The Palisades Were Waiting to Burn

As Santa Ana winds whipped sheets of embers over the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California last night, the palm trees along the beach in the Pacific Palisades ignited like torches scaled for gods. The high school was burning. Soon, the grounds around the Getty Villa were too. The climate scientist Daniel Swain went live on his YouTube channel, warning that this fire would get worse before it got better. The winds, already screaming, would speed up. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing as he spoke. Sunset Boulevard was backed up; ash rained down on drivers as they exited their cars to escape on foot. A bulldozer parted the sea of abandoned cars to let emergency vehicles pass.

The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.

Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since recordkeeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on. As The Atlantic wrote last summer, California’s fire luck of the past two years had run out. “You’d have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me.

Then the colder months brought the Santa Ana winds: stuff of legend, the strong downslope gusts that suck humidity out of the air, if there was any to begin with. This time, the winds were stronger than average, too. A parched landscape; crisp-dried vegetation; strong, hot winds: “The gun was loaded,” MacDonald said. And it was pointed at Pacific Palisades.

MacDonald studies climate change and wildfires, and he has published a paper with colleagues projecting that the wildfire season in Southern California would, on average, start earlier and last longer in the future, thanks to human-driven climate warming. The lengthier the season, the greater the probability that a fire-weather day would overlap with a Santa Ana–wind day, or a day when someone happened to ignite a fire—more than 90 percent of fires in Southern California are sparked by human activity, he said.

Last night, he watched an example of his work unfold in real time. He could see smoke rising off the Palisades Fire from his house in Thousand Oaks. He had important documents in bags, just in case he and his family had to evacuate. In a dry year, he told me, the concept of fire season no longer applied in Southern California: “You can have a fire any month of the year.”

This morning, a second and third major fire are pressing toward more suburban zones where people are now evacuating. The Los Angeles mayor has told the city to brace for more. Altogether, more than 5,000 acres have burned already, and an unknown number of structures along with them. Schools are closing this morning, and Los Angeles health officials warned of unhealthy air, directing people to wear masks outdoors and keep windows closed as smoke and soot blanketed some parts of the city.

As he watched the smoke, MacDonald said he had colleagues at the university who lived in the active fire zone. He hoped they were all right; he texted them, knowing that they may not respond for a while. He’d evacuated from the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned nearly 100,000 acres and destroyed some 1,600 buildings, including some of his neighbors’ homes. I asked what it was like to study the future of fire in California while living it. “It makes the work more immediate,” he said. “It gives you a sense of unease. As the summer ends and you know you’re dried out, you look around you at things you own, and you think, This could just be ashes.”