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Friday, January 10, 2025

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Here are the latest developments.

The threat of more fires loomed over the Los Angeles area on Friday as firefighters made a sliver of progress against blazes that have ravaged roughly 56 square miles of land over the last four days.

At the same time, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, began trying to figure out who and what to blame for firefighters running out of water early on while fighting the destructive firestorms. On Friday, he called situation “deeply troubling” and ordered an independent report to examine why some hydrants ran dry as homes, and entire neighborhoods, burned.

The fires have turned thousands of structures into ashes and rubble, and have killed at least 10 people, with more death expected, according to President Biden, who on Friday said there were “still a lot of people who are unaccounted for.” He offered assurances that the federal government would help rebuild the affected areas, and Deanne Criswell, the administrator of FEMA, said the agency was ready, and sufficiently funded, to support displaced residents.

The largest blaze, the Palisades fire between Santa Monica and Malibu, was 8 percent contained on Friday morning, meaning firefighters have been able to establish lines around that much of the perimeter to prevent the blaze from spreading. To the east, firefighters have contained 3 percent of the Eaton fire, near Altadena and Pasadena. Both blazes now rank in the top five most destructive fires in California’s history.

National Guard units have been deployed to secure evacuation zones, keep people safe and “protect against anyone thinking of taking advantage of this tragedy,” the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, said at a morning news conference, referring to possible looting and scammers. On Friday afternoon, law enforcement officials said that 18 people had been arrested in the areas of the Eaton and Palisades fires, on charges that included looting, identity theft, possession of narcotics and possession of burglary tools.

Here’s what we’re covering:

Ivan Penn

Decisions utilities made ahead of the L.A. fires are under scrutiny.

Power lines near the Eaton and Palisades fires in the Los Angeles area were on when those blazes started Tuesday, which energy experts said was concerning because electrical equipment has often ignited infernos during periods of high wind in California and elsewhere.

It is not clear what ignited the fires ravaging Southern California, and investigators will likely take months to come to any firm conclusions. But the fact that utility lines stayed on during unusually dry and very windy conditions suggests they could have played at least some role in spreading the fires, energy industry experts said.

Power lines and other utility equipment have been identified as the cause of several major fires in recent years, including California’s most deadly, the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. Other fires that were linked to electrical equipment include the 2023 fire in Maui, Hawaii, and a 2020 blaze near Oregon’s coast.

One of the most concerning details to emerge since the fires began is that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest municipal utility in the country, does not have a program in place to pre-emptively shut off power in urban areas when fire risk is elevated. California’s investor-owned utilities have had such programs in place for years.

The city’s utility, which serves the Pacific Palisades enclave, where most homes have been destroyed, does not use remote power shut-off systems to cut off electricity to customers, according to an analysis of the department’s fire prevention plan by Robert McCullough, an electric utility consultant based in Portland, Ore. He described the utility’s plan as “woefully inadequate.”

“L.A.D.W.P.’s documents are primarily public relations with little of the advancements in wildfire prevention and response seen throughout the industry,” Mr. McCullough said.

The city’s water and power department said it did not use pre-emptive shut offs during high wind because of potential impact on government agencies and other vital services. But the utility does prevent circuits from automatically powering back up after an outage or disruption during high winds. In such cases, utility crews manually restore power after conducting inspections of the area to make sure it is safe to do so.

Mr. McCullough also noted that the utility’s electric grid was designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 56 miles per hour, which he said was “quite low in today’s climate.” The utility, he said, is upgrading to equipment that withstands 80 m.p.h., but data “strongly implies that older poles and conductors were failing at less than 80 m.p.h.” during this week’s wind storms. The Santa Ana winds that have whipped Los Angeles this week have reached speeds of around 100 m.p.h.

In response to questions about its response, the department of water and power acknowledged that it did not cut power in advance of the fires in the city despite the wind speeds. The utility said it had developed a strategy with the city’s fire department to fit the needs of Los Angeles.

“L.A. is different: It is highly densely populated and has fewer power lines in the highest fire risk areas,” the utility said in a written statement on Friday. “Impacts to critical city services, including emergency response, the ability to fight fires, traffic and streetlights, as well as impacts to vulnerable people at home, are risks of widespread power outages, as are hospitals, dialysis centers and care centers.”

The city department said it was reviewing the ability of its system to handle higher wind speeds.

Los Angeles’ municipal utility is not unusual in its reluctance to cut off power as a fire prevention measure. Other major California utilities have much more detailed wildfire prevention programs — like Southern California Edison, which operates equipment in the area of the Eaton and Hurst fires. But they have also been reluctant to shut off power, which is often unpopular with customers and elected officials, to prevent wildfires and see the measure as a last resort.

As many as half a million Edison customers were under consideration for power shut-offs at various times this week but less than half of those ever had their electricity deliberately shut off at any one time.

Data released Friday by Whisker Labs, a Maryland technology company that maintains sensors that can detect abnormal activity on power lines to predict and prevent electrical fires, showed that utility equipment near the starting points of the Palisades, Hurst and Eaton fires remained energized as winds ripped through the Los Angeles area.

In the case of the Eaton Fire, Whisker Labs’ chief executive, Bob Marshall, said that low-voltage power lines that feed homes with Altadena addresses, as well as high-voltage transmission lines west of where the blaze started, remained on before and during the start of the fire.

David Eisenhauer, a spokesman for Edison, criticized the findings of Whisker Labs as a firm attempting to market a product that electric utilities have evaluated but found “not useful or accurate in identifying the cause or source of any potential issues.” For example, Mr. Eisenhauer said, the increase in abnormal activity on the grid is likely related to the impact of the wind speeds in the area, rather than particular problems.

“Misleading the public by speculating on the cause of the catastrophic fires that are still raging through Southern California is wildly inappropriate and unhelpful to the community and our customers,” Mr. Eisenhauer said. “We should be focused on the facts and supporting the safety of our neighbors.”

Southern California Edison, which operates electrical equipment in the area where the Eaton Fire is believed to have started, said it had cut power to customers to the east of the ignition point under its wildfire prevention program, but it did not say whether low- or high-voltage lines to the west were shut off.

In an incident report Edison filed Thursday evening, the utility said it had received notices from lawyers representing insurance companies related to the Eaton fire to preserve evidence. But the power company added that “to date, no fire agency has suggested that S.C.E.’s electric facilities were involved in the ignition or requested the removal and retention of any S.C.E. equipment.”

With damage from the Los Angeles fires estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, the potential liability the two utilities face could prove overwhelming. The Palisades fire is the worst in Los Angeles history.

“The system that was built was never designed to anticipate this,” said Martin L. Adams, a former general manager at the Los Angeles utility who worked for the agency for 40 years. “It’s a different world, because things we thought would never happen are happening.”

Mikal C. Watts, a lawyer in Austin, Texas, who has represented wildfire victims in California and Hawaii, said he had been receiving information and images that suggested utility equipment as a possible cause of the fires. Mr. Watts said he had received a steady stream of phone calls from wildfire victims, including dozens of friends, seeking to represent them in cases stemming from the fires.

In the Palisades fire, Mr. Watts said he was investigating a broken utility pole and downed wire along Temescal Ridge Trail. He said he believed the city department of water and power and Edison both failed to take steps to prevent these fires, given the wind storm forecasts.

“There was clear warning that this was coming,” Mr. Watts said.

Isabelle Taft

Smith added that investigators had not found anything yet that would indicate a natural or accidental cause of the Kenneth fire, such as a downed power line. “The way that we typically investigate fires, it’s an arson until it’s not,” she said.

Judson Jones

The weather won’t give Southern California’s firefighters a break.

The vegetation was parched, and the air was dry. The worst windstorm in a decade had arrived.

All it would take was a spark.

As a fire ignited in the Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, the winds crashed over and through the mountains like white water rapids. Winds as strong as those in a hurricane propelled the flames through dense urban neighborhoods, and swirling fire whirls danced from home to home, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

Since November, the extremely dry vegetation has been blasted by regular Santa Ana winds, sparking first the Franklin fire in November, then the Malibu fire in December, and now this week’s blazes, which are thought to be the most destructive Los Angeles has ever seen. Ahead of each cycle, the National Weather Service has issued a warning for a “particularly dangerous situation,” a newer kind of higher-level alert that was intended to be used only every two to three years.

The current cycle of Santa Ana winds began on Tuesday with the first of four wind events that are expected to continue into next week and likely beyond, fostering fire activity and hampering firefighting efforts.

