Thousands of personnel—firefighters, first responders, and the National Guard—have turned their attention towards stifling the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires, some of the worst California has ever seen. The Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire, which continue to burn since they were first detected ten days ago, have destroyed 12,000 structures, killing at least 27 people, and burning down nearly 40,000 acres of land (when including damage from the smaller, now extinguished fires). The fires are the second and fourth most destructive in the state’s history. While experts say the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in California is slightly similar to the Los Angeles fires in terms of destruction, the Los Angeles fires distinguish themselves from others due to the rapid rate of spread and the fact that it is an urban conflagration—referring to a fire that spreads from structure to structure, with buildings and homes acting like the primary source of fuel instead of trees. “Under the wind conditions, embers are transported upwards of a mile from the fire itself, raining down in the thousands and thousands on homes and neighborhoods, igniting anything that is flammable,” says Daniel Berlant, California state marshal. The 2020 August Complex Fire in Northern California for instance, burned more than 1 million acres, but it only damaged 935 structures. The 2021 Dixie Fire, also in the North, had similar acre damage and harmed just over 1,3000 structures. To date, they are the two largest California wildfires, according to CalFire. Both the Dixie and August Complex Fires happened during the regular wildfire season, which typically runs from the spring through fall, per the Western Fire Chiefs Association. But, things have changed in the past year as climate change has extended wildfires to a year-round threat, and fuels fires when they do happen. “In less than a decade, California has experienced its largest, its most damaging, its deadliest wildfires,” says Berlant. “Our dry matter and climate has always lent itself naturally to wildfires, but really, more recently, I'd say a confluence of issues has led to this immense wildfire crisis. A changing climate is one of those.” The most-recent fires certainly lended themselves to such rapid spread due to the lack of precipitation in Southern California and Santa Ana winds that measured more than 80 miles per hour. The state has rolled out aid for firefighters in recent years. In 2024, CalFire received an additional $2 billion, an investment that boosted their budget up by 47% from 2018. Berlant says that aid has doubled the number of personnel working for Cal Fire. Agents have focused on three main areas: fire response, community preparedness, as well as forest restoration work. The Palisades and Eaton Fire stand at 31% and 65% contained as of Friday, respectively, though winds are supposed to pick up next week that could stifle containment. U.S. Fire administrator Lori Moore-Merrell says that while the death count from the recent Los Angeles fires is still unclear, more lives could have been lost if officials weren’t already wary of the weather conditions that put them on alert. “We anticipated the Santa Ana winds, the other variables, like drought. So there was a good deal of anticipation that if we had an ignition, it was going to be bad,” she says. “That caused early evacuation warnings, and people listened. And that is why we are not yet seeing the fatality count go up astronomically, like we saw, for example, in the Paradise Fire, or the [2023] Lahaina Maui Fire.” (Paradise is a nickname for the 2018 Camp Fire.) Moore-Merrell admits, however, that there are lessons to be gleaned regarding the proper messaging mechanism for evacuation orders, and the actions that should be taken to avoid traffic jams such as the ones reported early on in the fires. For now, state officials continue to replenish the budget needed to fight these fires. California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for an increase of $2.5 billion in state funding for emergency response efforts and recovery in Los Angeles on January 13. The money would help rebuild schools, and increase the preparedness against future threats, which firefighters see as necessary given the latest trends. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has rolled out some relief for impacted residents, issuing a $770 stipend for families to purchase essential items. Victims can apply for other forms of disaster assistance. They have also opened local assistance centers to aid those in most need. FEMA did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment. Still, while California wildfires are a natural part of the landscape, the threat of urban conflagrations also extend past the state. Moore-Merrell says that this marks the third instance of an urban conflagration under the Biden Administration. The other two were the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, which burnt more than 6,000 acres and 1,000 homes in Boulder County, and August 2023 Lahaina Fire in Maui, which took more than 100 lives and cost about $5.5 billion in damages. The Maui Wildfire was the fifth deadliest wildland fire in U.S. history, destroying neighborhoods and historic landmarks. “We are seeing a change in the baseline risk of wildfire across the nation,” she says.

At least 16 people are reported to have died and over 150,000 residents have been forced to flee in the wake of raging wildfires in the Los Angeles region, as firefighters have struggled to contain several blazes that continue to be fanned by strong winds. Fueled by low humidity and raging Santa Ana winds, the Palisades Fire had burned through over 23,000 acres by Sunday morning, while the Eaton Fire spanned over 14,000 acres. Firefighters are battling multiple fires across the Los Angeles area at once. Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell warned that crews were facing "unprecedented conditions,” and asked people to heed evacuation orders at a press conference on Wednesday morning. “This is a tragic time in our history here in Los Angeles, but a time when we’re really tested and see who we really are,” McDonnell said. Businesses and homes have been damaged in the Pacific Palisades, thousands of structures destroyed by the Palisades Fire. California Governor Gavin Newsom deployed thousands of firefighters to the region after declaring a state of emergency on Tuesday night. Here's how you can help victims of the Los Angeles wildfires: California Fire Foundation Wildfire & Disaster Relief Fund The California Fire Foundation works with local fire agencies and community based organizations to provide ongoing, mid- and long-term support to California communities affected by natural disasters like wildfires. The organization, which provides direct support to victims, is beginning to support those impacted by the Palisades Fire. World Central Kitchen World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit global food relief organization founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, is already on the ground in Southern California to aid first responders and evacuees. “Our teams have mobilized across the region to provide immediate relief in the form of sandwiches and water as we identify all areas of need,” the organization said in a statement on Jan. 8. Salvation Army The Salvation Army operates a disaster services fund that directly supports evacuees and first responders of California wildfires. The organization provides emergency relief and long-term assistance to those impacted by natural disasters. GoFundMe The online fundraising platform GoFundMe has created a centralized hub of verified fundraising pages on its site. The list is updated by the platform's Trust & Safety team to ensure that all included fundraisers are authentic. GoFundMe has also launched its own 2025 Wildfire Relief Fund, and says that all money raised will go directly to impacted people who are seeking help through GoFundMe fundraisers, and to nonprofit organizations providing relief on the ground. California Community Foundation The California Community Foundation has been working to strengthen Los Angeles County since 1915. The organization's Wildfire Recovery Fund targets the most underserved and hard to reach communities in the region, with the goal of helping provide long-term recovery relief. CAL FIRE Benevolent Foundation CAL FIRE Benevolent Foundation provides financial aid to firefighters and their families in the case of injury or loss of life. The organization also helps support burn victims and their families, along with research focused on firefighter health and safety. Baby2Baby Baby2Baby provides diapers, formula, clothing, and other basic necessities to children living in poverty. The organization has already distributed over 3 million emergency supplies to families in Los Angeles and is working with 470 partner organizations—including schools, homeless shelters and resource centers— in L.A. County to fulfill requests for necessities.

