The Palisades Fire burns through an intersection along the Pacific Coast Highway 1 in Los Angeles County on January 7, 2025. Photo published via Ventura County Star. When flames are being driven by 60 to 100 MPH winds, it’s beyond the control of human efforts.

Like many people I’ve been watching videos on the recent fires in Los Angeles County on YouTube in recent days. Of course I’ve been watching news accounts, but also long-format, raw video, including some which is sparingly edited and with minimal commentary as well. Additionally there are now some good, informative interviews from knowledgeable people who are taking the time to explain how this has happened. Here are some of my synthesized takeaways, in case you are interested.

Before I get started, I want to add a footnote. This article took me several days to research and write. It focuses on the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, northwest of famous localities such as downtown Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and the Hollywood sign, because that was where the video I was using as source material for photo screenshots was filmed. Pacific Palisades suffered tremendous devastation in the Palisades Fire, which was but one of 4 to 5 major fires that broke out and spread beyond control within minutes on this day across the northern Los Angeles metro region. But I want to add that the city of Altadena, situated up against the rugged foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains about 35 to 40 miles east of Pacific Palisades, arguably suffered even worse in the Eaton Fire. Altadena had more buildings burn – at least 7,000, as compared to more like 4,500 in Pacific Palisades. The known death toll as of January 20, 2025 is a total of 25 people. 16 of them were in Altadena, and 9 died in the Palisades. I’m definitely not trying to compare suffering and assign one as being more valuable than the other, but I just wanted to pay respect to Altadena also, even though it gets very little mention in this piece. Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and other places also suffered significant losses. The overall discussion and analysis that you’re about to read applies more or less evenly across all of them in terms of how uncontrollable fires become under the conditions of wind and drought seen on January 7th and 8th, 2025. I just wanted to acknowledge the other communities that also lost a great deal this day.
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1. These fires are not the fault of any one person, group, agency, or factor, and they cannot be pinpointed to just one time or source. The problems that set everything up for this disaster are frequently decades in the making. As time goes on blame for certain elements can be assigned and fixes made, but it’s simplistic to lay it mostly or entirely at the feet of any one thing.

2. What would turn out to become the Palisades Fire was reported by area residents just before 10:30 AM on Tuesday, January 7, 2025. The source of ignition and cause of the blaze is still under investigation as of me writing and publishing this article on Sunday, January 19, 2025. One man going by the name of ‘effspot’ on YouTube was driving through the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in the hours before the fires escalated, in a video lasting about 35 minutes. (It was edited down to encompass at least 4 to 6 hours in that time frame, and appears to span roughly the time between early afternoon and a couple of hours after nightfall on Tuesday, January 7.) Initial footage showed flames in the canyons and brush, with unburnt houses in the foreground and whipping winds of at least 40 to 50 MPH. At times and in some places the winds were as much as 80 to 100 MPH, although this was not shown in the video I was watching, but that hardly matters since even 40 MPH wind is catastrophic for wildfire spread. Traffic on the only exit routes was at a gridlock and people were starting to abandon their cars on the street and walking instead. Many of these abandoned cars had to literally be bulldozed out of the way onto the sidewalks and medians so that firefighters and their vehicles could pass, and later that night many of these bulldozed and abandoned vehicles went up in flames.

A screenshot lifted from a news clip showing the remarkable scenario of a bulldozer shoving aside abandoned, gridlocked vehicles clogging Sunset Boulevard and other main evacuation arterials of the region in order to make way for firefighting personnel and equipment. Photo credit to KTLA News, Los Angeles.

Screenshot from a video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday, January 8, 2025, the day after the Palisades Fire broke out in far northwestern Los Angeles. While the video’s creator ‘effspot’ had been driving around the Pacific Palisades neighborhood for some time prior to the entry of flames into the neighborhood, seeing only smoke and fire on the hillsides and in the canyons some distance away, he had not observed any fires within the neighborhood yet, not until this spot fire in landscape shrubbery. Using road signs in the neighborhood and Google Maps I was able to figure out that this residence was on Bestor Boulevard, at least a couple of blocks away from the nearest canyon with fire in the native chaparral vegetation. Some of the photos screenshotted from the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in the early hours of the fire out of this video are posted later in this article; but I will start with the first spot fires shown at the outset here. Photo credit: ‘effspot’ channel on YouTube, henceforth ‘effspot’.

