Apocalypse now: Five factors that fuelled the California wildfires

Wildfires raging in California have rendered swathes of the United States’ most desired postcodes to an apocalyptic wasteland, destroying homes and hearths and killing at least 24 people at the last count.

From the Hollywood Hills to the Palisades, California residents are seeing decades of development go up in smoke from indiscriminate wildfires, said to be the worst in history.

Here are five reasons explaining why these fires have been a long time coming

Fire zones

Houses in Los Angeles country face a higher risk of wildfires than 99 percent of other US counties, according to a federal analysis. Experts say California authorities have been allowing houses to be built deep in fire zones, permitting development despite knowing the risks and the dangers they pose.

The Palisades area, the highly-coveted Los Angeles residential neighbourhood which several celebrities call home, is right in one of those fire zones.

Along with the Hollywood Hills and Altadena, the Palisades possesses a “very high fire hazard severity”. Altadena and the Palisades were built decades ago when those areas were at relatively lower risk of fires.

Nearly 90 percent of Los Angeles County’s homes were built prior to 1990 before wildfire codes were put in place, according to Molly Mowery, who authored a 2020 report for the county on reducing wildfire risk. Mowery told the Washington Post that the fires are “the culmination of factors of decades of development”.

But with global warming and an increasingly erratic climate, wildfires are becoming larger, more dangerous and harder to control. Fire severity in Los Angeles shot up by 30 percent between the 1980s and the 2010s.

Some of these homes in Palisades, perched on cliffs or nestled in canyons, constituted ripe fuel for wildfires, positioned just so, allowing winds to sweep them onwards with renewed zeal and speed.

LA water system

Los Angeles’s water system is not equipped to deal with massive wildfires like the recent ones but only suitable for more localised fires. Reports have been surfacing of weak water pressure, insufficient water supplies and dry fire hydrants.

Aerial firefighters have resorted to scooping water out of the Pacific Ocean to dump on encroaching fires.

An LA Fire Department official said that although LA’s water department had filled up water tanks proactively, extreme demand and the high elevation at which some hydrants were located contributed to water pressure issues.

Authorities say that their municipal water systems were working effectively, but they were not designed to battle blazes; instead, they were designed for an urban environment.

Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group and an adjunct professor at the Department of Urban Planning, said the problem was not the lack of water but instead, the difficulties posed in quickly getting large amounts of water to a specific point where it was needed. To get to that level would require major investments in power and infrastructure.

High winds

Fierce winds have been the one unpredictable condition that humans have no control over.

Winds originating from the inland deserts, in combination with low relative humidities and low fuel moistures, are ripe conditions for the fire to spread. Scientists are talking about a "mountain wave" event, a phenomenon that occurs when strong winds hit a mountain range at a perpendicular angle, forcing them to rise over the crest of mountains and come swooping down with speed and ferocity.

Los Angeles is home to the Santa Ana winds that blow regularly across the landscape toward the coast. Scientists say that during dry winter conditions, it is not uncommon for rapid winds to develop.

Add to that the powerful winds, fanning flames and blowing embers up to 3 kilometres ahead of the front lines and the situation spirals even more out of humanity’s control.

Vegetation clearing

Maintaining a property in California requires some foresight, a gardener and some pruning shears.

Californians living in areas at high risk of wildfires must abide by the five-foot rule, essentially maintaining a five-foot perimeter around their residence free of vegetation called a “defensible space” to augment any potential fires.

This would require removing dry, flammable vegetation, trimming limbs and low-hanging branches, and replanting gardens. The argument is that cleansing the perimeters provides less fuel for fires to spread right up to a house.

Yet, many Los Angeles residents were not on board with the rule, preferring the privacy that greenery affords them, liking their property the way it is or just loathe to undo the landscaping work they forked out cash on.

Some residents say that pruning the vegetation on their property did not stop fires this time from catching on unbridled vegetation on neighbouring properties and spreading from there.

Bad policies

It might seem counterintuitive, but to eliminate the threat of wildfires, sometimes you just have to start one.

Research scientist and UCLA Professor Jon Keeley put it to TRT World in an earlier interview this way:

“At times of the year when the temperatures are not too high, and the winds are not too high and it’s relatively safe to light a fire, we would go into the understory of the forest, we would light a fire and burn off as much of the dead vegetation as possible.”

The problem is that federal policies that were in place for over a century mandate that all fires, no matter how small, should be extinguished. This led to a build-up of dead vegetation in the undergrowth of California’s forests, energy waiting to be released. Although these policies are not in place anymore, their legacy still remains in California’s woodlands.

Yet, prescribed fires are a costly and vast initiative to undertake and an endeavour that is severely underfunded. A Biden government plan in 2022 to shave off the fire risk across 50 million acres of land would cost the state around $50 billion, but to date, only $3 billion has been made available.