The fire that razed Melise Gerber’s house raced from the dry slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles through thousands of tightly packed homes, through a beloved 1950s diner, a sprawling Victorian-style mansion, an entire strip of downtown stores — its damage extending miles from anything locals considered wilderness.
The path of destruction confounds Ms. Gerber, 58, a Southern California native who for a quarter-century lived in her brick-red bungalow in Altadena, a historic town 15 miles northeast of downtown L.A. Firefighters had always been able to quickly contain fires to the foothills above the city, she said.
“My house had been there almost 80 years, and nothing had ever happened,” said Ms. Gerber, who works in marketing. “I just don’t understand it.”
The devastation from the two major fires that erupted in L.A. last week has stunned Californians, with more than 10,000 structures across the region destroyed and at least 27 people killed. The damage, fueled by once-in-a-decade wind gusts and an extremely parched landscape, has reached much farther into cities than many residents thought possible.
The destructive power of the infernos multiplied when they entered neighborhoods, fire scientists say: They transformed into urban fires, in which homes ignited one after the other — and little could be done to slow the spread.
“The houses became the fuel,” said David Acuña, spokesman for Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. “It’s a structure fire within a wildland fire, which is bad. But then you multiply that by five or 10 structure fires, all at the same time, all being pushed by 100-mile-per-hour wind. It’s what people keep saying: It’s what appears to be Armageddon.”
The morphing of wildfires into urban fires has created some of the worst disasters in the nation’s history. During fires in Paradise, Calif., in 2018 and another in Maui in 2023, homes emitted heat and embers that set other homes ablaze. In 2017, a wind-whipped fire in California’s wine country destroyed more than a thousand homes in a suburban development long considered invulnerable to wildfire, 10 miles from the rural area where the blaze had begun.
“Once the fire is inside the city, it doesn’t need the wildland to spread anymore,” said Albert Simeoni, a professor and the head of the fire protection engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.
The fuel for these urban fires often comes from houses that were constructed long before California enacted strict building codes aimed at preventing fires and were not retrofitted. That means, experts say, that the risks could be controlled, in part, with improved building codes and safety practices. If homes are less vulnerable to catching fire, the blazes cannot sustain themselves with fuel from other homes once they leave the wilderness.
“I don’t know that we’ll mitigate every potential loss, but I think we can substantially change the outcome,” said Yana Valachovic, a fire scientist with the University of California, as she surveyed damage in the L.A. fires this week. “There are things that people can do.”
Proximity to wilderness has long been an attraction of the West, especially in Los Angeles, where the city’s 19th-century boosters sold a vision of suburban communities nestled in nature — an alternative to the crowded, dense cities of the East Coast. William Deverell, a professor of American history at the University of Southern California, said the region was cheerfully marketed as having “an unusually harmonious relationship with nature,” where one could go surfing and skiing in the same day, pick oranges off trees and enjoy 75-degree weather in January.
So, what fire scientists now describe as living in “the wildland-urban interface” — developments that bump up against forests and grasslands and are particularly fire-prone — is a generations-old way of life in Southern California. Some of the region’s most iconic and desirable places to live are in such areas, including the Hollywood Hills, Malibu and Calabasas.
For 18 years, Nancy Spiller savored “the magic of living in the canyon” high up in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of L.A., where the sun each morning would cast the craggy brush-covered mountains outside her window in a spectacular orange glow. Ms. Spiller, 71, watched the fog march in from the Pacific Ocean during her daily trail runs.
Ms. Spiller’s town-home complex, known as the Woodies, was consumed last week as fire stretched from oceanside bluffs near Santa Monica up into the hills where Ms. Spiller lived. Little is left of the dozens of two-story town homes beyond piles of rubble, warped metal fences and several mostly unscathed trees.
In recent years, residents had removed some pine trees from the complex grounds for fear they would “be like Roman candles in case of a fire,” Ms. Spiller said. Now it’s clear that they underestimated the flammability of the homes themselves, built in the early 1970s with wood siding and wooden fences.
“It’s the property that went up like Roman candles,” said Ms. Spiller, a writer and artist.
California’s building code for wildfires is among the most stringent in the nation, requiring homes in high risk areas to follow guidelines aimed at limiting fires, including using materials that are less likely to burn, such as stucco, concrete or steel. Windows must be made of tempered glass, which is less likely to shatter and allow embers inside a home.