There are a lot of variables at play in the catastrophic wildfires currently clawing through southern California: dry vegetation, lack of rain, dense housing development, errant sparks potentially from cigarette butts or campfires or power lines or even arsonists. And then of course there’s gravity. Of all of the factors involved, there may be nothing as basic or as powerful as the tendency of an object with mass to roll or slide or plunge downward under the pull of the Earth below it. In the case of the wildfires, the massive object is air—specifically cold air, swirling and flowing 1,200 meters (4,260 ft.) high in California’s Sierra Nevada and White mountains, and the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California—a whirling of atmospheric dervishes that creates the signature Santa Ana winds. The warmer, less compacted air down at sea level is no match for the colder, denser air in the high elevations and what’s at the top comes crashing down. Fire absolutely loves it when that happens. “We call those downslope winds,” says Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. “They act as water does in an obstructed stream—they pull up against topography, and as they rush over the crests and through the gaps in the topography, they accelerate down the lee slopes and form something of a waterfall—or an airfall of downslope winds.” It is those atmospheric gushers that did as much as anything else to fan the flames that have so far killed dozens, displaced tens of thousands and destroyed thousands of structures across the Los Angeles area. Last week, isolated gusts, especially in the Santa Monica Mountains, reached 100 mph. The weekend saw some easing back, but Wed. Jan. 15 and Thurs. Jan. 16 are expected to see winds back up to 65 mph. Category One hurricanes, by comparison, start out at 74 mph. Blindsided as Los Angeles has been, some of this was entirely foreseeable. On the whole, Gershunov says, the Los Angeles area absorbs five batterings by Santa Ana winds every December and four or five every January. Most of that turbulence is stirred by seasonal changes in pressure gradients and the jet stream sitting over the Great Basin and the Four Corners region that cause the high, dense air to spill its banks. That’s not to say those are the only two months that the Santa Anas can do their damage. Wind events occur in October as well and that is typically the end of the fire season, which usually begins in June or July, since the gusts arrive before the first winter rains do. The problem in late 2024 and early 2025: there’s been winter wind but no winter rain—the latest start to the wet season in 150 years—and there’s none in the forecast; that’s bad news given the likely resurgence of the Santa Anas at the same time the land continues to burn. “We are beginning to experience another Santa Ana wind event now, and there'll be another one early next week, and we may have two to three Santa Ana winds before we get the first rains,” says Gershunov. “That's what happened in 2017 and 2018, when the Thomas fire burned through most of December and the smoldering remains were put out by an atmospheric river Pacific storm that occurred on Jan. 9, 2018. But [the fire] was extreme enough over Montecito, in Santa Barbara County, that it caused debris flows from the fire scar that killed 22 people.” Containing wildfires—never mind extinguishing them—in parched and windy conditions can be monstrously difficult. Dry vegetation is rocket fuel for blazes and wind both feeds the flames and spreads the embers. “The winds are like pointing an air blower at a fireplace,” says Gershunov, “except it’s not contained and it’s on a much larger scale.” What’s more, while the ability of weather forecasters to predict a resurgence of the Santa Ana winds as they’re doing this week inspires some confidence that Los Angelenos can plan for what’s coming, the fortune telling is reliable only until it isn’t. Surface features—trees, hills, mountains, buildings—are agents of chaos, causing all manner of unpredictable turbulence when the winds touch down. And higher in the atmosphere things can be even screwier—and on a larger scale. “Last week the jet stream did this tremendous loop and retrograde up in the upper troposphere and was blowing in the opposite direction from what it normally does,” says Gershunov. “It was pointed right into the L.A. basin.” Humidity—or, specifically, the lack of it—is another problem. Hot, arid winds blowing in from the Sierra Nevadas, White Mountains, and Klamath Basin strip whatever moisture there might be in the Los Angeles air, and that further dries out leaves and underbrush and other fuel. “Single digits in terms of relative humidity are a prescription for uncontrollable wildfires if the fuels are dry,” says Gershunov. What less humid wind there is often blows in from the ocean, which unhandily pushes fires that might actually be rolling down to extinguish themselves in the water back up hill. If there’s even a faint bright spot in the current disaster, it’s that the Santa Anas have been gusting in clear blue skies, meaning no lightning to act as an additional ignition source. But even so, regardless of the cause, once a fire is lit in a tinder box environment like a windy Los Angeles, the business of extinguishing it takes a massive expenditure of public effort and treasure—all in the face of a massive loss of life and property. The current crisis will end, though for now no one can say when.

