A curious social-media ritual repeats every time a major fire explodes in Southern California, and this month’s catastrophe was no exception. Between dispatches about evacuations and the hot takes and conspiracy posts that followed, the armchair urbanists got busy citing literature. First came the Joan Didion quotes about the fire-stoking Santa Ana winds (“I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew”). Arriving shortly thereafter were the links to “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” by Mike Davis, a 1995 essay that methodically lays out the history of Southern California’s troubled, delusional relationship to fire. For the past few weeks, that relationship has been tested in ways that even Didion and Davis couldn’t have fathomed when they wrote the words that now proliferate on social-media platforms.

Davis, who died in 2022, was best known for his sprawling 1990 best seller, City of Quartz, a withering analysis of Los Angeles’s development. His Malibu essay is a clear-eyed explanation of how areas such as Malibu have evolved to burn amid natural cycles of regeneration, and how, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people practiced controlled burns in these areas to keep the landscape in balance. Total fire suppression, he writes, “the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel.” Davis also assails the unsustainable “firebelt suburbs,” whose presence compounded calamity while policy decisions were “camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety.” Malibu, he concludes, didn’t simply have a tendency to burn—it needed to burn. After this article, first published in 1995, reached wide audiences when it was included in his 1998 collection, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, many local homeowners were not pleased.

As ash rained down on my home in East Los Angeles from the Eaton Fire, so did the online invocations of Didion and Davis on wind and flame. In a catastrophe, people are tempted to search for a theory that will explain everything. But as I prepped a go bag in the event of an evacuation, I wondered whether these writings were what we should be reaching for in 2025.

I won’t be the first to declare that it’s time to give Didion’s Santa Ana melodramas a rest; some of her stories are more noir mythology than incontrovertible fact. Almost two decades ago, in fact, Davis himself poked fun at “lazy journalists” who use these disasters as an opportunity to trot out lines by Didion and other writers about how “the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever.” (If you must pontificate about the winds, quote Bad Religion’s 2004 song “Los Angeles Is Burning,” whose dark refrain succinctly references “the murder wind.”) On Davis, my verdict is split: His essay remains crucial to understanding the events that led to this moment, but after 30 years, it can’t account for the constellation of issues we now confront.

“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” is uncannily prescient. Davis pored over decades of historical and scientific research and then proceeded to smartly (and colorfully) synthesize the history of fires in the Southern California ecology and the policies that made them worse. He dug into the psychology around fire—both the human urge to “fix” it technologically and the tendency to spin conspiracy theories around its untamability. And he aimed his most pointed barbs at the new subdivisions springing up on fire-prone hillsides—what he terms “sloping suburbia” but what news stories commonly call the “wildland-urban interface.”

[Read: How well-intended policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

A lot has changed since 1995. Among the biggest fires described in Davis’s essay is Malibu’s 1970 Wright Fire, which claimed 403 homes, 10 lives, and 31,000 acres of land, primarily brush. Compare that with the Woolsey Fire, which in 2018 roared through roughly the same terrain, incinerating 97,000 acres and destroying 1,600 structures. As I write this, greater Los Angeles faces not just one gargantuan fire but two. Together, the Eaton Fire, on the fringes of the Angeles National Forest, and the Palisades Fire, in the Santa Monica Mountains, have burned through almost 38,000 acres, damaged or destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and killed 27 people (that toll is likely to rise). Davis was once described as L.A.’s “dark prophet” for his bleak view of the forces that shaped the city. But the 2025 fires have demonstrated that perhaps he wasn’t bleak enough.

Although Davis did, over the course of his career, write about climate change—and he added a postscript on the topic when “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” was excerpted online by Longreads in 2018—his original essay does not contend with how the climate would set the stage for ever bigger blazes, fires with different causes, effects, and solutions than the cyclical events of the past. “This is a story about drought and lack of precipitation this winter,” Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the director of a statewide fire program for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told me. “The extreme dryness combined with an exceptional wind event—to have those things concurrent is a recipe for disaster. Even if you had fuel breaks around those communities, even if you had prescribed burns”—a solution that Davis highlighted—”it might not have had any effect.”