As they drove by the burning landscaping on Bestor Blvd ignited by a windblown ember that landed in dry leaf litter, I tried to identify what the plants were. The quantity of combustible leaf litter in this xeric garden looks to have been fairly small, and the first plant to ignite might have been a clump of ornamental grass. Nearby plants included some leafy green shrubs of an unknown species, New Zealand flax (Phormium), and the succulent rosettes of Agave attenuata. None of these other plants are high litter or traditionally flammable, but fanned by the steady high winds of about 40 MPH, whatever dry leaves were present were burning vigorously. And note how now these burning plants are creating a new source of embers as well, amplifying the issue and threatening to start new spot fires elsewhere themselves. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

After pausing to film the burning landscaping for roughly 20 seconds, they drove on up the street, made a U-turn, and drove back by literally only about 70 seconds later. In a bit over one minute, the flames have advanced along the line of green leafy shrubs and were heading deeper into the yard, back towards a wooden fence that separated the two neighboring houses. I did not see this house again in the video, but I am assuming that the fence caught fire, and eventually ignited both houses. Audible in the video were indoor home fire alarms. But no one was home to hear them, or work to put out the fire while it was still containable with a garden hose and a shovel, because everyone in the neighborhood had already evacuated. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

3. Within an hour or so, he was filming spot fires in the evacuated neighborhoods. An occasional random house was already on fire while the majority of neighboring houses were still standing intact. There were fires in hedges, underneath shrubs, in the dead leaf skirts of palm trees, along wooden fences and decks, and in fabric awnings and canopies. Most of these fires were still small and could easily have been extinguished with a garden hose, had there been anyone around to do it. But tens of thousands of people evacuated from thousands of homes, and there was nearly no one to contain these random spot fires being started by windblown embers. So a handful of small and still manageable fires spread, multiplied in number, and ignited bigger structures. Most of Southern California has not seen any significant rainfall since March or April 2024, meaning 8 to 9 months or more. The wind paired with the drought means that any small ignition source can quickly spiral into a gigantic problem.

As the videographers drove about one block uphill from the first spot fire just shown above, they came across a second spot fire. This was located at Bestor Blvd and Whitfield Ave, well within the neighborhood and several blocks from the inferno in the wild canyon vegetation – not right on the edge of the most dangerous fire zone in other words. Yet here was another spot fire! This one had gotten started in the dead leaf litter underneath a square-trimmed hedge, and had already ignited another wooden fence. This was only the second spot fire observed so far in the video, and both houses were a minimum of three to four blocks into the neighborhood, well away from the conflagration in the brushy canyons 200 to 300 yards away. But fires started by wind-thrown embers have already started entering the neighborhood. No houses are actually aflame just yet, but some will be within the next 5 to 10 minutes. It’s horrifying to anticipate what is going to happen next over the coming hours! Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Online videos I’ve watched this week show that in fire laboratory conditions where researchers study fire dynamics on various structures and in varying conditions, that having any combustible materials within 5 feet of a house poses a grave risk to the entire structure. Obviously three of the biggest culprits in this regard are foundation shrubbery, wooden fences attached to exterior walls, and wooden decking. (There are many more things that are also hazardous, but these are 3 very common things that can be ignited by windblown embers and then lead to the loss of the whole building.) I am sure that the fence, clearly attached to the corner of the garage, caused the loss of the entire home within 15 to 20 minutes in winds like these.

4. Don’t underestimate how dangerous windblown embers and glowing hot bits of flaming debris are. It is hard to overstate how frightening it is to see showers of orange fireworks being thrown hundreds of meters ahead of the main fire front, if there is in fact a main fire front. Any one of these embers can land in a spot with dried leaf litter, weeds, or grass and start a brand new blaze. Most urban structural fires that consume dozens to hundreds or even thousands of buildings are not actually a single fire front sweeping across the city. Rather they are most likely to be a random patchwork of fires spread out over multiple blocks, mostly in evacuated zones without human vigilance or the possibility of interference and fire control, and then the fires fill in the mosaic of burning buildings over the span of hours. In high winds, this is nearly impossible to contain no matter what firefighting resources are summoned. It’s simply too much, too many new fires being spread at random over too wide of a generally unmonitored, evacuated area.

Look at this firestorm, and tell me that there’s anything humans can do to stop it from advancing? This is a hurricane of fire, without any rain to dampen the ignition of millions of embers. It’s no wonder that nearly every building subjected to this fiery onslaught ended up being incinerated within a few hours. Photo credit to Ethan Swope, Associated Press.

