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Apocalypse in the City of Angels: What Might Have Been So Different

If only the city of Los Angeles had invested more to protect its Angelenos, the enormous destruction from the Los Angeles fires perhaps could have been considerably smaller.

Fire in Los Angeles. (Photo: @satggin)

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By Lee Ohanian

February 11, 2025
5:18 pm
Los Angeles, CA

If only the city of Los Angeles had invested more to protect its Angelenos, the enormous destruction from the Los Angeles fires perhaps could have been considerably smaller. The LA fires have claimed twenty-nine lives, including an amputee father and his son with cerebral palsy, both of whom died in their home waiting for an evacuation team to rescue them, which hadn’t arrived before flames engulfed their home. The estimated property damage from these fires is an estimated $30 billion, with total damages from $250 billion to $275 billion. This estimated total loss could exceed California’s entire state budget from the 2021–22 fiscal year.
I lived in the Pacific Palisades, the location of one of the Los Angeles fires, for fourteen years, so I know the area well. My family and I are fortunate, as the Pacific Palisades home we owned is now gone. Several of our friends were not so fortunate. One friend, who managed to keep his sense of humor after fire destroyed his home, texted me a photo of where his house once stood, on the south side of Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades. The image he sent showed a pile of rubble and ash. Within the image was the chimney of his home, the only thing that was still standing. He wrote in the text “For sale: one chimney. Good condition. Fire-tested.”

So many lives lost. So many other lives changed forever. Over fifty thousand acres burned, including some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Called “paradise,” “God’s country,” “idyllic,” and “Shangri-La” by some residents. Images taken of the Pacific Palisades before the fire showcase its beauty and uniqueness. But the Palisades now looks like a war zone, reminiscent of the damage the German city of Dresden experienced from firebombing during World War II.

Some emphasize climate change as being the central cause of the LA fires. Governor Gavin Newsom has expressed a similar but more broad opinion about the California wildfires, calling them “a climate damn emergency”.

Those who believe that climate change is primarily responsible for California’s wildfires should insist that governments invest heavily in fire protection and prevention. Eight of the ten largest California wildfires (measured by acres burned) have occurred since 2017, and the Camp, Tubbs, and North Complex fires, all of which occurred within the last eight years, have taken 122 lives.

Los Angeles is all-in on spending money on certain climate-related programs but should be spending more on higher-priority services, including fire protection. Just a month before the fires broke out, LA mayor Karen Bass celebrated LA’s green accomplishments, which include creating 100,000 green energy jobs and installing 16,000 electric vehicle chargers.

Bass stated, “We have worked urgently to build a greener Los Angeles to make a healthier and more sustainable city.” But creating EV charging stations and hiring green energy workers doesn’t move the climate-change needle. California is responsible for less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions. Containing about 10 percent of the state’s population, the city of Los Angeles is likely accountable for only about 0.1 percent of global carbon emissions.

These green initiatives take resources away from other programs. According to city budget documents, the city of Los Angeles spent about 6.4 percent of the city’s budget on the Fire Department (LAFD) in the 2024–25 fiscal year, down from about 8.5 percent in 2003–4.

About a month before the fires began, LA’s fire chief warned that the existing budget significantly affected the department’s ability to respond to large-scale emergencies. She had also warned that the department needed two fully staffed professional crews to maintain wildfire lines and clear brush rather than relying on teen volunteers.

Just imagine what could have been if more of the budget had been allocated to fire prevention and protection. Substantial firefighting equipment and personnel could have been deployed to the Palisades as a cautionary measure before the Santa Ana winds began. Before the fires, no equipment or additional personnel were deployed there. Perhaps the department could have invested in technologically advanced fire detection systems that can identify fires before they become so large that they are difficult to contain. While these new systems are in their infancy, research using them could potentially have been further along had California state and local governments funded these diagnostic efforts in earlier years, given the enormous potential value to the state of identifying fires early.

But without additional equipment and personnel in the Palisades, and learning of the fire only after Palisades residents called it in around 10:30 am on the morning of January 7—over two hours after a hiker had smelled smoke close to the origin of the fire—the two fire stations in the Palisades were quickly overwhelmed.

At 10:48 am, eighteen minutes after the 911 call reported the fire, firefighters were communicating by radio that the Palisades fire was spreading with the wind. First responders were reported to have arrived at the fire around that time, based on an LAFD report obtained by the Los Angeles–based ABC affiliate, a report that does not appear to be publicly available on the LAFD incident status website. However, the homeowner who made the 911 call, and who was watching as fire personnel arrived, claimed that it may have been as late as 11:15 am, before the first water was put on the fire, and a media story based on a Washington Post article reports first responders did not arrive at the fire until 11 am.

By 11:06 am, the fire was reported to encompass ten acres, which would seem to be manageable, particularly if additional resources had been stationed in the Palisades, ready to go. By 11:31 am, the fire was reported to cover two hundred acres.

Even without a larger fire budget, the LAFD could have positioned more personnel and equipment in the Palisades, but they chose not to. A retired LAFD battalion chief stated, “This required strong leadership that day—that did not happen.”

What a tragedy. One that potentially could have been much smaller. And one that the city had hoped to avoid with the substantial fire-protection investments it made more than sixty years ago. In 1961 the community of Bel Air, which is in the hills just above the UCLA campus on Sunset Boulevard, lost nearly five hundred homes in a fire that was like the 2025 LA fires in that it was driven by very strong Santa Ana wind gusts. And just as in the case of the Palisades fire, firefighters in the Bel Air fire struggled with fire hydrants losing water pressure. To increase fire protection, city leaders added thirteen fire stations, mapped out new fire hydrants, purchased helicopters, and dispatched more crews to the Santa Monica Mountains. And to help protect the Pacific Palisades, a reservoir was built in Santa Ynez Canyon in the Pacific Palisades highlands, as well as a pumping station “to increase fire protection,” as noted by the then–chief water engineer of the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP), Gerald W. Jones.

But the reservoir that was supposed to help save Pacific Palisades had sat empty for nearly a year, waiting for its cover to be repaired. This seems to be the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with the neighborhood’s fire protection and is hard to reconcile with the statement by current LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones in December 2024 that “we are making significant investments in infrastructure and programs to ensure our city continues to weather the impacts of climate change and maintain access to critical life services of water and power. We are here to show the world how Los Angeles is a model of innovation and sustainability in the United States and the world.”

You may wonder who will be held accountable for the LA fires and the enormous destruction of life and property? Will it be Mayor Bass, who chose to attend the inauguration of the Ghana president after being warned about the probability of wildfires, and who didn’t seem amenable to increasing the fire budget? Or will it be the LADWP CEO, for keeping a 117-million-gallon reservoir that is near the origin of the Palisades fire empty for nearly a year? Or will it be the LA fire chief, for not deploying more personnel and equipment before the fires started?

If it were up to two California lawmakers, the answer might be “none of the above.” They would instead seem to place the blame on the energy companies for allegedly deceiving the public about climate change for years.

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins its cleanup of the LA fires, they will confront a task that has been made more complicated and hazardous and will probably take longer because of all the lithium batteries in the incinerated electric vehicles—the blackened steel shells that line streets of a city with more electric vehicles than any other in the United States.

So much for Los Angeles being “a model of innovation and sustainability.” Just where will the EPA store all the toxic debris leaking from all those EV batteries? And who will answer for the twenty-nine individuals who lost their lives and the thousands whose lives have been turned upside-down?

Slource: Hoover Institution