The second event began Friday morning, and it was expected to diminish by Friday afternoon. It was slightly weaker than the first, but it still brought winds of 80 to 90 miles per hour to the mountains of Southern California.

Afterward, a projected window of about 18 hours of relative calm, which is expected to last into Saturday, may be the best break firefighters have had in helping to contain the outbreak of fires in Los Angeles.

A third round of winds, with gusts about as strong as Friday’s, is expected to last from Saturday into late Sunday morning or early Sunday afternoon.

Even with the slightly weaker Santa Ana wind events, gusts could still spread fires farther, and fire danger will remain elevated.

While the intensity of the winds may ebb and flow over the weekend, with another brief lull projected for Sunday into Monday morning, forecasters are concerned with a fourth wind event that is set to begin on Monday and last through Wednesday.

On Friday afternoon, not all the forecast computer models were aligned on what might happen next, which has produced some uncertainty among the forecasters at the Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center about the event’s overall intensity and duration next week. The most likely scenario is that a moderate to strong Santa Ana wind event will pick up late Monday and peak on Tuesday.

This event has the potential to be stronger than two before it, but, like them, it is most likely to be what forecasters called a more “classic Santa Ana event,” which the first event was not.

One of the complicating factors of this week’s first windstorm was that, unlike a typical Santa Ana event, it had a slightly more northerly direction, putting the winds perpendicular to the mountains and forcing them to crash over the range like waves smacking large rocks on the seashore. This brought strong winds to areas where they don’t normally occur.

As they pushed through the mountains, the winds also created swirling wind patterns known as eddies, just like water would in a river as it passes a rock. That made the wind swirl on the sheltered side of the mountains, leading blazes like the Eaton fire to burn in an especially erratic pattern. For now, while next week’s winds may be intense, they should follow a more classic path through the region.

While such a series of Santa Ana winds is not uncommon in January, the extreme fire conditions have been worsened by the arid weather that has brought only meager rainfall since last May. Typically, the peak fire season in this region ends with the arrival of rain in the fall.

A sprinkling of rain may finally come toward the end of next week, but if it does, it will likely not be anywhere close to the amount the area would needs to stop the fire danger.

Tejal Rao

This couple lost their restaurant and home to fire, on their daughter’s birthday.

Kevin Hockin and Rosanna Kvernmo were pushing their daughter’s stroller toward the entrance at Disneyland when they found out that their Altadena restaurant, Side Pie, had burned to the ground in the Eaton fire.

On Wednesday, text messages from friends showed photos of the smoke-obscured corner of Lake Avenue and East Altadena Drive where locals used to eat pizza at communal tables on the sprawling, kid-friendly back patio.

“I just stopped and broke down,” Mr. Hockin said in a phone interview from Seal Beach, where he had paused on his way north from Anaheim. “My wife could tell from the look in my eyes, and we both started crying.”

But it was their daughter Judith’s seventh birthday, and Mr. Hockin and Ms. Kvernmo didn’t want to spoil the day. She had asked for gift cards from all of her grandparents and great-grandparents so she could go to Disneyland, where she might get to see Moana.

As they moved through the park, Mr. Hockin, 42, and Ms. Kvernmo, 40, called neighbors and friends, desperate for information, and found it got even worse. They hadn’t just lost the restaurant, but their nearby home as well.

“You know how they say, find the nicest street and buy the crappiest home? That’s what we did,” said Mr. Hockin.

He and Ms. Kvernmo, who owns Shorthand, a stationery shop in Highland Park, had bought the place in 2021, remodeled the interior, replaced its decaying walls and ceilings, chased away the rats and fixed the pool.

“We’d always said, we love Altadena; this is the place,” said Mr. Hockin. He and Ms. Kvernmo had started Side Pie out of their old rental home in the neighborhood during the pandemic. During lockdowns, Mr. Hockin baked large, bubbly-edged pizzas in the backyard oven, sliding them out in boxes through a gap in the fence to diners who waited on the sidewalk.

The business grew and became an essential part of the neighborhood. When Mr. Hockin posted images of its wreckage on Instagram, hundreds of messages of shock and support came in.

Last June, the wood-fired pizzeria was dropped from its insurance, and Mr. Hockin was still shopping for a new policy when the restaurant burned down. Right away, he started doing the math: a cycle of payroll for 16 people, including himself; bills 30 days out. Like so many of the homeowners and business owners affected by the Los Angeles fires, he has started a GoFundMe.

“It’s extremely hard to ask for any contributions right now, knowing that all of our friends are in the same boat,” Mr. Hockin said. “Most of our friends — 9 out of 10 of our friends — have lost every single thing to their name.”

Many of their daughter’s friends, first graders in the Altadena Arts Magnet school, had lost their homes in the fire — Judith Kvernmo insisted on buying toys for them before leaving Disneyland. Their friend and neighbor Tim Murphy, who had a greens-topped pizza named after him at Side Pie, had lost his home as well. And that list kept growing.

“But I don’t want to leave,” said Mr. Hockin, who plans to head to Palm Springs with his family to stay with friends temporarily.

He said they will return to the area and rebuild as soon as it is safe to do so. “We love Altadena, and there’s nowhere else we want to live. We’re in this for the long haul.”

L.A. officials don’t know what caused a false evacuation alert, or how to stop it.

Emergency officials said they did not know how an erroneous evacuation alert was sent to cellphones across Los Angeles County this week — in some cases more than once — sparking panic across a region of millions where wildfires continue to ignite and expand out of control.

The alert was supposed to target residents in the area of the West Hills neighborhood, which was threatened by the burgeoning Kenneth fire. Instead, it blared on cellphones across Los Angeles County on Thursday night and, for some, again on Friday morning.

The county is the most populous in the nation, with 9.6 million people, though it was not immediately clear how many residents had received the alert.

The failure has led public safety officials to fear false panic — or perhaps worse, that residents might ignore future, accurate alerts because they’d become accustomed to false warnings.

Kevin McGowan, the director of the county’s emergency management office, acknowledged at a news conference on Friday that officials did not know why the warning had gone out to people who didn’t need to receive it. He said they were struggling to stop the notification from continuing to blare on people’s phones.

The false alert was “not being activated or initiated by a person,” he said, blaming an unknown technical glitch that officials had not yet been able to identify and fix.

Mr. McGowan pleaded with people not to disable the emergency notifications on their phones, saying that accurate alerts had already saved lives this week. Even as he was speaking, the emergency alert sound could be heard from someone’s phone nearby.

Brittney Mendez, 27, was one of many people who began preparing to flee when she got the alert on her phone on Thursday evening. It said an “evacuation warning has been issued in your area” and told her to “gather loved ones, pets, and supplies.” She called her mother and grandmother, got her three dogs ready to go and began packing to leave her home in the Reseda neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley.

“I just started thinking about what I could live without and what I couldn’t live without,” she said. A second alert was issued about 20 minutes later, telling recipients to disregard the evacuation notice. “It was horrible, for those 20 minutes, as I was gathering my life together,” Ms. Mendez said.

Lauren Ames, a spokeswoman for Genasys, an emergency communications company whose software was used to send the alert, said the company was working with the county to “identify the cause” of the problem. “While we have not been able to replicate this error, we have added safeguards into the software to ensure this cannot happen within our platform,” she said.

Kathryn Barger, the chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, vowed to get to the bottom of what had gone wrong and expressed concern for Los Angeles County residents. “They’re on pins and needles, thinking that they’re next,” she said.

Ms. Barger said some people might have received the erroneous alert on Friday morning because cellphone towers that had gone offline were powering back up. She compared the situation to sending an email without internet service; the message could go into a “drafts” folder and be sent automatically once the computer reconnected to the internet.

“My question is, why can’t we turn it off?” she said. “And the answers we’re getting are not satisfying. I’m not making any excuses. It’s unacceptable. And it is frustrating, because we are asking people to trust us, to believe us when we say, ‘Evacuate.’”

Mike Baker contributed reporting.

Debra Kamin

Homeowners affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires will get insurance protections.

Los Angeles homeowners living in the zones of the Palisades and Eaton fires cannot be dropped from their insurance policies, thanks to a moratorium issued by California’s insurance commissioner on Thursday.

Commissioner Ricardo Lara issued a bulletin shielding any resident who owns property within the perimeters or adjoining ZIP codes of those two fires from having their home insurance policy canceled or from facing a nonrenewal over the next year.

