A critical question became why the largest city in California, a state that has spent years fortifying itself against wildfires, couldn’t stop the firesthis time. State regulations required residents in high-risk neighborhoods to create vegetation-free buffers around their homes. California had invested billions of dollars to reduce the amount of woody fuel for fires to burn. It boasted the
largest firefighting force in the nation.
Yet within a few days, decades-old communities and
beloved landmarks were gone, and residents were left asking why.
Experts said several key factors — including urban sprawl, a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes, and a water system that’s not designed to combat multiple major blazes at once — left L.A. exposed to disaster.
The two communities decimated by fires,
Altadenaand the Pacific Palisades, were built decades ago at the foothills of mountains that frequently burn ... before many subdivision or building code requirements for wildfire hazards took effect.
[As a side note, just as I question rebuilding efforts in hurricane prone regions without taking climate change into account, similar questions arise here and certainly anything would need to adhere to the current building codes.]
In California, people living in risky areas are required to maintain a buffer around their homes — a five-foot perimeter free of vegetation known as “defensible space.”
But in practice, the rules haven’t been followed uniformly. Many homeowners are reluctant to remove wooden fences, replant their gardens and trim the lower limbs on pine trees.
For nearly two decades, volunteers in Altadena have come together each spring to cut the grass and clear invasive weeds from around their neighborhood, tucked into the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. They share a profound sense of their vulnerability to wildfire.
the group’s offers to help residents create fire buffers around their homes were often ignored. Last spring, the group’s mowing and weeding led to contentious exchanges with neighbors upset over the weed whackers’ noise, he said.
Some of the most desirable homes in the Palisades were built high on bluffs or in steep canyons that run from the mountains to the ocean. “The houses are perfectly aligned with the direction of the prevailing Santa Ana winds,”
Managing the grasses, bushes and shrubs on these hillsides is “physically impossible” Lunder said. “You would have to send someone down on rope with a chainsaw
Researchers say that while climate change is making fires larger and more destructive, there’s another contributing factor: more than a century of federal policies that called for all fires to be extinguished, no matter how small, which contributed to the buildup of dead vegetation. Federal and California land managers no longer embrace that approach — they now use thinning and intentionally set fires to clear away fuel.
But this work is expensive and, at the federal level, is underfunded.
“There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighborhoods at once.
As homes burned, water continued to flow through their pipes even as they ruptured or melted.