As the Pacific Palisades documentarians motored their way through the neighborhoods filled with smoke from the nearby burning canyons, they came across their third set of spot fires. Here is an image of a Mexican fan palm, Washingtonia robusta, with fire in its leaf crown. Fan palms in this genus are extremely popular in cultivation worldwide and are grown by the tens of millions in Southern California, as well as elsewhere in the USA and globally. These palms are not ‘self shedding’, meaning they do not cleanly drop dead leaves to leave behind a smooth trunk, and instead retain a shag of dead leaves all the way up and down the trunks from ground to crown. While these dead leaf skirts can easily become a dangerous fire hazard if not removed, in cultivation the palms are frequently kept trimmed to green leaves only, as this one has been. But in a firestorm of embers, there is still enough dry, fibrous leaf material and dead leaf bases left 50 feet/15 meters up at the top of the naked trunk to ignite and spew new embers into the wind. If you look closely you can see the black and orange specks of glowing leaf material dropping out of the palm’s crown to the ground below. This is a bit hard to see in a still photo, but it’s perfectly obvious in video. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Here’s a wider angle view of the flaming Washingtonia robusta palm, showing the presence of at least two other spot fires on the ground beneath it. From available information it is impossible to fully tell whether the palm crown was lit up first and then dropped flaming debris to the ground to start the other fires, or vice-versa. Either way, there are now several fires in between extant houses, and everything is at risk, especially since the evacuated neighborhood had no one present to engage the fires and stop their spread. The simple fact that the palm is so tall also means that embers dropping out of it will travel farther before landing, thus widening the scope of potential fire growth. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

5. These embers can be blown underneath roof tiles, into the eaves and gutters where there might be additional accumulated combustible organic matter, and a small fire fanned by the intense wind makes it hotter and brighter than under normal calm air conditions. These roof and eave fires can start melting vinyl siding, or they can enter the attic via soffit vents, or a room via a broken window dislodged by the melting vinyl. Within minutes the fire is out of control in that house. The house now becomes its own source of flaming embers that are thrown into neighboring yards by the relentless wind. Adjacent houses now catch on fire and what started as one isolated fire now becomes several, all in the same area.

Shortly after the flaming palm tree lording over several ground fires beneath it, our friends come upon their first house fully engulfed in flames. How or where this fire might have started can’t likely be known, but it is the first house in this section of the neighborhood of hundreds to be lost. Note that the plastic garbage and recycling bins of the neighboring property to the left have also caught fire despite being separated from the burning house by easily 10 meters or so. The two orange dots above the garbage bins are flying embers drifting through the air. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

6. The situation has now changed from a wildland fire with a linear front (we’re all seen footage of lines of flames racing up and down hills and through forests in aerial and night footage) into a suburban or urban structural fire, and those behave differently from one-another. Urban fires are initially much more spotty and random. Fires can crop up blocks away in places where no one is watching, again because literally everyone evacuated, and firefighters are often spread very thin and are somewhere else. Under drought and dry high wind conditions like those found last week in SoCal, it is nearly impossible to prevent a catastrophe like what happened unless the entire community planned ahead decades ago for it. (And most didn’t, and perhaps even couldn’t.)

This is a more advanced example of a burning wooden fence on Bestor Blvd, a few houses away from the very first spot fire I showed at the start of this article. Obviously as time wears on we’d expect to see more such scenes, as small starting fires utilize available fuels to spread and eventually merge. Once again this illustrates just how vulnerable wooden fencing makes a property in a fire-prone region, especially ones that are both hilly and windy and have nearby ecosystems with lots of fuels such as chaparral or forests. Modern wildland fire safety protocols suggest using fences and walls of non-flammable materials such as metal, stone, concrete, or cinder blocks. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

In this view, rounding the corner, you can see that the fire has not yet made it along the fence to the point where it reaches the house or garage it adjoins about 10 meters away. But once it does, without anyone to stop it, it will cause the full loss of those structures. It’s tragic to know what’s coming in this video within 15 to 20 minutes as someone’s residence will be destroyed. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

7. Who has played Blackout Bingo? The type of game where you try to fill out the entire card rather than just trying to get a single line of five somewhere on the board? You know how it goes – the numbers and letters are called, you fill the space, and eventually the entire board is blacked out. That’s what happened here in California. A few bingo numbers were called early in the form of a burning house here and there, but as time wore on, more and more houses in the grid blacked out until literally everything was eventually burned. But unlike bingo, where the first to get a full board filled wins a prize, everyone loses in this game played with fire in lethal conditions.

In this deadly game of Blackout Bingo, two houses’ numbers come up at the same time. An ember found its way between them and managed to set fire to the wooden decking of one of them. Once more, if there were anyone here to tackle the problem, they could put it out with a garden hose in its infancy. But the danger of the situation unfolding has made mandatory evacuations necessary to save lives. Meanwhile firefighters are directed to ensure that people escape and are informed to leave, rather than to spend resources doing the impossible task of covering hundreds to thousands of homes against property losses. While protecting property is very important, it’s secondary to health and safety of the human lives involved. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Note that the plants used in this landscaping is sensibly water-efficient, succulent, and low-litter in nature. There’s not a lot of stuff to burn here. Sadly, the wooden deck proved to be the point of failure, although ultimately given the Blackout Bingo game underway in the entire Pacific Palisades neighborhood meant that all of these homes (and nearby businesses mixed in) would be doomed. This type of wind-driven fire exacerbated by drought is nearly impossible for structures to survive unless they were originally built with every fire safe principle now known to work. But since most of these buildings were constructed 30, 40, 50 or more years ago, they weren’t. And that is proving to be their undoing in this video as it documents ever more frequent new spot fires popping up on the neighborhood bingo card. (One additional observation is that there appears to be an automated chairlift installed to accommodate a person who is unable to scale the stairs, whether due to age or disability. This was an important home to someone….) Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