“My heart goes out to my fellow Angelenos. Our top priority is protecting Californians during this crisis and helping us recover,” Commissioner Lara said in a news release, adding that he was enacting the moratorium “so people don’t face the added stress of finding new insurance during this horrific event.”

The Palisades and Eaton fires, among the most destructive in California’s history, erupted as the state was already grappling with an exodus of insurance companies, who are increasingly pulling out of the region as wildfires become more frequent and ferocious.

Many homeowners in the worst-hit areas of Los Angeles this week were carrying insurance through a state-backed system called the California FAIR plan, which is considered a last resort for those who can’t otherwise find coverage. California FAIR plans are more expensive and offer less coverage than home insurance plans on the private market.

In addition to offering homeowners a financial safety net, home insurance is a key component in the housing market: Banks won’t issue a mortgage without proof of coverage, so as home insurance companies exit areas that are deemed too high-risk, entire swaths of California’s housing market are rendered inaccessible to anyone other than cash buyers, who are generally wealthier than buyers who require a mortgage.

The insurance moratorium is similar to a California policy adopted in 2019 that offered one year of protection for homeowners affected by that year’s fire season. Around 800,000 homes were included in that moratorium.

Since 2020, the share of home insurance contracts dropped in California has grown each year, according to data issued last month by congressional investigators. Many California counties are now among those with the highest rates of so-called nonrenewals in the country.

Commissioner Lara also called on insurance companies to halt any pending nonrenewals or cancellations for properties located near wildfires, including nonrenewals that were issued up to 90 days before the fires broke out. And he asked insurers to extend the grace period on policyholders, which is 60 days under existing law, to pay their premiums.

Californians can check if their ZIP code is included in the moratorium on the Department of Insurance’s website.

Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.

Loren ElliottEmily Baumgaertner

See what the fire destruction looks like from 3,000 feet in the air.

From a helicopter, the juxtaposition was halting: The gleam of the Pacific in its unchanging glory, running parallel for miles against sheer devastation.

Leveled homes, clubs and restaurants snaked along the shore, punctuated by billows of smoke from the few structures that remained. Cal Fire helicopters hummed along the coastline and ground fire crews gathered around a roof here, a fence there. But mostly, everything was just gone.

On Thursday afternoon, from 3,000 feet in the air, the magnitude of the destruction from the Palisades and Eaton fires was revealed in striking landscapes — whole neighborhoods flattened, a smoky haze settling over the city.

In Pacific Palisades, blazing orange jewels still dotted the ridges. The bluffs of the west side of the neighborhood were nearly unrecognizable: The inferno had torn down the cliffs, destroyed the scarps, hopped Pacific Coast Highway and ignited almost every last structure until it reached the sand.

Toward Eaton Canyon, a sleepy haze had settled over La Cañada Flintridge, and smoke still rose from the foothills. There were neat grids of smoldering rubble and chimneys — just chimneys — where cul-de-sacs had been.

From the west, the Los Angeles basin was yellow — the sun glistening on high-rises against the backdrop of a sienna haze. From the east, everything looked blue — ashy, cool-toned silhouettes of what still stood.

Over large swaths of the city, the scene was more familiar: cars inching along the freeways under a clear California sky. But as the helicopter pivoted, a dark cloud was swelling to the northwest just as we heard a voice on the air traffic radio — a new fire, it said.

Danielle Kaye

Prices on some L.A. rentals spike, despite prohibitions on price-gouging.

Laura Kate Jones, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, is trying to find a house for a client whose Pacific Palisades home turned to rubble this week. The woman and her two children were left with no belongings but the clothes on their backs.

Ms. Jones has been scouring the West Los Angeles rental market to find a house that the family could rent for the next eight months, or longer. On Friday morning, she noticed something disturbing on the rents of at least three of the properties she had been tracking: 15 to 20 percent increases overnight.

The sudden surge in rental costs took Ms. Jones by surprise, but aligned with what she has noticed since wildfires started to tear through the Los Angeles area on Tuesday. Ms. Jones was touring a rental house in Beverly Hills with her client on Thursday when the listing agent raised the monthly cost by $3,000 — on the spot. Agents and landlords are aware that some displaced Angelenos might be willing to pay given the circumstance.

“People are so panicked and desperate to get into a house right now that they’re just throwing money into the wind,” Ms. Jones said. “People taking advantage of this. It’s horrendous.”

California’s state of emergency, declared by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, bans price gouging for a range of goods and services, including rental housing. That means any rent increase above 10 percent since the start of the state of emergency is illegal for the duration of the crisis.

But since Tuesday, some landlords and their agents have raised prices by more than what California law allows. These price increases come as hundreds, if not thousands, of displaced Los Angeles residents search for interim housing while they figure out their next steps, worsening an already tight rental housing market in the region.

A review of active rental listings on Zillow shows that rents for several properties in West Los Angeles have increased more than 10 percent since Tuesday. These price jumps have ranged from 15 percent on a five-bedroom house near Century City, to an eye-popping 64 percent spike for a one-bedroom rental in Venice.

“There will be a desperation on the part of folks who will need housing, and an opportunity for property owners to take advantage of that,” said Rachel Bogardus Drew, senior research director at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable-housing nonprofit. Dr. Drew has studied how disasters affect rental housing markets.

Samira Tapia, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, has also been working with families devastated by the fires. Among her clients is a couple with a 1½-year-old baby, whose Altadena home is no longer standing. One rental house the family visited, in North Hollywood, surged by $800 a month on Wednesday, to $5,700.

When she pulled pricing data this week from the agents’ listing service, Ms. Tapia found that out of more than 400 listings in the Central Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley areas, about 100 had raised rent more than 10 percent since Tuesday.

“Through working with these families, I’ve been seeing an unfathomable amount of illegal price gouging,” said Trey White, a real estate agent from Pacific Palisades whose house was spared, but who is working with members of the community who lost theirs. “That’s taking advantage of displaced families who are already in a crisis and a state of emergency.”

Chelsea Kirk, director of policy and advocacy at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a small Los Angeles nonprofit that focuses on tenant and housing rights, said she anticipated that the fires would lead to greater strain on the Los Angeles housing market, especially as former homeowners opt to rent, either temporarily or permanently. Landlords in the city are already asking for “outrageous” rental prices this week, she said.

Rental price gouging in Los Angeles is not a new concern for Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, a community-based organization that holds weekly tenants rights clinics. In the past, during emergency orders that banned rent increases above 10 percent, tenants have flagged illegal jumps in rent to his organization, which has helped file complaints with authorities.

But it falls on tenants to report the rent increases and fight them, Mr. Gross said, complicating enforcement of the price-gouging prohibitions.

“We are bracing ourselves, because we’ve been through various things like this before,” Mr. Gross said.

Mimi Dwyer contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

David GellesAustyn Gaffney

How climate change is supercharging disasters.

As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.

With temperatures rising around the globe and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the world has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.

The firestorms ravaging the country’s second-largest city are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable. Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. The same is true for cyclones in Appalachia, where Hurricanes Helene and Milton shocked the country when they tore through mountain communities in October.

Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. And soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought, which can be devastating on their own and leave communities vulnerable to dangers like mudslides when heavy rains return.

Around the globe, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.

“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”

The fires currently raging in greater Los Angeles are already among the most destructive in U.S. history. By Friday, the blazes had consumed more than 36,000 acres and destroyed thousands of buildings. As of midday Friday, at least 10 people were dead, and losses could top $100 billion, according to AccuWeather.

Although it is not possible to say with certainty as any specific weather event unfolds whether it was worsened or made more likely by global warming, the Los Angeles fires are being driven by a number of factors that scientists have linked to fire weather and that are becoming increasingly common on a hotter planet.

Last winter, Southern California got huge amounts of rain that led to extensive vegetation growth. Now, months into what is typically the rainy season, Los Angeles is experiencing a drought. The last time it rained more than a tenth of an inch was on May 5. Since then, it has been the second-driest period in the city’s recorded history.

Temperatures in the region have also been higher than normal. As a result, many of the plants that grew last year are parched, turning trees, grasses and bushes into kindling that was ready to explode.

That combination of heat and dryness, which scientists say is linked to climate change, created the ideal conditions for an urban firestorm.

“Wintertime fires in Southern California require a lot of extreme climate and weather events to occur at once,” said Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And the warmer the temperatures, the more intense the fires.”

