Firefighters in Southern California readied for another round of critical fire weather after calmer than expected winds Tuesday gave them a much-needed reprieve in which they were able to make progress battling the Los Angeles area’s largest blaze and quickly snuff out several smaller new fires.
With winds not reaching dangerous levels Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service pushed back its dire warning of critical fire weather until 3 a.m. Wednesday. The so-called red flag warnings were to remain in effect from Central California to the Mexican border until late afternoon Wednesday as firefighters battled two massive blazes that have killed at least 25 people.
“Key message: We are not out of the woods yet,” the weather service said in a post on social media. “The winds underperformed today, but one more enhancement could happen tomorrow.”
The latest round of Santa Ana winds was not expected to be as mighty as last week when gusts packed hurricane force, but they still could carry fire-sparking embers for miles.
Firefighters made more progress on the Palisades Fire, the largest and most stubborn blaze. CalFire Operations Section Chief Christian Litz said Tuesday evening that he took a helicopter ride around the perimeter and saw no active flames, though it was far from over.
More than 77,000 households were without electricity as utilities shut off power to prevent their lines from sparking new blazes.
A state of alert
Weary and anxious residents were told to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice. They remained vigilant, keeping an eye on the skies and on each other: Police announced roughly 50 arrests, for looting, flying drones in fire zones, violating curfew, and other crimes.
Of those, three people were arrested on suspicion of arson after being seen setting small fires that were immediately extinguished, LA Police Chief Jim McDonnell said. One was using a barbecue lighter, another ignited brush and a third tried to light a trash can, he said. All were far outside the disaster zones. Authorities have not determined a cause for any of the major fires.
Among nine people charged with looting was a group that stole an Emmy award from an evacuated house, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said.
The biggest worry remained the threat from intense winds. Now backed by firefighters from other states, Canada, and Mexico, crews were deployed to attack flareups or new blazes. The firefighting force was much bigger than a week ago when the first wave of fires began destroying thousands of homes in what could become the nation’s costliest fire disaster.
Kaylin Johnson and her family planned to spend the night at their home, one of the few left standing in Altadena, near Pasadena. They intended to keep watch to ward off looting and to hose down the house and her neighbors’ properties to prevent flare-ups.
“Our lives have been put on hold indefinitely,” Johnson said via text message, adding that they cannot freely come and go because of restrictions on entering the burn areas. “But I would rather be here and not leave than not be allowed back at all.”
An unusual and ominous warning
Tuesday’s forecast included a rare warning: The winds, combined with severely dry conditions, have created a “ Particularly Dangerous Situation,” the National Weather Service said, meaning that any new fire could explode in size.
The forecast was later adjusted to say gusts were expected to pick up strength early Wednesday.
Packed and ready to go
Residents said they were ready to make a hasty escape.
Javier Vega, who said he feels like he has been “sleeping with one eye open,” and his girlfriend have planned out how they can quickly pack up their two cats, eight fish, and a leopard gecko if they get orders to evacuate.
“Typically on any other night, hearing helicopters flying overhead from midnight to 4:00 in the morning, that would drive anyone crazy,” Vega said. But figuring they were helping firefighters to keep the flames from threatening their neighborhood, he explained, “It was actually soothing for me to go to sleep.”
Preparing for another outbreak
Planes doused homes and hillsides with bright pink fire-retardant chemicals, while crews and fire engines deployed to particularly vulnerable spots with dry brush.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other officials who were criticized over their initial response expressed confidence that the region is ready to face the new threat. The mayor said she was able to fly over the disaster areas, which she described as resembling the aftermath of a “dry hurricane.”
Winds this time were not expected to reach the same fierce speeds seen last week but they could ground firefighting aircraft, LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said.
He urged homeless people to avoid starting fires for warmth and to seek shelter.
Wildfires on the rise across LA
With almost no rain in more than eight months, the brush-filled region has had more than a dozen wildfires this year, mostly in the greater Los Angeles area.
Firefighters have jumped on small blazes that popped up, quickly smothering several in Los Angeles County, including a blaze Tuesday evening in the Angeles National Forest.
The four largest fires around the nation’s second-biggest city have scorched more than 63 square miles (163 square kilometers), roughly three times the size of Manhattan. Of these, the Eaton Fire near Pasadena was roughly one-third contained, while the largest blaze, in Pacific Palisades on the coast, was far less contained.
