January 2025 Southern California wildfires

Based on Wikipedia: January 2025 Southern California wildfires

The reservoir was empty.

On January 7, 2025, as hurricane-force winds tore through Los Angeles and flames raced toward Pacific Palisades, the Santa Ynez Reservoir—a 117-million-gallon emergency water supply built specifically to protect this neighborhood after a devastating fire in 1961—sat completely drained. Workers had been repairing a tear in its cover. The tear had been noticed a full year earlier. The repair was supposed to be finished by April 2024. It wasn't.

This small bureaucratic failure became one detail in a catastrophe that would kill somewhere between 31 and 440 people, destroy more than 18,000 homes and structures, and burn nearly 90 square miles of Southern California. The wildfires of January 2025 would become the second- and third-most destructive fires in California history.

A Fire That Wouldn't Die

Six days before the disaster, on New Year's Day 2025, a small fire broke out in Pacific Palisades. Firefighters called it the Lachman Fire. They contained it quickly—just eight acres, no structures destroyed. By 4:46 in the morning on January 2nd, they declared it controlled.

They were wrong.

Something continued smoldering underground or beneath dense vegetation, invisible to the human eye. The Los Angeles Fire Department doesn't routinely use aerial thermal imaging—the kind that can detect heat signatures hiding beneath the surface—on fires this small. Some fire experts argue this should be standard protocol for any fire larger than one acre. Had someone flown a drone with a thermal camera over that hillside, they might have spotted what was coming.

Instead, everyone went home. The fire waited.

On January 7th, Santa Ana winds arrived with extraordinary violence. These aren't ordinary winds. They're born when high-pressure air masses build over the Great Basin deserts of Nevada and Utah, then spill westward over California's mountain ranges. As the air descends thousands of feet toward the coast, it compresses and heats up dramatically—sometimes gaining 20 or 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The air arrives hot, bone-dry, and moving fast.

The winds that day gusted to 100 miles per hour on Mount Lukens. The smoldering remnants of the Lachman Fire rekindled. Within hours, it had a new name: the Palisades Fire.

A Disaster Foretold

Here's what makes the January 2025 fires so haunting: everyone saw them coming.

On January 2nd, five days before the catastrophe, the National Interagency Fire Center warned that conditions in Southern California fostered "above normal significant fire potential." The National Weather Service issued a Fire Weather Watch. By January 3rd, the Storm Prediction Center was forecasting a critical fire weather risk for January 8th.

The warnings escalated daily. On January 7th itself, forecasters upgraded their assessment to "extremely critical"—the highest level. The National Weather Service called it a "particularly dangerous situation" and warned that it could become "the most destructive windstorm seen since 2011."

Red flag warnings. Life-threatening conditions. Extreme fire behavior. Long-range spotting—the phenomenon where burning embers fly miles ahead of the main fire, starting new blazes faster than firefighters can respond.

Everyone knew. The question is why knowing wasn't enough.

Why California Burns

To understand these fires, you need to understand what's been happening to California's climate. It's not simply that things are getting hotter—though they are. It's that the weather has become volatile in a particularly dangerous way.

Southern California experienced its driest start to the rainy season on record. The driest nine-month period on record. By late December 2024, most of Los Angeles County had entered moderate drought. This happened because of a large-scale climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation—often abbreviated ENSO—which had shifted from El Niño (warmer Pacific waters that typically bring rain to Southern California) to La Niña (cooler waters that push storms north instead).

But here's the cruel twist: the previous two rainy seasons, 2022-23 and 2023-24, had been wet. Very wet. All that rain produced vigorous growth of grasses, shrubs, and trees across the hillsides.

Then the drought arrived and everything dried out.

Scientists have a term for this pattern: drought punctuated by periods of heavy rain. Climate change has made both extremes more intense. You get explosive vegetation growth, then rapid desiccation. The landscape becomes a tinderbox built from its own recent abundance.

A study from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace—a French climate research center—analyzed the January 2025 conditions and found striking differences from similar historical events. Temperatures were up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than comparable situations between 1950 and 1986. Precipitation was down 15 percent. Wind speeds had increased by roughly 20 percent. Urban areas, with their concrete and asphalt, were up to 5 degrees warmer.

All of this was primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.

The Jet Stream's Cruel Physics

The winds that January weren't just strong. They behaved in ways that caught people off guard.

Normally, the lower elevations of Los Angeles—places like the San Gabriel Valley and the Los Angeles Basin—receive some protection during Santa Ana events. The mountains absorb much of the wind's force. But on January 7th, something called mountain waves formed as the jet stream crossed from north to south over Southern California's mountain ranges.

Mountain waves are atmospheric phenomena where air, after being forced up and over a mountain, doesn't simply settle on the other side. Instead, it oscillates up and down in a wave pattern, and as it descends, it accelerates. Think of water rushing over rocks in a stream, forming turbulent rapids downstream.