A third factor fueling the fires, the fierce Santa Ana winds, which blow West from Utah and Nevada, cannot be directly linked to climate change, scientists say. But the winds this week have been particularly ferocious, gusting at more than 100 miles per hour, as fierce as a Category 2 Hurricane.

Fires across the West have been getting worse in recent years. In 2017, thousands of homes in Santa Rosa, Calif., burned to the ground. The next year, the Camp fire leveled more than 13,000 homes in Paradise, Calif. In 2021, roughly a thousand homes burned near Boulder, Colo.

And from the boreal forests of Canada to the redwood groves of Oregon, large fires have been incinerating vast areas of wilderness.

“In the last couple years we’ve seen an increase in extreme weather events and increasing amounts of billion-dollar disasters,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate focused on wildfires and the West Coast at Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. “It’s very clear that something is off, and that something is that we’re pumping an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere and causing the climate systems to go out of whack.”

As the Los Angeles fires consumed some of the most valuable real estate in the world, an unfolding tragedy became fodder for political attacks.

President-elect Donald J. Trump blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for the disaster. Mr. Trump inaccurately claimed that state and federal protections for a threatened fish had hampered firefighting efforts by leading to water shortages.

And on Thursday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ally of Mr. Trump, inserted himself into the debate over the role climate change plays in wildfires.

“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim,” Mr. Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns. He said the loss of homes was primarily the result of “nonsensical overregulation” and “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water.”

Those claims were rebutted by scientists, who noted that, as humans continue to warm the planet with emissions, extreme weather is becoming more common.

In Los Angeles, residents displaced by the fires watched in exasperation as the unfolding disaster was politicized.

“People are just wanting to blame somebody else,” said Sheila Morovati, a climate activist who lives in Pacific Palisades and saw her neighborhood burn. “What about all the dryness? What about the temperatures? There’s so many pieces that are all pointing back to climate change.”

News that 2024 was the hottest year on record was hardly a surprise. The previous hottest year was 2023. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come in the last decade.

“We sound like a broken record but only because the records keep breaking,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures. “They will continue to break until we get emissions under control.”

But the world is not getting emissions under control. In fact, last year countries released record amounts of planet warming gases into the atmosphere, even as the consequences of climate change have become painfully clear. U.S. efforts to cut emissions largely stalled last year.

The inevitable result: more heat and more extreme weather.

In late September and early October, Hurricane Helene, which scientists said was made worse by climate change, roared across the Southeast, unleashing deadly floods and landslides in several states, including North Carolina.

Months earlier, researchers showed that the devastating floods that swamped Porto Alegre, Brazil, would not have been so severe were it not for human caused global warming.

In May, scientists found the fingerprints of climate change on a crippling heat wave that gripped India, and found that an early heat wave in West Africa last spring was made 10 times more likely by climate change.

On Friday, parts of the South that are not used to winter weather, including Atlanta, saw sleet and snow, disrupting travel and canceling flights. But it’s unclear whether the recent blast of cold air that has led to plunging temperatures across the Southeast and Gulf Coast states was caused by a warming climate.

“We just don’t see robust increases in severe cold events,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a research organization. “If anything, they’re decreasing.”

While Southern California is no stranger to fires, the events of the past week have exposed the region’s inherent vulnerabilities.

As the first fires started, fierce winds pushed the flames through canyons loaded with dried-out vegetation and into homes built in the so-called wildland-urban interface, areas where neighborhoods abut undeveloped wilderness. Both of the areas in the Los Angeles region that suffered the greatest losses, Pacific Palisades and Altadena, were in such fire-prone areas.

Art delaCruz, the chief executive of Team Rubicon, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes veterans and other volunteers to assist after disasters, was at home in Los Angeles when the fires broke out. His house is safe for now, and he is now preparing to deploy volunteers who will help clear roads and distribute aid.

Team Rubicon was founded after a group of former Marines went to Haiti to volunteer after the devastating earthquake in 2010. But Mr. delaCruz said that most of the disasters his organization responds to around the world now are linked to climate change.

“It’s simple physics,” he said. “Warmer air holds more water. The storms are increasing in frequency. The storms are increasing in severity. And the damage is just unbelievable.”

There is no rain in the forecast for Los Angeles for at least another couple weeks. But scientists are already concerned about what will happen when the rains do arrive.

In 2018, the wealthy enclave of Montecito, Calif., just north of Los Angeles, was devastated by mudslides after torrential downpours fell on hills that had recently burned.

“If we get intense rainfall on those burn scars, then we’re going to add insult to injury and have debris flows,” said Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Heat waves. Drought. Fires. Superstorms. Floods. Mudslides. These are the growing threats of a rapidly warming world, and scientists say nowhere is entirely protected from the effects of climate change.

“We think sometimes that if we live in a city, we’re not vulnerable to natural forces,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But we are, and it comes as a huge shock to people. There’s no get out of climate change free card.”

Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.

Hotels in Los Angeles have become a refuge for fire evacuees.

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The lobby of Shutters on the Beach, the luxury oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica that is usually abuzz with tourists and entertainment professionals, had by Thursday transformed into a refuge for Los Angeles residents displaced by the raging wildfires that have ripped through thousands of acres and leveled entire neighborhoods to ash.

In the middle of one table sat something that has probably never been in the lobby of Shutters before: a portable plastic goldfish tank. “It’s my daughter’s,” said Kevin Fossee, 48. Mr. Fossee and his wife, Olivia Barth, 45, had evacuated to the hotel on Tuesday evening shortly after the fire in the Los Angeles Pacific Palisades area flared up near their home in Malibu.

Suddenly, an evacuation alert came in. Every phone in the lobby wailed at once, scaring young children who began to cry inconsolably. People put away their phones a second later when they realized it was a false alarm.

Similar scenes have been unfolding across other Los Angeles hotels as the fires spread and the number of people under evacuation orders soars above 100,000. IHG, which includes the Intercontinental, Regent and Holiday Inn chains, said 19 of its hotels across the Los Angeles and Pasadena areas were accommodating evacuees.

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On Thursday, the pool and beach were empty outside the Casa del Mar hotel in Santa Monica, one of many hotels where fire evacuees have found refuge.CreditCredit...By Todd Beck

The Palisades fire, which has been raging since Tuesday and has become the most destructive in the history of Los Angeles, struck neighborhoods filled with mansions owned by the wealthy, as well as the homes of middle-class families who have owned them for generations. Now they all need places to stay.

Many evacuees turned to a Palisades WhatsApp group that in just a few days has grown from a few hundred to over 1,000 members. Photos, news, tips on where to evacuate, hotel discount codes and pet policies were being posted with increasing rapidity as the fires spread.

At the midcentury modern Beverly Hilton hotel, which looms over the lawns and gardens of Beverly Hills, seven miles and a world away from the ash-strewed Pacific Palisades, parking ran out on Wednesday as evacuees piled in. Guests had to park in another lot a mile south and take a shuttle back.

In the lobby of the hotel, which regularly hosts glamorous events like the recent Golden Globe Awards, guests in workout clothes wrestled with children, pets and hastily packed roll- aboards.

Many of the guests were already familiar with each other from their neighborhoods, and there was a resigned intimacy as they traded stories. “You can tell right away if someone is a fire evacuee by whether they are wearing sweats or have a dog with them,” said Sasha Young, 34, a photographer. “Everyone I’ve spoken with says the same thing: We didn’t take enough.”

The Hotel June, a boutique hotel with a 1950s hipster vibe a mile north of Los Angeles International Airport, was offering evacuees rooms for $125 per night.

“We were heading home to the Palisades from the airport when we found out about the evacuations,” said Julia Morandi, 73, a retired science educator who lives in the Palisades Highlands neighborhood. “When we checked in, they could see we were stressed, so the manager gave us drinks tickets and told us, ‘We take care of our neighbors.’”

Hotels are also assisting tourists caught up in the chaos, helping them make arrangements to fly home (as of Friday, the airport was operating normally) and waiving cancellation fees. A spokeswoman for Shutters said its guests included domestic and international tourists, but on Thursday, few could be spotted among the displaced Angelenos. The heated outdoor pool that overlooks the ocean and is usually surrounded by sunbathers was completely deserted because of the dangerous air quality.

“I think I’m one of the only tourists here,” said Pavel Francouz, 34, a hockey scout who came to Los Angeles from the Czech Republic for a meeting on Tuesday before the fires ignited.

“It’s weird to be a tourist,” he said, describing the eerily empty beaches and the hotel lobby packed with crying children, families, dogs and suitcases. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be these people,” he said, adding, “I’m ready to go home.”

