Why the West Burns

How policy choices are fueling more severe fires

In January 2025, Ted Koerner stood in what used to be his Altadena living room, staring at two brick chimneys rising from ash. His home was gone. So was most of his neighborhood. At 67, he faced a choice: wait for insurance payouts that might not come for months, or act now.

Koerner liquidated 80% of his retirement savings and started rebuilding immediately. Four months later, he was among the first in the neighborhood to finish — one of fewer than a dozen completed rebuilds in a disaster zone where more than 16,000 structures burned. He made it. Most didn’t.

The Pacific Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire in Altadena killed 31 people and razed more than 16,000 structures in January 2025. They rank as the second and third most destructive fires in California history. More than a year later, 70% of survivors haven’t returned home, according to a survey by the Department of Angels, a nonprofit formed after the fires. Recovery isn’t just slow. In many cases, it’s stalled entirely.

Houses being rebuilt on cleared lots months after the Palisades fire

The timing of the California fires was as shocking as the scale. Fire once belonged to late summer and fall, something distant, seasonal, manageable — January was supposed to be off-season. Now wildfires occur whenever conditions align.

This is not how wildfires used to work in California. And it’s not simply because the climate is warmer. The scale of today’s disasters is the result of a century of policy decisions colliding with climate change, population growth, and institutional failure — a slow-motion catastrophe that has finally become impossible to ignore. Pacific Palisades burned because the system that once kept fire predictable no longer exists.

One resident said after the fire: “I will only live here if the neighborhood is rebuilt to withstand fire.” That’s not an impossible future — in fact, it would mean returning to some of the past fire management conditions and practices that once prevented calamities on this scale.

When fire was part of the system

For most of California’s history, fire was a normal process.

Before European settlement, Indigenous communities used frequent, low-intensity cultural burns to clear undergrowth, renew soil, and reduce the likelihood of large destructive fires. Fire moved across the land often but gently, extinguishing itself when it encountered previously burned areas or sparse vegetation.

A cultural burn taking place in Mariposa, California

As California’s Air Resources Board explains, Indigenous fire stewardship made landscapes less prone to large, high-severity wildfires.

That system ended abruptly in the early 20th century. After massive fires in 1910 burned three million acres across Idaho, Montana, and Washington, federal agencies adopted a policy of aggressive suppression. Fire became something to eliminate rather than manage.

The consequence was accumulation of kindling on a massive scale. By preventing frequent low-intensity fires, land managers allowed combustible material to pile up year after year. Forests grew denser. Chaparral thickened. Dead trees remained standing. Fire didn’t disappear. It waited. When fires ignite under these conditions, they burn hotter and spread faster than firefighters can contain them.

“What we’re seeing in California right now is more destructive, larger fires burning at rates that we have historically never seen,” said Jonathan Cox, a Cal Fire spokesperson.

Land-use policy made it worse. California steadily expanded housing into the wildland-urban interface — the zone where homes meet flammable landscapes. Since the 1990s, housing growth in these high-risk areas outpaced overall population growth. More than 95% of California’s residential property remained zoned single-family only, helping to force development outward into canyons and foothills rather than upward in urban cores.

Local governments approved development because it expanded tax bases. State officials avoided imposing hard limits because California’s housing shortage made restrictions politically explosive. Fire agencies warned about risk but lacked authority over zoning.

Communities were built on the assumption that firefighters would always arrive in time. Given how quickly the fires now spread, that assumption no longer holds.

Then there’s infrastructure. Aging power lines remain one of the most common ignition sources. The 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people was caused by faulty electrical equipment. The Eaton Fire in Altadena may have started when a transmission line unused since 1971 —- one that could have been removed decades ago — was energized in winds. The grounding equipment designed to prevent exactly this scenario was damaged.

Utility companies have paid billions in fines, but risk reduction lags behind climate reality, which leaves little margin for error.

Pacific Palisades: prepared, wealthy, still exposed

Pacific Palisades was undone by a system that still assumes catastrophic fire is an exception rather than an expectation.

The Palisades Fire shattered a comforting myth: that preparedness and resources are enough.

Pacific Palisades residents are affluent, politically connected, and acutely aware of fire risk. They had evacuation plans. Firefighters had equipment. When winds intensified and embers began flying miles ahead of the flame front, none of that mattered.

“It was something like I had never seen,” said Cal Fire Battalion Chief Brent Pascua. “It was just a blowtorch igniting the thing next to it. What wasn’t on fire was soon to be on fire.”

The Palisades fire likely reignited from the Lachman Fire, an eight-acre blaze that burned six days earlier, and may have been the result of arson. A former Pacific Palisades resident was arrested and indicted by a federal grand jury last October, accused of intentionally setting the Lachman fire on January 1, 2025. He has pleaded not guilty.

Firefighters texted that they were ordered to leave the Lachman fire even though “the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch,” The Los Angeles Times reported. LAFD didn’t use thermal imaging to confirm the fire was extinguished — standard protocol to prevent rekindling. Once the fire crossed into steep canyons dense with accumulated brush, fire suppression gave way to evacuation.

The aftermath exposed another failure: recovery. Insurance payouts lagged. Coverage gaps widened. Fewer than 30% of survivors closed insurance claims by December, according to the Department of Angels survey. State Farm and FAIR Plan customers reported the highest dissatisfaction, citing burdensome requirements, lowball estimates, and multiple adjusters cycling through their cases.