8. This game of fire bingo took multiple hours and it happened overnight. As stated before, and which bears repeating, it wasn’t a line of flames advancing through the community, but a broad patchwork of horror that eventually got fully filled in with devastation. How can any firefighting force be expected to handle this over an area spanning multiple square miles? What community could realistically have prevented this, especially since most of the infrastructure was laid many decades ago back when fires of this magnitude and speed were largely inconceivable?

As time progresses, day turns into night as the smoke-shrouded California sun sinks towards the Pacific horizon near another burning home, one of several now recorded in the past few minutes of the video. Someone’s Ford F150 pickup loses its life to the fire in the driveway as well, just one of what will be thousands of vehicles to suffer the same fate as thousands of homes. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

9. On questions regarding water availability, there is a lot of hostility being cast about and laying blame for what happened. Interviews with various fire officials and first responders have mostly stated that due to the wide scope and great magnitude of this fire outbreak, involving several different communities simultaneously, that demand for water in municipal systems greatly exceeded the ability to supply it. It’s not that the water had been shut off in some nefarious way – it’s that the pipes and water mains can only deliver so much water, only so many gallons per minute, based upon pipe diameters and other factors such as the elevations of water tanks and standpipes to help pressurize the water system. When hundreds of fire trucks and hoses are all simultaneously (or sequentially) hooked up, pressure and flow in the system drops. For normal fires involving one or maybe a few structures or points of demand, the system can keep up. But with roaring winds and thousands of homes ablaze all at once in a matter of hours, it can’t.

Amazingly, at some points in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, there are still multiple people standing around recording certain fires. One example is this building (a house?) being photographed and filmed by at least 7 or 8 people, including a couple of them dressed in fire gear. They might look like firefighters and perhaps they are; or they might also simply be journalists or media figures doing documentary work of what is at this point shaping up to be a historic night of fire losses. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Looking back towards the nearby intersection from the burning house in the photo above, there are no fires yet elsewhere in the immediate vicinity. Sadly this will not be the case for much longer, as all these buildings will be burned overnight and gone by the next morning of Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

10. There are also other factors regarding water systems that are not being considered in the highly emotional accusations being levied in various directions. One is that every municipality has its own water system. There is not one single uniform water supply system across California, or anywhere else for that matter. Each city and town has its own unique system, and the water is sourced from numerous different places – groundwater, this reservoir over here, that reservoir over there, a canal, a treatment plant or two or ten, or any combination of these and more. Some municipal systems are interconnected, or can be in an emergency; others are singular and isolated. Some are huge and serve millions of customers, others serve a few hundred. None of them has limitless capacity to deliver infinite water immediately when demand is off the charts as it was during these LA County wildfires.

The bingo card is getting blacker. The two guys filming from their car are operating largely south of Temescal Canyon Road and east of Sunset Boulevard – a zone that was commonly known as “The Alphabet Streets”. They are covering the Alphabet Streets repeatedly, although there is much more in the greater Pacific Palisades region that they aren’t evidently going to. By now there are regular spot fires and more than one house or business is burning, in contrast to maybe an hour before when the fire was still mainly in the wild canyon/hillside zones. The small spot fires are not only in dry leaf litter, but in bark mulch or wood chips used in landscaping. Normally these organic mulches are useful for plants and the soil and are not highly flammable. But in high winds and dry air, they convert over to a liability instead. If burning mulch glowing like BBQ briquettes is caught in time it should be easy to put out, but if it’s laid down up against the house foundation and walls, and no one is around, it becomes a point of failure that can take the whole house down. One more reason to keep all organic matter at least 5 feet clear of your buildings! Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

A few houses down from the previous photo of the burning bark mulch above, there are two more yards in trouble. The one to the right shows a serious fire getting going in the leaf litter of a densely planted landscape including a large Canary Island date palm tree (Phoenix canariensis) and numerous woody shrubs and trees. Slightly farther down the street to the left another fire is raging in the dead leaf bases of an otherwise trimmed-up palm tree. While contained to the landscaping for now, eventually every home on this block (and across the whole neighborhood comprised of a thousand-plus homes) was burned by the next morning of Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