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Corina Knoll

How one family escaped the inferno in Altadena.

There was, at first, not even a whisper of fire.

Aurielle Hall had heard about the blaze that had broken out in the coastal neighborhood of Pacific Palisades that morning.

But she was in Altadena, a hillside community 40 miles away and outside the eastern edge of Los Angeles.

It was Tuesday evening, and Ms. Hall, 35, figured she would head to bed early. She was exhausted, having spent an hour commuting home from her job with Los Angeles County’s probation department. And she had not gotten much sleep the night before because she was startled awake early by the winds that pounded on her walls.

She had grown accustomed to Altadena, the kind of place where residents raise goats and chickens and pride themselves on rustic living. It is also where high winds, power outages and spotty cell service are not unusual.

The community had a down-to-earth vibe, far from the glamour of Pacific Palisades where nannies driving children to elite private schools was common. Altadena was also more racially diverse. In the 1970s, it had attracted middle-class Black families who saw it as a refuge, and their children and grandchildren often stayed put. One in five households speak Spanish at home.

Just before 7 p.m., Ms. Hall texted her friend. “It’s really bad out here,” referring to the wind. Her daughter, Jade, 12, was taking a nap.

Ms. Hall plugged in her cellphone and extra battery, hoping to fully charge them in case the power went out. The lights were already flickering in her living room.

She took a shower and went to pick up her phone. By then, it was about 7:45 p.m., and she had missed a barrage of calls and texts. One included a screenshot of an Instagram post about a fire in nearby Eaton Canyon.

It had broken out about 6:20 p.m., but Ms. Hall had not smelled smoke. She had relatives in the neighborhood who were longtime locals and familiar with evacuation warnings. They seemed unperturbed.

But Ms. Hall, who had moved to the area in 2020 and never experienced an encroaching fire, felt uneasy about the wind. “Instead of it going in one direction, it was like a whirlwind, like a circle, and it made me feel like it could turn at any moment.”

An alarm went off in her head: We need to get out.

Hiding her panic, she went to Jade’s room and called out casually, “Hey, when you get up, can you pack some clothes? We’re just going to leave for a few days, it’s really windy and there’s starting to be a fire on the hiking trail.”

Then she phoned her cousin, Cheri West. Ms. Hall had always referred to her as Aunt Cheri as a sign of respect because at 64 years old, she was a mother figure.

Aunt Cheri, a retired paralegal who worked part-time at HomeGoods, lived a half-mile away and insisted on staying home. She planned to go to sleep and expected that things would wind down. Everything was going to be OK, she said.

“Honestly, Auntie, I’m tired too, but I think it’s just the safest thing to get further down the mountain,” Ms. Hall told her.

Her aunt refused. She had lived in the area for more than three decades. The fire, she believed, would not head her way. Leaving seemed like an overreaction.

“Auntie, whether you say yes or no, I’m pulling outside your house in 20 minutes,” Ms. Hall said.

Aunt Cheri was among the reasons that Ms. Hall had moved to Altadena.

Ms. Hall had spent much of her youth bouncing around communities in south Los Angeles County like Compton and Watts — areas that always felt like home but came with sharp edges. She had lost one friend to a drag racing hit-and-run and even more to shootings. After a couple years at California State University, Dominguez Hills, she dropped out because she was working several jobs to stay afloat.

Ms. Hall’s mother had died of breast cancer in 2013, and she regretted not having a longer goodbye. Four years later, Jade’s father was fatally shot.

“I just needed my daughter to be around family, I needed a village,” Ms. Hall said. “I couldn’t do everything by myself.”

Altadena, a place where her mother had grown up and where a dozen relatives lived in what had been a historically Black neighborhood, seemed the place to help them heal.

They ended up renting the lower half of a duplex on Las Flores Drive that Ms. Hall’s grandmother, a seamstress for the television show “Star Trek,” had purchased decades ago, back when homes could be had for less than $50,000. Her cousins had inherited the place and offered her affordable rent. Another cousin and her family lived in the unit above.

When the fire broke out, Ms. Hall worried in particular about Aunt Cheri who would not be able to drive in the dark because of weak eyesight.

At the same time, an uncle had decided he planned to stay. His son, not wanting to leave him behind, said he would stay as well.

Ms. Hall began packing, grabbing a crate of personal documents and stuffing clothing and toiletries into a duffel bag. Jade did the same, adding a tablet and a stuffed bear that had the recorded voice of her father. Just before leaving, Ms. Hall lingered over an array of costume jewelry and souvenirs, the only things left of her mother’s possessions.

“I just remember looking at her stuff and thinking I’m going to be back in a few days,” she recalled.

Outside, the neighborhood had been transformed. A furious wind that had already knocked down their fence and torn a wooden gate whipped up debris and dirt. Pomelos ripped from the trees littered the ground.

Ms. Hall and Jade struggled to make their way to their gray Kia Forte. The power had officially gone out and the entire neighborhood was dark, the air thickened with smoke. The cousin who lived above them appeared with her mother to check on them and retrieve belongings. They all shouted at one another over the wind, but their voices could hardly be heard.

Then Ms. Hall and Jade drove to Aunt Cheri’s house and waited in the car outside the metal gate that was always chained shut. The area was a dead spot for cell service. They prayed she would come. Twenty minutes idled by.

Finally, Aunt Cheri arrived with her purse and two bags. She left her pit bull terrier, Stanton, behind.

As they tried to drive out of the hillsides, a terrorized town revealed itself. Homes were catching on fire, trees bursting into flames. Branches had been flung onto the roads.

“It was just horrible. Everywhere you look, everything’s on fire,” Ms. Hall said. “Everything was unrecognizable.”

The roads were clogged with other cars trying to flee, and Ms. Hall could hardly see in front of her. Acrid smoke flooded across her windshield.

“Streetlights were out, all the business lights were out, gas stations were shut down — everything was completely black and dark,” she said.

“Nobody was obeying any kind of traffic laws. They were just frantically panicking.”

Every time Ms. Hall tried to get to a main thoroughfare, she would come across a police blockade and a line of cars that had been forced to turn around.

“There was no point in using a map, because no matter which way you go, you can’t go,” she said. “So we were literally zigzagging through streets we’ve never been on before, and I was like, ‘I don’t even know where we’re at.’”

Finally, after about 40 minutes of maneuvering south, they managed to get out of the region and orient themselves.

“When we looked back behind us, you can literally see the helicopters flying, trying to drop water, and a line of cars with white lights just trying to come down the mountain.”

Ms. Hall drove about 10 more miles southeast to Temple City to leave Aunt Cheri with a cousin, and then she and Jade drove down to Inglewood to stay with another relative. When they arrived, they were relieved to learn that the uncle and his son who had stayed behind had eventually evacuated. All of their family members, they would soon learn, were safe.

Early Wednesday, a cousin managed to get back up into their neighborhood. He sent Ms. Hall a video of the scene at her home.

Scorched cars. Strips of metal too deformed to decipher. Crumpled roofing. The rest, ash and rubble.

The entire neighborhood was more of the same. Including the home of Aunt Cheri. The body of Stanton, her pit bull, was among the remains.

Up until then, Ms. Hall had maintained a tough facade. But the images made her weep.

Across town, many evacuees of the Palisades fire fled to luxury hotels or to stay with friends with homes big enough for large families.

But Ms. Hall and her daughter are now sleeping on the couch at a relative’s home, anxious about what seems to be a precarious future. It will be impossible to match the rent she was paying. Her limited salary had already been tough to stretch. Which is why she kept $12,000 at her home, finding it easier to budget with cash. She had left it behind, worried about being robbed on the road.

The two have been homeless before, back when Ms. Hall left an unhealthy relationship. Jade was a toddler and they slept for a while in the closet of a friend’s mother. When they finally settled in Altadena, that sort of past seemed far behind them.

“It’s like, how many times do I have to go through rebuilding my life and starting all over?”

But Ms. Hall has also had another feeling fluttering inside her, one of disbelief and love and gratitude. The devastation to her neighborhood illustrated the fate that she and her family members narrowly escaped. At least three people who stayed behind in the same area had died, all longtime Altadena residents, one of whom was found holding a garden hose.

When Ms. Hall’s cousin in Temple City called on FaceTime to check in, she thanked her for ferrying her mother to safety.

Aunt Cheri then appeared on camera. Ms. Hall cried at the sight of her.