“We’re seeing huge gaps between the money insurance is paying out and what it will actually cost to rebuild,” said Joy Chen of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

A year later, only 758 rebuilding permits have been approved within Los Angeles city limits — the area which includes Pacific Palisades — while 568 have been issued outside the city, where Altadena is located, representing less than 10% of destroyed homes. Jessica Rogers discovered her insurance had been canceled only after her home burned. She’s now navigating FEMA and SBA loans, wondering if she’ll need to empty her 401(k) to cover remaining costs. She estimates hundreds face the same decision.

West Altadena: warnings that came too late

If Pacific Palisades showed the limits of preparation, West Altadena revealed the cost of systemic gaps in emergency response.

Residents there didn’t receive evacuation orders until hours after the fire reached their neighborhood. All but one of the Eaton Fire’s fatalities occurred in West Altadena — a community with significant Black homeownership and a history shaped by redlining elsewhere in Los Angeles.

Emergency notifications relied on mobile alerts. Some residents received nothing. Others got false warnings or delayed orders. The delivery system fragmented exactly when reaching the most residents mattered most.

Water infrastructure failed under demand that hit four times normal levels for 15 hours. Roughly 20% of fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry. Pump stations that feed the higher-elevation areas of the Palisades and the Santa Ynez Reservoir sat empty — drained in February 2024 for repairs that took over a year. But even if full, experts say, it wouldn’t have prevented pressure drops. The system was never designed for fires at this scale.

Climate change as multiplier

Climate change is central to the wildfire crisis, but not its sole cause. Rising temperatures dry vegetation. Snowpacks melt earlier. Fire seasons stretch longer. Extreme heat increasingly overlaps with high-wind events. Scientists estimate warming has increased fuel aridity and extreme fire weather likelihood across the West by roughly 35%.

But climate change doesn’t determine where people build, how land is managed, or whether warnings reach residents in time.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain warned before the fires about California’s vulnerability to wet-to-dry swings. “We really haven’t seen a season as dry as this one follow a season as wet as the previous one,” he said. “All of that extra abundant growth of grass and vegetation, followed immediately by a wind event of this magnitude while it’s still so incredibly dry,” is a recipe for extreme fire behavior.

The previous two wet winters produced record vegetation growth. Then came a record-dry fall — no measurable precipitation from May through December. When Santa Ana winds arrived in January, the landscape was primed for explosive fire.

Research shows an October–December dry period is now 2.4 times more likely to occur than in the preindustrial climate. The dry season has extended by roughly three weeks, increasingly overlapping the peak Santa Ana wind season. What used to be separated by seasonal rainfall now collides with deadly regularity.

Back in 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown put it plainly: “This is not the new normal. This is the new abnormal.”

Invoking climate change as a catch-all explanation risks obscuring responsibility. Warming may make fire more likely, but policy determines whether fire becomes fatal.

Maui: different terrain, same avoidance

Maui’s Lahaina fire revealed the cost of neglect.

The parallels with California are structural, not ecological: unmanaged fuel loads, infrastructure built for past risks, and political systems that defer hard decisions until after catastrophe strikes. Aging power lines were also a culprit. Security cameras captured the moment Maui’s electrical grid faulted, sparking what became the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century. Sensors recorded dozens of similar grid faults that night as fires spread across the island, killing 99 people.

Aftermath of the Lahaina fire

The town of Lahaina wasn’t surrounded by forest. The fire burned through grasslands created by decades of abandoned agriculture and invasive species that replaced native vegetation. Prolonged drought turned those grasses into continuous fuel beds. When hurricane-driven winds arrived, fire moved faster than evacuation plans assumed possible.

Emergency systems failed at the worst moment. Sirens were not activated in many areas. Power and cell service collapsed. Warnings arrived through social media, if they arrived at all. More than 100 people died.

As one peer-reviewed analysis noted, residents were left to rely on “informal communication channels in the absence of functioning emergency alert systems.”

Lahaina demonstrated that wildfire disaster is no longer confined to traditionally fire-prone regions. It follows fuel, wind, and human settlement, wherever those come together.

The accountability gap

The most consistent feature of the wildfire crisis is diffusion of responsibility.

Local governments approve housing in fire-prone areas but rely on state and federal agencies for suppression. State agencies regulate utilities but hesitate to impose costs that would meaningfully harden infrastructure. Federal land managers control vast tracts but lack funding and political cover for large-scale prescribed burns. Insurance markets retreat quietly, forcing homeowners to absorb risk. Each actor can point elsewhere.

California and the US Forest Service signed a 2020 agreement to treat 500,000 acres annually through controlled burns and forest thinning. As of 2024, California treated just over 100,000 acres per year on average. The Forest Service treated approximately 200,000. Neither met its commitment. Fire will reduce fuel loads one way or another — through methodical controlled burns or uncontrollable wildfires that destroy entire communities.

The result is a system optimized for avoidance rather than prevention. Hard choices — restricting development, forcing infrastructure upgrades, investing in fuel management, confronting that some areas are no longer safely habitable — get deferred because they’re politically unpopular, expensive, or legally complex.

Fire is inevitable. But wildfire disasters aren’t nature’s vengeance. They’re the consequence of choices about how and where we live, who pays for protection, and which costs we defer until after catastrophe strikes.