The devastating Los Angeles fires are thought to have taken 16 lives, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner's Office. Though officials have warned that the death toll may continue to rise in the coming days. The Palisades Fire—the largest of the multiple fires currently impacting Los Angeles County—remains rampant, engulfing more than 23,000 acres as of Sunday morning. The fire is only 11% contained so far. The Eaton Fire is at 14,000 acres, with 15% containment. Meanwhile, the Hurst Fire is at least 799 acres and 76% contained and the newer Kenneth Fire, which started on Thursday afternoon, is just over 1,000 acres and is now 90% contained. The earlier Sunset, Woodley, Tyler, Olivas, and Lidia fires have been fully contained. “This is a tragic time in our history,” said Los Angeles County Police Department Sheriff Jim McDonnell during a press briefing on Wednesday. “These are…unprecedented conditions, but also unpredictable as the fire continues to spread and pop up in different locations, none of us know where the next one is going to be.” The devastating nature of the fires is in part due to climate change, experts say, which has exacerbated the size, intensity, and damage caused by the wildfires in recent years. The southwestern U.S. is undergoing the driest 22-year period in the last 1,200 years. As temperatures have risen, so has the aridity, or dryness of the vegetation, which proved disastrous when coupled with the gusty Santa Ana winds. “The hot and dry Santa Ana winds that often affect the southern California region and fuel large wildfires such as the ongoing one, only make things worse,” said Imperial College London Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis in a statement. “Research has shown that the occurrence of Santa Ana winds in the autumn are also likely to get worse with climate change, leading to even drier vegetation, fast fire spread and more intense late-season wildfires.” The fire’s scope At least 150,000 residents have been forced to flee in the wake of the raging wildfires. The biggest threat to Los Angeles remains the strong winds. Despite broad efforts to take control of the fires, officials have expressed their distress about their magnitude. “We're facing a historic natural disaster,” said L.A. County Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan during Wednesday’s press conference. “This is not a normal red flag.” During the press conference, local leaders addressed concerns about fire hydrants that reportedly went dry in the county as firefighters sought to extinguish flames. Local media had reported on the incidents, though discussions about the topic also circulated on social media platforms including X. L.A. Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones said that in Palisades, the three tanks of water that hold about a million gallons each and supply the region had run out. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who declared a state of emergency on Tuesday night, ordered an investigation into the fire water supply issue on Friday afternoon. Power outages have also been affecting much of Southern California. More than 63,000 California customers were still without power as of Sunday morning, according to Poweroutage.us. Climate impact A combination of factors compounded the impact and scope of the Los Angeles fires. The L.A. region has received little rain this year—a U.S. Drought Monitor Map, released last week, reported parts of Southern California as “abnormally dry”—coupled with warmer than usual temperatures. In addition, the area was battling a windstorm the day the fires were reported. “[The] National Weather Service reported wind gusts of close to 100 miles an hour in a region that had received close to zero precipitation with a season of very warm conditions,” says Stanford Professor Noah Diffenbaugh. “That is a very high-risk situation. And it was forecast in advance.” The fires are occurring outside of the state’s wildfire season, which typically runs from May through late October or November in the Southern California region, according to the Western Fire Chiefs Association. Warmer temperatures and extended droughts could mean that wildfires might continue to occur outside of their usual season. “Because of the warming trend of climate change, the vegetation is a little bit drier and the fire season is a little bit later,” says Crystal Raymond, deputy director of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative at the University of Washington. “You get more of the chance for this dry season to then overlap with the Santa Ana wind season.” It’s a phenomenon that could become more common due to climate change, says Raymond. “Generally throughout the West, we expect wildfires to become more frequent, larger, and happen in a longer fire season.” Raymond says that wildfires will continue to cause devastation as long as areas that were previously natural vegetation are commercially developed, a process known as wildland-urban interface. “There’s a lack of awareness about how much most people living in the West are living in areas that are prone to wildfire,” she says. Practices like controlled burns or vegetation management can help manage fire risks, and experts say that communities should have evacuation plans and plan any development with wildfires in mind. But wildfires have long been a part of California’s ecosystem, and will continue to be so. “There have been wildfires in California much longer than there have been cities,” says Diffenbaugh. “The key question for living with wildfire is how we as humans manage the risks.”

