WILDFIRESWhat Made the Los Angeles Wildfires So Monstrous

By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey and Matt Simon

Published 14 January 2025

Powerful winds and extra-dry vegetation have fueled what may become the costliest wildfires on record. The longer-term challenge is better adapting Los Angeles, and the rest of California, to a future of ever-worsening droughts and wildfires. “People talk about adapting to the climate,” sys one expert. “We haven’t adapted to the climate we have, let alone the climate that’s coming.”

Harel Dor and Finn O’Brien were just finishing up dinner at a restaurant in Pasadena, California, on Tuesday evening, when a friend texted them about an evacuation warning. A severe windstorm had spread what became the Eaton fire to the hills behind their home. 

“Driving back up the house it was already feeling apocalyptic, with downed trees and visibility getting worse,” Dor said. As the couple returned to the house to evacuate their two cats, they could see the flames in the distance. Dor, who works nearby at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says while some co-workers have lost their homes, they don’t know if their apartment has survived the blaze.

“The emotions haven’t arrived yet,” Dor said. “A lot of it is just numbness and shock at the events unfolding.”

The hills around Los Angeles have become an inferno. Days after forecasters warned of dangerous fire weather conditions, twin blazes — driven by 100 mph winds — began raging across some of Southern California’s most expensive neighborhoods, sending thousands of residents fleeing and threatening historic sites. Within five hours on Wednesday morning, both the Palisades Fire east of Santa Monica and the Eaton Fire across Pasadena exploded from 2,000 acres to over 10,000. So far, two people have been confirmed dead and more than 1,000 structures have burned, potentially making the Palisades Fire one of the country’s most destructive.

“I do expect it is plausible that the Palisades Fire in particular will become the costliest on record, period,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a live stream on Wednesday morning. That’s partly due to “the fact that some of those structures are some of the most expensive homes and buildings in the world.”

The fires have both immediate and underlying causes. The first ingredient for making such monstrous wildfires is the fuel. In the previous two years, some parts of coastal Southern California experienced their two wettest winters on record, spurring the growth of grass and brush. But now the region has had its driest start of winter on record, which parched that vegetation. The chaparral landscape turned into abundant tinder just waiting to burn.