Three weeks ago today the LA Fires of 2025 kicked off in The Palisades, igniting a blaze of terror for hundreds of thousands in Los Angeles and LA County.
Watching this natural disaster unfold from afar has been a surreal and disturbing experience. From checking in and reaching out to friends and colleagues, to watching along in horror with the rest of the world, we felt helpless but lucky.
We moved from Hollywood back to the East Coast last year. Our old neighbors had to evacuate one night from the Sunset Fire that erupted shortly after the the Palisades and Eaton fires began. Fortunately, the firefighting teams were able to contain it before it threatened to engulf the Hollywood Hills, Hollywood and West Hollywood. While, all of our friends and colleagues are safe, they are not all lucky. Some lost home and apartments. LA is large but everyone knows someone who lives in those neighborhoods that now look like bombed-out zones on the news.
One of our big motivators to leave LA was the increase of natural disasters, specifically wildfires, in recent years. The uptick in fires throughout California and the West in our time there was always on our minds. When we first moved to Oakland in 2015 for a new job, California was in the middle of years long drought. We lucked out and got a wet winter that year. Moving to LA in 2016, we were quickly greeted with our first wildfire experience, the Sand Fire of 2016. It never threatened the city but for some time the smoke and haze from Sand Canyon, near Santa Clarita, was everywhere.
These pictures from the Sand Fire show the eerie red sky, hazy sunlight and odd neon green the palm trees take on when enfolded in wildfire smoke. I keep seeing these colors in the photos and videos from the early days of the 2025 fires. They create a haunting palette and beauty that doesn’t quite lend itself to the danger you are experiencing. The eye sees dawn or dusk, but the body feels the sun is high and hot. The shadows are wrong. That eerie neon green stands out, like a storm is coming. It is an unnerving happening.
Even the Sand Fire, a relatively innocuous fire by most definitions, took two lives and over 3,000 firefighters to put it out. The danger of wildfires is real and imminent even though the tens of millions living in these risk zones in the American West live their daily lives in a delicate balance with natural and human-caused wildfires.
In the time we lived in California, we saw the increasing wild-fire risk driven by climate change. When we first moved there, fire season was 8 months. Then 9 months. Then 10. Then 11. Now, fire season is year round. Since we left LA on March 31st of last year, it hasn’t rained until now (that morning it rained heavily. So much so, it delayed our start by hours and hours. But, we did get one last beautiful LA sunset with snow-capped peaks as drove out of town for the last time).
The shock of these fires in January is deep, problematic and creates all kinds of logistical issues
Why was the Palisades reservoir offline? I assume the answer will be it was January and it was the only time to schedule the maintenance it needed, because in the past you didn’t worry about fires in January
or
How can regions and countries share firefighting resources if there is no downtime?
and life issues
If winter is the best time to live in LA, but you can’t go outside because the air is so bad, the toxins aren’t even showing up on your AQI meter, then why live in LA? Is it any better than living in Beijing?
I think the 2020 fires were our wake-up call knowing that it was time to start talking about leaving LA. The combination of the 2020 wildfires and the pandemic was brutal and opened our eyes to a tough future in these locales. Before that there were multipe major fires in California every year we lived there. While there were some better years since, the risk never goes away and only builds, until an inevitable outbreak like this month.
People chuckle when we say we are climate change refugees moving from LA. They don’t get the risks associated with climate change in certain places, the same way many will be climate change refugees from worsening storms in the Atlantic.
The pundits keep saying the LA Fires of 2025 will be remembered for decades and hundreds of years. But, I think these fires are only a 2, maybe a 3, out of 10 on the disaster scale of how bad a fire can truly be in Southern California. This month there has been 47 total wildfires (as of January 26th) in SoCal. While most of them were contained after a few acres of burning, it’s easy to imagine all of these fires being as bad as the Palisades or Eaton at one time; a monster fire raging from Ventura to Tijuana.
I don’t believe these fires will be remembered for long, not because they aren’t horrific and created lasting damage, but because there will bigger and badder fires in the near future to overshadow them.
You can send donations for LA Fire victims through:
- https://lacity.gov/LAstrong#givefinancialsupport
- https://www.redcross.org/local/california/los-angeles/ways-to-donate.html
- https://lafiredonationcenter.org/donate/
- https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/business/money-report/heres-a-list-of-the-top-rated-charities-to-help-the-wildfire-relief-effort/3599214/
- https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/where-to-give/palisades-fire-2025/
- https://shop.kaceymusgraves.com/collections/all-products/products/la-wildfire-relief-tee
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