As fires continue to blaze across Los Angeles, more than 12,000 personnel have been deployed to support the ongoing firefight. Among those attempting to quell these fires are incarcerated persons working in a three-way partnership between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), CAL FIRE, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department LACFD. The current state of the fires is that at least 16 people are thought to have died, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner's Office. “Unfortunately I think the death toll will rise,” L.A. Sheriff Robert Luna said on Jan. 9. And the sheer volume of land destroyed is massive. As of Sunday morning—over 40,000 acres have been decimated. As of Friday morning, 939 incarcerated firefighters have been working “around the clock cutting fire lines and removing fuel behind structures to slow fire spread,” CDCR told TIME in an emailed statement. This includes 110 members of a support staff helping the firefighters. Here’s everything you need to know about how and why inmates are currently fighting the L.A. fires. Incarcerated firefighters have been working all week Incarcerated firefighters have been on the frontlines of the multiple fires breaking out in Los Angeles County and Southern California since earlier this week. On Wednesday, the CDCR told the Washington Post it had deployed 395 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines. A day later, that number had nearly doubled to 783. The department said the crews also have 88 staff members supporting them. By Friday morning, almost 1,000 firefighters from the program were fighting the blazes. A look into the program making this happen—and what the firefighters can gain The incarcerated firefighters are a part of the Conservation (Fire) Camp Program—a partnership between CDCR, Cal Fire, and LACFD, which jointly operates 35 conservation camps across 25 counties in California. Participants in these camps “support state, local and federal government agencies as they respond to all types of emergencies such as fires, floods, and other natural or manmade disasters,” according to the CDCR website. Inmates must apply to be a part of the program and “no one is involuntarily assigned to work in a fire camp,” per the CDCR. “Thus, incarcerated people do not face disciplinary action if they choose not to serve their time in a fire camp.” Those who participate in the program can also receive “time credits,” according to the CDCR. Most of those who work as firefighters can receive two-for-one credits, “meaning they receive two additional days off their sentence for every one day they serve on a fire crew,” while those working as support staff receive one-for-one credits. The program started in 1915, though the modern protocol of training the inmates at camps began during World War II. Since their rates were doubled in 2023, the fire crew members now earn between $5.80 and $10.24 per day, paid by CDCR, with an additional $1 per hour during “emergencies” paid by CAL FIRE. This is the salary that the inmates currently fighting the California fires are receiving, in great contrast to their non incarcerated counterparts (salaries for the LACFD begin at around $85,000 according to their website). In recent years, the camp sizes have shrunk, thanks largely to a combination of prison reform efforts and overcrowding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pre-COVID, incarcerated firefighters made up around 30% of California's firefighting workforce; post-COVID, this is now closer to 10 to 15%, according to The Nature Conservancy. The dangers of the job Though the CDCR emphasizes that inmates working as firefighters have the opportunity to gain employment from their training with CAL FIRE, graduates of the program have reported difficulties accessing firefighting jobs once released despite their experience and training. Royal Ramey is a formerly-incarcerated individual who worked in the Conservation Fire Camp Program in 2012, and experienced first hand the struggle of finding work after his release in 2014. “The harsh reality is that once they get out [of prison], they face an uphill battle getting a job,” he tells TIME. Now, Ramey is the co-founder and chief program officer of his own nonprofit, the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, where he helps fellow formerly incarcerated individuals find paths to employment in forestry and wildland firefighting. The FFRP has a 10% rate of recidivism, compared to the California state average of 41.9%. It’s a difficult situation, Ramey says. On the one hand, he found his “calling” as a firefighter while in prison, and he “fell in love” with the work. “It really gave me the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be a little bit more confident, to understand how to communicate effectively with different folks, and also have a shared vision with a group of men,” Ramey says. On the other hand, he recognizes how little firefighters like him were getting paid in comparison to their counterparts, and when he first signed up, he says he “didn't really know what I was getting myself into.” A 2018 TIME report found that incarcerated firefighters were, at the time, four times more likely to experience object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures, compared with professional firefighters working on the same fires. Inmates were also more than eight times as likely to be injured after inhaling smoke and particulates compared with other firefighters. For Ramey, the work is making sure that incarcerated firefighters are not just utilized in times of extreme need, but that they have pathways to employment after their release and mentorship along the way as well.

In the wake of reports that a lack of water supply may have negatively impacted the work of firefighters battling the multiple blazes in Los Angeles, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for an investigation on Friday, Jan. 10. “The ongoing reports of the loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community,” Newsom wrote in the letter addressed to Janisse Quiñones, CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and L.A. County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella. “While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish fires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors.” Newsom posted the letter on X (formerly Twitter), telling his followers: “We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires.” Currently, the Los Angeles Fire Department and CAL FIRE are fighting multiple blazes, the most dominant being the Palisades Fire. As of Jan. 12, at least 16 people are thought to have died, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner's Office, thousands of homes have been destroyed, and over 40,000 acres have been decimated. Soon after the first fire sparked on Jan. 7, reports and concerns began to emerge that the fire hydrants were running dry, after being overstressed without aircraft support. On Jan. 8, Los Angeles Fire Department Public Information Officer Erik Scott, addressed the “multiple questions” he was receiving about firefighters experiencing challenges with water pressure when fighting the Palisades Fire. He posted on X about how water supply and dry conditions had negatively affected firefighting efforts, despite the fact that the L.A. Department of Water and Power filled all available water tanks in the area. “[W]ater availability was impacted at higher elevations, which affected some fire hydrants due to limited replenishment of water tanks in those areas,” he wrote. “The extreme demand caused a slower refill rate for these tanks which created a challenge for our firefighting effort.” In a news conference on Wednesday morning, both Quiñones and Pestrella discussed the struggles with water supply. “We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said. “We're fighting a wildfire with an urban water system. And that is really challenging.” On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which helps supply water in Pacific Palisades, was offline for maintenance when the Palisades fire ignited on Tuesday. The 117-million-gallon-water storage is a fundamental tool in sustaining the water system for the residential area. In a memo posted by the LADWP attempting to combat misinformation regarding water supply, they clarified that “LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations,” but stated that “water supply remained strong to the area.” They also said that they are “initiating [their] own investigation about water resiliency.” Some experts have told the media that “no water system in the world” would have been able to handle the sheer magnitude of fires that have blazed over the course of the week, especially with the strong Santa Ana winds often grounding air support. According to Newsom, many of Southern California’s largest reservoirs are "currently at or above their historic average storage levels for this time of year.” And while he has ordered for an investigation “into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir,” he states on his new California fire facts website—launched on Jan. 11 with the intention of combating misinformation about the fires—that “reservoirs are full and water is available.” According to Newsom, many of Southern California’s largest reservoirs are "currently at or above their historic average storage levels for this time of year.” And while he has ordered for an investigation “into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir,” he states on his new California fire facts website—launched on Jan. 11 with the intention of combating misinformation about the fires—that “reservoirs are full and water is available.” He also reminds readers that “urban water systems are built for structure fires and fire suppression, not hurricane-force firestorms” and that the water supply was “exhausted because of the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm.” Newsom addressed his call for an independent investigation in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, which aired on Jan. 12. He was asked what questions he’s hoping to get answered. “The same ones you’re asking…What the hell happened? What happened to the water system…Was it just overwhelmed?” Newsom said. “Did it contribute in any way to our inability to fight the fire? Or were 99 mile-an-hour winds determinative and there was really no firefight that could've been more meaningful? So I want—all of us want to know those answers, and I just don't want to wait because people are asking me. I want to know those facts. I want them objectively determined, and let the chips fall where they may. This is not about finger pointing." Throughout the week, there has also been much discussion as to whether budget cuts to the fire department have affected LAFD’s ability to fight the destructive wildfires. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times posted on X, criticizing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. “Fires in LA are sadly no surprise, yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M,” he claimed. “And reports of empty fire hydrants raise serious questions.” L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has also criticized the city and Bass, stating on Fox 11 that the budget “was cut, and it did impact our ability to provide service.” She said: “We are still under-staffed, we are still under-resourced, and we’re still under-funded,” and added that she was not aware that the reservoir had been closed before Tuesday. “That is something to discuss, and we’re going to look into that in regard to how we can ensure there’s going to be water when we need it,” Crowley said in the Jan. 10 interview. Newsom has denied that there were cuts to the firefighting budget. “CA did NOT cut our firefighting budget. We have nearly doubled the size of our firefighting army and built the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet,” Newsom wrote in a social media post announcing his new California fire facts website. Meanwhile, in a memo Crowley sent to Bass in Dec. 2024, she stated that the elimination of civilian positions and overtime within the department was causing “unprecedented operational challenges” and “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” Bass, who was criticized for being out of the country when the fires broke out, has repeatedly defended her support of the fire department throughout the week, stating in a news conference on Jan. 9 that “the impact of our budget really did not impact what we’ve been going through over the last few days.” TIME has reached out to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Department of Public Works for comment.

There are many ways of framing the scale of the dislocation in Los Angeles this week. As the ferocious ring of five wildfires roared across the region in a multi-day blaze that began Jan. 7., some 180,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes—the equivalent of pitching the entire population of Little Rock, Ark., out into the streets or filling Los Angeles’s massive So-Fi stadium to more than double its capacity and not letting anyone go home again. The Southern California blaze was a special kind of hell. At least 10 people lost their lives and officials expect more deaths to come to light before the multiple infernos are tamed. Thousands of homes and a sprawl of entire neighborhoods were transformed into outdoor charnel houses. Nursing home residents in Altadena, Calif., were evacuated into the night—riding in wheelchairs and pushing walkers, many in their night clothes, as a stinging snow of orange embers descended around them. Fire fighters watched helplessly as houses burned, their hoses at the ready but the hydrants to which they were connected producing no water or merely a low-pressure trickle. “Wildfires do not care about jurisdictional boundaries,” said Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, at a Jan. 9 news conference. Meanwhile, the sextet of localized blazes—the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire, the Hurst fire, the Sunset fire, the Lidia fire, and the Kenneth fire—blurred in the public mind and in the sprawl of destruction into one great undifferentiated inferno. President-Elect Donald Trump laid blame for the disaster at the feet of Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” Trump wrote in a Jan. 8 Truth Social post. As for Newsom, Trump faulted the governor for allegedly refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California.” Biden ignored Trump’s broadside. Newsom’s office hit back, posting on X: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.” Trump was wrong about FEMA, which released funds to fight the fires on Jan. 7; he was not wrong about the feeble water system, though it’s possible there is nothing the city could have done to keep it supplied sufficiently. The hydrants are fed by three one-million gallon tanks in the Pacific Palisades hills. Those were not meant to work alone, however, but rather to be supplemented by water from firefighting aircraft that, in this case, couldn’t fly in the cyclonic Santa Ana winds. At a news conference, Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the demand for water was four times greater “than we’ve ever seen in the system.” But there are bigger—far bigger—factors at play in the disaster, factors that have less to do with local politics and institutional preparedness and more to do with the existential matter of a planet grown sickly from climate change. A crisis that is feeding more and bigger storms and causing more and greater destruction—destruction that lawmakers and other leaders, here and around the world, still seem unable to muster the will to address. Here is the reality: The very metabolism of the Earth has been thrown off by an atmosphere choking on greenhouse gasses, and it will take more than political bickering to set things right. Another reality: Fixing the problem first requires understanding—and, even more fundamentally, accepting—the science. Only then can we implement policies and put in place protocols that help us both reduce the likelihood of more such crises and minimize the death and destruction when they ultimately do occur. It’s long been established that climate change turbocharges wildfires, with droughts, persistent heat, dried vegetation, and lightning storms all worsening in a warming world and all contributing to out-of-control blazes. That’s just one reason a new report from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service—a report that landed on Jan. 10, while L.A. still burned—arrived as such bad news. According to the release, 2024 was the first year global mean temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.6°C (2.88°F). That blows past the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which sought to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C. Doing so would help limit the impact of a hotter planet. In Southern California, the report could be read by the light of a burning city where, at one point, the rapidly moving fire incinerated the equivalent of five football fields per minute. Those blazes came not long after a bad year for wildfires in the U.S. overall. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, a clearinghouse for fire information and logistical resources, by mid-September 2024 alone, more than 38,000 wildfires had incinerated more than 7.8 million American acres—a pace slightly ahead of the annual U.S. average of more than 45,000 wildfires per year. While it’s still unclear what sparked the L.A. fires, the underlying cause goes back decades—if not centuries. Fire is one of the most primal expressions of a planet in upheaval; the Earth was born in molten violence and, under the right conditions—say, after hundreds of years of emissions released from burning fossil fuels—it still has an exceedingly fiery temperament. “As our planet continues to heat up, droughts are getting more intense in some regions of the world,” says Peter Kalmus, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The droughts, combined with higher temperatures, cause more frequent and intense fires in those regions.” Southern California is not remotely the only tinderbox part of the world, but it’s an especially flammable one—not just because of the droughts Kalmus speaks of, but because of their persistence. “The Southwest U.S. has been in megadrought since 1999,” says Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the school for climate and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “This is the primary reason we’re seeing so much more wildfire in the region, and all across the U.S. West up into Canada.” Then there is the tornadic power of the winds—most notably Southern California’s Santa Ana. Those ferocious atmospheric rapids get their power, explains Frank Marsik, associate research scientist in the college of engineering at the University of Michigan, by being forced to move through narrow channels in the mountains of northern Mexico and Southern California, “resulting in an increase in the speed of the winds. A good analogy for what happens with the Santa Ana winds would be the way that you can increase the speed of water flowing out of a garden hose by putting your thumb over the end, causing the water to flow through a much smaller area.” Wildfires are hardly the only sign of our warming world—or the dangerous mile-marker we passed in 2024 when we crossed the 1.5°C excess warming documented in the Copernicus report. Everywhere, the planet showed signs of heat swoon last year, with record high levels of water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; record low expanses of sea ice around Antarctica; and record oceanic temperatures in the North Atlantic, Indian, and western Pacific Oceans. July 22, 2024, went into the books as the hottest single day ever recorded worldwide, with the global average thermometer popping its top at a comparative fever level of 62.8°F (17.16°C). The 13 months that preceded that day were blistering too, with each one from June 2023 to June 2024 clocking in hotter than the same month in any previous year. “All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus’s European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. Human-generated greenhouse emissions were not the only factors that made 2024 so punishing. From May 2023 to May 2024, an El Niño current prevailed in the tropical Pacific, helping to drive average sea surface temperatures to a record-high 20.87°C (69.56°F), or more than half a degree celsius warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average. But even after El Niño ended and a more moderate La Niña cycle took over, the oceans stayed hot, with sea surface temperatures from July to December 2024 entering the record books second only to the same period in 2023. From June to October, sea ice around Antarctica reached its second lowest extent ever, also behind 2023. The Arctic, at its annual minimum sea ice in September, was its fifth lowest on record. High sea surface temperatures always lead to accelerated evaporation. In 2024, that meant record levels of water vapor in the atmosphere, with concentrations exceeding the 1991 to 2020 average by 5%. Not only does water vapor itself have a greenhouse effect, it also leads to extreme rainfall events, and 2024 saw plenty of them. They included catastrophic flooding in the northeast U.S. in August; in Spain in October; and in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Germany in September. Europe as a whole was hit especially hard by 2024’s record heat. The year was the warmest ever for the continent, with average temperatures 0.28°C (0.47°F) hotter than the previous record, set in 2020. Spring and summer were more than one and a half degrees celsius warmer than the seasonal average from 1991 to 2020. Human health worldwide was affected by the soaring temperatures. When the body cannot cool itself off sufficiently, symptoms of heat stress—including nausea, vomiting, loss of coordination, shortness of breath, dizziness and more—can occur. So-called strong heat stress commonly happens when outdoor temperatures reach or exceed 38°C (100.4°F); extreme heat stress, with more severe symptoms including brain swelling and vital organ damage, happens at 46°C (114.8°F). On July 10, 2024, Copernicus reports that 44% of the globe was affected by either strong or extreme heat stress—5% more than the average annual maximum. “These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapor levels…meant unprecedented heat waves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people,” said Samantha Burgess, the ECMWF’s strategic lead for climate, in a statement. That rainfall, interspersed with droughts is one more mechanism that leads to wildfires. Such a boom and bust cycle means a lot of lush greenery that grows in the rainy times, and a lot of dead leaves, trees and other tinder that gets left behind when things dry. “This is a perfect storm of fire weather: a combination of plentiful and extremely dry fuel,” says Kalmus. As earth’s temperature crossed new and troubling thresholds in 2024, so too did the chemistry of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide reached a record of 422 parts per million, or 2.9 parts per million higher than it was in 2023. Once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide—and its ability to warm our planet—remains there for hundreds of years. Methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas which does its damage at much lower concentrations, reached 1,897 parts per billion, or three parts per billion higher than in 2023. Said Laurence Rouil, director of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service, in a statement: “Our data points clearly to a steady global increase of greenhouse gas emissions and these remain the main agent of climate change.” Persistent wildfires across the Americas were not only a result of global warming, but a cause of even more future heat, as Bolivia and Venezuela released record levels of wildfire-related carbon dioxide; also due to fires, Canada reached its second highest annual output. The Los Angeles fires are similarly pouring smoke and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the local topography—mountains that trap haze in the Los Angeles Basin—keeping the mess around. Nothing in the short term is going to ensure Southern California does not see a repeat of this week’s devastation, though the construction of more million-gallon water tanks can help prevent the hydrants from running dry again. The industrial-era greenhouse gas output that created the conditions that fed the fires was centuries in the making and it will, ultimately, be generations in the fixing. If there was any good news in the Copernicus report it is that a single year that exceeds pre-industrial temperatures by 1.5°C or more is not the end of the story. The Paris agreement considers the 1.5°C threshold breached only if that is the average temperature increase over a 20-year stretch. And so, as the Los Angeles blaze rages, as fire-ravaged communities take stock of the destruction, as families mourn—as we collectively struggle and grieve and pick up the pieces—the disaster is at once a warning and an admonition: There is still time for aggressive climate action to lower emissions and bring temperatures to heel in the process. “Humanity is in charge of its own destiny…how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence,” said Buontempo. “The future is in our hands. Swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.”