Nor is Davis’s wildland-urban interface what it once was. The Eaton Fire (which likely began as a wildland fire in Eaton Canyon) quickly spread to urban areas of Altadena, razing commercial thoroughfares and ravaging homes that had been around for more than a century. The Palisades Fire likewise reached deep into residential developments, igniting homes and schools that sit just half a mile—and a few wind-whipped embers—from the border of densely populated Santa Monica. “In the ’90s … there were much fewer incidences of fires burning into communities,” Quinn-Davidson said. That has changed over the past 10 years; wildfires are no longer staying wild.   

Class and wealth also provided an important frame for Davis’s essay. He documented a tremendous gap between the hefty resources deployed toward fighting fire in well-to-do exurbs and the meager funds allocated to quash fires in L.A.’s poorer urban core (most of these caused by a lack of regulation in old tenement buildings). Today, the class disparities remain, but the particulars have changed. The real-estate magnate Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to watch over his Brentwood home as other homeowners faced down the flames with garden hoses. And as wildfires penetrate farther into the city, it’s not just wealthy sloping suburbia that’s getting scorched. The Palisades Fire wiped out a mobile-home park; the Eaton Fire destroyed a multigenerational Black middle-class enclave in Altadena. For everyone but billionaires, fire has become a threat at every level of class and wealth.

Some positive change has occurred since Davis first published his essay; more of the controlled burns he advocated for have become a tool of forest management, preventing the accumulation of dried brush that can turn into kindling with the tiniest spark. Indigenous people, including the Tongva and Chumash, practiced managed burning for millennia prior to colonization. Although some controlled burns were allowed on federal land starting in the 1960s, residential areas long resisted the remedy, thinking them risky or visually unappealing. (In his essay, Davis describes a Topanga Canyon homeowner fearful of what such a burn could do to their property values.) In more recent decades, however, the practice has spread. In California’s north, regular burns are led by Yurok and Karuk practitioners. Near San Diego, in the south, the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians has a “burn boss” in the ranks of the reservation’s fire department. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to promote the practice.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

But the hopeful idea that small fires might save us from big ones is hard to reckon with in the era of climate change. In 2019 and 2020, wildfires in Australia resulted in the loss of nearly 25 million acres of vegetation, 34 human lives, and more than 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates. In 2023, drought and unusually high temperatures led to the immolation of 37 million acres of Canadian land. That same year, another deadly fire destroyed the Maui community of Lahaina. Late last year, New York City’s drought-wracked Prospect Park burst into flames. In attempting to understand fire at this scale, it might be time to set aside Davis and turn to the work of Stephen J. Pyne, a fire historian whom Davis not only cited in “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” but also counted as a friend.

In his 2021 book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, Pyne provides a compelling (if rather jargon-filled) geologic and cultural history of fire, describing the types of burns that have shaped our planet. There is fire in the wild (such as a wildfire generated by lightning), fire set and monitored by humans (a cooking fire, say, or the controlled burn of a field), and the perpetual flame that consumes fossil fuels: the ignition of a car’s engine, the flare stacks at a power plant, the electricity that powers the smartphone on which we share essays about fire. This third type of fire is what makes it feasible for people to commute to sloping suburbias and fuels the helicopters that fight the fires that encircle them. It is the fire that has remapped the surface of the Earth, even in places that rarely see literal flames. “Not every place has to burn to be influenced by fire’s reach,” Pyne writes. “It’s enough for combustion’s consequences, in this case on climate, to shape biogeography.”

In “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis asks Californians to reexamine the way that they live on the land. Pyne does the same at the scale of our planet. The Pyrocene sharply critiques our reliance on fossil fuels and endless sprawl, as well as our inability to live with fire in the way that nature intended. “We don’t need new science or more science,” he writes. “We already know what needs to happen (in truth, we used to know much of it before we got greedy and forgot).” Pyne updates and expands on Davis, but their goals are similar: not to tell us what to do but to remind us why it matters, even when (or where) the world isn’t in flames. In Southern California, we are currently feeling the burn, but the fire is everywhere.

When my family woke up last Thursday, we learned that our friend Arthur Simoneau was missing.

The day before, when the Palisades Fire was heading toward the neighborhood where I grew up and where he still lived, my mom had texted his ex-wife, Jill, to ask if she knew where he was—he’d stayed behind to defend our road from fire before. Jill thought he was out of town, at a hot spring. But the next morning, she called to tell us that he’d raced back to his house, and no one had heard from him since. She asked if my father and I could head out from our place nearby to look for him.

