Transcript of Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?

Hey, all. It's Kyra Blackwell from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times, and I test mattresses. Today, I am testing seven mattresses. This mattress is very supportive. It's just a very easy to shift positions. We've considered nearly four dozen foam, Innerspring, and hybrid mattresses. We're looking out for edge support, motion isolation, and firmness levels. At Wirecutter, we do the work so you don't have to. For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come visit us at nytimes. Com. Com/wirecutter.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kytrowaf, and this is The Daily. As wildfires ravage Southern California for a seventh straight day, residents are seeking answers about why so much has been lost and whether their government could have done more to protect them. Today, my colleagues Mike Baker and Chris Flavel on the response so far and whether some of the devastation could have been avoided. It's Tuesday, January 14th. Help.

Help.

I'm right here. I need a little water.

In the day since the fire started, a bleak picture has emerged of the extent of the damage they caused. My family and I just lost our home here that we grew up in.

It's very, very hard.

It's hard not to cry.

As you can see, there's nothing left. I've been here for about an hour and a half, and I don't want to leave. So I'm like, Man, how much can one guy take? People tell me to be strong. It's like, How much stronger do I have to be?

These fires are on pace to be the most destructive in California's history. In the Palisades, on the west side of Los Angeles, an out-of-control fire ripped through homes and historic landmarks. Near the Eastern edge of the city, entire neighborhoods in Altadena were reduced to ashes. As rescuers combed through the rubble, they found the body of a man named Victor Shaw. He was laying dead in his front yard, clutching a garden hose.

I couldn't be here to save him.

I couldn't be here.

That's what hurts the most.

I couldn't be here.

Throughout the week, intense winds fueled new fires. There were more and more haunting images. There were roads full of charred cars, embers falling from the sky onto scorched palm trees. Families, hauled-out houses. Even though the fires were still burning, residents who had evacuated to safety began to return to survey what was lost.

Oh, shit. Oh, my God. It's all gone. Oh, my God. No.

Oh, no.

My colleague, Emily Baumgartner Nun, was driving up a street in the Palisades when she saw a woman named Nas Sykes, hiking up a canyon with her husband, Steve.

Can you take us to your street and what it was like walking down the street to your own home?

I mean, so Steve was ahead of me. He was like, I'm just going to run. He's like, I need to see. I need to see. So he's ahead of me. We turned a corner and I see smoke. I'm thinking, maybe our house is fine because there's a little smoke coming. He's ahead of me and he's running. The next thing I know, he stops and he's just emotional. He's holding his head. Then I knew it was gone. It was almost like an out-of-body experience. So many little pieces of our identity to see it in ashes. My first thought was, how am I going to explain to my children because I can't even understand what I'm seeing in front of me right now. How is this possible? And in such a short amount of time, I mean, literally less than 24 hours from the time that we had left, an entire town was burnt.

What do you think you'll miss most about your old home?

I will miss every time I open my door and I walked in and the way the sun would shine into the room, right when you walked in and I would have my little flowers from Trader Joe's on the in my vase and try to make the house look pretty for the girls and looking at their little rooms every day, making their bed every day as I would make the bed. I literally would thank God and say, Thank you for giving them this space. It was almost like I had proved something to myself that I can do this and I can do it for my kids, that I was able to give it to them.

Let me ask you, do you ever find yourself just wondering who could have prevented this? Are you angry?

You know what? I am angry. I'm angry because there was no surprise to this. They knew that this weather system is coming in. They knew that things are dry. We haven't had any rain, but it seems like nobody was proactively taking care of anything. Even the number of fire truck, you would expect more, or number of planes dropping water, you would expect more. If we can't have planes, then what What's the other option? Even the most basic is, do we have water? It's not the fire department's fault. It's not the police officers. They're doing what they need to do. But how can a place like Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, the amount of money, the amount of resources, the amount of taxes that we pay, you run out of water? Definitely, nobody was prepared for this. I think that it didn't need to go to the extent that it did. I think 50% of the loss could have been prevented.