“Thank you for letting me take you out of there,” she said.

She repeated the words again and then added, “Because … ” but could not finish the sentence.

Then they both cried together.

“Auntie, imagine if we didn’t leave?”

Mike BakerNicholas Bogel-Burroughs

An important reservoir was offline when the fires began.

An important reservoir that helps supply water in Pacific Palisades was offline at the time the fires began, officials said Friday, and that shutdown may have contributed to firefighters losing water so early in their fight against the blaze.

The Santa Ynez Reservoir sits within the Palisades and can hold millions of gallons of water. Records show it was recently set to undergo maintenance to the reservoir’s cover.

Ellen Cheng, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said in a statement on Friday that the reservoir had been offline when the fires began.

“We are still evaluating what role Santa Ynez being offline would have had on this situation,” she said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday called the lack of water “deeply troubling” and ordered an independent report on what happened. He asked the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to review their procedures and share information with state water and firefighting officials who will conduct the investigation.

“While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish wildfires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” he said.

Water for the Pacific Palisades is fed by a 36-inch line that flows by gravity from the larger Stone Canyon Reservoir, said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. That water line also fills the Santa Ynez Reservoir.

Water from the two reservoirs then sustain the water system for the Pacific Palisades, and also pump systems that fill storage tanks that feed higher-elevation homes in the neighborhood. It was unclear whether officials could have brought the reservoir back online before the fire, after forecasters began warning of dangerous wildfire conditions.

Officials have said that the storage tanks in the Pacific Palisades area, each holding about 1 million gallons, were filled before the fire but then depleted as so many firefighters tapped into the system at once. The system struggled to refill the tanks in part because so much water was being pulled from the main water line before it could get to the pumps that feed the higher tanks.

Mr. Adams said an operational reservoir would have been helpful initially to more fully feed the water system in the area. But he also said it appeared that that reservoir and the tanks would have eventually been drained in a fire that was consuming so many homes at once. Municipal water systems are generally designed to sustain water loads for much smaller fires than what consumed Pacific Palisades.

Years ago, crews had installed a cover on the Santa Ynez Reservoir. Mr. Adams said he heard that the cover had been damaged, and contracting documents from November showed that a company was hired to repair the cover.

Mr. Adams said repairs and maintenance for such systems would be normal, as would taking the reservoirs offline. Under normal circumstances, the water system in the area would have continued functioning just fine.

Ms. Cheng, the water department spokeswoman, said officials were still looking into when the reservoir had gone offline.

Janisse Quiñones, the chief executive and chief engineer at the city’s water department, has said that firefighting operation put immense strain on the system, with four times the normal demand over a 15-hour period.

Traci Park, the Los Angeles City Council member whose district includes Pacific Palisades, had not been made aware that the reservoir was offline, a spokesman said on Friday.

The spokesman, Pete Brown, said Ms. Park and her team had many questions about the water systems and the Santa Ynez Reservoir, and would be seeking more answers about whether it should have been out of commission.

Christopher Flavelle

California’s wildfires reveal the limits of even the most aggressive efforts to cope with climate change.

This week’s fires around Los Angeles present a puzzle: Why is California, the state best equipped to deal with wildfires, seemingly unable to prevent blazes from consuming entire chunks of the country’s second-largest city?

California’s building code for wildfires is among the most protective in the nation. Its local fire departments are backed up by CalFire, the state fire agency, which has a $4 billion budget and some of the best trained firefighters in the world. The state’s huge tax base generates effectively unlimited resources for wildfire protection. And California has mandatory statewide requirements that homeowners in risky areas create “defensible space” around their property — rules that other Western states would like to apply but can’t because it would anger conservative voters.

Yet the events of this week demonstrate the limits of those efforts, raising uncomfortable questions about whether any part of the United States — even the wealthiest, best prepared and most experienced — can truly adapt to wildfires made worse by a hotter climate.

“Climate change, and climate events, are causing us to butt up against that limit,” said Joshua Saks, the adaptation program director for Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. “The risk will always grow, and at some point outpace what you’ve done.”

Part of the extensive damage from the fires in Los Angeles may reflect errors in planning or execution. Fire hydrants designed to fight house fires ran dry, as water reserves faced greater demand than officials anticipated. It’s not clear that residents had sufficient warning or that evacuation routes were well planned. The second-guessing and questions about accountability have already begun even as the fires continue to rage.

But there is no escaping the fact that wildfires in the American West are growing worse. Rising temperatures mean drier vegetation, which creates more fuel for fires; it also means those fires are harder to extinguish once they start. An analysis of 60,000 wildfires between 2001 and 2020 found that fires are spreading faster over time, in California and other Western states.

There are fundamentally two ways to prepare for wildfires and other climate shocks.

One is to try to fortify communities without fundamentally changing them. That kind of adaptation, often called resilience, is where California excels, at least compared with most Western states.

In 1961, a wildfire made worse by Santa Ana winds destroyed almost 500 homes in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the aftermath, the city banned wood shingles on new homes, and mandated rules around clearing brush.

That approach eventually spread across the state. By 2008, California adopted as part of its state building code a series of requirements governing how homes are to be constructed in areas at high risk of fires. Builders must use materials that are unlikely to burn, such as stucco, concrete or steel. Homeowners must thin or remove vegetation up to 100 feet from the edge of buildings. Now, the state is even looking at establishing a so-called “zone zero” in the five feet immediately around houses, requiring the removal of all flammable material.

Many states have comparable guidelines. But California’s state rules regarding building materials and clearing vegetation are mandatory — local officials don’t have the ability to ignore or overrule them.

Still, the state’s building code doesn’t solve the problem of homes and neighborhoods that were built before those standards took effect, noted Roy Wright, who managed risk mitigation programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations. Many of those homes are in areas with high fire risk.

The other kind of adaptation entails more aggressive changes, experts said. It involves measures that could make communities more wildfire-resistant even as the climate gets hotter. But very few communities have ever tried them because they would drastically change the nature of neighborhoods, which would be unpopular, costly, or both.

Those measures include cutting down trees, Mr. Wright said, so that fires don’t spread as easily, even if that strips away the character that attracted people in the first place. It means banning wood decks or fences, the kind of aesthetic details that homeowners value.

“Very little can stop this kind of fire, short of the construction of fireproof bunkers,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who specializes in climate adaptation.

When it comes to rebuilding after a disaster, it could mean leaving more space between homes, Mr. Wright said. But that means fewer or smaller homes, which is likely to face objections from homeowners and local officials.

In Los Angeles, another approach would be to build a half-mile buffer zone between neighborhoods and the forests that surround them.

“What ultimately moves these fires is the ember comes in and then it ignites the house, and then that house produces the embers that cause the next one,” Mr. Wright said. “Make sure that when the embers come out of the wooded area, they don’t ignite anything.”

This more aggressive kind of adaptation means building fewer homes in high-risk areas in the first place, and drastically changing neighborhoods that already exist to make them less fire-prone, said Mr. Keenan.

But local officials who approve where homes get built have a strong incentive to encourage development, even in risk-prone areas, because it means more property tax revenue, said Kate Gordon, a former senior climate adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The Los Angeles fires could force state and local officials to recalculate where new construction takes place, Ms. Gordon said. “I think we’ll have that conversation,” she said. “Continuing to do policy the way we have, as if this is an outlier, is just devastating.”

The fires might spur another change in how California approaches adaptation, Ms. Gordon said. In areas that frequently flood, government agencies offer homeowners money to move — a strategy sometimes called managed retreat. She said it’s time to consider applying that idea to areas exposed to wildfires.

Perhaps the most aggressive type of adaptation is simply being honest. Officials should start telling people in dangerous areas that their homes can’t be protected, according to Michele Steinberg, the wildfire division director with the National Fire Protection Association.

She cited the example of Hollywood Hills, which was built up a century ago without wildfires in mind, and has been threatened by the Sunset fire. “It’s not a place that I would ever develop homes,” Ms. Steinberg said. “It’s not safe.”

It may be necessary to tell homeowners in the Hollywood Hills, where the median sales price was $1.8 million in November, that the wildfire risk is so great, they may not be able to protect their properties, Ms. Steinberg said.

“Elected officials, the fire service, the insurance industry, needs to let folks know,” Ms. Steinberg said. “You say, ‘There’s not a way — in a major event, in a very extreme wildfire — that we can do anything for you. You just need to know that.’”