Searching for victims
The death toll is likely to rise, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna. Nearly 30 people were still missing, he said Tuesday. Some people reported as missing earlier have been found.
Just under 90,000 people in the county remained under evacuation orders, half the number from last week.
Hollywood on hold
Hollywood’s awards season has been put on hiatus because of the crisis. The Oscar nominations have been delayed twice, and some organizations postponed their awards shows and announcements without rescheduling.
Firefighters on Tuesday held the line against two massive wildfires that have ravaged parts of Los Angeles for the past week, even as desert winds and a parched landscape presented extremely hazardous conditions.
PRICELESS ART DEEMED SAFE
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, “Bring Your Own Brigade,” at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
“It was really hard,” the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. “I didn’t blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror.”
And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn’t reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a “ particularly dangerous situation.”
“This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable,” she said in an interview.
She added: “It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, ‘Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What’s tricky is that they’re really hard to accomplish.”
Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency
In “Bring Your Own Brigade” (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the northern California city of Paradise and the Woolsey fire in Malibu, two towns on opposite ends of the political and economic spectrum.
She embeds herself with firefighters and explores the lives of locals affected by the fire. She shares harrowing cellphone footage of people driving through exploding columns of fire as they try to escape, crying out “I don’t want to die!” She plays 911 calls in which people plead vainly for rescue as fire laps at their backyards or invades their homes.
And she conveys a layered message: Devastating fires in California are increasingly inevitable. Climate change is a clear accelerating factor, yes, but it’s not the only one, and therein lies an element of hope: There are things people can do, if they start to make different (and difficult) choices — in both where and how they choose to live.
But first, complacency must be vanquished.
“Complacency sets in when there hasn’t been a fire for a few years and you start to think, it might not happen again,” Walker says.
It even affected Walker herself a few months ago. A British transplant to Los Angeles, she had chosen to live on the Venice-Santa Monica border — too scared, she says, to live in the city’s lovely hilly areas with small winding roads, surrounded by nature and vegetation, near the canyons that wildfires love.
But a few months ago, she started wondering if over-anxiety about wildfires had incorrectly influenced her choice. And then, of course, came the Palisades catastrophe —“this God-awful reminder that it only takes one event,” she says.
The challenge of enacting fire safety measures
Walker became interested in making a film about wildfires after she arrived in the city and wondered if she was safe. “Why is the hillside on fire?” she says she wondered. “Why do people just keep on driving?” She had considered such fires “a medieval problem.”
One thing she learned while filming: Firefighters were even more impressive and courageous than she’d thought. “If you want to watch a firefighter have their heart broken, it’s when they want to do more,” she says. “I was just absolutely wowed by how incredibly selfless and brilliant they were.”
Not that the public wasn’t angry at them — her film depicts angry residents of Malibu, for example, chastising firefighters for not doing enough.
One of the most stunning parts of “Bring Your Own Brigade” — the title is a reference to the economic inequity of wealthy homeowners or celebrities like Kim Kardashian hiring private firefighters — is watching the reaction of firefighters at a town meeting in Paradise, where 85 people had been killed in the fire. They’ve convened to discuss adopting safety measures as they rebuild. One by one, measures are rejected — even the simplest, requiring a five-foot buffer around every house where nothing is flammable. Safety takes a back burner to individual choice.
“It was very shocking to be at that meeting in particular, given that people had died in the most horrible way in that community. And you have firefighters with tears in their eyes saying, ‘This is what we need to have happen to keep us safe, and then (they) get voted down.”
Walker is not the only filmmaker to have made a film about Paradise. In 2020, Ron Howard directed “Rebuilding Paradise,” which focused on the effort to rebuild, and the resilience of residents. Walker says she looked at the same set of facts and arrived at different takeaways.
Townspeople were indeed amazing and resilient, Walker says. “But are we right to be building back without a real rethink? Because the tragedy is that these fires are predictably going to be repeating and against the backdrop of climate change, they’re getting worse, not better.”
In the wildfire age, rethinking where we live — and how
That rethink involves making hard calls about where people should live. “The population is overwhelmingly moving into these wildland-urban interface areas,” Walker says, referring to areas where housing meets undeveloped wildland vegetation — exactly the areas most likely to burn.
In California, some of these places are very expensive — like Palisades and Malibu — but others are in more affordable areas. With the great pressure on housing, more people are moving into such areas, she says. But the “braking mechanism” could be that insurance companies “are doing the math, and it’s not sustainable.”