Mike, we've seen this outburst among residents in LA of frustration and anger over the government's response to these fires. There's been a lot of speculation about whether more could have been done. Take me through what happened with the efforts to contain the fires.

Yeah. So the day before the fire, we're starting to see forecast from the National Weather Service of a particularly dangerous scenario, how the winds would be gusting up to potentially 100 miles an hour, where any spark could spread into a catastrophic fire. But it's also the classic fire danger scenario for Los Angeles. The city knows the situation. They know how to prepare for that circumstance. And so they did. They started to fill water tanks all over the city, the water tanks that are a supply for high elevation neighborhoods. They start prepositioning trucks in vulnerable areas. They've got firefighters deploying. They've got extra engines coming in. They're calling up people who are off-duty. The Forest Service is getting involved, and there's trucks and bulldozers and helicopters and airplanes all getting ready in case something happens.

They're actively trying to guess, it sounds like, where where the most vulnerable places are, and they're surging, firefighters, water, resources to those areas.

Yeah. The fire department is looking at past wind events, where fires normally take place, and they're looking at the forecast for the day and making their own educated guess about where the best spot will be for them to place their assets. But of note, none of the extra trucks went to Pacific Palisades.

At this point, do know how the Palisades fire started?

We don't. We've been spending some time the last few days up there examining satellite images, collecting images and videos from neighbors who saw the start. We have a pretty good idea exactly where it began. But even being up there, there's a lot of clues on the ground that could suggest a few different things that could have taken place.

What, for example?

In that exact area, there was a fire about a week prior, started on New Year's Day. That had been put out, but there's lingering questions of whether maybe embers deep in the ground had sustained and survived from that fire and then reemerged when the winds kicked up. There's remnants of power line materials up there that don't seem to be connected to any active power lines, but were there on the ground near the origin of the fire. Then it's along a trail that's a popular one for people to come climb and hike and be around. There were people up there that day, that morning. Something they had done, purposely or not, could have contributed to the fire starting.

It sounds like there's a lot of theories, but as of now, we don't really know the origin of this thing. But once it gets going, what happens?

It's around 10: 30 AM that the first report of fire comes in, and it's in the Palisades. Residents start seeing flames emerging out in the dry brush land, and it immediately starts racing down the hillside toward the ocean. I mean, it's moving fast right from the beginning. We've listened to the dispatch audio from firefighters who are rushing to the scene that they can see that it's moving quickly and headed right toward the Palisades.

Structure is being pressed in the next 20 minutes.

You can hear one of them warning that it could be getting towards homes within minutes. Command 42 from Palo Alto, give me a second. And...

This thing is going to make a good run.

That it looks like it's going to have a good run ahead of it. And you can tell immediately this is a pretty dire situation. And at the same time, the conditions are getting worse. The wind is picking up, smoke is choking the air, the fire is moving quickly. There's frantic evacuations that are blocking one road as the road gets clogged up. One fire captain says he can't see more than 10 feet in front of his rig. And as these winds keep getting worse as the day progresses, the firefighters start losing one of their key tools. They're no longer able to use those aerial assets, the helicopters and the planes that pick up water and drop it on the fire and also spread fire retardant to prevent the fire from spreading further. Then we get the word that things are even worse. There's another fire 25 miles away, threatening a different part of the Los Angeles area.

The Eaton fire. Yeah.

The Eaton fire begins in the hills around the Altadena area, and immediately it's starting to threaten neighborhoods nearby. Firefighters are once again scrambling, trying to get assets there. One fire chief talks about driving there actually from the Palisades. He plugs it into his GPS. He's stuck in this bumper-to-bumper traffic. He watches as this new fire he's trying to get to starts filling the sky. That fire chief, he eventually calls the California Office of Emergency Services and says, essentially, Eventually, we are out of resources and need more help. He asked for 50 strike teams, a total of 250 more fire engines and 1,000 more firefighters. Even as he's putting in this request, there's really more trouble brewing. Soon we get word that there's a third fire up in the San Fernando Valley. They're really beyond their max capacity, and it keeps getting worse. The fire in the Palisades is spreading ever further. More homes are going up into flames. Then late into the night, this one fire captain talks about how their fire hoses start sputtering and then go dry, and they try a new hydrant, still dry, try another hydrant, still no water. There's no water left for them to keep fighting the fire.