Author and her father driving through the canyons to their old house. The driveway entrance to author’s childhood home, where a sign her father made, “Bilberry Ln.” used to be. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic) Author’s father with the lamp he once installed, next to what used to be their garage (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

My old neighborhood began because my Dad and Arthur, separately, looked at the hills above Malibu and thought, I should build a house up there. They each bought land in a stretch of Topanga Canyon so sparsely populated that the path from the main road to their parcels was unpaved, running through a hillside of sumac, sagebrush, and toyon that produced red berries in the winter. Each lot had a panoramic view of the ocean and coastline. City water and power did not quite reach our road, so throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, Arthur and Dad made the spot habitable, jerry-rigging a well, generators, solar panels, and an unofficial connection to a neighbor’s utilities.

Arthur building his home (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka) Arthur’s house, with Andre’s Door to Nowhere on the right side of the second floor (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

Fires might have been more of a worry up in the hills, but settling there didn’t seem much riskier than building a house in earthquake-prone Southern California to begin with. Fire was a part of life, and they upheld the codes, putting in driveways large enough for a firetruck and regularly clearing the brush around their lots. In Topanga Canyon, a clique formed around Arson Watch, a volunteer organization whose members cruise around in logoed jackets, looking for signs of emerging fires.

When we went to search for Arthur last week, Dad took his Arson Watch jacket with him. We were both hoping this 25-year-old piece of nylon could get us through closed roads and into our old neighborhood. But the officers we met weren’t buying that my 78-year-old father, with his faded jacket, needed to pass by barricades to a still-smoldering area. We returned home hours later, worried and exhausted, and then an evacuation warning for our area came through on our phones. As we packed the car, Jill called again, to tell us that Arthur was dead.

Arthur’s trees after the fire (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

My first memory is of Arthur, and in it, he looks the same as he did when I saw him last month. We’re standing on my lawn at my third-birthday party, next to the rosebush that Mom was always trying to make happen but that the deer always ate. He asks me how old I am, and when I tell him, he staggers.“No way, dude!” he says, feigning disbelief. “You’re so old!” He’s in a T-shirt, a ponytail, and (as he always was, no matter how formal the occasion) flip-flops. Backpacking at 9,000 feet of elevation, chasing a bear away while camping—flip-flops, because they were easy to slip off and didn’t collect burs as easily as sneakers.

He and Jill spent years constructing their three-story brick rectangle, painted olive green, with fragrant pepper trees along the front walkway. Arthur wanted to build a house with his own two hands, as his grandfather had done. (A bonus: He could design the garage door to fit his car with his prized hang-gliding gear strapped to the roof.) A football field away, across a small canyon, Dad and a construction crew built what he’d thought would be his bachelor pad. After he met my mom, she went with him to Mexico to buy the tiles that she laid in the floors and walls.

Back then, the only other dwelling on our road was a geodesic dome about a half a mile away, occupied by a gay couple who drove a DeLorean and held a support group for gay Filipino men with custody issues. Later on, a germophobic epidemiologist took over the Dome House, as we called it, figuring its remote location would help him avoid contagion. Peculiarity was a neighborhood prerequisite. When Jill and Arthur saw people touring properties who they thought would make annoying neighbors, they would walk around outside naked to scare them off.

Scrapbook photographs of Arthur and Jill building their home, and the trailer they lived in during the years they were building (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

A fire came through the canyon in 1993, and Dad and Arthur stayed behind with utility hoses and nearly 20,000 gallons of water to extinguish spot fires that erupted around their newly finished houses. Somehow, everybody and their homes stayed intact, minus a few warped windows.

My parents had kids first, then Arthur and Jill had Andre, who became my first and best childhood friend. Eventually our road got paved, more families moved close by, and we had a neighborhood. We called it simply “the hill” to differentiate it from “town”—Malibu. Our parents would trade off taking us to school, past an abandoned fire truck incinerated in the ’93 fire. My parents helped raise Andre; Andre’s parents helped raise my brother and me. I only just learned that Dad and Arthur had cleared a path between our two homes so that Arthur could run a phone line from his house to ours. I’d always thought it was so Andre and I could get to each other’s houses faster.