The aforementioned home with the large burning palm and numerous trees had the entire front yard on fire as they drove past it. In this still photo grabbed from the video, the outer trunk of a large conifer (possibly a Sequoia or a Metasequoia tree?) has flames at least 10 to 12 feet up into the lower branches emanating off of the trunk. I am guessing that this was due to dropped, dry needles from the tree being caught in the bark, and possibly the shredding bark of the tree itself, or both. In any case this is a deadly outcome for the nearby houses since it is an abundant source of embers that can start new fires nearly anywhere else nearby. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

I saved this still shot from the video because it shows the tragedy of this situation. Christmas lights and holiday decorations festoon the front of a house that will soon cease to exist. The electricity is still on even though no one is home and no one is able to stop what’s about to happen. This was someone’s life, and it’s gone. It’s very, very sad. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Switching attention to the next home slightly farther down the block, the burning palm trees come into better view. As I have repeatedly shown, under normal conditions these palms would not be a particularly large fire hazard. They are situated blocks away from the nearest densely-vegetated chaparral scrub canyon; they have minimal and largely unavoidable dead matter attached to the trunks and have been properly trimmed; and without the intense Santa Ana winds bringing burning embers from a quarter mile or whatever distance away, nothing about the palms makes this house or yard excessively vulnerable to fires. This is a perfectly defensible house were it not for the wind and the necessary evacuation orders mandated to save lives. But when you add all of the unique conditions of the situation together at once, you end up with an unfightable fire and the loss of to date over 12,000 homes and businesses in several northern Los Angeles neighborhoods and suburbs. Photo credit to ‘effspot.’

One more final home in this series. This was next to the one with the burning palm crowns and down the street from the burning coniferous tree trunk. The lights are on. There are pretty tree ferns in the front. And this home is now gone. I’m detailing this to show HOW this disaster happened in the face of so much erroneous conspiracy thinking and finger pointing. How fires start throughout an evacuated neighborhood and how the Blackout Bingo board filled in over the course of hours to burn virtually every home in the Pacific Palisades. And how it was essentially impossible to stop it given the patterns of development and infrastructure placement since the first homes in the community were started in the 1930s, nearly 100 years ago. Photo credit to ‘effspot.’

It’s worth mentioning that Pacific Palisades went close to 100 years without completely burning to the ground, so this is not necessarily an inherently awful place to build a neighborhood. Although again had certain choices been made differently in decades past it might not have done so in 2025 either. But given the stacked factors accumulating over the decades combined with climate change, one of the driest starts to the local water year on record, and some of the strongest Santa Ana wind events in the month of January (historically one of the rainiest on average in SoCal but not in 2025) it was hard to stop this cascading series of spot fires from doing what they did once they got going. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

11. The fires themselves worsen water pressurization and delivery capacity issues as they continue for hours. When homeowners and businesses evacuate in a hurry, many if not most fail to turn off the water valves that serve their buildings. This matters because when a house burns, it typically melts or incinerates the water lines or various valves and fittings, which causes water to spew randomly and flood into the yard or street without actually providing any benefit to quell the fires themselves. Having at first a few, then dozens, then hundreds or even thousands of leaks in the collective water lines of this distributed nature exacerbates the already-strained system, leaving low or no pressure for the fire hydrants and the firefighters that need to use them. All these leaks plus high demand were why so many fire crews found the system depleted after hours of fire growth. While tragic and horrific, there’s nothing evil or nefarious about this – it’s simply the scale of the disaster that led to the eventual lack of water, system-wide.

Using street signs visible in the video I was able to locate this inferno as happening in a mixed-use commercial zone at the intersection of Temescal Canyon Road and Bowdoin Street in Pacific Palisades. Multiple fire alarms going off in the buildings across the street are audible in the video, eerily punctuating the otherwise mostly silent scene. According to the map, a band of undeveloped greenery does run not far away from here, and when the flames entered that it was almost inevitable that wind-driven embers would set off fires in the nearby commercial district. By now water pressure from high demand elsewhere in the system has probably dropped the capacity of local fire hydrants to nearly nothing, even if it weren’t too deadly to fight the fires under such high winds. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

12. Is it possible to design redundant water systems with backups and safety valves that can be opened and closed in emergencies? What about designing firefighting-only water systems that are separated from the potable drinking water systems that serve dual purposes in most places? The answer is yes to both questions.

A prominent example is the city of San Francisco, which has precisely such an independent firefighting water hydrant/storage tank/hilltop reservoir system that is not strictly tied to the potable water of the rest of the community. San Francisco designed and installed this separately operated auxiliary firefighting system in the wake of its 1906 earthquake. The most ruinous aspect of the 1906 quake was not the earthquake itself – it was the extensive fires that followed afterwards, which destroyed about 80% of the city and were unable to be effectively contained thanks to the broken water mains and disrupted electrical supply.