We've been really spending a lot of time trying to understand exactly what went wrong here. We talked a little earlier about the city had filled a bunch of storage tanks all around neighborhoods that are high up in these hillsides, and that included the Palisades, where there are three million gallon storage tanks designed to fill the system with water, designed to support not only homes and their water lines, but also the fire hydrants below. And what we've learned is that the city could not fill them up to keep pace with how much water was being used.

Wow.

What the city has basically said, there's so much water being funneled out of this system. You have residents that are spraying their own properties, trying to stop any embers from taking hold. You have the mega-rich who are contracting their own private firefighters to protect their own properties. At the same time, you have all these firefighters tapping numerous hydrants all at once. Frankly, this is not what the system is designed to handle. Municipal water systems like this are really designed for small fires, handling blazes that might consume a few homes, not one that is consuming a few hundred all at once.

They depleted 3 million gallons of water, which to me sounds like a lot. But was there more that they could have or should have had access to?

Yeah, it turns out one of the reservoirs, the one actually located in the Palisades, was down for maintenance. No water available at that point to feed the system and to also help push water up into the storage tanks that turned out to be depleted within hours after the fire began.

So critical reserves unavailable at perhaps the most critical moment. How big of a deal do you think that is?

Certainly to the firefighters that were there watching their hoses go dry, there was a lot of frustration, a feeling of desperation, a feeling of helplessness that they couldn't really do the work that they're in position to do. Certainly, having those resources could have at least helped to some degree. But I think there's a lingering question about whether it could have turned the tide of a fire that had already grown so large.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like there is a fair question to ask about why it was offline for maintenance when the fire risk was so high.

Yeah, that's definitely one of the questions I've been asking. In some ways, it's offline for maintenance in the winter, and these things need repairs, and winter is normally a good time to make that happen. But I keep wondering, was there an opportunity here to bring it back online, especially when the weather forecast was predicting a scenario that could turn disastrous?

Mike, we've talked about two real issues in terms of preparedness. One is the number of firefighting resources available, and the other is the amount of water available. Both came up short. There's now been a pretty robust debate about whether the city government did enough to get ready for these fires.

What are the firefighters themselves saying?

Yeah, we're hearing from firefighters that they felt they did everything they could with the resources they had.

We're back with breaking news. The Los Angeles City Fire Chief said that the city failed her and the fire department in the response to the deadly wildfires.

Fire Chief, Kristen Crowley, said there were not enough resources.

I want to be very, very clear. Yes, we took a $17 million budget cut. As we know, any budget That budget cut would negatively impact our ability to carry out our mission.

That cuts to her budget made last year definitely had some negative impacts for her crews.

I warned, I rang the bell that these additional cuts could be very, very devastating for our ability to provide public safety.

That would have- This is something she had been talking about for months, even before the fires. Crowley had felt that her department did not have enough resources. She said cuts that were made last year to overtime created unprecedented operational challenges for the department and has repeated that now in the aftermath of the fire. Meanwhile, on the other hand, Can you address the criticism now over the budget issue and the slashing, $17 million- You know, I think if you- The mayor is saying that those budget cuts didn't have an impact on the response to this event.

There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days. Then there was a little bit- You have the fire chief saying this was a real issue, the funding, and you have the mayor saying this wouldn't have made a difference.

What's the truth here?

I think from talking to people throughout Los Angeles this past week, there's a general sense that, of course, more resources would have been helpful. People would have been grateful for it. It probably could have saved homes. Maybe it could have even saved lives. But it also seems likely that given the scale of this disaster, a few million more dollars, some more firefighters, it Maybe only could have helped around the margins. It seems these fires were bound to overwhelm a system that wasn't designed to handle them.

Thank you, Mike.

Thank you.

We'll be right back.