Members of the neighborhood, gathered in Arthur’s backyard for Andre’s second birthday part. Jill is on the far left beside Andre (held by a neighbor); the author and her mother are on the far right. (Courtesy of Family of Arthur Simoneau)

Arthur was our neighborhood’s unofficial scoutmaster. We were free to be as weird as we wished, but he would nip any selfishness or malice in the bud with a stern “Not cool, dude.” He’d help us wriggle under the chain-link fence next to a No Trespassing sign so we could soak in hot springs in Ojai, and strap pillows around our behinds with duct tape to teach us to rollerblade. He turned a wild garter snake, then another, into pets, Snakey and Snakey 2, who would roam freely in the living room; he’d lecture us extensively on gun safety before showing us how to shoot .22s and stash our guns in the brush if we saw any sheriff’s helicopters. He let us believe we were running wild, keeping us safe the entire time. When I woke up the morning after my dad had a heart attack, having slept through the ambulance lights that brought Arthur to our house, I wondered not about what might be wrong, but about what adventure he would take us on that day.

Our houses never really got finished. My brother’s bedroom was intended to be a walk-in closet, mine a breakfast nook, and neither had doors. Andre’s bedroom, meanwhile, had a surplus: a Door to Nowhere overlooking the driveway. Arthur had always meant to build a staircase there. The land, too, would allow us only so much normalcy. When my parents got us a trampoline, the Santa Ana winds blew it down the hillside, where it landed at a 45-degree angle against a tree and began its second life as our slide. We went through fires, blackouts, mudslides, rockslides, and windstorms. But we had the sense that tolerating these dangers made this life possible—one where you could see the Pacific Ocean from the kitchen and, from your bedroom at night, watch coyotes trot across the yard, backlit by the glow of Los Angeles. My family moved away when I started high school, only because we had to downsize, and other families left too. Eventually, Arthur was the only person from those years who still lived on the road.

Arthur looking out his window at the clouds above the Pacific Ocean. He could be found in this spot frequently, reading. (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

Before my father and I tried to reach the old road, we called the man who had bought our house on the hill. He told us what we didn’t want to hear: It had burned down. He thanked my father for building such a lovely home. Dad immediately thought of the nautilus fossil he’d placed in the center of the fireplace, made of rocks he’d collected along the canyon to the house. He wondered out loud if it had survived. On Monday, we finally did make it through the charred canyon, past deflated cacti, and up to the hills. We’d point to the piles of debris: I can’t tell if that used to be so-and-so’s house. When we saw the hills with nothing on them, I tried to superimpose what I knew of the land on what I saw, and I couldn’t. The sumac, sagebrush, and toyon were pulverized. We were on a new, blackened planet that happened to have the same topography as the place where I was raised.

Arthur’s home (foreground) and the rest of the neighborhood, burned. The rubble of the author’s house can be seen, flattened, on the far left. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

Standing in what I think used to be our living room, I could not tell if a crumbling piece of metal was a washing machine or the 1920s Roper stove that we’d sold with the house. But I did find the nautilus, resting on top of some of the rocks Dad had collected. I thought about Arthur: He would have known how long it would take for the sumac to grow back.

So many people here are staring down losses like these. At least 10 of my friends’ childhood homes burned. If I drive down the coast right now, I can see hundreds of flattened houses where people I’ve never met were raised. All around Los Angeles, histories are vanishing. When we first found out that Arthur was missing, the fires’ official death count included just a few people; it has since risen to 25.

Dad and I drove away, and as we turned on a road where Arthur would lead us on bicycle rides, Dad gently mentioned that we’d found only one nautilus. He had actually placed two in the fireplace, and the one he loved the most was still missing. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. Yes, there were two.

Wind conditions will ease but authorities warn another round of Santa Ana winds could develop early next week.

There has been no shortage of explanations for the devastation wrought by the wildfires still burning across greater Los Angeles. Some commentators have argued that sclerotic local governance left the region unprepared to respond to such a large-scale disaster. Others have invoked the impact of climate change or the perils of the Santa Ana winds. And some have blamed the Ukrainians or Israel.