Learning from this disaster, San Francisco rebuilt using a dual system of water lines, hydrants, underground storage cisterns, and hilltop reservoirs. One system provides drinkable treated water to city residents and businesses. The other provides water to fight fires in the event of a new earthquake or other type of wildfire. The auxiliary system has multiple redundancies to prevent a single point of failure, and in an emergency it can also utilize salt water pumped from two fire boats stationed in San Francisco Bay to keep the system pressurized and stop depletion of the freshwater reserves that normally flow through it. According to the Wikipedia page on the matter, using freshwater is preferred since saltwater can be corrosive to system components, but it can nonetheless use seawater as a temporary backstop and then be flushed out with freshwater afterwards.

Obviously these systems have to be preplanned in advance and installed upon initial construction in order to be most cost-effective. Even when they are, they’re still quite a bit more expensive than using the same water system for both applications. Cost is a factor when considering whether to build two different water systems, and in deciding where to place them and how much area to protect. But having two systems can definitely protect life and property if the community decides to install them. Since the now-burned out L.A. County communities that suffered these devastating losses didn’t have firefighting-only water systems, when the existing single system was overdrawn and collapsed by thousands of leaks caused by incinerated pipes, it failed, and there was nothing to do but abandon them and hope that not too many lives would be lost. (As of today, Sunday January 19, 2025 a total of 27 lives were deemed to have been lost in the several fires that raged the week prior. This number of deaths could have been so much higher, so the evacuations mostly worked to that end at least.)

Fires are raging on at least two of the four corners of Temescal Canyon Road and Bowdoin Street here in Pacific Palisades at this point in the video. By morning, everything on all four corners and beyond will be charred to the ground. It appears that a nursery was located here based upon the banner advertising a 50% off sale on “Over 100 Acres of (Cactus? indistinct lettering in the image), Shrubs, and Plants”. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Since “Cactus, Shrubs, and Plants” are my thing, I was curious to see if I could find out which nursery this was. A simple Google Maps search showed that this was an outlet of The Standard Design Group Nurseries, which I find to be a bit of an atypical name for a retail location. But a visit to their website reveals that they have nine locations scattered across five counties in southern California from Ventura to San Diego. They do a wide variety of commercial and residential landscaping work, including this (now former?) location at 810 Temescal Canyon Road in Pacific Palisades. I imagine that the chain as a whole should survive this particular loss, but I am sure that it’s far too soon less than two weeks after the fire to determine whether this location will reopen. Photo/screenshot credit to Google Maps.

13. Can seawater be used to put out these fires that are fairly near the ocean? Sure, if you have a way to get the seawater to where the fire is. Once again, you can design a saltwater-pressurized, firefighting-only system if you throw enough money and engineering expertise at it, but that has to be done up front in order to be workable. As discussed above, San Francisco has a system that can use saltwater to maintain system pressure and water delivery capacity if necessary, but freshwater is preferred for various technical and ecological reasons. Otherwise there was essentially no way to run miles of hoses and dozens of big pumps and tanks uphill from the Pacific Ocean into the various neighborhoods being burned in a few hours in order to save the affected homes and businesses.

So people criticizing the firefighters (or “environmentalists”) for not using seawater to douse the flames can stop complaining, because every single firefighter on the front lines will tell you that aside from using these hoses and pumps on the beachfront properties of Malibu, that there was no way to do it miles inland in Pacific Palisades, or ever farther inland in the city of Altadena. Even in Malibu, right on the water, there was almost no time to mount seawater defenses against the dangerous and deadly wind-driven firestorm that had ignited only hours before. Perhaps a few Malibu structures were saved by seawater fire hoses, but clearly even there most buildings were burnt to the ground, literally feet from the ocean. It’s all about the setup time and the logistics of deploying the solutions, man.

Our videographer friends stop at an overlook to peer into the canyon where they said they sometimes watch the sunsets, and are confronted with a hellish view. The wind looks fierce. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

He zooms in on the flames below, and it appears that at a minimum there are several fully burned structures, some of which are now down to the rectilinear foundations. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

A quick pan out of the canyon to the residential street behind them (perhaps on Chautauqua Blvd?) shows a row of homes with one end already burning, and the lights still on next door. As I have said multiple times by now, everything will tragically be gone within the next few hours. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Panning to the west, a lurid glow illuminates the underside of clouds of smoke as the sun sets over the currently invisible Pacific. The bent crowns of the palm trees indicates that the Santa Ana winds are blowing from the interior deserts, over the Transverse Mountain Ranges of Southern California, and offshore out to sea. Sandwiched in between still-unburnt canyon brush and already-burning nearby homes, every building in this view is toast. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