Claire Fahy

The Los Angeles police department said the suspect who was detained in Woodland Hills was arrested on felony probation violation. A public information officer with the department could not confirm whether that person was still in custody.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

A curfew is in effect from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. for the areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires, as well as all mandatory evacuation zones, Luna said. “You cannot be in these affected areas. If you are, you are subject to arrest.” The goal is to make people feel more comfortable about leaving their homes behind without a fear of looting, he said.

Bernhard Warner

The wildfires lay bare an insurance crisis in California.

The devastation in the Los Angeles area has more people asking one hard question: Has this part of California become uninsurable?

“We think these could be among the most expensive wildfires in U.S. history,” Scott Heleniak, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a research note on Thursday, estimating that insured losses could top $20 billion. The previous record was the 2018 Camp fire in Northern California, where losses hit $12.5 billion.

Even before this week’s wildfires, officials in the region had warned that the California FAIR plan, a state-run insurer of last resort that has increasingly become a main source of coverage for residents, was “one bad fire season away from complete insolvency.”

The FAIR plan’s exposure soared by 61 percent year-on-year to $458 billion by the end of September, according to Mr. Heleniak. Driving that is the flight of insurers from the California market: Between 2020 and 2022, private insurers dropped coverage for 2.8 million home insurance customers, Mr. Heleniak wrote.

One problem for insurers and Californians: Unlike hurricanes, wildfires are harder to model, ratcheting up the risk.

L.A. artists have lost studios, works and homes.

The Los Angeles painter Alec Egan had spent two years preparing work for a solo exhibition that was scheduled to open in late January at Anat Ebgi gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. Now every one of those canvases is gone.

“It’s terror and despair,” said Egan in a telephone interview from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he, his wife and two young children had evacuated — the only hotel he said was open.

Egan is among several Los Angeles artists who lost their studios, their artworks — and in some cases their homes — in this week’s fires. Now many are picking up the pieces of their lives and worrying about whether they’ll be able to make a living anytime soon.

Diana Thater, an artist celebrated for her nature-inspired film and light installations, and her husband, the conceptual artist T. Kelly Mason, stored their archive — including decades’ worth of raw video footage, master tapes, hard drives and paintings — in a temperature-controlled garage that burned to the ground along with their home in Altadena.

“It’s hard to live to be 62 years old and lose your entire life in one night,” Thater said from a friend’s house in nearby Atwater Village, where she and Mason are sleeping on the floor with their three cats.

Also gone is a work-in-progress she had been commissioned to make for the reopening of the expanded Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2026. “The raw footage is the thing that kills me,” Thater said. “Now, everything we have is in this tiny room.”

Tools and materials can be replaced, like the melted camera equipment whose value Thater estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the artwork is irreplaceable.

The multimedia artist Kathryn Andrews lost her Pacific Palisades home and her entire art collection, including works she had bought or acquired through trades with prominent artists like Rashid Johnson, Jim Shaw and Charles Long. “They serve as markers of this beautiful network of friendship that happens amongst artists,” Andrews said. “It’s just really sad to lose that. Insurance can’t replace that.”

The artist Camilla Taylor is mourning “over 20 years of artmaking,” including hundreds, if not thousands, of prints, drawings, and sculptures in metal, ceramic and glass that she stored in her West Altadena home studio, now rubble. She had been preparing for three exhibitions this year, including one at the University of Nevada, Reno. “Usually, I’m a very last-minute artist, but I was so pleased with myself — half of the work for a show in December was done,” she said. “Now it’s evaporated.”

Kelly Akashi, who makes haunting glass and bronze sculptures about the impermanence of the natural world, expected to return to her Altadena home and studio when she left and drove to a friend’s house on Tuesday evening. “You’re looking around like, what am I going to do, lug a bunch of sculptures in my Honda?” she said.

In the end the fire claimed Akashi’s home and studio, including archival work, recent sculptures and several pieces she planned to show at her inaugural exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles later this month. She had considered naming one of her recent works “Monument to Loss.” Now it is actually lost.

Egan, the artist who lost the works for his upcoming exhibition, lived and worked out of the house he grew up in on Bienveneda Avenue in the Pacific Palisades. He described watching the fire spread from his window while his wife was in the shower. “There was a little tiny plume of smoke and by the time she got out of the shower the plume was 30 football fields big,” he said. “Within the hour the sky was black.”

Sending his wife and children out ahead of him, Egan initially stayed behind to try to arrange for trucks to rescue his paintings. But his effort quickly proved fruitless and ill-advised: the entire neighborhood was rushing to evacuate around him. When he returned days later, Egan said, his house had “burned to the ground.”

Many Pacific Palisades residents have lost treasured artworks and family heirlooms. Some of the wealthiest collectors in Los Angeles are concentrated on the West Side of the city, which includes Pacific Palisades.

On Tuesday night as the wildfire swept across the lawns, a man hopped onto his bicycle and handed two paintings to a nearby NBC Los Angeles reporter, Robert Kovacik, for safekeeping. “Backyard’s on fire,” the bicyclist said in a video that has gone viral on social media. “I’m out of here.”

Among the celebrated artists in Altadena whose homes or studios known to have been damaged or destroyed by the fire was Paul McCarthy, who lived in Altadena near his daughter, Mara, a gallerist, and his son, Damon, also an artist. “It’s the home I grew up in,” Mara said in a telephone interview from a friend’s house in Silver Lake. “Our whole family, our whole community, is devastated.” As a result of the fire, she added, her father had postponed his upcoming show at Hauser & Wirth in London.

The artist Ross Simonini said he lived right down the street from Paul McCarthy. “We lost our home, my studio, all my art from — ever,” Simonini said by telephone from a rest stop off Interstate 5. He was on his way with his wife, infant and dog to stay with his father in Northern California. “It’s so horrific, seeing it now. I have an aerial shot from our neighborhood and six blocks in every direction, there’s nothing.”

Catrin Einhorn

The blazes also raise worries for Southern California wildlife.

Officials say it’s too soon to know how Southern California’s mountain lions, lizards and other wild animals have been affected by the fires that have ravaged the region. State wildlife officials haven’t been able to access the area as the blazes rage.

What is reassuring, experts say, is that native species, including the plants that offer food and shelter, are adapted to fire because it’s an integral part of the Los Angeles ecosystem. Certain seeds need fire to germinate, and animals like deer and ground squirrels flock to the green shoots that spring up after a blaze.

Most animals are good at fleeing the flames, biologists say. They run off, fly away or bury themselves. Still, fast-moving fires cause losses because certain animals simply can’t escape in time.

“The acute effect of the fire is you’re going to lose some wildlife,” said Tim Dillingham, environmental program manager with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “I’ve seen birds that have ended up on the ground from smoke inhalation. The same kind of things that affect a person affect wildlife too.”

After a fire, certain species may face competition for habitat, particularly in the Los Angeles region, where they are hemmed in by human development.

Concerns for wildlife are increasing as climate change supercharges wildfire around the world. Even some species that rely on fire are struggling with the intensity of the flames — for example in parts of Canada, where boreal forests are burning faster than they can regrow.

In California, scientists have been alarmed at the damage in recent years to the state’s beloved Joshua trees, sequoias and redwoods. Invasive grasses compound the fire problem, adding to the fuel.

In the Los Angeles region, one protected species that state biologists are concerned about is the ringtail, a member of the raccoon family. The adorably big-eyed mammals move relatively slowly, so they are at higher risk of getting caught in the flames, Mr. Dillingham said. Ringtails also occupy a fairly narrow habitat of rocky outcrops along streams, meaning that if their home is destroyed, they could have difficulty finding a new one.

Erin Mendell

Several communities are under water advisories.

The devastating Southern California wildfires have raised worries about the safety of the water supply in several communities, whether because of diminished water pressure or the possibility of contamination by fire debris.

Here are some of the water advisories and instructions for residents:

Hiroko Tabuchi

Pink retardant is a weapon against fires, but poses dangers.

From above the raging flames, these planes can unleash immense tankfuls of bright pink fire retardant in just 20 seconds. They have long been considered vital in the battle against wildfires.

But emerging research has shown that the millions of gallons of retardant sprayed on the landscape to tame wildfires each year come with a toxic burden, because they contain heavy metals and other chemicals that are harmful to human health and the environment.

The toxicity presents a stark dilemma. These tankers and their cargo are a powerful tool for taming deadly blazes. Yet as wildfires intensify and become more frequent in an era of climate change, firefighters are using them more often, and in the process releasing more harmful chemicals into the environment.