“We sent $250 billion to Ukraine,” Charlie Kirk, the CEO of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, wrote on X. “And yet we can’t get water to fight fires in California.” The post received more than 100,000 likes and 10 million views, and was echoed by other pro–Donald Trump surrogates. “California is literally on fire right now so of course Biden gave Ukraine more money,” quipped Not the Bee, a popular right-wing commentary site, in response to the administration announcing its final military-aid package this week.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, a similar discourse has unfolded—but with a different culprit. “Sorry America, your government couldn’t afford water for fire hydrants and firefighting planes, they have to give billion of tax dollars to israel to kill innocent children in Gaza,” declared the activist Mohamad Safa, who runs a human-rights organization accredited by the United Nations, in an X post that garnered some 150,000 likes and 2.9 million views. In response to an NBC report that L.A.’s fire chief had warned that budget cuts could harm “response to large-scale emergencies,” the progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan appended this to the headline: “US spends a record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since last Oct. 7.”

Similar attempts to export accountability abroad emerged after September’s Hurricane Helene and are fast becoming a fixture of our post-disaster discourse. But whether left-coded or right-coded, such claims are equally misguided—and dangerous. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, ranking ahead of the United Kingdom, India, and France. It is one of the wealthiest and highest-taxed states in America. Simply put, the federal government using a fraction of a percent of its $6.8 trillion budget for Ukraine and Israel is not why one of the richest state governments in the country was unprepared to deal with a very plausible emergency. Regardless of what one thinks of either conflict, they have nothing to do with what is transpiring in Los Angeles.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

Bizarre theories like these are damaging not just because they misconstrue the nature of American governance or assail overseas targets, but because they undermine our society’s capacity to self-correct. In the aftermath of disaster, healthy communities ask themselves, What did we do wrong? Unhealthy ones ask, Who did this to us? Nations that externalize their internal issues lose the ability to address them. Blaming freeloading foreigners for the policy and governance failures that enabled the L.A. wildfires will not prevent future failures, but rather will allow the real causes of those failures to continue to fester.

For this reason, the historian Walter Russell Mead once warned that “an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom.” When people pin their domestic problems on foreign scapegoats—whether Ukraine or Israel or another country—they erode any effort to genuinely confront those problems. Which means that those who spread these arguments don’t just endanger their targets; they endanger us all.

Over the past week, fires have ravaged greater Los Angeles, killing at least 10 people, destroying more than 10,000 buildings, scorching more than 35,000 acres, and forcing the evacuation of at least 180,000 residents. The dry Santa Ana winds continue to blow, threatening to spread the destruction further. As I write this, a backpack stuffed with mementos, documents, and a water bottle sits next to the front door of my West Los Angeles apartment.

Commentators wasted no time trying to find a villain. Was it Mayor Karen Bass, who had left the city for Ghana before the fires began? Doubtful. What about budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department? In fact, its budget recently grew by $50 million. Was it a 2022 donation of firefighter boots and helmets to Ukraine? Water is in short supply, not uniforms.

The real story of the wildfires isn’t about malice or incompetence. It’s about well-intentioned policies with unintended consequences.

Take insurance—a trillion-dollar industry built to identify risks, particularly from disasters such as wildfires. Insurance companies communicate this risk to homeowners through higher premiums, providing them with useful information and incentives. People may think twice about moving to a fire-prone area if they see the danger reflected in a fee.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

But in 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, arbitrarily reducing rates by 20 percent and subjecting future rate increases to public oversight. Nobody likes high premiums, of course. But the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state’s most dangerous areas. And they reduced the incentive for homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire-resistant roofs and siding materials.

Decades of worsening climate risk alongside suppressed premiums have prompted many insurers to drop coverage altogether. Just last summer, State Farm dropped 1,600 home-insurance plans in Pacific Palisades. Earlier this week, most of the neighborhood was burning.

Many Californians in high-risk areas have been forced to depend on the California FAIR Plan—a public insurer of last resort. In 2023, the plan covered an estimated $284 billion in home value. In 2024, that exposure increased by 61 percent. Within the next few years, California taxpayers could be on the hook for more than a trillion dollars. The state insurance commissioner is scrambling to bring insurers back. But it may be too little, too late.

Artificially low premiums have also spurred new housing production in fire-prone regions on the edges of cities like Los Angeles. From 1990 to 2020, California built nearly 1.5 million homes in the wildlife-urban interface, putting millions of residents in the path of wildfires. Policy didn’t just pull Californians into dangerous areas. It also pushed them out of safer ones. Over the past 70 years, zoning has made housing expensive and difficult to build in cities, which are generally more resilient to climate change than any other part of the state.