This is what looks like the final scene that the videographers filmed in Pacific Palisades before announcing (not for the first time, but evidently the last) that they needed to “get out of here”. They were fortunate to get this footage of the last hours and minutes of this community, but they did so at significant and unnecessary risk to themselves. People who waited too long to evacuate an active fire zone have gotten trapped on the roads by intense flames on both sides of the road, downed trees or power lines, or thick toxic smoke and been killed in their vehicles or when trying to flee on foot. The danger is highly unpredictable and the stakes of getting something wrong by accident can easily become fatal. While I am using screenshots of their footage to tell this story and show the process by which a vulnerable neighborhood catches fire in phases over the course of hours, I would never have encouraged them to enter the evacuated zone to capture this either. No footage is worth your life, guys! Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

14. Seawater was in fact used by many of the aircraft used to fight the worst wildfires, as soon as wind conditions abated a bit. During the most dangerous periods of fire growth, when the winds were howling down the mountains and canyons and the greatest turbulence and densely blinding clouds of toxic smoke were being emitted, flying places and helicopters to drop water (salty or fresh) was far too deadly. Without any possibility of air support and failing water pressure on the ground, there was nothing that could be done to prevent the losses of buildings. The priority by necessity became to save lives and evacuate people, often by a single winding canyon road leading to the Pacific Coast Highway, which itself has strict limitations upon its capacity for traffic volume even under normal circumstances much less emergency ones. Once the Santa Ana winds died down a bit and flying became somewhat less risky, water drops from aircraft resumed, and many of them utilized the ocean not too far away. But even an army of airplanes and copters can only do so much to contain a fire of this nature. Rest assured that everyone did the best they could under enormously trying circumstances.

I cropped down this screenshot image of some sort of firefighting air tanker that they caught on video banking a turn overhead to show that efforts were being made within hours of fire ignition to combat the blaze. Judging by the red staining on the belly of the plane, this one drops fire retardant, which can consist of one or several different chemicals such as ammonium phosphate, aluminum hydroxide, magnesium hydroxide, and others. Far from being caught ignorant and unprepared, state, local, and national fire officials had already mobilized numerous resources to Los Angeles County well in advance of the Santa Ana wind event. Red Flag Fire Warnings were issued days earlier by forecasters at the National Weather Service, NOAA, and other agencies, and precautions were taken well in advance in case blazes broke out. Firefighting crews and trucks were on site in the region beforehand. Aircraft and fire retardant were at the ready, prepared to do their best to extinguish any fires while they were still small, if possible. There was nothing conspiratorial or negligent happening here. It’s just that the historically dry 9 months prior and winds up to 100 MPH simply made fire growth too rapid and uncontrollable for containment. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

15. One more under-discussed reason why firefighting is so challenging is that you literally cannot know precisely where a fire will erupt in advance. Fighting fires would be comparatively much easier if you knew when and where they will pop up, and could be ready for them at the appointed time and place. If you’re “fortunate”, a fire breakout will be near where crews and equipment are already set up and containment will be rapid under “normal” conditions. More likely, however, it will be elsewhere (quite possibly fairly remote and in difficult terrain) and you can’t actually do anything until you know when and where it is. The only option then is try to do the best you can to get the resources to said spot. Minutes count, since the spread of fire is exponential. A comparatively containable blaze is one that happens first in calm conditions, on simple flat terrain, and is not choked with dead brush and thick leaf litter or tall dry grass. A fire like this might only spread to an acre or two before it is extinguished. Meanwhile an uncontrollable blaze is the exact opposite and might never be realistically quickly contained. The Palisades Fire was surely in the latter category, as were all the other fires that same day in Altadena, Malibu, and so forth.

This image shows a rooftop sprinkler system that was actively pumping water onto the roof of this home while thick smoke billows in the near distance. While this is certainly a good idea and perhaps was even required by certain insurance policies in some particularly risky zones on the edge of a wildland-urban interface, I am not sure if under the conditions seen on Tuesday, January 7, 2025 that anything would have helped substantially. I do not know whether this particular home burned anyway or not, but it would be a surprise if it didn’t, despite the sprinkler precautions. My guess is that the loss of water pressure eventually shut off the sprinklers, that strong dry winds dried the damp roof back out, or that a firestorm of sparks and embers from the nearby canyon chaparral or burning neighboring houses entered the building somehow and started a fire from within the home. Even if the building lasted longer than it might otherwise have, I would bet that on this day that little could ultimately have been done to prevent its loss. If this home did somehow miraculously survive, then that is some of the best news imaginable in this terrible blog post! Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

