The L.A. Fires Show a Need to Rethink Our Wildland Firefighting Systems

or equipment would not have meant that the Palisades or Eaton fires would have been suppressed in a day or two. Given the severe drought and winds, along with the lack of beneficial natural or prescribed fire in the landscape that has built up what experts refer to as the region’s fire debt, ignitions this month were perhaps destined to cause major fires.

Even if nothing could have stopped those fires, L.A. only narrowly escaped further destruction from numerous new blazes that started after the Palisades and Eaton fires were already burning out of control. As is normal in our current system, additional firefighters from outside the local area arrived to backstop the initial responders when they were exhausted after their 24- or 48-hour shifts. Those relief firefighters helped to ensure new fires didn’t escalate out of control, too.

As a former firefighter myself, I’ve long preached the benefits of the mutual aid and resource-sharing systems. Our world is changing, though, and firefighting tactics must follow. Our firefighting systems are still organized around seasonal staffing surges—but as these January blazes make clear, there is no such thing as a “fire season” anymore.

Land managers, researchers and advocates correctly point to the dire need to reintroduce fire to Western landscapes to repair some of the damage done by more than a century of mismanagement. But prescribed fire in densely populated Altadena or Santa Monica is a tricky task with limited scope. As fires in the so-called wildland-urban interface grow ever more destructive, fighting them is still often the only answer that protects lives and property.

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“We need [the firefighting] workforce to be stable, year-round and localized.”

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And fighting them requires us to have the workforce to do so. We need that workforce to be stable, year-round and localized. This means exploring options such as perpetual National Guard activations with a focus on firefighting. It might even mean implementing voluntary local or national service models that funnel Americans’ desire to help into these overdrawn and overwhelmed systems. None of this would substitute for the mutual aid we see when communities share resources; those systems should be expanded as well.

Whatever the new system looks like, it can’t just keep doing the same thing we have done every fire season—because if the usual response didn’t work in L.A., it won’t work anywhere.

Jay Balagna, a former wildland firefighter, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at RAND. He lives in Los Angeles near the Eaton fire. This article is published courtesy of RAND.