The classic urban neighborhood in America—carefully maintained park, interconnected street grid, masonry-clad shops and apartments—is perhaps the most wildfire-resistant pattern of growth. By contrast, the modern American suburb—think stick-frame homes along cul-de-sacs that bump up against unmaintained natural lands—may be the least. Several of L.A.’s hardest-hit neighborhoods resemble this model.

Infill townhouses, apartments, and shops could help keep Californians out of harm’s way, but they are illegal to build in most California neighborhoods. And even where new infill housing is allowed, it is often subject to lengthy environmental reviews, which NIMBYs easily weaponize. And if you want to build anywhere near the coast—the only part of greater Los Angeles not currently under a red-flag warning—prepare for months of added delays.

[Read: When the flames come for you]

In fairness, the state has made some progress. In 2008, California lawmakers passed S.B. 375, which directs planning agencies to reform land-use and transportation policy in order to facilitate housing production in long-settled areas. But this remains purely advisory—yet another plan on a shelf, in a state with too many plans and too little implementation.

In recent years, Los Angeles has also taken steps to fix itself. Thanks in part to state lawmakers and a rising local YIMBY movement, building homes in existing neighborhoods has been somewhat streamlined. But reform isn’t going to get any easier. Our city started the week with a housing shortage in the hundreds of thousands. Now it’s ending the week with thousands of homes destroyed, and thousands of newly homeless families.

Once the fires are out, California will need to build, fast. This disaster can teach it how, if policy makers will listen.

The LA wildfires continue to burn, with Santa Ana winds set to intensify and challenges hampering rescue efforts.

The dry Santa Ana winds are expected to pick up overnight and continue to cause problems until Wednesday.

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.

We knew to expect winds. When they came on Tuesday morning, sounding like a tsunami crashing over my family’s home in western Malibu, the utility company shut off our power. We knew the chance of fire was high.

I had arrived home for the holidays in early December, and had already been greeted by the Franklin Fire, which had burned the hills black. Now, when my dad and I went in search of electricity, a great plume of smoke was rising above those burned hills. It cast out over the Pacific, just as it had during the Woolsey Fire that tore through Malibu in 2018. The way the wind was blowing—rattling our car, scattering palm fronds and tumbleweeds across the road—we knew this new fire would probably hit Topanga Canyon, the mountain community where I grew up. Dad decided we needed to get up there and help our former neighbors. People who have lived in this area for decades, as my family has, can get so used to evacuation warnings that they don’t always follow them.

Yesterday, the fires burning around Los Angeles were frightening; overnight they became a terror. A fire this strong, at this time of year, is unusual, an outlier. But it is also familiar, one in a series of fires that, as a seventh-generation Californian, I’ve lived through, or my family has. It has destroyed places that I’ve loved since childhood; it’s not the first fire that’s done so. To some of our friends and neighbors, this fire seemed manageable—until it didn’t. Today, it is, as one friend said, a hell fire.

On the way to Topanga Canyon, Dad and I stopped to watch the fire burn. The flames were coming into a neighborhood where two of my childhood friends grew up, just beyond the Pacific Palisades where the blaze started. The way the fire was burning, I couldn’t imagine that the Palisades was still standing. The main road was closed—these winds can dislodge rocks and rain them down on cars—so we took back streets. “You can tell people are emotional from the way they’re driving,” Dad said, after someone whipped around a blind turn. We made it to the house of a friend, another old-timer who, like Dad, lived through the 1993 fire, the one that got so close, it warped the double-pane glass in my childhood home. He told us he’d be fine, based on the way the wind was blowing, and offered to make us a pot of coffee while he still had power—he’d heard they’d be shutting it off in the next hour. Dad said it looked like the flames had reached the mouth of Topanga Canyon, and our friend promised he’d get ready to evacuate. “But nothing will ever be as bad as ’93,” he said.

When Dad and I got home, our power was still out. The city had issued evacuation warnings in a nearby neighborhood. Should we get ready? A month before, we’d packed up the family photos and the birth certificates for the Franklin Fire, and our house had been fine. Our Malibu neighbor, who stayed behind during the Woolsey Fire, tends not to worry. But the winds were so strong, she thought this one could be worse than all the others.

That night, Dad and I decided to get back in the car, to see how close the fire was. When we managed to open the front door against the wind, we were coated in a fine layer of dust. The houses around us were dark, all their power out. Driving on the highway this time, instead of smoke, we saw flames.

