Grim Wallace-Wells Op-ed in NY Times: Which City Burns Next?

There was an interesting essay in the New York Times by David Wallace-Wells, probably due to the anniversary of the Los Angeles fires of 2025.

One year ago this week, the Santa Ana winds roared over the Santa Monica Mountains at over 60 miles per hour, gusting up to 100 in some spots in what some people called, loosely, once-in-a-century fire conditions. What followed was a new kind of fire disaster, for which even the fire-wise communities of the American West seem deeply unprepared.

One moral of this story: Last January’s catastrophic fire disaster did not have to be a catastrophe at all, only a close call.

Another moral comes from the wisdom repeated to me by firefighters, policymakers and researchers over the past year: that there is more to fire risk than ignitions and fire response, that what can burn will eventually burn, and in a landscape baked by warming in which human structures have been erected in open defiance of known risk, some of those fires will prove catastrophic. “California is built to burn,” the fire historian Stephen Pyne once told me. “It is built to burn explosively.”

As I was writing this, I received notice of fire weather and ongoing fires in my area from Watch Duty. I don’t think that that’s actually true. I don’t think Downtown Denver will burn because we happen to be in a “landscape baked by warming in which human structures have been erected “in open defiance” of “known risk.” I’m not sure what the florid writing style adds or detracts from the points he is trying to make. Because you could argue that about any place in the western US, even the Great Plains. In my area, we are building housing and expanding into grass areas- it makes housing more affordable. Maybe we should all live in tower blocks in Connecticut?

But the Los Angeles fires mark a new phase, and seem to affirm a new consensus among a certain cohort of fire experts, that we have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the problem and mismanaged fire risk as a result.

We’ve seen a lot of “new phases”, Marshall Fire, Paradise and so on.. count me skeptical. There have been many “new wildfire paradigms” proclaimed over the years.

Watching from afar, we still reflexively call these disasters “wildfires,” perhaps imagining that they ignite in some distant forest. But there may be little truly “wild” about such fires beyond the ferocity of the burn. Increasingly, disaster strikes almost entirely within an urban envelope, drawing on homes and landscaping for fuel rather than trees and wild brush. These are not forest fires encroaching on human settlement but rather human settlements burning like only forests used to. And stopping them will require something much harder, and more unpopular, than clearing out distant forests of dead wood.

As a native Southern Californian, this framing fascinates me. But how about this.. fire spreading in suburban areas is a problem. Ignitions can come from outside or inside the relatively urbanized area. In some cases, (in Calif, for example) they can build up quite a head of steam before they get to the suburban boundary (if there is even such a thing, perhaps it’s really more diffuse). Of course, “disaster” strikes within an urban(ized) envelope, because it wouldn’t be a disaster if there weren’t people there. And where did “clearing out distant forests of dead wood” come from?

The climate scientist Daniel Swain has called the phenomenon the return of the “urban firestorm,” a throwback to horrors from centuries past, when cities such as Chicago and San Francisco could burn for miles and days on end. By the middle of the 20th century, that kind of urban fire had come to look like an extinct beast.

Actually I found this kind of funny.. changes in climate (in urban areas? where the vegetation seems to be the same kind planted 50 years ago?) cause us to return to the past. We stopped urban fires via improving construction and suppression practices.
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Probably, the list features your most vivid impressions of our new age of wildfire. But in 2023, a group of researchers reviewed some of the decade’s most nightmarish fires in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, and declared that “wild-land-urban fire disasters aren’t actually a wildfire problem.” The ignitions weren’t wild, the predominant fuel wasn’t wild, the surrounding landscape wasn’t really wild land and wild-land firefighting wasn’t able to change the outcome, either.

Not to disagree with “a group of researchers” but when fires start on wild (or wild-ish) land and develop a head of steam before heading into urban areas.. in the case of the Palisades Fire, this occurred in Topanga State Park… which is wild-ish and were they wildland firefighters? I think this might be a definitional nightmare.. think of the Marshall Fire with the firepit and the electric lines..

In our grassy open areas “wildlands”, we put out wildfires before they get to houses. But maybe grass fires aren’t “wild”? Were the folks told to leave the Bachman fire wildland or not? Maybe all this is saying is that urban and adjacent wildish (grazing or shrublands) lands are all intermixed and have to be considered on the ever-popular “landscape scale.”

The problem is often defined almost entirely in terms of forest management, as it was in a 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy document prepared by the Department of Agriculture. But federal land increasingly contributes little to disasters in urban and semi-urban settings, said David Calkin, the lead author of the PNAS paper and a pioneering fire-risk scientist who recently left the U.S. Forest Service lamenting its direction under President Trump.

“We know the wild lands need fire,” he said. But we also need to stop pretending that these disasters are wild-land fires. They aren’t. “It’s a different beast,” Calkin said. Instead, we should start thinking about the risks of those disasters primarily in terms of community design: how homes are built, with what materials and in what configuration. Instead of thinning fuels in the wild land, as we’ve struggled to do now for decades, perhaps we need to thin the fuel of the community itself.