Insurance companies were worried about many of the homes in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles long before this week’s devastating wildfire burned through the area, ravaging homes and forcing evacuations. The Palisades, because of its location next to the brush-heavy Santa Monica Mountains and the high value of its homes, was too vulnerable to fires to insure at permissible rates without the companies losing money. Insurers including State Farm, which dropped nearly 70% of policyholders in Pacific Palisades in July 2024, refused to offer new insurance plans or renew old ones. As a result, many homeowners were forced to obtain coverage from the state’s insurer of last resort, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (CA FAIR) Plan, which covered 1,430 homeowners in the Pacific Palisades zip code of 90272 in September 2024, an 85% increase from 2023. The FAIR plan insures homes against fire but has higher premiums than traditional home insurance and only covers up to $3 million in damages for residential properties. Like many other insurers of last resort in the 33 other states with this type of system, the California FAIR Plan is buckling under the weight of natural disasters worsened by climate change. “I’m concerned that we’re one bad fire season away from complete insolvency,” said Jim Wood, then a California Assemblyman, at a March hearing in which CA Fair Plan President Victoria Roach explained that it had just $200 million of cash on hand, with $450 billion of exposure in the state. That bad fire season is now here. As infernos burn across Los Angeles County, torching at least 28,000 acres, analysts at Accuweather estimate losses could reach $52 to $57 billion. It is a blow to the hundreds of insurers operating in California, but a particular challenge for the state’s insurer of last resort. And its predicament highlights the precarity of the home insurance market, in California and nationally. Due to an increased risk of fires, floods, convective storms, hurricanes, and other national disasters, it doesn’t make financial sense for insurers to offer plans to some people. In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowner coverage in 18 states, up from 12 states five years ago, according to an analysis by the New York Times. About the same number of states are seeing both increases in home insurance prices as well as increases in non-renewals of insurance, according to Dave Jones, the former insurance commissioner of California and now director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “In the long term, we’re not doing enough to deal with the underlying driver, which is fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions, so we’re going to continue to see insurance unavailability throughout the U.S.,” says Jones. “We are marching steadily towards an uninsurable future in this country.” As insurers drop policyholders, homeowners turn to insurers of last resort—in the Southeast, they’re often called Beach and Windstorm Plans—which can’t really afford to insure them either. Yet more states are creating these plans to bolster private property insurance markets. Nationwide, the number of FAIR Plan insurance policies nearly doubled between 2018 and 2023, rising to 2.7 million, according to data from AM Best, a company that rates the financial strength of insurers. The California FAIR Plan alone saw its exposure grow nine-fold over the past six years. “The plan of last resort,” says Benjamin Collier, a professor of risk management and insurance at Temple University in Philadelphia, “ is becoming the de facto insurance in the state.” The fate of the California FAIR Plan affects everyone in the nation’s most populous state. If it doesn’t have enough money to cover its claims, every policyholder in the state ends up paying more. Insurers are responsible for covering the first billion dollars of claims in California, but then the responsibility goes to every insurance policyholder in the state—who are responsible for additional assessed charges. Essentially, everyone has to pay to reimburse people whose homes lie in high-risk areas. Florida is a case in point: when Citizens, the state-run insurer of last resort, can’t pay out claims, policyholders must pay the bill, which added up to a “Hurricane Tax” of hundreds of dollars per household after Hurricane Ian hit the Atlantic Coast near Cape Canaveral in 2022, causing $113 billion in damages. The way FAIR Plans work “is really a symptom of the broader insurance market failing,” says David Marlett, managing director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University. “It’s a horrible system.” In some ways, it’s useful for people to be priced out of insurance and have to turn to FAIR Plans, which are more expensive than regular insurance and don’t cover as much loss, says Collier, the Temple professor. The insurance market is one way of signaling where people should and shouldn’t live; more expensive plans may help guide people from high-risk areas. But as the insurance math becomes unworkable in wider bigger swathes of the country, FAIR Plans won’t be a tenable solution. “We need to be dramatically rethinking how homeowners’ insurance works and what it covers,” says Collier. One potential fix would be for the federal government to offer to provide insurance (called reinsurance) for FAIR Plans, essentially backstopping them if they don’t have enough money to pay out claims, says Jones, the former insurance commissioner. That would also help FAIR Plans save money on buying insurance from the private markets. Jones also suggests creating an Obamacare-style marketplace for home insurance, where the government can subsidize low or moderate-income households buying insurance. What won’t work, experts say, is continuing with the same system and hoping that climate risk just goes away. “Insurers are not magicians,” Jones says. “The risks of loss are rising through climate change, and insurers can’t just wave a magic wand and make them go away.”

