New Delhi: Five different wildfires raging in Southern California since Tuesday have wreaked havoc across Los Angeles in the US, killing at least five people and displacing over 1,00,000. The fires have spread across almost 30,000 acres in Los Angeles, targeting posh neighbourhoods, like Malibu and Hollywood hills, burning down celebrities’ homes and numerous businesses.
Three of these wildfires are zero percent contained, and firefighters from five other states have been called in to help the fire department in Southern California counter the spread, Reuters reported Wednesday.
The Palisades and Eaton wildfires, according to media reports, are the two most destructive to ever strike the city of Los Angeles, together destroying over 2,000 structures and accounting for 27,000 acres of the total wildfire spread in LA.
While this is not the worst wildfire episode to hit the West Coast state, with two 2020 fires, which burnt for weeks across 1 million acres each, taking the mantle, it is the scale and speed of the current fires that are worrisome. It is also important to note that while California is a wildfire-prone state, the normal season is during the summers between May to October, and winter wildfires are rarer.
Among the main causes behind these particular fires and their spread are the dry winter season and low humidity, mixed with the effect of Santa Ana winds.
As five major fires—Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Lidia and Sunset—rage across Los Angeles and Southern California, ThePrint takes a look at the history of wildfires in California and the effect of climate change.
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Why did these fires spread?
The LA fire department’s website does not specify the cause behind any of the major fires that are currently active. However, they had started issuing red flag alerts for ‘high fire weather’ on 30 December because of the onset of Santa Ana winds from inland Southern California towards the coast. These are extremely fast and dry winds that increase the risk of wildfires especially in dry forests.
Even in 2014, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire had estimated that wildfires during days with Santa Ana winds spread much faster, and to larger areas, than non-Santa Ana days.
Added to this is the fact that Southern California has experienced an extremely dry season with “negligible rainfall” this year. According to media reports, California is entering ‘drought’ conditions due to the lack of rain during what is currently the rainy season there. There has been only 0.16 inches of rain since October, which is four inches below average, reports say.
Without rainfall events, the dryness of the vegetation is exacerbated so that even a small spark can result in heavy wildfires. So, with Santa Ana winds, drought conditions, and overgrowth of vegetation, the fires had the perfect mix of factors to aid their spread.
The University of California, Los Angeles released a new paper Thursday, attributing the wildfires to a phenomenon called hydroclimatic whiplash, where periods of extremely wet and extremely dry weather intersperse, led by climate change.
This kind of whiplash has increased by 31 percent to 66 percent in the world since the 1950s, found the UCLA paper, and it is expected to increase further if the world continues on the global warming journey. This will increase not only rainfall and wildfire events, but also landslides, floods and storms, especially over northern Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.
How is anthropogenic climate change responsible?
The role of climate change here cannot be ignored. A 2023 report by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expressed how rise in global warming has a direct impact on the “risk and extent of wildfires in western United States”, leading to record wildfire seasons from 2020 to 2022. Climate change-induced global warming leads to excess drying up of organic matter and has, in fact, nearly doubled the forest fire area expected in its absence in the US from 1984 to 2015.
Even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2021 released a report saying how eight out of ten largest wildfires in California occurred only between 2017 and 2021, burning almost 100,000 square kilometres of land together. The report also points to extended drought conditions in the western state, especially in 2020-21, where 80 percent of the state was said to be under ‘extreme’ drought, according to the US Drought Monitor.
These drought conditions exacerbate tree mortality and loss of green vegetation in a region, thus quite literally adding fuel to the fire when a wildfire spreads. Drought conditions also likely reduce the water table, making it difficult for the fire department to put out these fires.
Juliette Kayyem, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, took to X to share how “municipal water systems are not equipped to fight wildfires”, referring to the lack of water resources available for firefighters in California.
In such drought conditions too, climate change has a significant impact. An October 2024 report published in Communications Earth and Environment Journal found that anthropogenic climate change affects the probability of drought recovery. In Western US, the ability of the land to recover from drought conditions between 2000 and 2021 is 25-50 percent lower than it was from 1901 to 1980. The study found that this ability would only reduce further in the coming decades, as a result of changing weather patterns and increased warming of the world.
According to Wildfire Resilience Alliance, an initiative by the Los Angeles City Fire Department, climate change is “changing the weather in Los Angeles”, ranging from atmospheric rivers dumping huge amounts of rainfall in Los Angeles in February 2024 to wildfire conditions a year later.
These statistics correlate with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute report that showed how the 2020 wildfire season produced between $5 to $9 billion dollars in losses. Compared to that, the current wildfires in LA have been estimated to have caused $50 billion in losses so far, according to Accuweather, a private US weather forecasting company.
The solution
The natural propensity of California to wildfires has been exacerbated due to climate change and global warming, leading to higher fire risks and longer fire seasons in the coming decades, says NOAA.
Both government organisations and independent academic institutions have solutions in place to deal with increased wildfires, from strengthening wildlife preparedness plans to adopting fire-safety building codes.
The Governor of California has shared a list of measures adopted by the state to improve wildfire resilience, which include expanding the aerial firefighting fleet, and investing a total of $4 billion in wildfire prevention.
Currently, there are over 7,500 firefighters and other personnel employed in Los Angeles to fight the wildfires, with more support pouring in from neighbouring states.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)