combination of suburban sprawl in fire-prone areas, fierce Santa Ana winds, dry conditions fueled by climate change and the limits of firefighting.
For the Los Angeles area, the recent string of wildfires represents a worst-case scenario — unusually powerful and prolonged Santa Ana winds struck after months without significant rain. But the steep consequences of the blazes are not a surprise, according to an NBC News review of after-action reports following previous fires, wildfire risk maps, public meetings about wildfire risk and interviews with fire experts.
“Entirely foreseeable,” said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College.
The fires have forced nearly 180,000 people to evacuate, cut power to nearly half a million customers and burned thousands of homes.
“We have been building homes deep into the fire zones. We know they’re fire zones, we know they’re dangerous, and yet City Hall and county government has constantly greenlit development in places of greater and greater risks,” Miller said. “All of the factors you don’t want to see combined combined.”
The risk of wildfire to homes in Los Angeles County is higher than in 99% of counties in the United States, according to a federal analysis. Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills and Altadena, three areas where blazes are burning, have “very high fire hazard severity,” according to mapping from the the Los Angeles Fire Department and the state.
“It was not if, it was when” said Joe Scott, the chief fire scientist at Pyrologix, a wildfire risk consultancy that worked on the federal analysis. “But this is at the high end of what could have happened.”
After the Woolsey Fire in November 2018, an after-action review described problems that resemble those firefighters face today.
That blaze raced across the Santa Monica Mountains toward homes on the Malibu coast, casting embers up to a mile from its front line and forcing 250,000 people to evacuate. More than 1,000 homes in Ventura and Los Angeles counties were destroyed.
The report described it as a “perfect storm.”
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Five images that explain why the LA fires spread so fast
From more vegetation to flying embers, the BBC Earth team look at why the fires in LA have been so intense and why they’ve grown so rapidly.
The flames spread with terrifying speed. As residents of the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood to the west of Los Angeles started to see smoke rising from the hills opposite their homes on the morning of 7 January, the fire was already around 10 acres in size. Within 25 minutes it had grown to cover an area of more than 200 acres.
Over the hours that followed the blaze would spread, engulfing homes, theatres, restaurants, shops, schools – entire communities. By the early morning of 9 January, the Palisades fire covered an area of 17,234 acres and other blazes had broken out across the LA area, becoming one of the worst fires in LA’s history, according to AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. An early estimate of damage has put the cost of the fire between $52-57bn (£42-46bn).
Why have the fires been so intense and why have they grown so rapidly? Here are five reasons.
Rapid fuel growth
A period of heavy rainfall in 2024 linked to El Niño is thought to have led to conditions with a high risk of fire this winter.
“Rain is often thought of as generally a bad thing for fires, and if the rain is happening during the fire, then that is a bad thing for the fire,” says Rory Hadden, fire science researcher at the University of Edinburgh. But rainfall prior to a fire can mean lots of vegetation growth, which then becomes potential fuel. “And then you enter a period of drier weather, and then that vegetation dries out very, very quickly, and there’s more of it. So, you can build up more fuel.”
The period of wet weather in 2024 followed by a drier period produced the “perfect conditions for wildfires to spread”, wildfire scientist Maria Lucia Ferreira Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology said in a statement.
This switch from very wet to very dry weather is known as “hydroclimate whiplash“. One recent paper found that risk of hydroclimate whiplash has increased by between 31 and 66% globally since the middle of the 20th Century.
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Visual explainer: why are the LA wildfires so bad?
Santa Ana winds, drought and a hotter planet have helped exacerbate the fires in California
Even in a state that has become accustomed to severe conflagrations, the rapid surge of wildfire that has torched the Los Angeles area has been shocking, triggering mass evacuations that have left behind charred suburban homes.
Several major fires are enveloping LA, including one raging in the western Pacific Palisades and another in the eastern mountains above Pasadena, where five deaths have been recorded.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2025/01/laburnedareas-zip/giv-4559TS35yb1hR2R8/LA fire map: Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Lidia and Sunset fires.
Roughly 130,000 people are under evacuation orders in the US’s second-largest city.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2025/01/lafires10jan-zip/giv-4559mfnUmREupfCM/
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, called the situation “unprecedented” as he ordered 1,400 firefighters to help quell the blazes. The fires caused the skies to turn a dystopian orange, cut power to several hundred thousand people, triggered panicked getaways that caused cars to pile up in the roads and incinerated scores of homes, including those of Hollywood film stars in Malibu.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/from-tool/looping-video/index.html?poster-image=https%3A%2F%2Fuploads.guim.co.uk%2F2025%2F01%2F08%2F240108CaliUGC.00_00_00_00.Still001.jpg&mp4-video=https%3A%2F%2Fuploads.guim.co.uk%2F2025%2F01%2F08%2FHousesFireLoop2.mp4https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2025/01/altadena-zip/giv-4559ZSkU2W2AcPhF/
While fire is not new to California, several factors have helped fan the flames, leading to “one of the most significant fire outbreaks in history”, according to Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Los Angeles, who spoke of an impending “catastrophe”. He said: “I’m pleading with everyone: if you receive that evacuation order, take it seriously. Your life depends on it.”
So why have the fires been so bad?
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Destruction in California: What caused the LA fires to spread so rapidly?
A growing number of wildfires spread rapidly across Los Angeles, fueled by powerful Santa Ana winds, low humidity and dry vegetation due to a lack of rain.
At least five fires were active in Los Angeles County including the Palisades Fire, which grew from 10 acres to more than 17,000 acres in just three days and the Eaton Fire, which has swelled to more than 10,600 acres east in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, according to Cal Fire.