I have focused a lot on how many homes burned where the owners had done so many things correctly to hopefully prevent that outcome, but that the circumstances of that day overwhelmed these preparations regardless. That said, it is worth pointing out that some homes were likely to burn in virtually any case, even far lesser ones than which were present on January 7, 2025. This home is mostly obscured by dense vegetation that comes right up to the walls in numerous places, and surely contains immense amounts of dry leaf litter that couldn’t be better designed to catch and nurture embers into flames. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that this home was one of the first to fall victim to the fires in the neighborhood simply by virtue of how much brush and organic matter both living and dead was in close proximity to it. The tragedy of the loss is still the same, and it wouldn’t have mattered in the grander context of every other house also being burned that day, but this house was prone to any fire, even a small one. BTW I think the tree is an Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica), one of the more graceful conifers in my opinion. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

The ‘effspot’ channel on YouTube is mostly one that seeks out cool cars while driving around the greater L.A. metro region. As such, they stopped several times amidst the growing chaos of flaming homes and yards to film and comment on various vehicles, especially sports cars, such as this Corvette Z06 Viper. (This is his identification in the video – I myself have no idea. He spots cars, I spot plants….) The cover was blowing loose in the wind, and this was earlier in the video before the fires had started migrating into the inhabited zones of Pacific Palisades. Unless this car was moved by someone, it almost surely burned in the fires later that evening or overnight. In addition to thousands of lost homes, many more thousands of parked, stored, garaged, and abandoned vehicles were also burnt out. All of it adding up to major economic losses for the owners, not to mention the toxic smoke and ash left behind from all of the synthetic chemicals that were combusted and released into the environment. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

Once ‘effspot’ had left the Palisades and gone elsewhere not quite so constricted by limited-access single points of entry and exit, he paused to film the fire raging at night across the hillsides near the Brentwood neighborhood, north of Sunset Boulevard. Brentwood suffered much less loss of property than Pacific Palisades next door did, or which Altadena some 40 miles away to the east did. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

While Pacific Palisades is mostly situated within no more than 3 to 5 miles of the Pacific Ocean, it is clear that there was zero way for seawater to be utilized to help quench the fires. The people bitching and criticizing politicians, municipalities, and even the firefighters themselves should be quiet and learn something about how this fire, and others like it in the past, came to be and why they are so destructive and impossible to fight when horrific conditions prevail. Setting up hoses, pumps, tanker trucks, and crew and then pumping ocean water for miles uphill is a logistical problem that can simply not be solved quickly or with minimal expense. It cannot be done in a matter of hours or even days, and even if it were possible, it would have been plagued by volume limitations of the pumps and the hoses. Saltwater distribution would have been limited to a few main streets in any case. If the existing fire hydrant and water delivery systems built decades ago proved inadequate to the task of fighting this fire using fresh water, why would a quickly-rigged, randomized system of temporary ocean water hoses be any better? Just be quiet please. You’re not helping by spreading rumors, criticisms, and misinformation. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

The Palisades Fire was first noted by area residents and reported at a bit before 10:30 AM PST on Tuesday, January 7, 2025. Firefighting equipment and personnel that had already been positioned knowing that a major Santa Ana wind event paired with historic drought was on the way were mobilized immediately. By 2 to 3 PM, this is what the fire looked like, only a few hours later. Within 24 hours, over 4,500 buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged in the fire, plus around 7,500 more in Altadena, Malibu, Topanga, and other communities around the region. In past fires under similarly drought-stricken and windy conditions thousands of buildings were lost: Paradise, California; Santa Rosa, California; Oakland, California; San Diego, California; Louisville, Colorado; Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii; Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee; several times in Australia and Greece. These types of wildfires are on the increase due to climate change and population growth encroaching into wildland regions, as well as related issues such as improper fire suppression policies, and invasive plants that provide extra fuel to assist in fire spread and severity. It’s not a conspiracy, and it’s not willful negligence by a recently elected politician whom you might dislike. It’s because of long-standing problems with the ecosystem and climate colliding with capitalism and the limitations of human nature. There are also economic forces that don’t want to pay for protection or plan for a bad future outcome because it costs too much or means more regulation and higher taxes. File that under human nature as well…. Photo credit to ‘effspot’.

16. This essay is already quite long and I’m not going to dive much farther into longer-term solutions to handle the threats of wildfires in California, a state famously prone to them by virtue of its climate, topography, and natural ecology. Climate change, use of proper fire-resistant construction materials and methods, rebuilding permitting processes, taxation levels, insurance policies, cost of living, expanded and redundant water systems, cleaning up the toxic ash and debris left behind – all of these are things that need to be factored into questions about how and where to proceed from here. I am sure that human nature being what it is that there will be plenty of finger-pointing and animosity, but at minimum having a basic understanding of how fires this costly and ruinous could have happened in a matter of hours is necessary to help keep the energy focused on the right things. I hope that this article will assist in helping that happen. My heartfelt condolences to those who lost everything, and especially to those who died or lost loved ones in this catastrophe.