The allegations flew as fast as the flames. The Palisades fire raging through the coastal mountains of Los Angeles, rich and powerful critics said, wouldn’t have been quite so devastating had authorities done a better job of clearing hillside brush.
“We knew the winds were coming. We knew that there was brush that needed to be cleared 20 years ago,” Rick Caruso, the developer and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, told The Times. “This fire could have been mitigated — maybe not prevented.”
Elon Musk wrote on X that the “biggest factor, in my opinion, is that crazy environmental regulations prevent building firebreaks and clearing brush near houses.” And actress-producer Sara Foster chimed in with an X post saying “our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared.”
Did these and other second-guessers have a point? Scientists, wildfire specialists and firefighting officials had differing viewpoints. But several of these experts — including strong proponents of brush clearance — said that the winds fanning the flames were so fierce, and ground conditions so dry, that clearing more shrubs wouldn’t have had a significant effect.
“All of the brush clearance, fuel breaks — they’re very effective on what we would consider a normal day,” said Chief Brian Fennessy of the Orange County Fire Authority. “But what you’re talking about here is probably less than 1% of all the fires that we respond to in Southern California.”
The Palisades fire ignited Jan. 7 amid hurricane-force winds, with gusts of up to 100 mph recorded in some areas.
“You could have put a 10-lane freeway in front of that fire and it would not have slowed it one bit,” Fennessy said.
Vegetation management efforts are typically most effective when firefighters are able to take advantage of the reduced fire intensity they provide to snuff out flames.
In this case, Fennessy said, fire was blowing sideways from house to house, with the structures themselves serving as fuel. The winds grounded firefighting aircraft. And firefighters on the ground were focused on getting people out of the path of the fast-moving inferno as it burned deeply into communities.
Several experts noted that the intense gusts lofted embers miles from the fire front, essentially spreading flames through the air — not by brush. They also pointed out that landscape-level fuel reduction, in which brush is cut back over large swaths of land, is controversial in Southern California’s sensitive coastal ecosystems.
In the forests of Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, large blazes are often stoked by a buildup of trees and brush that accumulated due to decades of fire suppression. Removing some of that vegetation can help make those forests both more fire-resilient and healthier, since an abundance of plants competing for finite resources makes the ecosystem more sensitive to drought, said Patrick T. Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank.
Modeling by the nonprofit suggests that clearing brush — and thus eliminating fuel — can reduce the intensity of wildfires in the Los Angeles Basin even during extreme weather, Brown said, although it’s not likely to have prevented the kind of destruction Pacific Palisades is experiencing now.
At the same time, he said, unlike in forested areas, fuel reduction in the region’s chaparral shrublands risks harming the ecosystem rather than making it healthier.
That’s because the Santa Monica mountains, Malibu canyons and other wildland areas near coastal Los Angeles generally burn too frequently, said Alexandra Syphard, senior research ecologist at the nonprofit Conservation Biology Institute and adjunct professor at San Diego State University.
That’s caused native evergreen chaparral shrubs, which take several years to mature and make new seeds, to be replaced by invasive annual grasses that die in the early summer and catch fire more easily, said Helen Holmlund, biology professor at Pepperdine University.
“That promotes more frequent fires which, in turn, leads to more loss of chaparral shrubs and more invasive species,” she said.
Large-scale attempts to preemptively thin or burn these coastal areas could therefore actually make the landscape more flammable in the long run, said Max Moritz, a cooperative extension wildfire specialist at UC Santa Barbara.
“Those are trade-offs that, as a society, you have to think about if they’re worthwhile,” Moritz said.
Given the weather conditions, Moritz is skeptical that more landscape-level brush clearance would have done much to slow the fire’s initial spread. He also noted that landscape-level brush management is distinct from brush clearance around individual homes, which is typically the responsibility of the property owner and can help give firefighters opportunities to protect structures.
Still, Joe Ten Eyck, who coordinates wildfire and urban interface programs for the International Assn. of Firefighters, said extreme weather conditions can make brush clearance even more important.
“The more we take away the fuel for a fire to burn, the more we’re going to lessen the risk and make individual residences and communities resilient,” said Ten Eyck, who is also a retired operations chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
In fact, the Getty Villa credited its pruned landscaping and irrigated grounds with helping to save the museum’s structures from the Palisades fire.
Ventura County fire officials also said that residents’ compliance with a strictly enforced county ordinance requiring 100 feet of brush clearance around buildings, as well as other fire-resistant construction features, helped firefighters defend homes from the Kenneth fire that spread through the West Hills area Jan. 9.
Although the winds weren’t as fierce as in previous days, they were still strong, said Scott Dettorre, public information officer for the Ventura County Fire Department.
Los Angeles has similar rules for homes in fire-prone areas, although Fire Chief Kristin Crowley wrote in a Dec. 4 memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners that a $7-million reduction in overtime funding had hindered her department’s ability to carry out inspections ensuring residents were complying, among other tasks.
But even those efforts can only help so much during the most extreme events, said Jason Moghaddas, fire ecologist and registered professional forester for think tank Spatial Informatics Group, and his colleague, Carrie Levine, co-lead of the group’s forest and agriculture domain.
Once a fire reaches clusters of buildings, the structures themselves become the fuel, they said. Moghaddas pointed to the Sunset Boulevard area, where the Palisades fire burned fire-hardened buildings like concrete commercial structures surrounded by pavement.
“It’s all these cascading probabilities — you can improve your chances of survivability, improve the chance that firefighters will protect your home, improve the chance that flame lengths will be lower … but somewhere all those probabilities show up on the ground in real life and the fire tests them,” he said. “And you can see, ‘well, there wasn’t enough there to change the outcome.’”
Times staff writers Matt Hamilton and David Zahniser contributed to this report
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