This acceleration poured wind into areas that historically haven't seen the worst of Santa Ana events. The National Weather Service Los Angeles office described conditions as "potentially life-threatening" and warned that winds would "accelerate to dangerous levels."

By morning on January 7th, wind speeds hit 84 miles per hour on Magic Mountain Truck Trail in Santa Clarita. Sixty-two miles per hour in Escondido Canyon. Fifty-five at Van Nuys Airport. And those were just the readings from instruments at relatively accessible locations. In the mountains, gusts reached 100 miles per hour.

When the Water Ran Out

As the Palisades Fire and a second major blaze called the Eaton Fire—which ignited in Altadena, a community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains—roared into residential neighborhoods, firefighters faced a nightmare scenario.

They ran out of water.

The infrastructure wasn't designed for this. Storage tanks that supply high-elevation neighborhoods couldn't keep pace with demand. Pumping systems meant to fight a fire consuming several homes failed when confronted with one consuming hundreds.

Los Angeles's water infrastructure consists of 114 interconnected tanks, and officials had filled them in advance of the predicted windstorm. But the system was built to fight urban fires—the kind where a single building catches and firefighters can surround it with hoses. Fast-moving wildfires operating on multiple fronts simultaneously present an entirely different challenge.

And then there was the Santa Ynez Reservoir.

After the 1961 Bel Air-Brentwood fire destroyed nearly 500 homes, Los Angeles built this reservoir in the upper Pacific Palisades as a hedge against exactly this scenario. One hundred seventeen million gallons of emergency water supply. But when firefighters needed it most, the reservoir had been drained for maintenance that was running nearly a year behind schedule.

Former officials from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power—often abbreviated LADWP—said the reservoir would have provided higher water pressure to the Palisades. Instead, hydrants ran dry while homes burned.

Budget Cuts and Corporate Concentration

The Los Angeles Fire Department entered the disaster with $17.6 million less than the previous year—a two percent budget reduction. On December 4, 2024, just over a month before the fires, Fire Chief Kristin Crowley publicly stated that the cuts had "adversely affected the Department's ability to maintain core operations."

Seven million dollars had been slashed from overtime hours, which Crowley said "severely limited the Department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies." The cuts also affected inspections of residences and brush clearance—the routine work of ensuring people have defensible space around their homes.

Critics later pointed out that the LAFD hadn't pre-positioned any fire engines in the Palisades area on January 7th, despite knowing about the extreme danger. They hadn't used thermal imaging after the Lachman Fire. They hadn't treated a small New Year's Day fire with the respect it deserved.

Budget pressures weren't unique to Los Angeles. Fire departments across the United States have been struggling to acquire new equipment. Prices for firefighting vehicles have skyrocketed while delivery delays have lengthened—a consequence of corporate concentration in the manufacturing industry. When you need a new fire truck, there are only a handful of companies that make them, and they can charge what they want.

Houses Built to Burn

Fire scientists studying the January 2025 disaster found something troubling about how the destruction spread: older homes ignited one after another, each one feeding the next.

California's building codes now require homes in high-risk fire areas to use materials that resist burning—fire-resistant roofing, ember-resistant vents, tempered glass windows, and defensible landscaping. But these codes only apply to new construction. In Pacific Palisades, many homes date to the 1950s and 1960s, long before anyone thought seriously about wildfire-resistant building.

These older homes are more likely to be built with wood frames, wood siding, and wood shake roofs. They tend to have more vegetation close to their walls. They're often closer together than modern subdivisions allow. Each of these factors increases the likelihood that fire will spread from house to house.

Once a fire enters a densely built neighborhood of older homes, it can create its own weather. The heat from burning structures generates powerful updrafts that loft embers high into the air. These embers land on neighboring roofs, in gutters, on wooden decks. A single ember the size of a dime, landing on dry leaves in a gutter, can ignite a house in minutes.

The Power Grid Question

In fire-prone parts of California, electrical utilities have adopted a controversial strategy called public safety power shutoffs. The idea is simple: during extreme wind events, deliberately cutting power to areas at high fire risk prevents sparks from downed power lines or damaged equipment from starting blazes.

Southern California Edison, the area's primary utility, announced it might cut power to as many as 400,000 customers before the January windstorm. San Diego Gas & Electric made similar preparations.

But critics argue that Los Angeles's electrical grid has a more fundamental problem. Robert McCullough, an electric utility consultant, has pointed out that the LA grid was designed to withstand wind speeds of only 56 miles per hour. "Quite low in today's climate," he said. When winds exceed what the infrastructure can handle, equipment fails catastrophically.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which operates the city's electrical grid separately from the private utilities that serve surrounding areas, doesn't have the same kind of pre-emptive shutoff protocols. McCullough criticized this gap: there's no systematic way to cut power in urban areas ahead of time when wildfire risk is extreme.

The Day Everything Changed

As winds began to blow on the afternoon of January 7th, the City of Los Angeles declared a state of emergency. Schools in Malibu had already closed. Sections of Pacific Coast Highway were shut down. The South Coast Air Quality Management District issued a dust storm warning.

