LOS ANGELES — The risk was always there, growing more dangerous through the warming and drying decades until conditions were primed for disaster.
Like others in the city’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, Brian Lallement had spent a lifetime dodging wildfire before Southern California’s cataclysmic blaze finally came for the family home this week.
Lallement, 71, grew up there and remembers his father standing on the roof during the 1961 Bel Air Fire, a hose in hand to soak the house.
“We’ve always known there was a huge fire danger here,” he said, wandering the area to check on his mother’s home. “We’ve packed up six, maybe seven times.”
This time would be the last. Lallement’s mother, now in her 90s, had safely evacuated with the help of her caretaker. But the home, he found on Thursday, did not survive.
Farther east Friday, where the Eaton Fire had ripped through Altadena, Todd Jones carried a small fire extinguisher as he stood at the intersection of Santa Rosa Avenue and Woodbury Road. He and other residents who had left under mandatory evacuation orders were now blocked by yellow caution tape, the National Guard and the California Highway Patrol. His home remained safe from damage, but he grew frustrated at the blockade.
“They won’t let us go past and use something like this,” he said. “I just want to go find any embers to put out. There are embers still flying. There are houses still catching fire. If we could just get up there and put any little spot fires out next to our homes, then we could prevent more damage.”
New building materials, better roads, robust water systems
These fires, devastating as they have been, are harbingers of even more dangerous times ahead if residents don’t adapt to changing conditions, experts said.
For those who lucked out this time, and for those who may rebuild in burned neighborhoods, experts say it will take more than fire extinguishers and hoses to prevent recurring disasters in these hills. It will take fire-resistant building materials, arterial roads that can fit both evacuee traffic and fire trucks, adequately pressurized water systems and residents who work together to reduce fuel loads at all times, said Monalisa Chatterjee, an environmental studies professor and community resilience specialist at the University of Southern California.
“We have to think about changing from reactive to proactive,” she said. “With climate change, these kinds of wildfire events are also changing constantly.”
Providing help: Tucson Red Cross volunteer and former firefighter to bring aid in California fires
All levels of government must engage with and likely fund neighbors who want to work together to reduce risks, Chatterjee said.
“If we are going to live here, we have to live in a certain way,” she said. That will mean adapting to changing conditions instead of expecting fires to behave as they did 50 years ago, when Chatterjee said California’s wildfire season was more like three months of the year instead of eight.
January was once predictably wet, she said. That is no longer so, and this year’s total lack of winter rain set the stage for fast-moving fires whipped by Santa Ana winds.
A report by the World Resources Institute this week said the conditions that primed these fires are unusual for January but also increasingly likely as the region warms. California’s average annual temperature has risen over the last century, WRI noted in a graphic using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. The average hovered around 57 degrees Fahrenheit in the early 20th century, but has been just under 60 degrees during this decade.
Residents look for belongings and survey a home destroyed during the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 9, 2025.
“As average temperatures in California continue to rise, so does its vulnerability to catastrophic fires,” according to WRI’s report.
Santa Ana winds like those that drove this week’s fires occur when high pressure over the Great Basin sends air speeding toward lower-pressure zones over the Pacific Ocean. As the wind moves downslope in California, U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist Jon Keeley said in a report posted by UCLA, where he is an adjunct professor, it warms and dries.
Besides drought, warmth and wind, building patterns have boosted the danger. More people now live on the combustible edges of wildlands, Keeley said, and combustion sources such as power lines have followed.
“California is seeing more destructive fires that we saw in the past,” he said. “That’s driven not just by changes in the climate and the winds, but also by population growth.”
‘It’s going to be a different place to live’
With thousands of homes now gone, it remains for the victims, their communities and rising costs including insurance to determine what will take their place. In the immediate aftermath, victims have different visions of the future.
Kevin Lake has lived in Pacific Palisades for some 15 years, and finds the topography and views too enchanting to imagine bare earth for long.
“If you take the long-term view, it’s going to get rebuilt,” he said. “It’s such an incredible sort of geographical place to live, but it’s going to be a rough five or six years while everybody’s going through that.”
Lake’s home survived, but he’s unsure if his family will stay.
“It’s going to be a different place to live because literally all the homes across the street all the way down to the ocean bluff were burnt down to the foundation, except for maybe six or seven.”
The fires also spared Carmen Kallberg’s Pacific Palisades home, but on Friday she was frustrated. Homeowners there pay “astronomical property taxes,” she said, and the fire hydrants couldn’t sustain adequate pressure to fight the flames.
“People are going to have to answer some serious questions to this town,” she said.
At her home, she said, the fire stopped at the edge of her swimming pool, where it appeared that firefighters had tossed her gas grill and propane tanks to keep them from exploding.
Despite her comparative good fortune, Kallberg said she now wants to move from Pacific Palisades.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m going to be 68 years old in a couple months. I’m not doing this again. Never in my life have I been this scared.”She said that although she had never seen such winds before, she worries that the changing climate could bring a similar fire again.
Jimmy Dunne’s Pacific Palisades condo survived. He’s not sure whether he’ll stay, in part because two of his children lost their homes, and he will want to be near his grandchildren wherever the families land.
Jimmy Dunne returns to Pacific Palisades Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, to assess the damage in his hometown two days after the Palisades Fire ignited. After he hiked and hitchhiked to get back to his condominium, which was spared, he found his bicycle and began his tour.
But Pacific Palisades, he said, will rebuild. The community is too strong, and the real estate between the hills and ocean is too special.
“It’s going to be reshaped, that’s for sure,” he said of the community. “It will find a way to make that work.”
Those who do stay on or rebuild will need to apply a new, community-wide mindset to work together for resilience, said USC’s Chatterjee. Unlike with earthquake preparedness, in which one structure’s retrofit could save it while all around it crumble, fire hazards around one home can jeopardize all in a neighborhood. Well-funded programs that reduce risk without fail are the price for remaining, she said.
“Rebuilding in a smart way, in a more fire-conscious way, is something that will definitely help,” she said.
Jimmy Dunne returns to Pacific Palisades Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, to assess the damage in his hometown two days after the Palisades Fire ignited. After he hiked and hitchhiked to get back to his condominium, which was spared, he found his bicycle and began his tour.
USA Today Network reporters Paul Albani-Burgio, Isaiah Murtaugh and Jose Quintero reported from Los Angeles.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Rebuilding after LA fire means adapting to climate change