In an ember storm, every opening in a house is a portal to hell. A vent without a screen, a crack in the siding, a missing roof tile—each is an opportunity for a spark to smolder. A gutter full of dry leaves is a cradle for an inferno. Think of a rosebush against a bedroom window: fire food. The roses burn first, melting the vinyl seal around the window. The glass pane falls. A shoal of embers enter the house like a school of glowing fish. Then the house is lost.

As the Palisades Fire, just 8 percent contained this morning, and the Eaton Fire, still uncontained, devour Los Angeles neighborhoods, one thing is clear: Urban fire in the U.S. is coming back. For generations, American cities would burn in era-defining conflagrations: the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the San Francisco fires of 1906. Then came fire-prevention building codes, which made large city burns a memory of a more naive time. Generations of western firefighters turned, instead, toward wildland burns, the big forest devastations. An urban conflagration was the worst-case scenario, the one they hoped they’d never see. And for a long time, they mostly didn’t.

Now more people live at the flammable edges of wildlands, making places that are primed to burn into de facto suburbs. That, combined with the water whiplash that climate change has visited on parts of California—extraordinarily wet years followed by extraordinarily dry ones—means the region is at risk for urban fire once again. And our ability to fight the most extreme fire conditions has reached its limit. The Palisades Fire alone has already destroyed more than 5,300 structures and the Eaton Fire more than 4,000, making both among the most destructive fires in California’s history. When the worst factors align, the fires are beyond what firefighting can meaningfully battle. With climate change, this type of fire will only grow more frequent.

The start of the Palisades and Eaton Fires was a case of terrible timing: A drought had turned abundant vegetation into crisp fire fuel, and the winter rains were absent. A strong bout of Santa Ana winds made what was already probable fire weather into all but a guarantee. Something—it remains to be seen what—ignited these blazes, and once they started, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The winds, speeding up to 100 miles an hour at times, sent showers of embers far across the landscape to ignite spot fires. The high winds meant that traditional firefighting was, at least in the beginning, all but impossible, David Acuna, a battalion chief for Cal Fire, told me: He saw videos of firefighters pointing their hoses toward flames, and the wind blowing the water in the other direction. And for a while, fire planes couldn’t fly. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, Acuna said. The fire retardant or water they would have dropped would have blown away, like the hose water. “It’s just physics,” he said.

California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.”  

The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”

In California, the shift toward ungovernable fires in populated places has been under way for several years. For the former Cal Fire chief deputy director Christopher Anthony, who retired in 2023, the turning point was 2017, when wildfires in populated places in Northern California’s wine country killed 44 people and burned nearly a quarter million acres. The firefighting profession, he told me, started to recognize then that fortifying communities before these more ferocious blazes start would be the only meaningful way to change their outcome. The Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise in 2018, “was the moment that we realized that this wasn’t, you know, an anomaly,” he said. The new fire regime was here. This new kind of fire, once begun, would “very quickly overwhelm the operational capabilities of all of the fire agencies to be able to effectively respond,” he said.

As Wara put it, in fires like these, houses survive, or don’t, on their own. Sealed against ember incursion with screened vents, built using fire-resistant materials, separated from anything flammable—fencing, firewood, but especially vegetation—by at least five feet, a house has a chance. In 2020, California passed a law (yet to be enforced) requiring such borders around houses where fire hazard is highest. It’s a hard sell, having five feet of stone and concrete lining the perimeter of one’s house, instead of California’s many floral delights. Making that the norm would require a serious social shift. But it could meaningfully cut losses, Kate Dargan, a former California state fire marshal, told me.

Still, eliminating the risk of this type of wind-driven fire is now impossible. Dargan started out in wildland firefighting in the 1970s, but now she and other firefighters see the work they did, of putting out all possible blazes, as “somewhat misguided.” Fire is a natural and necessary part of California’s ecosystem, and suppressing it entirely only stokes bigger blazes later. She wants to see the state further embrace preventative fires, to restore it to its natural cycles. But the fires in Southern California this week are a different story, unlikely to have been prevented by prescribed burns alone. When the humidity drops low and the land is in the middle of a drought and the winds are blowing at 100 miles an hour, “we’re not going to prevent losses completely,” Dargan said. “And with climate change, those conditions are likely to occur more frequently.” Avoiding all loss would mean leaving L.A. altogether.

Rebuilding means choosing a different kind of future. Dargan hopes that the Pacific Palisades rebuilds with fire safety in mind; if it does, it will have a better chance of not going through this kind of experience again. Some may still want to grow a rosebush outside their window. After this is over, the bargaining with nature will begin. “Every community gets to pick how safe they want to be,” Dargan said.

In Los Angeles, we live with fire. There is even a season—fire season, which does not end until the rains come. This winter, the rains have not come. What has come is fire. And Angelenos have been caught off guard, myself included.

Tuesday mid-morning, a windstorm hit L.A. In the Palisades, a neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, a blaze broke out. Over the past two days, it has burned more than 17,234 acres and destroyed at least 1,000 structures. The Palisades Fire will almost certainly end up being the most expensive in California history. It is currently not at all contained.

By Tuesday night, another fire had sparked—this time in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Altadena, where winds had been clocked at 100 miles an hour and sent embers flying miles deep into residential and commercial stretches of the city. By mid-morning yesterday, the Eaton Fire had consumed 1,000 structures and more than 10,600 acres. It, too, is zero percent contained. Together, the fires have taken at least five lives.