Mayor Karen Bass wasn't in the city. She was in Ghana for the inauguration of President John Mahama—a diplomatic obligation scheduled long before anyone knew January 7th would become a disaster. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson stepped in as acting mayor.

Governor Gavin Newsom had already assigned emergency resources: 65 fire engines, 7 helicopters, 7 water tenders, and 109 firefighters. The National Interagency Fire Center raised its National Preparedness Level to 2, authorizing the initial deployment of federal assets.

None of it would be enough.

The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire became the headline disasters, but twelve other significant fires ignited across Los Angeles and San Diego counties during the last three weeks of January. In total, fourteen wildfires burned more than 57,000 acres. More than 200,000 people were forced to evacuate.

The Human Cost

Initial reports counted 31 deaths directly attributable to the fires. But fires kill in ways that don't show up immediately. Smoke inhalation damages lungs. Stress triggers heart attacks. Displacement leads to medical care being missed or delayed.

In August 2025, researchers from Boston University's School of Public Health and the University of Helsinki published a study through the American Medical Association that painted a grimmer picture. They connected up to 440 deaths to the January wildfires—more than fourteen times the official count.

This kind of analysis looks at what epidemiologists call "excess mortality"—the number of deaths above what would normally be expected during a given time period. It captures not just people who died in flames or smoke, but those whose deaths were hastened by the chaos, the air quality, the displacement, and the trauma.

Four hundred forty people. That's more than died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake's fire. More than any California wildfire in memory.

Arson

In October 2025, nearly ten months after the disaster, police arrested a 29-year-old man and accused him of starting the Palisades Fire.

The allegation is startling: the man allegedly set a fire in Pacific Palisades on January 1, 2025. That fire was the Lachman Fire—the one firefighters thought they had contained. According to investigators, when Santa Ana winds arrived on January 7th, that fire rekindled and became the Palisades Fire.

If true, it means a single act of arson on New Year's Day led to one of the most destructive wildfires in California history. The wind event was natural. The drought was driven by climate change. The empty reservoir was bureaucratic failure. But the initial spark may have been deliberate.

The arrest raises uncomfortable questions about vulnerability. In a landscape this dry, with winds this fierce, how much does it matter where a fire starts? Would a different ignition source—a downed power line, a spark from equipment, a carelessly discarded cigarette—have produced the same result?

Probably. The conditions were primed for catastrophe. All that was needed was a match.

What California Faces

The January 2025 fires weren't an anomaly. They were a preview.

Climate analysis from multiple research groups—Climate Central, World Weather Attribution, and others—found that climate change strongly increased the likelihood of exactly this kind of disaster in multiple ways. Higher temperatures dry out vegetation faster. Longer dry seasons extend the window for fire. Changes in atmospheric patterns make extreme wind events more likely to coincide with extreme drought.

California's traditional fire season used to run from late summer through fall, ending when winter rains arrived. But the January 2025 fires erupted in what should have been the middle of the wet season. Fire season has expanded to overlap almost completely with Santa Ana wind season, which runs from October through January.

Some scientists now argue that California is heading toward a year-round fire season. There's no longer a reliable period when the landscape is wet enough, and the winds calm enough, to be safe.

Controlled burns—the practice of deliberately setting small fires under safe conditions to reduce fuel before dangerous weather arrives—have become harder to conduct. The window of days when it's safe to burn but conditions are dry enough for the fire to be effective keeps shrinking. Fewer burns mean more fuel accumulating, which means bigger fires when ignition finally occurs.

The Lessons

After every disaster, people ask what could have been done differently. For the January 2025 fires, the list is long.

Thermal imaging of the Lachman Fire might have detected the smoldering that rekindled into catastrophe. A full reservoir would have given firefighters more water pressure. Pre-positioned engines in the Palisades would have meant faster response. Better building codes applied retroactively to older homes would have slowed the house-to-house spread. A more robust electrical grid would have reduced ignition risks.

But all of these are specific fixes for specific failures. The larger lesson is harder to accept: Southern California has become a place where the background conditions—the heat, the drought, the wind, the fuel—are now regularly sufficient for catastrophic fire. Specific failures didn't create that vulnerability. Climate change did.

The January 2025 fires burned 90 square miles and destroyed 18,000 structures. They killed somewhere between 31 and 440 people, depending on how you count. They caused billions of dollars in damage to some of the most expensive real estate in America.

And they will happen again.

The winds that funneled through the San Gabriel Mountains on January 7th have been funneling through those mountains for millions of years. The Santa Ana pattern is as old as California. What's new is what the wind encounters when it arrives: a landscape dried to tinder by climate change, covered with houses built before anyone imagined fires like these, protected by water systems designed for smaller emergencies, and governed by institutions that saw the disaster coming but couldn't move fast enough to stop it.

The reservoir was empty. The warnings were ignored. The fire was waiting.

The next one is too.