The causes of the largest fires are still under investigation, according to Cal Fire. The environment was primed for ignition. The National Weather Service office in Los Angeles warned that low humidity and widespread, damaging winds up to 100 mph in some areas would fuel massive blazes “with extreme fire behavior.”
Santa Ana winds fuel fires
One of the nation’s most notorious wind events has helped fuel the destructive wildfires.
The Santa Ana winds, which occur most often in the fall and winter, push dry air from over the inland deserts of California and the Southwest toward the coast, the National Weather Service said. As high-pressure systems move east to west over the Santa Ana Mountain range, wind is forced down where it’s compressed and warms up.
An area of high pressure over the Great Basin, the high plateau east of the Sierra Nevada, combined with a storm in northwestern Mexico to create the conditions for strong winds over Southern California starting on Tuesday, said AccuWeather meteorologist Gwen Fieweger. The Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains also have canyons and valley, which may act as funnels for the Santa Ana winds and further accelerate the spread of wildfires in these mountainous areas.
Janice Coen, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said these winds also dry out vegetation on the mountain ridges as they pass and can carry embers over long distances – allowing fires to spread rapidly.
Lack of rain, low humidity create dry conditions
The rapid spread of the fires were likely also aided by the extremely dry season that preceded them.
Over 83% of Los Angeles County was in a drought, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor. Los Angeles has not received a quarter of an inch of rain since April, Accuweather reported.
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California Fires Expose a $1 Trillion Hole in US Home Insurance
Homeowners in increasingly risky areas can’t obtain adequate coverage as insurers flee the state to avoid losses.
The wildfires terrorizing Los Angeles this week have been like something out of a movie: vast, fast-moving, unpredictable, merciless. Their scope and nature have surprised even fire-jaded California. They are also evidence of the sort of consequences that can be expected as the planet continues to heat up, consequences for which traditional risk-management tools — like, say, home insurance — are increasingly obsolete.
The fires didn’t even exist on Tuesday morning. The only hint of what was to come were forecasts for some of the strongest and most dangerous Santa Ana winds on record to barrel out of the Great Basin and into Southern California. Those hurricane-force blasts can be destructive enough. But these coincided with drought conditions, dry vegetation, low humidity and relatively high air temperatures, leading the National Weather Service to issue an “extremely critical” fire-weather warning for the area around Los Angeles, the first-ever such warning in the lower 48 US states in January.
It didn’t take long to see the results. Within hours, a serious fire was threatening the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles, moving so quickly that some residents abandoned their cars on the road and fled by foot. By Wednesday morning, three out-of-control fires had spread across 4,500 acres around the city, taking at least two lives and destroying at least 100 buildings and threatening hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of homes and businesses. And the emergency had not yet peaked, with strong winds expected to continue the rest of the week.
There have always been Santa Ana winds and wildfires in California. But climate change, along with human development, has made the combination of the two much more destructive. Warmer air dumps more moisture when it rains and snows, which encourages plant life in the spring. But then all those plants become kindling during hot, bone-dry summers and falls. When the Santa Ana winds blow down through the canyons out of the Great Basin in the colder months, all it takes is a spark to create a monster fire that spreads quickly.
And those fires generate new sparks, spreading fires across landscapes that over the past few decades have been filled with houses. These structures, built in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, become their own kindling, as Tim Sahay, co-director of the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab, pointed out on Bluesky.
The glut of homes in increasingly fire-prone places has created an insurance crisis in California, with many big insurers pulling out of the state to avoid more losses. Nearly 500,000 Californians have turned to the state’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, which has doubled in size over the past five years. The state is now exposed to nearly $458 billion in potential damage, a figure that has nearly tripled since 2020.
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The goats fighting fires in Los Angeles
Grazing goats are becoming a common sight in Los Angeles – can this ancient solution to wildfires really prevent ever bigger, fiercer blazes?
t’s a typical Los Angeles scene: the Pacific Ocean sparkling under a crystal-clear, bright blue sky, with miles of golden sandy beaches stretching as far as the eye can see. There’s also a herd of goats precariously perched on a clifftop, enjoying the multimillion-dollar view.
These aren’t just any goats, though – they’re California’s new secret weapon in the fight against wildfires, and they’re being put out to graze across the state.
“The reception is overwhelmingly positive wherever we go,” says goat herder Michael Choi. “It’s a win-win scenario as far as I can tell.”
Choi runs Fire Grazers Inc, a family business which leases goats to city agencies, schools and private clients to clear brush from hillsides and terrain that’s hard to access. The company has 700 goats, and they recently had to expand their herd to keep up with demand.
“I think as people get more aware of the idea, and environmental impact, they become more conscious about which methods they want to use for clearing weeds and protecting the landscape from fires. So, there’s definitely a bigger demand, and it’s a growing trend,” he says.
Goats are well adapted to eat woody shrubs, with dexterous tongues and lips together with strong stomachs (Credit: Lucy Sherriff)
California has been at the epicentre of battling wildfires, which have become more frequent, more destructive, and larger, since 1980. In 2021, California faced “unprecedented” fire conditions, according to CalFire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state’s fire agency), with one fire alone burning more than 960,000 acres (3,885 sq km). Well-timed rainfall can bring some relief, even as the wider situation remains severe. The wildfire season in 2022 was described as a “mild” for the state – more than 300,000 acres (1,214 sq km) burned compared to the five-year average of 2.3 million acres (9,307 sq km). August 2023 was cooler and wetter than average in California. Still, more than a quarter of a million acres have burned, and four people have died.
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