Harel Daw and Finn O’Brien had just finished dinner at a restaurant in Pasadena, California, on Tuesday night when they received an email from a friend about the evacuation order. A heavy rainstorm started the Eaton Fire, which spread up the hill behind the house.
“When we drove back to the house, there was already a feeling of apocalypse, with trees down and visibility poor,” Do said. When the couple returned to their home to evacuate their two cats, they saw flames in the distance. Do, who works at nearby NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said some of her colleagues lost their homes, but she doesn’t know if their apartments survived the fire.
“The emotions haven’t arrived yet,” Do said. “A lot of it is just numbness and shock to the events that are unfolding.”
The hills around Los Angeles turned into hell. Days after forecasters warned of dangerous fire weather conditions, twin fires fanned by 160 mph winds began raging through some of Southern California’s most exclusive neighborhoods, killing thousands of residents. were evacuated and historic sites were threatened. Within five hours Wednesday morning, both the Palisades Fire east of Santa Monica and the Eaton Fire across Pasadena exploded from 2,000 acres to more than 10,000 acres. so far, 2 people confirmed dead With more than 1,000 structures on fire, the Palisades Fire could become one of the most destructive fires in the country.
“We predict that the Palisades fire, in particular, is likely to be the costliest on record,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said on a livestream Wednesday morning. Part of that is due to “the fact that some of those structures are some of the most expensive homes and buildings in the world.”
Fires have direct causes and root causes. The first ingredient to start a huge wildfire like this is fuel. Over the past two years, parts of coastal Southern California experienced two of the wettest winters on record, spurring grass and brush growth. But now, as the region faces the start of its driest winter on record, its plants have dried up. The chaparral landscape has been transformed into a rich crater waiting to burn.
“In the context of climate change, there will be wetter periods. very wet humid periods and very dry It’s a dry season,” said Stephanie Pincetre, director of UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities. “Climatic conditions that Southern California has experienced for centuries will only get worse.”
The second ingredient is a spark. It will take time for law enforcement to uncover the causes of all these fires, but wildfires start wherever humans set foot. It could be a wayward firework, a chain pulled off the back of a truck on the highway, or arson. California also has a big problem with electrical equipment swaying in the wind and throwing sparks onto the vegetation below. As winds picked up on Tuesday, utilities such as Southern California Edison turn off the power A call was made to all areas of the city to prevent just such a situation.
John Putman/Anadolu, via Getty Images
The third factor was strong winds. This is the season when the Santa Ana winds, which occur in the interior of the western United States, are at their strongest in Southern California. The warm, dry air moves toward the ocean and speeds down the mountains. Scientists don’t expect Santa Ana’s wind speeds to increase due to climate change, but it could make it drier and hotter. “Plants could become even drier,” said Alexander Gershunov, a climate researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Slopes that receive more precipitation from atmospheric rivers also receive strong Santa Ana winds.”
Therefore, there is more fuel in those locations, and unfortunately, there are also more winds that can cause devastating fires. Once there is a spark, wind often pushes the fire forward at unavoidable speeds. Thus, the 2018 Camp Fire killed 85 people and caused flames to race through the town of Paradise, trapping people in their homes and cars. That’s why authorities fear the worst with the new, fast-moving Los Angeles fires.
“The spread was very dramatic, especially the Eaton Fire,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Devin Black. He said the public should use caution when driving around the blaze as winds were moving erratically. “They move so quickly that they can get trapped,” he said.
Wind-driven wildfires are notorious not only because they move very quickly, but also because they are difficult to fight. These Santa Ana winds blow embers in front of the main wall of the fire, igniting a new fire perhaps a mile away. Therefore, large, intense fires can cause smaller fires that can flare up on their own and get out of control. This is because workers are already spread thinly across the landscape. Four fires broke out in Los Angeles County Wednesday afternoon, some of the fire hydrants ran dry, and efforts to extinguish the fires took a lot of effort. None of them could be contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Part of the problem is that the wind is blowing landed the aircraft Used for dropping water.
The immediate emergency is to extinguish the fire and safely evacuate people. The long-term challenge is to successfully adapt Los Angeles and the rest of California to a future of increasingly worsening droughts and wildfires. “People talk about climate adaptation,” Pincetl says. “We are not adapted to our current climate, much less the future climate.”