The friend we’d visited that afternoon called us. “I’m on the freeway now,” he said. “I got the hell out of there. We’re toast. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

From a radio broadcast, cutting in and out, we could hear the gist of the damage so far. “Malibu Feed Bin”—where my family would buy dog food and pet the rabbits—gone. “Topanga Ranch Motel”—the bungalows where I’d wait for the school bus—gone. “Reel Inn”—a seafood restaurant where employees would handwrite ocean puns beneath its neon sign—gone. “Cholada Thai”—a high-school standard where my friends and I still gather—gone. “Wiley’s Bait & Tackle,” a wooden shack opened in 1946, where my brother and I would gross each other out looking at lugworms—gone.

My ancestors came to California before it was even a state; we have lived through decades of Santa Ana winds coming in off the desert and shaking our houses so powerfully, we lose sleep. But my brother and I also used to stand outside our childhood home, our backs to the wind, and toss stones into a nearby canyon, laughing as the Santa Anas carried them farther than we could ever throw. The winds are part of life here, and one that I’ve always, probably foolishly, loved.

Last night, my parents and I kept our phones on in case any emergency notifications came through. This morning, our power was still out. We have loaded the family photos and the birth certificates in the car and are ready to leave if the evacuation notice comes. Even as the fires are still burning, my parents are already talking about how they will handle this all better “next time.” We will get a larger coffee press so that, next time, we can each have two servings when the power goes out. We will get a camp stove so that, next time, when the gas shuts off, we won’t have to boil water on the barbecue.

Mom just told me that her friend sent her some new photographs: My childhood home, which she and my Dad built together in Topanga Canyon, may be gone. For now, the fire is still on the other side of Malibu. The wind is still blowing.

As Santa Ana winds whipped sheets of embers over the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California last night, the palm trees along the beach in the Pacific Palisades ignited like torches scaled for gods. The high school was burning. Soon, the grounds around the Getty Villa were too. The climate scientist Daniel Swain went live on his YouTube channel, warning that this fire would get worse before it got better. The winds, already screaming, would speed up. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing as he spoke. Sunset Boulevard was backed up; ash rained down on drivers as they exited their cars to escape on foot. A bulldozer parted the sea of abandoned cars to let emergency vehicles pass.

The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.

Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since recordkeeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on. As The Atlantic wrote last summer, California’s fire luck of the past two years had run out. “You’d have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me.

Then the colder months brought the Santa Ana winds: stuff of legend, the strong downslope gusts that suck humidity out of the air, if there was any to begin with. This time, the winds were stronger than average, too. A parched landscape; crisp-dried vegetation; strong, hot winds: “The gun was loaded,” MacDonald said. And it was pointed at Pacific Palisades.

MacDonald studies climate change and wildfires, and he has published a paper with colleagues projecting that the wildfire season in Southern California would, on average, start earlier and last longer in the future, thanks to human-driven climate warming. The lengthier the season, the greater the probability that a fire-weather day would overlap with a Santa Ana–wind day, or a day when someone happened to ignite a fire—more than 90 percent of fires in Southern California are sparked by human activity, he said.

Last night, he watched an example of his work unfold in real time. He could see smoke rising off the Palisades Fire from his house in Thousand Oaks. He had important documents in bags, just in case he and his family had to evacuate. In a dry year, he told me, the concept of fire season no longer applied in Southern California: “You can have a fire any month of the year.”

This morning, a second and third major fire are pressing toward more suburban zones where people are now evacuating. The Los Angeles mayor has told the city to brace for more. Altogether, more than 5,000 acres have burned already, and an unknown number of structures along with them. Schools are closing this morning, and Los Angeles health officials warned of unhealthy air, directing people to wear masks outdoors and keep windows closed as smoke and soot blanketed some parts of the city.

As he watched the smoke, MacDonald said he had colleagues at the university who lived in the active fire zone. He hoped they were all right; he texted them, knowing that they may not respond for a while. He’d evacuated from the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned nearly 100,000 acres and destroyed some 1,600 buildings, including some of his neighbors’ homes. I asked what it was like to study the future of fire in California while living it. “It makes the work more immediate,” he said. “It gives you a sense of unease. As the summer ends and you know you’re dried out, you look around you at things you own, and you think, This could just be ashes.”