Dave Gomberg had been watching the wind, his concern mounting. A veteran fire weather specialist at the National Weather Service, he understood the high and low pressure systems that ginned up the infamous Santa Anas that blew periodically through Southern California.

This wasn’t that. High in the upper atmosphere, powerful currents were forecast to align with the fast-moving air off the desert, threatening a rare supercharged windstorm — all this in a region that had seen less than a quarter-inch of rain over the last eight months.

The National Weather Service held a conference call with Southern California fire and emergency management officials on Jan. 3, warning that a “truly historic event” was due in four days, with the possibility of fires that would spread with extraordinary speed. Even an amateur weather watcher was worried about the conditions: “Altadena, we have a problem,” he warned his followers.

Yet neither days of lead time nor highly specific warnings from weather experts were enough to save Los Angeles from an inferno. The firestorms that would ravage the area would expose multiple weaknesses in the region’s ability to respond to an extreme weather event — even one whose timing was widely predicted — that was far more serious than the seasonal fire threats California had long endured.

There was no all-hands news conference by public officials before the winds arrived, as happens in Florida before a major hurricane. There was no single local leader in the politically fragmented region taking to local television to warn residents of the extraordinary danger. County supervisors issued warnings, but mainly on their social media accounts. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who runs the biggest of 88 cities in the county, was out of the country when the fires ignited. Gov. Gavin Newsom had driven down from Sacramento, not for the fires but for an unrelated news conference, and he was more than two hours away in the Palm Springs area when the first fire broke out.

Los Angeles had spent decades preparing for a major earthquake disaster — the “Big One,” they call it — and the Big One was here. But it was a fire, and no one had a playbook for one this big.

State and local leaders have called for a full review of the response, with Mayor Bass promising “a full accounting of what worked and, especially, what did not.”

The New York Times examined the four critical days leading up to the disaster, reviewing internal documents, text messages, timelines and fire response guidelines, and interviewing dozens of emergency management, fire and government officials to map out the region’s preparations.
The Times review found that California’s emergency management and fire systems mobilized for what seemed to be an extreme version of a familiar threat that comes when dry conditions and high winds create the risk of fire — a red flag day. Until recently, there were typically around a half-dozen red-flag days a year in Southern California.

But this was not a typical red-flag warning. The National Weather Service was invoking a new category it has used as fire threats have become more extreme. And in Los Angeles, as in many other areas of the country, there was no stepped-up playbook to respond to one.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department took the rare and costly step of ordering 900 firefighters to remain on overtime duty after the end of their shifts, even before any fire had erupted. The city’s fire department could have done the same, doubling the number of firefighters it had on duty to as many as 2,000. But it did not.

Nor did the city department deploy engines in advance as aggressively as the region’s other federal, state and local fire agencies, a strategy that can be critical to containing wildfires, which in high winds can often be stopped only if they’re caught immediately.

As it played out on the first day of the fires, perilous hurricane-force winds repeatedly grounded aerial firefighting equipment. Water systems failed in Pacific Palisades, one of the densest concentrations of wealth in the nation. Los Angeles city firefighters were caught short as brush fires fatally outran an inadequate early deployment.

By the time the Altadena fire exploded on the other side of Los Angeles later in the day, the county fire department, responsible for that area, had already sent many of its firefighters to the Palisades to help the city, which had not deployed any extra engines there in advance.

Later, many residents of the Palisades complained that they had never been told in advance which routes to plan to use for evacuations. In Altadena, an unincorporated area that lies in the county’s jurisdiction, even members of the town council said they had not understood the seriousness of the fire hazard.

Officials in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties who oversee the alert systems had in fact heard a pitch from Weather Service officials ahead of the fires to consider issuing public text alerts of hurricane-level Category One winds. But the three agencies eventually decided against the idea at the time, saying it should wait until the wind had reached a certain sustained threshold. By that time, the fires were raging.

“They did mention there would be red-flag warnings, but we get those all year round,” said Milissa Marona, a member of the town council in Altadena, where most of the 17 deaths that ultimately occurred happened in areas that did not receive evacuation orders until long after the flames were upon them.