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Chris, we just heard from our colleague, Mike Baker, that LA could have used more water and more firefighters, but that even if it had those things, controlling these fires would have been really, really hard. You're a climate reporter for the time programs. Help me understand what that means about our ability to respond to wildfires just across the US.

The first thing that's really important to make clear is climate change makes this all harder. The combination of rising temperatures and longer droughts mean you've got more vegetation ready to burn. You've got hotter temperatures making it easier for that vegetation to burn. You've got even more of a It's a challenge putting it out. This is fundamentally a climate story. But if any state is prepared for these things, it's California. They've done all the things that you'd want a state government to do to get ready for those climate risks. Still, it didn't really work.

Tell me why California, at least in theory, is the state that should be most prepared for fires like this.

The first thing to know about California is they've had wildfires throughout their history, including some really devastating blazes, not least the disastrous fires in 2017 and 2018. First of all, this is a state that knows fire is a part of the landscape. But also there's this question of vulnerability. California is painfully exposed to wildfires because of the physical nature of the state. The risk in Los Angeles is high for a bunch of reasons. One is you get very little rainfall, so you get dry that can burn easily, but also the topography. The hills around Los Angeles are a delight. You get to live somewhere with a view, you get a wonderful breeze, which is nice, but you also get really high fire risk. Fires can move quickly up hills. It's harder for firefighters to access those homes. As we saw, the fire hydrants, harder to move water up the hills. We're realizing that these neighborhoods in Los Angeles that seemed like wonderful places to live, like Pacific Palisades, like the Hollywood Hills, have a really high risk. Also, you've got these Santa Ana winds. The Santa Ana winds, as we've all learned to devastating effect, can push hot, dry air at huge speeds, which is catnip for fires.

Then the vegetation. This vegetation is meant to burn. If you get a long drought, coupled with, in our case, a huge burst vegetation after last year's rain and snow, you get the ideal conditions for wildfires that grow quickly, spread fast, and are hard to put out.

Right. I mean, these are conditions that are just baked into the place. It's been this way forever. We've talked about this on the show. These things make fires like this almost foreseeable. So how has California prepared given that?

That's right. They're not just foreseeable, they're almost guaranteed to happen. As a result, California has been pretty thorough at setting up a system of prevention and toughening that can make these fires, in theory, more manageable. Start with their building code. California has one of the best building codes in the country for how to build homes in fire prone areas so that they're less less likely to burn. That means using materials that are less likely to catch fire, so stucco or concrete, steel roofs, not having wood exterior, not having openings that embers can fly through to ignite the interior of the home. Those rules also include things like what you can plant and how close to your house. This idea of defensible space, those rules say that as far away as 100 feet from the edge of your structure, you've got to manage the vegetation to reduce the amount of shrubs and mulch and trees that can catch fire. Very thorough. Then beyond that, California, pulling out to the macro level, does a lot of things other states, I'm sure, would love to do. They've got a really well-funded state agency called Cal Fire that predicts fire activity, draws maps, but where the risk is the highest, has armies of really well-trained firefighters and resources to move in when they're needed.

They've got a political culture, perhaps most importantly, that is open to this idea of rules that homeowners have to abide by to reduce their risk. Then they've got money. California, one of the largest economies in the world, and the result is they've got a tax base that can fund just a huge array of measures to harden and protect communities against fires.

Yeah, it sounds like California is particularly vulnerable, but it also has a bunch of things working in its favor. And yet all of those things obviously were not enough to contain these fires. What does that tell you, Chris?

It's exactly the right question. It creates a puzzle. If California was, in general, pretty ready, what went wrong. But at a big level, California was pretty ready. That raises the question, well, can you be ready enough? Is it even possible to do enough as a city or a county or a state or a country to repair communities against these fires that are getting worse because of climate change. It's a question that, for the moment, doesn't have a good answer.

It's like you're asking, is the pace of climate change just faster than the pace of possible adaptation?

