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.
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.
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.”
The Mobilization Ramps Up
In the last days of December, there began to be warnings that a big wind event was coming, with the National Weather Service issuing its weather watch on Jan. 3.
Mobilization for last month’s fires geared up quickly. The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, known as Cal OES, met online at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 5, with Los Angeles County fire officials to coordinate planning. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, assured Mr. Newsom’s office at 2:15 p.m. that it remained at peak season staffing.
By 5:02 p.m., Cal OES had authorized the pre-positioning of 65 fire engines, eight water tenders, nine bulldozers, eight helicopters and 105 support personnel in red flag areas from Santa Barbara to San Diego and inland to San Bernardino and Riverside, with more resources in the pipeline.
Robert Garcia, the fire chief for the Angeles National Forest, hiked up to the hills overlooking Altadena to see the situation for himself. The brush was ominously dry and brittle. He sent photos to colleagues and called local chiefs to talk about plans. The Forest Service was advancing trucks by then from out of state and Northern California, and readying planes, bulldozers, helicopters and water carriers.
In Pacific Palisades, there was already a water challenge. A reservoir that ordinarily would have held 117 million gallons of water had been drained for repairs. Later, it would not be able to replenish water tanks serving the very neighborhoods where the fire ultimately started. Nor was the water hydrant system, designed for limited fires in urban neighborhoods, up to fighting a mega-fire.
Chief Marrone and his deputies readied plans to predeploy crews and fire equipment around the county’s parched suburbs. The strategy was standard for the department, which is known for all the communities in its jurisdiction that are backed up to dry canyons and foothills.
This time, it had multiple features: Wildland hand crews. Engine companies, bulldozers, helicopters, dispatchers. Chief Marrone authorized overtime and state funding to staff units in the Santa Monica Mountains, the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley near Altadena and fire-prone Santa Clarita, not far from where the Hurst fire would explode late Tuesday. He pre-positioned four five-engine strike teams and asked Cal Fire to preposition two more.
County officials also had begun to weigh the rare step of ordering firefighters who were going off their 24-hour shifts to remain on the job, in case they were needed. It was a decision that would need to be made early on the day the windstorm was expected — Tuesday, Jan. 7 — in time for the 8 a.m. shift.
Expensive, the option was also a risk to Chief Marrone’s credibility if no fire erupted. Nearly 5,000 public employees work in the county’s fire department, including more than 3,100 firefighters who rotate in shifts of about 900. Perhaps 200 members of the force commute from outside California, he said, swapping shifts to create long blocks of time off that they spend at homes in places as far-flung as Tennessee and Texas.
“It’s a big deal to hold 900 people for an incident that hasn’t happened,” Chief Marrone said. Holding a shift back would double his force to 1,800 firefighters. “But it also could have been, ‘There goes Marrone again, and nothing’s happened and here I missed my son’s birthday, I missed my anniversary.’”
By 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, he said, his chief deputy for emergency operations, Jon O’Brien, had convinced him to take the gamble. The wind in the San Gabriel Valley foothills was howling. Nine hundred county firefighters stayed on for another shift, he said, many sleeping on the floors of fire stations and draped across recliner chairs.
At the Los Angeles Fire Department, Chief Kristin M. Crowley’s team was also weighing predeployment.
An internal planning document for Jan. 7 showed plans to advance nine L.A.F.D. engines into potential hot spots in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. A department spokeswoman later issued a list of 24 L.A.F.D. engines that she said had been added or pre-positioned on Jan. 7, although it was unclear how many were already on duty or sent after fires broke out.
In any case, the department placed no extra advance engines in the Palisades to augment the normal capabilities of its two nearest fire stations, and Chief Crowley’s team opted against ordering that morning’s departing shift of about 1,000 L.A.F.D. firefighters to remain on duty.
At a news conference two days after the Palisades fire, Chief Crowley said that her department’s careful preparations had been overtaken by the severity of the windstorm, and that no one had anticipated that crucial aerial support would be grounded. Later, she complained that, had the department been allocated more money, “we would’ve been in a better position” to battle the fires.