She said she had been in touch with Los Angeles County fire officials but didn’t fully appreciate the threat. “I wish we would’ve known the potential was there for a big fire.”Whatever reckoning comes as a result of the fires may wind up having broader implications for how communities from Hawaii to North Carolina think about wildfires. Fire experts say that the deadly mix of hurricane-level winds and bone-dry conditions increased the risk that firefighters would be overwhelmed, no matter the level of preparation, and that states like California may need to adopt an entirely new playbook for preparing for wildfires as climate change makes them exponentially worse.

That includes the long-recognized need for better evacuation alerts and water systems, better management of brush and grasslands, and homes that are more fire-safe, as well as better technology to fight fires. It could mean a stronger, more unified response structure that brings multiple jurisdictions together during the planning stages in extreme fire weather.

In the most extreme cases, cities in the West facing volatile fire conditions may be forced to consider the kind of advance staff deployments and public warnings that are already standard elsewhere in the country for hurricanes and tornadoes.

Up until now, emergency planners have been reluctant to issue evacuation warnings ahead of a fire, even when risks are clear, because precise predictions of where a fire will ignite are impossible, and the potential for crying wolf could prompt the public to eventually ignore them.

“I thought we were prepared,” said Los Angeles County’s fire chief, Anthony C. Marrone, a 39-year veteran of his department. “And we were prepared. As prepared as we could be. And it wasn’t even close to being enough.”

Living With Wildfire
To live in California is to live with wildfire. Preventive power outages. Smoke in one town blocking the sun in another. Admonitions to “harden your home.” Hundreds of thousands of Californians live in coastal and mountain areas of exceptionally high fire hazard, their lives a calculus of risk and stunning natural beauty. In these places, people come to learn how fire can start, and how quickly a stiff wind can explode it. And, once that happens, how nearly impossible it can be to put out.

Two of the five largest municipal fire departments in the country serve Los Angeles and the flammable sprawl around it — one for the city of Los Angeles, and an even bigger one for the surrounding county — plus about two dozen smaller city departments, a combined force of at least 9,000 firefighters serving some 10 million people over an expanse larger than the combined states of Delaware and Rhode Island, not counting state and federal firefighters who are stationed in the area.The fires on Jan. 7 were not even the first this year to require a joint effort. Seventeen minutes into the New Year, a three-acre brush fire at virtually the same spot where the Palisades fire would erupt six days later nearly tripled in size before city and county firefighters, helicopters and brush crews contained it several hours later. Afterward, they counted themselves lucky. The wind had been light.

Luck would not last.

One warning came on the afternoon of Jan. 3, when the National Weather Service issued an official fire weather watch for Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Four hundred miles to the north that day, the state’s Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center notified Mr. Newsom’s office. Striding into an informal briefing with the Capitol press corps on his 2025 agenda, the governor mentioned in passing that wildfire, which ordinarily threatens in the summer and fall, was already a concern.

With the first workweek of a new year and a new presidential administration looming, though, the ominous forecasts were just one concern among many.

In Sacramento, Mr. Newsom was struggling to balance a deadline for presenting his state budget proposal with an invitation to Washington, D.C., for the memorial service for the late President Jimmy Carter. There was a news conference on Jan. 7 near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley, where the outgoing president, Joe Biden, would proclaim two new national monuments.

Los Angeles leaders had their own competing demands as they prepared to meet the weather warnings. Mayor Bass and the five supervisors who lead Los Angeles County were working on a new initiative to get homeless veterans into housing. On Saturday, Jan. 4, Mayor Bass was heading to the inauguration of the new president of Ghana, a quick trip made at the request of the White House. She was in the air as the weather warnings started to increase in urgency.

As the weekend before the fires unfolded, the forecasts loomed larger. Fire weather doesn’t always mean fire, but the Los Angeles County fire chief, Mr. Marrone, had a bad feeling. Just a month before, a terrifying wildfire had roared through Malibu, not far from Pacific Palisades at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The Franklin fire had destroyed 20 buildings before firefighters stopped it, a relatively small footprint, but the skies had been calmer. In 2018, the Santa Anas had kicked up a fire in the same place, the Woolsey fire, that had leveled 151 square miles and killed three people.

“That’s the dickens,” the chief said. “The wind.”
It is far from clear that any measure of planning could have stopped an inferno driven by hurricane-force winds. But experts say they expect a close assessment of whether more vigorous public warnings, better evacuation planning and deployment of more firefighting resources before the fires started might have lessened damage and saved lives.