The state’s codes were developed after a fire in 1991 tore through thousands of homes in the verdant hills above Oakland, a high-profile example of a wildfire that turned houses into kindling. But the new codes, enacted in 2008, apply only to homes constructed after that year. The code did not require residents to retrofit older homes — a prospect that could be extremely costly for longtime homeowners and landlords — and such retrofits are relatively rare, officials say. So, in general, older homes are more likely to burn.
Altadena, where the Eaton fire has burned nearly 7,200 structures, has one of the oldest stocks of residential housing in the state, with half of all homes built before 1946. Fewer than one in 100 homes in the area that has burned in Altadena were built after the new codes in 2008, a New York Times analysis of property records found.
In the Palisades, the center of the other major L.A. fire, homes were largely built in the 1950s and 1960s. Fewer than five in 100 homes were constructed since the new codes took effect, the analysis found.
On the bluffs of the Palisades, a 20-minute walk from the beach, Elizabeth Schlaff’s family home, built in 1957, was leveled last week. Ms. Schlaff, grew up in the house, constructed with a wood frame and wood eaves, and said that over six decades, the home had never been subject to a fire evacuation order before last week.
Yet nearly every house on her street, and those nearby, burned. Little but a driveway is left of Ms. Schlaff’s house, once painted light blue with a covered porch. At another home, lined by the blackened skeletons of hedges, only the bricks of an entryway and a green metal mailbox remained. At another, structural beams precariously leaned over rubble as they framed a view of a glittering Pacific Ocean.
Ms. Schlaff mourned items that she and her husband forgot to grab as they rushed to evacuate: portraits of his mother, who was a starlet in the Golden Age of Hollywood, antique books, a Civil War-era sword, her mother’s ashes. “Everything burned up,” she said.
In the Paradise fire in 2018, the most destructive in state history, the age of homes influenced how likely they were to burn, researchers found. Roughly 44 percent of homes built after 2008 survived, compared with about 12 percent of those built before 1997, one analysis found. Older homes are more likely to be constructed with wood, have less hardy roofs, include more surrounding vegetation and be closer to other homes — all factors that make them more likely to ignite.
Experts say the people who lived in these neighborhoods ought not be blamed for the fires’ spread. The dangers of huge fires, ever more likely in a warming world, have not been effectively communicated to the public, the experts say, nor is it clear to most people what can be done to make their home safer from a blaze. The experts also say that entire communities need to shift to fire resistant standards, not single homes here or there.
Ms. Valachovic said that wildfires have for too long been framed by officials as primarily forest fires, which makes communities like the Palisades less likely to take the risk seriously. “The sad part is history repeats itself, and we’ve seen many fires now that have this transition to urban or semi-urban setting, and we think they’re anomalies and they’re not,” she said.
Steve Kerber, vice president of UL Research Institutes, who led an investigation commissioned by the Hawaii attorney general of the catastrophic Maui fire, put it another way. “In my opinion, no one in California should be surprised by this at all,” Dr. Kerber said. “This is a disaster that is human created.”
Fire scientists say they hope the fires will be a catalyst for major change, with new requirements for retrofitting older houses, prohibiting rebuilding in burned areas or encouraging people and developers to leave areas that are deemed high-risk.
“We have to recognize that the failure in urban planning happened 50 or 80 years ago when we were first laying out the communities on the fringes of L.A.,” said Michael J. Gollner, an associate professor and director of the fire research laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “We know how to make the destruction dramatically less.”
But the overhaul required to fireproof communities comes with enormous costs, either for retrofitting or rebuilding fire-vulnerable homes or for land newly deemed too risky to build on — a particularly difficult prospect in a state with a severe housing crisis. These changes also might mean a painful shift in identity for Californians, as preventing wildfires could require constructing homes without vegetation nearby, far from the wilderness that many hold dear.
Ms. Spiller, who lost her town home in the Palisades Highlands, said she wants to rebuild, if she has the chance. Climate change-fueled disasters threaten many communities, she said, and she believes that she can invest in fire-resistant materials that will make her next home safer.
“We don’t know what the possibilities are,” she said. “We don’t know what the expense is. I just don’t know. So it’s a big open question mark.” But, she said, if she could have her way, she would be there “to witness the canyon coming back to life.”
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