That's bang on. One question is, how fast can you improve the protections for places like Los Angeles? But another question is, how much can you improve it? All the things we talked about, the way home construction is regulated and the way people try to squeeze the flamble vegetation out of a landscape, you can always do more of that. You can build concrete boxes that are just surrounded by gravel and pavement. And there isn't a shred of wood anywhere in sites or even a tree. I don't know if people want to live like that, but in theory, you could. You could put more space between houses so that fires have a harder time jumping from house to house. You could build bigger buffer zones between the forest and communities so that embers would have to fly an even further distance on the wind. All of those things would help, and they're all possible, but they're all hard, and they would not eliminate the risk, which, as you noted, is getting worse just about every year.

You're saying the more your house can look like an isolated concrete box surrounded by rocks, the better, and even then, it wouldn't totally solve it.

Yeah, and we haven't even talked about cost. Even if people were willing to stomach the loss in beauty that these kinds of changes would entail, they're not cheap. If you want to replace your roof with something that is flame proof or more flame resistant with the steel roof, something like that, very expensive. Even just managing the vegetation on your property in a way that is effective is not cheap. Then there's the community and public level of cost. If you apply these rules more aggressively and you have more space between homes, so fires have a hard time jumping, and you have fewer homes getting built into the forest where the risk is highest, that reduces your fire risk, but it means fewer homes. In California right now, as we all know, the housing crisis is really severe. The idea that you would try to combat wildfires by having fewer homes would help, but it would also make another problem even worse. So the trade offs of trying to further squeeze the fire risk out of Los Angeles and out of California are real.

Right. I mean, for affordability to tackle the crisis of people living on the streets, California and LA in particular needs more homes, not fewer.

Yeah. It's hard to even say what California should do because arguably the homelessness crisis is as urgent or more urgent than the climate crisis and wildfires. There's really no No good answer to these questions.

What you're describing is a situation in which you are really weighing these two crises against one another. To solve one of them, you need a pretty radical shift in this city. What are the odds, do you think, of that actually happening? I ask this because even though the fires are still raging, we're seeing the beginning of discussions about what and rebuilding will actually look like.

The fundamental question after any big fire in communities like this, the first question has always got to be, how will you rebuild? In fact, it's already started. Governor Newsom issued an order directing officials to look for ways to ease or suspend provisions of the building code that would make it easier to build back more quickly, but also would not be unsafe. What does that mean? We don't know yet. But in the past, these fires often have been followed by attempts to weaken or loosen temporarily the standards around how you build for a good reason. People want to rebuild as fast as they can, and they want to rebuild as inexpensively as they can. Governments just want to do their best to serve the needs of people who've lost their homes. It's the most obvious thing you could do. The problem is that sets you up against a future where these fires get worse. This is also the moment where people who study resilience and climate change will say, actually, this is a good time to tighten the standards so that when we build back, we build back homes that are more resistant to wildfires. But typically, that takes longer.

Historically, often, those two forces are in opposition after a fire, and usually the people calling for easing the standards win out. But this time is different because the scale is bigger and because there's no longer really a debate about climate change. No one is saying that we won't have more of these fires. The question that I'll be watching is, to what degree do state and local officials and homeowners use this time to say this really is worth taking a moment and finding a way to build back in a tougher environment because we know the fires will get worse.

Chris, part of what you're talking about, building fewer houses in the most vulnerable areas in LA, that would mean a lot of people would need to move. I have to say these kinds of conversations where we're talking about people relocating things to climate change because of sea level rise and storm surge, it's something we've talked about with you on the show. This is really the first time that I've seen it come up in this way in the context of wildfire.

These LA fires are folding into a bigger conversation in the US about whether some communities are just too hard to protect against climate shocks. You're right, until now, the climate shocks that prompt that conversation have mostly been rising seas, repetitive flooding and storm surge. But these fires might become a turning point. They might raise the question of, are some communities too exposed to fires to have a reasonable expectation that we can protect people who live there. Obviously, we're not talking about emptying out all of LA. That's insane and you wouldn't want to. But there may be some neighborhoods around LA where because of the topography or something else that the risk is so high, experts look at them and say, Boy, we probably shouldn't have built homes there in the first place. People might start to ask, Maybe it doesn't make sense to build back there. It's important to note, even if the change is only affected some small sliver at the edge of LA, at the edge of the forest, it would change all of LA. Those people have to live somewhere. You'd really have to pair pulling back from a handful of high-risk areas with probably building more density in the downtown, in places that are easier to protect.