Former department officials charged that the city’s predeployment plan was not only less extensive than what other fire departments in the region were doing, but also much less aggressive than past L.A.F.D. deployments for similar forecasts. And city officials questioned the department’s contention that financial constraints had been an issue. The city administrative officer, Matt Szabo, said emergency deployments are routinely reimbursed by the city, and at the time of the fires, the department had nearly $150 million in its overtime accounts.
“Woulda shoulda coulda,” said Los Angeles Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who represents a fire-prone swath of the northern San Fernando Valley. She said that the city fire department also had its regular emergencies to attend to and prepared for the extreme fire weather as best it could.
A Rise in Alarm
As the week began, the level of concern continued to rise. It was now Monday, Jan. 6, one day before the windstorm was forecast to arrive. The National Weather Service was now alerting a “particularly dangerous situation,” its most extreme warning, with a danger zone from the Palisades to Altadena circled in bright magenta. On the local Los Angeles CBS station, the weather report was warning of “extreme to critical fire weather.”
Mr. Newsom issued a release announcing that resources were being sent to Southern California ahead of “life-threatening and destructive” winds.
Mayor Bass, who had landed early the night before in Ghana, was now scrambling to handle the situation despite a time difference that put her eight hours ahead of her city. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of the Los Angeles City Council and acting mayor in her absence, told her he was hearing warnings of 100 m.p.h. winds in Southern California.
“She was like, ‘I’m coming home right away, as soon as I could get there,’” Mr. Harris-Dawson said. But her return would take a 22-hour journey by military and commercial aircraft.
In the meantime, stepping in and out of diplomatic events in Ghana, Ms. Bass was briefed by phone through the ensuing hours by local emergency and fire authorities, according to Mr. Harris-Dawson and other city officials.
Activation was stepped up at the city’s emergency operations center. The city’s water and power department ensured that water tanks were filled and special “red flag” restrictions on parking were in place in fire zones. The police and fire departments were put on heightened alert and the city’s capacity to respond to power outages and wind damage was increased. The mayor’s office issued a release telling the public to sign up for alerts from city. Workers fanned out to bring homeless people in from parks and sidewalks.
On Monday at 7:38 p.m. Pacific time — already inauguration day in Ghana — the mayor’s office reposted a National Weather Service warning on X with a link to the city’s emergency alert system and an admonition to “Stay safe LA!”
Big cities weren’t the only ones bracing. Malibu turned a multipurpose room at its City Hall into an emergency operations center. Tables were arranged, chairs dragged in, computers set up on desks, equipment pulled out of closets. Big screen TVs played local news.
“One minute the seniors are doing dance lessons in there, and today it’s the center of our emergency operations,” Mayor Doug Stewart said.
As Tuesday morning dawned, the promised wind gusts were barreling down from the hills.
“Today is a RED FLAG day,” Mayor Bass’s office tweeted at 9:43 a.m. above a warning from the city’s public works department. In Ghana, her inauguration obligations were ending, and she was working her way through a farewell gathering at the U.S. ambassador’s residence and taking calls in a spare room on her way to catch a military plane.
In the farmworker community of Thermal, 137 miles to the east, Mr. Newsom waited for President Biden, only to learn that high winds had prompted the White House to cancel the news conference.
Los Angeles city fire officials were on a 10 a.m. call to go over the day’s operational plans. Less than 10 minutes in, a quarter-acre brush fire near Laurel Canyon broke out.
As it whipped to three acres, the hills of Pacific Palisades ignited. Chief Crowley texted Chief Marrone and the chiefs in the two adjacent counties: “Two brush fires in the city. Palisades and Hollywood. More requests coming.” Soon Pacific Palisades would be a wall of fire, black smoke billowing over condominiums and mansions, and the governor would be racing west with his California Highway Patrol security detail.
Miles up the coast, Mr. Gomberg, the meteorologist, could see the plume rising over the Santa Monica Mountains. Steering his Toyota Camry en route to meet a friend, he turned his car radio to the news, though he didn’t need to. “Uh-oh,” he said.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Ivan Penn contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy, Kirsten Noyes and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.