Last night, just before 6 p.m., another fire erupted in Runyon Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills. Like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, the Sunset Fire seems to have first broken out in the dry chaparral scrub whipped by the roaring winds. The hillside there is particularly dense with homes, and the neighborhood is jammed up against the even denser, urban L.A., where apartment buildings quickly give way to commercial blocks. One of this city’s many charms is its easy access to nature, but nature is also the cause of its current apocalypse.

Living through these fires, I’ve struggled to understand the scale of the event; to see the threat for what it is and respond appropriately. My family lives in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood 20 miles from the Palisades with a whole mountain range in between. On Tuesday, while driving on the freeway, I saw the colossal thunderhead of gray smoke of the Palisades Fire erupting from the Santa Monica Mountains and decided: This is fine. I finished my errand. I went on with my day.

When I got home, I turned on KTLA, which was broadcasting live from Palisades Drive, where dozens of cars, trapped in evacuation traffic, had been abandoned by their fleeing owners. A man ran up to the reporter, removed his face mask, and spoke into the microphone. Looking directly at the camera, he implored viewers to leave their keys in their car if they were going to flee, so that the fire crews could get to the fire unimpeded. The guy looked familiar. The reporter asked him to identify himself. It was Steve Guttenberg. Mahoney from Police Academy! Only in L.A.

The wind was making a constant low, terrible moan through the trees. Every few minutes, a violent gust would blast through and rattle the house. That afternoon, I went to pick up my kids, who had been kept inside their school all day. At home, I let them run around outside, but everyone’s eyes got itchy. There was so much dust in the air. Still, the only fire I knew of was all the way across town, so I went out again that evening to see a movie.  

At intermission, a friend returned from the restroom and told me that my wife had been trying to reach me. I turned my phone off airplane mode and called her; when she picked up, she told me a neighbor had just knocked on our door to tell her that a brush fire was burning nearby. It was close, she said. How close? I asked.

Across the street, she said. Like, can you see it? From our house? She said no. I’m coming home, I told her.

Driving back, I saw a huge, glowing gash in the San Gabriel Mountains—the Eaton Fire. I thought about what needed to happen when I got home: the go bags we should pack, the box of birth certificates and Social Security cards. A photo album or two. I’d park the car facing out, for a quicker exit. I’d move some potentially long-burning objects (trash cans) as far from the house as possible.

I knew what to do. I knew the procedure. I’d reported on fires before. Hell, the home I’d grown up in was nearly burned down by wildfires twice in 2017, and my aunt and uncle had lost their home in Santa Rosa that same year. I’d interviewed firefighters about days just like this one—when the Santa Anas howl and it hasn’t rained for eight months or longer, the chaparral is a tinderbox, and fires begin popping up everywhere.

And yet, I hadn’t thought that it could happen down the street. I hadn’t considered that it could happen to me and my family.

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

I arrived home just after 9 p.m. First neighbors with hoses, then the fire department, had doused the blaze nearby. I worked through my checklist, packed the kids a bag of clothes, then my wife and I packed small bags of our own. A thought nagged at me: All day, I’d been looking at fire—why hadn’t I seen the immediacy of the threat? I pulled out a book called Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry, which I find extremely calming in intense moments because it presents an extended argument for the benefits of thought and practice during emergency situations. “CPR is knowable; one can learn it if one chooses,” Scarry writes. “But one cannot know who will one day be the recipient of that embodied knowledge … It is available to every person whose path crosses one’s own.”

What we do during emergencies, when the habits of the everyday (getting out of your car, keys in hand) come face-to-face with the extraordinary (a fire by the side of the road), requires extraordinary thinking. And we would be wise to insert these acts of thinking into our everyday habits. We perform a version of this constantly: We call it “deliberation.” Mostly, we spend very little time between deliberation and action. But emergency-style deliberation is difficult, because true emergencies are rare. It is hard for us to conceive of them happening until they are.

The drivers who locked their car doors and left with their keys were not thinking within the framework of the fire as a threat. A fire doesn’t steal one’s car; it burns it down. I had been no different in my thinking that day. Maybe I was worse: I had the knowledge of what to do in a fire, but I hadn’t even considered the realistic possibility that the fire presented a threat to my family.

I spent most of Tuesday night awake. The wind remained terrible. The smell of smoke began to fill the house. I rolled up towels and stuck them at the foot of the doors. Yesterday morning, just after 7 a.m., our phones buzzed with an alert: an evacuation warning for our corner of the neighborhood and much of nearby Pasadena. We hustled our kids through breakfast, packed up, and got out. Our going was optional, but at least 100,000 other Angelenos are under mandatory evacuation, a number that is surely growing higher as all of these fires continue to burn.

We left with the little we’d packed in our go bags, which was clarifying. I felt a weight lift. This was everything that truly mattered. Rereading Scarry had reminded me: I did not learn to perform CPR until I was about to be a father, until the possibility of having to perform it seemed a bit more real. I still, thankfully, have never had to. But will I retrain myself? Should I be practicing? We motored on through traffic. After a while, the smoke began to clear, just enough to see patches of sky. I will schedule that CPR retraining, I thought. That’s something I should do. When we can get home and catch our breath.