Annie Harvilicz’s brother came to her in need. While fleeing his Palisades home on Tuesday—one of thousands of structures destroyed by the nearly 20,000-acre Palisades Fire in Los Angeles—he needed to find a place to house his two pets: a cat and bunny. Harvilicz, an L.A.-based veterinarian, saw this as an opportunity to house animals that were displaced amid the chaos of burning homes and evacuations. “We had this unique situation where my veterinary hospital, where I've been for 15 years, just moved to a new location that was bigger, and we hadn't gotten rid of our [old] lease yet,” says Harvilicz, 47. “I looked around, and the vet hospital has exam rooms that are empty, the x-ray room is empty, the pharmacy room is empty. And I was like, ‘All these rooms are empty. We could put animals in all these rooms.’” Seeing her community in need, Harvilicz, who works at the Animal Wellness Centers in Marina del Rey and Laguna Vista Veterinary Center in Harbor City, shared a Facebook post offering to house any animals seeking shelter at the old Marina del Rey location of her veterinary hospital. The response was substantial. As of Thursday afternoon, the old veterinary clinic space is a temporary home to 14 dogs, 12 cats, and a rabbit (though she is also in conversations about taking in a tortoise and eight hens). Since the Palisades Fire started Tuesday night, however, her team has housed many other animals that have only needed to stay for a night and have been able to return to their families. Harvilicz now spends the vast majority of her day sifting through emails and organizing pet drop-offs either at her old clinic, or with other volunteers who have offered temporary housing to pets. More than 170,000 residents in Los Angeles County have faced evacuation orders due to the five fires now burning in Los Angeles County, and many other residents still remain at-risk due to gusty winds, which reached 60 mph speeds on Thursday. Harvilicz says that while the outside world feels apocalyptic at times, she’s been warmed by the outpouring of support from others in the community. “I thought we would be absolutely inundated, but we haven't been and I think the reason for that is a lot of we're actually connecting a lot of people,” she says. “I actually got… substantially more emails, probably like 50 to [every] one, of people calling to help, volunteer, bring food, help animals.” Harvilicz isn’t the only one taking action. David Dimeno, president of Coachella Valley Horse Rescue, is taking in displaced horses. Larger animals can be housed at the Lancaster Animal Care Center, Industry Hills Expo, Pomona Fairplex and Antelope Valley Fair. Specific guidelines regarding capacity and the types of animals being taken in have been shared on the Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control site. Smaller animals can be housed at the Agoura Animal Care Center, Baldwin Park Animal Care Center, Carson Animal Care Center, Downey Animal Care Center, Lancaster Animal Care Center, and Palmdale Animal Care Center. Other local shelters may also be housing pets. Part of the work, Harvilicz says, is informing residents who only have one or two small pets that they can take their pets to hotels or find housing to accommodate their needs. “There are a lot of hotels that are becoming pet friendly. There are a lot of rental units that are accepting pets,” she says. “It's better for the family and it's better for the pets.” While there is no data surrounding the number of animals hurt and displaced by the fires, Harvilicz says that she’s already begun to see a shift in the emails she is receiving from concerned families. “I started to get the first emails from people saying I had to leave my dog. If anybody brings in a dog that looks like this, please let me know, because I hope I can find him again,” she says. “This is probably just the beginning of learning about the animals that didn't make it out.” So far, Harvilicz has only had to attend to one animal that exhibited clear injuries from the fire at her job. To better support her efforts and prepare to provide free or low-cost care for the animals impacted by the fires, Harvilicz is asking people to donate to her nonprofit, Animal Wellness Foundation, to offset the costs. She has been running the nonprofit for some 15 years, and the organization regularly provides pet care for low-income families. While the fires undeniably worry her, Harvilicz feels hopeful about the way the community has been coming together. “It made me feel proud to be an Angeleno,” she says. “I was so impressed with how people were helping each other.”

Beware of Blair. That’s the word from the Weather Channel, which, along with the National Weather Service, has issued a warning for the first named winter storm of 2025. The storm is set to arrive over the weekend and linger into Monday, clobbering the Plains, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic U.S. with snow, ice, and freezing temperatures—ensuring that the new year will land as a challenging one for up to 250 million people in 40 states. Winter storm Blair is the result of what’s known as an Arctic Outbreak, which is itself a creature of the polar vortex. The polar vortex is a formation of westerly winds that collect over the Arctic in the winter, isolating the polar region from the surrounding atmosphere and causing temperatures within the vortex to plunge, but leaving surrounding temperatures unaffected. That’s only when the polar vortex remembers its place, however—which it’s not doing this weekend. Instead, a pair of high pressure areas are forcing the jet stream to plunge southward, bringing the icebox air of the polar vortex with them deep into the lower 48 states. At the same time, a so-called blocking high—a static area of high pressure—over Greenland is also forcing the jet stream, and more cold weather, southward. The U.S. will feel the effects of all of this atmospheric activity dramatically. Throughout Saturday, snow is expected to hit the northern and central Rockies, along with the Plains, with precipitation likely extending as far south as the mid-Mississippi valley. The Weather Channel is warning Kansas City, St. Louis, and Wichita, Kansas, of hazardous driving conditions. Lake effect snow in states bordering the Great Lakes will add to the precipitation. On Sunday, the storm will stretch as far east as West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains and south into Oklahoma. Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Louisville will be added to the cities that will face hazardous driving. By Monday, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charleston, S.C., and portions of West Virginia will get their turn to potentially be buried by snow. Accumulations across the affected areas are expected to reach between six and 12 inches. Snowfall will taper and stop at the beginning of the week, but some models have the Arctic Outbreak lasting until the second half of the month, and that is when the majority of Americans should feel its effects. Even as early as Jan. 6., however, Texas and Oklahoma will see lows in the 20s and 30s; by midweek, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Appalachians could see similar temperatures. Local lows next week are projected to reach 23°F in Dallas, 33°F in New Orleans, 21°F in Atlanta, 36°F in Orlando, and 46°F in Miami. The Weather Channel calls for lows in some parts of the Plains, the mid-Mississippi Valley and the Ohio Valley to touch 0°F. According to Accuweather, the cold air from the far north will arrive in pulses, with repeated blasts keeping much of the country below average temperatures. The Midwest and mid-Atlantic states are projected to be from 12°F to 25°F below historical averages throughout at least portions of the next two weeks. All five Gulf coast states—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—may see snow and ice. A region extending 1,000 miles from western Nebraska to West Virginia could see up to three to six inches of snow, or “enough to shovel or plow,” says Accuweather. And the more snow that falls, the colder it will get, as the planet’s albedo—or reflectivity—increases, meaning that incoming sunlight bounces from the white ground back into space rather than being absorbed by darker surfaces and increasing warming. None of this changes the state of the Earth’s overall climate. The planet is still running the meteorological fever known as climate change. But there is plenty of fluctuation within that larger condition. The first month of 2025 promises to be a reminder of winter’s more punishing extremes.