Some environmental groups have questioned the retardants’ effectiveness and potential for harm. The efficiency of fire retardant has been hard to measure, because it’s one of a barrage of firefighting tactics deployed in a major fire. After the flames are doused, it’s difficult to assign credit.

The frequency and severity of wildfires has grown in recent years, particularly in the western United States. Scientists have also found that fires across the region have become faster moving in recent decades.

There are also the longer-term health effects of exposure to wildfire smoke, which can penetrate the lungs and heart, causing disease. A recent global survey of the health effects of air pollution caused by wildfires found that in the United States, exposure to wildfire smoke had increased by 77 percent since 2002. Globally, wildfire smoke has been estimated to be responsible for up to 675,000 premature deaths per year.

Fire retardants add to those health and environmental burdens because they present “a really, really thorny trade-off,” said Daniel McCurry, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, who led the recent research on their heavy-metal content.

The United States Forest Service said on Thursday that nine large retardant-spraying planes, as well as 20 water-dropping helicopters, were being deployed to fight the Southern California fires, which have displaced tens of thousands of people. Several “water scooper” amphibious planes, capable of skimming the surface of the sea or other body of water to fill their tanks, are also being used.

Two large DC-10 aircraft, dubbed “Very Large Airtankers” and capable of delivering up to 9,400 gallons of retardant, were also set to join the fleet imminently, said Stanton Florea, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, which coordinates national wildland firefighting efforts across the West.

Sprayed ahead of the fire, the retardants coat vegetation and prevent oxygen from allowing it to burn, Mr. Florea said. (Red dye is added so firefighters can see the retardant against the landscape.) And the retardant, typically made of salts like ammonium polyphosphate, “lasts longer. It doesn’t evaporate, like dropping water,” he said.

The new research from Dr. McCurry and his colleagues found, however, that at least four different types of heavy metals, including chromium and cadmium, that were present in a common type of retardant used by firefighters exceeded California’s requirements for hazardous waste.

Federal data shows that more than 440 million gallons of retardant were applied to federal, state, and private land between 2009 and 2021. Using that figure, the researchers estimated that between 2009 and 2021, more than 400 tons of heavy metals were released into the environment from fire suppression, a third of that in Southern California.

Both the federal government and the retardant’s manufacturer, Perimeter Solutions, have disputed that analysis, saying the researchers had evaluated a different version of the retardant. Dan Green, a spokesman for Perimeter, said retardants used for aerial firefighting had passed “extensive testing to confirm they meet strict standards for aquatic and mammalian safety.”

Still, the findings help explain why concentrations of heavy metals tend to surge in rivers and streams after wildfires, sometimes by hundreds of times. And as scrutiny of fire suppressants has grown, the Forestry Service has set buffer zones surrounding lakes and rivers, though its own data shows retardant still inadvertently drifts into those waters.

In 2022, the environmental nonprofit Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics sued the government in federal court in Montana, demanding that the Forest Service obtain a permit under the Clean Water Act to cover accidental spraying into waterways.

The judge ruled that the agency did indeed need to obtain a permit. But it allowed retardant use to continue to protect lives and property.

Altadena residents return to find little left of their homes.

Cathy Smythe stood on the grounds of what had been her home on Altadena’s Alta Pine Drive, sifting through ash and rubble.

She and her husband had left in a hurry before the flames swept down from the nearby San Gabriel mountains, consuming their home of 24 years along with most of the surrounding houses.

Now she surveyed the damage.

“There’s a lot of memories in this house,” Ms. Smythe said, her voice cracking. “It’s hard to leave.”

About 100,000 people were ordered to evacuate this week in the face of the Eaton fire, hurriedly leaving homes, cars and prized possessions — the makings of entire lifetimes — amid howling winds driving an insatiable firestorm.

With the winds subsiding, at least temporarily, on Thursday, the still-raging fire eased away from Altadena and back into the foothills, giving residents their first chance to return.

Wildfires have long been a part of life here, but locals tend to think of them largely as the source of bothersome smoke. The Eaton fire upended that notion, destroying as many as 5,000 structures, leaving little behind but brick chimneys and the blasted-out carcasses of washing machines, barbecue grills and pickup trucks.

But Ms. Smythe discovered that the safe containing her first wedding ring had survived. She put the ring in her pocket.

Rosa Bugarín managed to save some personal documents but little else as she evacuated with her two children early Wednesday. They had lived in their Altadena house for 20 years, pouring their savings into a remodel as they turned an 800-square-foot bungalow into their dream home.

“I thought I was going to come back to my house very ashy and maybe trees fallen down,” she said. “But not burned down.”

José Nájera also hadn’t thought the fire would amount to much. He had left with his family around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday because of the smoke, before the flames had reached their home on Mountain View Street. He came back with relatives on Thursday to sift through the wreckage.

There was nothing to find. Mr. Nájera’s sister excitedly lifted a key from the jumble of metal, glass and ash — only to realize that whatever lock it opened was long gone.

A few houses down, Ariana Vasquez was leaving mounds of kibble and bowls of water around what remained of the gate outside her home, hoping the cats she had had to leave behind would return. She had also come looking for the urn holding her father’s ashes, but failed to find it.

Two sisters, Andrea and Greta Gurrola, stood together crying in the front yard of what had been their great-uncle’s house on Monterosa Drive, one of Altadena’s hardest-hit streets. All they found intact were a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in the back of the house and a statue of Jesus.

Before coming back, the sisters had seen clips online of people making light of the devastation.

“I watched a TikTok Live of someone recording the burning, and they’re like, ‘Oh, eat the rich,’” Greta said.

Altadena did have some wealthy people, Greta acknowledged, but many here, like her great-uncle who came from Mexico, had put everything into their homes.

“At his age, 80, he has to rebuild it?” she asked. “This is everything he’s ever worked for.”

A correction was made on 
Jan. 10, 2025
: 

An earlier version of this article misstated who Rosa Bugarín evacuated with from her home. She evacuated with her two children, not her two children and husband.

Qasim Nauman

A firefighting plane collided with a drone over the Palisades blaze.

A firefighting plane flying over the Palisades fire in Los Angeles collided with a civilian drone on Thursday, officials said, putting the plane out of service and further stretching the resources available to battle the raging fires in Southern California.

The plane landed safely after the incident, said the Federal Aviation Administration, which will investigate the episode. The collision punctured a wing and put the plane out of commission, said Chris Thomas, a Cal Fire spokesman.

The blazes that broke out this week in the Los Angeles area were fueled by fierce winds that initially prevented aircraft from taking off safely. Once conditions improved, dozens of helicopters and planes joined the fight to contain the fires. More were on the way Thursday night, the authorities said.

The plane involved in the collision on Thursday is a Canadair CL-415 Super Scooper, leased by the Los Angeles County Fire Department from the Canadian province of Quebec, said Kenichi Haskett, a department spokesman. The department said on social media that the collision on Thursday, at around 1 p.m., involved a civilian drone.

The CL-415 can fly very low and scoop up water to dump on fires, according to its maker, De Havilland Aircraft of Canada. Mr. Thomas, the Cal Fire spokesman, said the Super Scooper holds 1,600 gallons and can refill in about five minutes.

In an hour, even if a refill takes 10 minutes, “that’s six water drops,” he said while discussing the setback to firefighting efforts. “So whose house is not going to get that water to protect it?”

The F.A.A. has imposed temporary flight restrictions in the Los Angeles area while firefighters work to contain the fires. The agency said Thursday that it has not authorized anyone who is not involved in the firefighting operations to fly drones in the restricted zones. Despite that, many videos of wildfire areas that appear to be from drones have been posted on social media this week.

Flight restrictions are often imposed by the F.A.A. when wildfires break out, and the authorities have warned for years about the threat posed by drones to firefighting aircraft. In September, at least two drone incursions were reported as firefighters battled the Line fire in Southern California.

Drone sightings force the authorities to ground firefighting aircraft for a minimum of 15 minutes and for as much as 30 minutes while they confirm it is safe to fly again, Mr. Thomas said.

“We have a saying: ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” he added. “But I don’t know how effective it is because everybody thinks it’s so cool to fly a drone up through the fire.”

Disrupting firefighting on public lands is a federal crime, punishable by up to 12 months in prison, according to the F.A.A., which said it can also impose a civil penalty of up to $75,000 on a drone pilot who interferes with efforts to suppress wildfires.

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