The transformation that that would entail would be really significant for all of LA. It's a hard conversation. There's no guarantee it's going to happen. But it's the thing I think people are more likely to start talking about because these fires were so bad.

It seems important to just say, Chris, that in this case, we're not talking about moving a relatively small coastal community from a barrier island. Here, we're talking about LA, the second largest city in America, 10 million people in a state that is just an economic engine for the whole country, has the biggest port in America. I mean, what we're envisioning is reshaping a major metropolis. That's not just a huge investment of money, right? It's also a massive emotional investment in just a new identity.

Yeah. Look, I've covered these conversations for a long time. Anytime you're talking about changing a community deliberately because of growing threats. It's really hard. You'll get many homeowners who just say, no, I want to rebuild exactly the way it was. My life has been turned upside down enough. I don't want anyone talking about maybe I should leave. But others will say, oh, what we just lived through was terrible. I'm not sure I want to do it again. Then there's the question of, is it even fair to put future homeowners in that situation where, as we now know, fires can emerge almost out of nowhere in January that cause disastrous scale damage. Fires like this open the door to talking about maybe the change that's going to happen anyway. At this fire should include some calculated decisions around, are there places that you can't protect?

That may be a question we need to grapple with, but it's also a really difficult thing to ask when people are in a lot of pain and just reeling from all this loss.

Yeah, it's almost too hard to ask, right? But the last week of fires show that you have to at least think it because fires like this demand that you at least try to be honest with yourself and your neighbors and your voters about the risk we're taking on when we build or rebuild in places that we know are inherently dangerous and getting more dangerous. In some of those really high-risk places, maybe we can't keep pretending that we can save every house if it's facing a fire, which is a terrifying thing to admit, and it's a huge shift in attitude because this country wants to say that we're ready and prepared to protect homes, to have fire fighters come to the rescue. But as we've seen from Los Angeles, sometimes there's still nothing they can do. At some point, the US might have to say to itself, if you live in these high-risk areas, there's no guarantee for safety. That brutal honesty is the hardest thing to do. It's not how Americans want to think, but climate change is pushing us in that direction. None of those solutions are really satisfying. But here we are. We've got a gigantic city in a fire zone, so maybe that's the best there is.

Chris, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Over the weekend, firefighters slowed the progress of the Palisades and Eaton fires, which are now partly contained. But winds in Los Angeles are expected to pick back up again, prompting officials to issue a rare fire danger alert for Tuesday until Wednesday afternoon. The National Weather Service warned that the gusts could lead to, explosive fire growth. At least 24 people have been killed in the fires, and officials say that the fatalities are likely to rise. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, a federal judge in Florida ruled that the Justice Department could release half of the report by the Special Counsel, Jack Smith, detailing the decisions he made in charging Donald Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election. After Trump won the 2024 election, the Special Council dropped the two criminal cases he brought against the President-elect. But the Justice Department rules required him to write a final report detailing his findings in the interests of public understanding. The Justice Department has been fighting to get the report into the public eye, even though Jack Smith formally stepped down from his post on Friday. Trump's legal team has fought to stop any part of the report from coming out calling it a one-sided attack on the President-elect.

Just after midnight on Tuesday, the Justice Department delivered the 137-page volume to Congress. According to a copy of the report obtained by the time, Jack Smith said he thought there was enough evidence to convict Trump in a trial if his victory in the 2024 election hadn't made it impossible for the prosecution to continue. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn, Alex Stern, and Sydney Harper, with help from Lindsay Garrison and Olivia Nat. It was edited by Lizzo Baylen and Paige Cawet. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Sophia Landman, Dan Powell, Alicia Bitt-Etup, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lancer of WNDYRLE. Special thanks to Ryan Mac and Ken Bensinger.

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That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kytroweef. See you tomorrow.