It’s not only a question of where people live.
“What does a fire-hardened home look like?” Walker asks. “Design-wise, that does dictate certain things.” For example: “This lovely wood is going to require tremendous firefighting.”
It’s too early to know, but Walker thinks she may be hearing something different now from those who’ve lost homes, of whom she knows many.
“What I’m hearing from people is not just ‘I can’t wait to rebuild. Let me rebuild,’” she says. “It’s: ‘How could we go through that again?’”
They seem endless, these sapping stories of loss. A grandfather starts over in his 90s. A family loses their dream home. People who were already struggling were dealt new, brutal blows.
As California’s massive wildfires burn, a barrage of GoFundMe campaigns for victims has become an outlet for onlookers transfixed by the blazes and eager to do something to help. Those appeals for help — plastered with photos of saffron flames or the charcoal aftermath or, most of all, the faces of the people at the center of the plea — are personalizing a tragedy too big to comprehend.
“I feel connected in a strange way to all these people that I don’t know,” says Rachel Davies, a 27-year-old writer in New York, who went through hundreds of GoFundMe’s wildfire campaigns and felt drawn into stories of strangers, donating to fundraisers for landscapers, housekeepers, and a cook.
Davies was moved by the little details of victims’ stories — like the fact that someone lost their home just as they were bringing a baby home from the hospital — and compiled and circulated a list of GoFundMe sites, thinking others would feel the same and be spurred to donate.
“Those stories,” Davies says, “will stick with me.”
They’re offering glimpses into lives you might never see
The pages feel intimate. They serve up glimpses into the lives of a compassionate nurse or a goofy driver, and into the things they lost — be it a prized sneaker collection or the tools they counted on for work. Here, each is not some faraway, faceless victim. They’re Todd Ulli or Susan.
“People can look for someone they see as the ideal victim for them,” says Amy Pason, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has studied social movements and teaches a class on persuasion.
In an era of constant connection, on-demand expectations, pinpointed preferences and endless customization, browsability and tailoring are second nature. Why not for disaster relief, too?
Plus, Pason says, it feels to many like a “more authentic” way to give.
In a statement, GoFundMe says thousands of fundraisers have been launched in connection with the fires, including its own Wildfire Relief Fund, which has already garnered about 30,000 donations. All told the campaigns have already raised more than $100 million for wildfire victims.
Ella Marx, a 26-year-old social worker in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is among those who chipped in. She came across an appeal from a woman who said the houses of her grandmother and three aunts were all destroyed by the fire in Eaton, California. She quickly donated $20.
Marx finds herself donating to GoFundMe campaigns every month or so. She likes them because she doesn’t have faith in the government to help victims and doesn’t like the constraints that nonprofits might put on recipients of aid. Plus, she likes the feeling of knowing who she’s donating to.
“I think it does personalize it a little more,” she says.
Stories that can touch many
Scrolling through GoFundMe’s pages, there is something to pull at nearly anyone’s heartstrings. It is a veritable catalog of grief.
Runners might be drawn to a campaign organized by the Pasadena Pacers, which posted photos of members who lost homes on happier days, on a favorite trail, or sporting a race-day medal. Rabbit lovers can flock to an appeal for The Bunny Museum, which paid tribute to the fluffy-tailed animal through its collection of tens of thousands of items, now all gone. A bar, a coffee shop, a mosque, a school — all are among the places left in ashes by the fire andare now the subject of campaigns to bring them back.
Matthew Wade, a sociologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who has researched GoFundMe, says donors are drawn to the immediate gratification of their gift and the ability to follow along as their beneficiaries recover from tragedy.
“A concrete action,” he says, “in these otherwise helpless moments.”
But while some crowdfunded fundraisers result in a massive response, Wade says many raise little or nothing. Only the most uniquely compelling stories manage to garner a fickle public’s attention, he says, reinforcing existing inequalities.
“Social crowdfunding platforms are effectively markets for sympathy, where the crowd weighs claims to moral worthiness,” Wade said in an email interview.
But John Dent, who created a GoFundMe page for his cousin’s family, who lost their home in Altadena, California, remains in awe of the generosity his campaign elicited. His relatives had initially rebuffed the idea of the fundraiser but were left in tears by the response of more than $22,000 so far.
“It’s just been so powerful,” says Dent, a 52-year-old teacher from Goleta, California. “These are often people that have no clue who they are.”