I think we’ve been saying and doing this for years, think CWPP’s and so on. Plus there is an extensive social science literature on community mitigation and prescribed fire.

Ideally, it would involve redrawing property lines and reconstructing houses with fire-hardened materials and fire-smart principles; a much more aggressive program of landscape management and more small-scale prescribed burning; eliminating or at least limiting flammable vegetation; retraining urban firefighting forces to prepare for the new threats; establishing some permanent firebreaks; and perhaps rerouting roads and homes away from natural wind patterns. If we could do all that, we could find our way to a much more comfortable relationship to California fire, probably, even with climatic changes that seem to increase those risks almost year by year.

“The astonishing thing is not that Los Angeles burns but that so much of its development has enhanced rather than blunted the threat from fire,” Pyne, the fire historian, reflected last January. The city was built with exposed wood and shake-shingle roofing, he pointed out, making homes “maximally primed to burn”; demand for public forests and parks meant, for all their pleasures and beauty, fire risks were mostly preserved within the design of the city itself; suburbs invariably pressed up against brush landscapes, which generate new fuel basically every time it rains.

You might hope that a disaster like the fires last January would prompt a reckoning with the way those communities were designed, with property lines perhaps redrawn to better resist future fires. But the interest in rebuilding quickly is too great, from homeowners and investors alike, such that the state has been forced to waive certain building codes to accelerate progress in Palisades, Malibu and Altadena — which have only just barely begun to rebuild.

Fire response remains a problem, too: Urban firefighting forces are unaccustomed to fires burning through dozens of homes at once, and wild-land firefighters who may be called in to help are unaccustomed to fires burning through urban environments. And there are problems of fire oversight. An after-action report prepared by the L.A. Fire Department was watered down, downplaying, for instance, failures in leadership. The original author of the report and the department’s battalion chief, Kenneth Cook, called these edits “highly unprofessional.”

At the state and national level, there’s been inconsistent guidance and erratic implementation concerning fuel reduction in parks and national forests, such that even those places with plans to thin the landscape of brush and other fuels aren’t always effective in doing so. A wildfire management plan prepared by California State Parks just before the fires a year ago called for allowing fires to burn through large parts of Topanga State Park, where the Palisades fire began, so long as they didn’t threaten homes and other “fire exclusion zones.” The plan also outlined several “avoidance areas” where firefighting was meant to be restricted. In the months before the fires, several projects were designed to thin fuel in parts of the Palisades that burned, including one project completed less than 36 hours before the initial fire began.

Officials highlighted homes where better landscaping may have saved the structures from the recent fires. Homeowners pointed to examples of others where action hadn’t been taken and they still survived. The two sides argued over studies showing that home hardening was more effective against fire than vegetation management was, and homeowners asked why fire risk should require tugging hedges out of the ground but not replacing wooden porches or door frames.

Perhaps some of this sounds reasonable, or perhaps it sounds like fire-safety NIMBYism. But the problems are much larger than Brentwood, with hardly any community in the state seeming to meet the challenge of urban fire at the appropriate scale — which is growing. Above the problem of homeowner resistance you can stack local officials, who are rarely comfortable challenging the preferences of their constituents and the aesthetic sensibilities of the California dream, embodied by non-native and often quite combustible vegetation. Above that, you can stack local planning and zoning, which has often produced communities like the Pacific Palisades where streets can serve as wind tunnels carrying embers from home to home so efficiently that even an initial burst, Calkin said, could ignite as many as a hundred homes almost simultaneously.

I wish people would talk more about mechanisms. Sure, these are urban fires. But if they are urban fires, how does climate change enter in? Is urban vegetation drier than it used to be? we see a great deal of sprinklers and non-native water-loving species in landscaping. Why are urban fires more widespread and problematic than they used to be? Yes, there are more houses where there weren’t before in the Marshall Fire, with notably dry periods and high winds. But the Palisades and Altadena have been around longer than I have, with notably dry periods and high winds.

The comments on this piece were also interesting. Many people suggested not using wood for housing, but others pointed out that wood is best for earthquakes. Some of the commenters articulated their concerns and different views of different kinds of vegetation removal compared to changes in exterior materials.

After I read a story like this, it reminds me how rare these disasters continue to be.. which means that most ignitions in urban and WUI mixes are not getting out of control. Just like the one put out while I was writing this. And all the folks around the West working with their communities on home-hardening, mitigation and evacuations projects. It would be interesting for a reporter to go back and see what changes have been made in the Boulder County area after the Marshall Fire. Anyway, I found this a bit of a grim opinion essay.. and again, it never seems like these folks juxtapose “things getting worse” with “technology making vast improvements” as we noted yesterday.