The Night the Wind Won
Picture this. It's January 7, 2025. You're on Engine 27 in Pacific Palisades. The Santa Ana winds are screaming through the canyons at 100 miles per hour. Not gusting — sustained. Your rig is rocking on its springs. And then the calls start stacking. Five, ten, fifty structure fires in the first hour. You can't get to them. Nobody can.
That was the reality for roughly 3,400 LAFD firefighters facing the worst urban firestorm in modern American history. The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire ignited nearly simultaneously, driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds that turned neighborhoods into blowtorches. By the time the smoke cleared, 31 people were dead — 19 in the Eaton Fire, 12 in the Palisades Fire. More than 16,000 structures were ash. Over 38,000 acres burned. And 200,000 residents had been evacuated from their homes.
One year later, I drove through both burn scars. About two-thirds of those destroyed lots are still empty. Bare foundations. Charred trees. Chain-link fencing around nothing. A year later, and the city is nowhere close to rebuilt.
So what did we learn? And more importantly — what are we doing about it?
The Numbers That Should Keep Every Chief Up at Night
Let's lay it out plain. The insured losses from the LA fires topped $40 billion. The debris removal alone involved 2.5 million tons of wreckage — twice the volume of debris from Ground Zero after 9/11. Think about that. Twice.
The LAFD after-action report confirmed what we all suspected: crews worked 36 hours straight without rehab. No food. No rest. No rotation. That's not heroism. That's a system that failed its people before the first ember landed.
And here's the part that makes my blood boil. The LAFD budget had been cut by $17.6 million before the fires hit. We had about 3,400 firefighters covering the second-largest city in America. You do the math. When you cut the budget, you cut response. When you cut response, people die.
I'm not pointing fingers at any one person. This is systemic. It's a pattern we see in departments across the country. Budgets get trimmed in quiet years, and then a disaster exposes every gap we papered over.
Mutual Aid Saved Lives — But It Has Limits
The mutual aid response was massive. Engines rolled in from across California, from neighboring states, from departments that stripped their own coverage to help LA. That's who we are. That's what we do.
But mutual aid is not a substitute for adequate staffing. It takes time for resources to mobilize. The first 30 minutes of the Palisades Fire were absolute chaos — and those are the minutes that determine whether a neighborhood survives or burns to the ground.
Every fire chief in this country should be looking at their mutual aid agreements right now. Are they current? Are they tested? Do your dispatchers know how to activate them at 2 AM on a holiday weekend? If you're relying on mutual aid as your primary surge capacity, you're already behind.
What We Need to Fix
- Pre-positioned resources during red flag warnings. We know when the Santa Anas are coming. We have days of advance notice. Departments need to staff up and stage resources before the winds hit, not after the first structure is fully involved.
- Realistic evacuation planning. 200,000 people trying to evacuate on canyon roads during a windstorm is a recipe for mass casualties. We got lucky the death toll wasn't ten times higher. Evacuation routes need to be tested, publicized, and drilled.
- Crew welfare as an operational priority. Thirty-six hours without rehab isn't a badge of honor. It's a liability. Fatigued firefighters make mistakes. Mistakes get people killed. We need mandatory rest rotations built into our incident management, not as an afterthought.
The Wildland-Urban Interface Isn't Going Away
Here's the uncomfortable truth. We keep building in the wildland-urban interface. We keep putting homes in canyons lined with chaparral that hasn't burned in decades. And then we act surprised when the fire comes.
If you're a wildland firefighter, you already know this. The WUI is expanding. More people, more structures, more exposure. The LA fires weren't an anomaly. They were a preview.
The Palisades neighborhood had burned before — in 1961, in 1978, in 2019. The vegetation grows back. The wind patterns don't change. The only variable is how many homes we've crammed into the fire's path since the last time.
Defensible Space: Still Our Best Tool
Every structure fire starts as a wildland fire until it reaches a structure. Defensible space — that 100-foot buffer of cleared vegetation around a home — remains the single most effective tool we have. It gives us room to work. It gives the structure a fighting chance.
But enforcement is inconsistent, and compliance is spotty. After the LA fires, California tightened its defensible space requirements. Other states should be watching closely and following suit.
Staffing Is the Real Story
Every lesson from the LA fires circles back to one thing: people. We need more firefighters. We need them trained, equipped, and rested.
LAFD's roughly 3,400 firefighters serve a city of nearly four million people. When two major fires ignite simultaneously with 100-mph winds, that force gets overwhelmed immediately. It's not a question of skill or courage. It's physics. You can't be in two places at once.
The national staffing conversation has to change. For years, we've been told to do more with less. We've gotten creative. We've cross-trained. We've leaned on volunteers and mutual aid. But there's a floor below which you simply cannot provide adequate fire protection, and the LA firestorm showed us exactly where that floor is.
If you're considering a career in the fire service, we need you. Seriously. Start the process today. The job is harder than it's ever been, and the stakes are higher than they've ever been. But there's no better work on this earth.
Climate, Risk, and the New Normal
I'm a firefighter, not a climate scientist. But I can tell you what I see on the ground. The fires are bigger. The winds are stronger. The droughts are longer. The seasons are less predictable.
We used to talk about "fire season." Now it's fire year. The LA fires hit in January — traditionally the wet season in Southern California. But there was no wet season. The vegetation was bone-dry. The humidity was in single digits. And the winds did the rest.
Our planning models, our resource allocation formulas, our staffing levels — they're all built on historical data that no longer reflects reality. We need to plan for the fire environment we have, not the one we had twenty years ago.
The Rebuild: Lessons or Repeat?
One year out, the big question is whether LA — and the rest of the country — will actually learn from this. The early signs are mixed.
On the positive side, there's been real movement on building codes. Ignition-resistant construction, enclosed eaves, tempered glass, Class A roofing — these measures work. Communities that adopted them before the fire saw dramatically better survival rates.
On the other side, the pressure to rebuild fast is enormous. Fast and safe don't always go together. If we rebuild the same structures in the same locations with the same vegetation management, we'll get the same result the next time the Santa Anas blow.
What You Can Do Right Now
Whether you're a probie or a 30-year veteran, the LA fires have lessons for all of us.
- Train for the worst case. Drill your department on simultaneous large-scale incidents. What happens when your mutual aid can't come because they're dealing with their own fires?
- Push for adequate staffing. Go to your city council meetings. Bring the data. Make the case. Our communities deserve better than skeleton crews.
- Take care of your people. Mandatory rehab. Mental health support. PTSD screening. The crews who worked the LA fires will carry those scars for the rest of their careers. Some will need professional help. Make sure they can get it.
- Talk to your community. Defensible space. Evacuation routes. Go bags. We can't fight our way out of a disaster this size. Prevention and preparedness are force multipliers.
We Owe Them Better
Thirty-one people died in the LA fires. Thousands more lost everything they had. And the firefighters who fought those fires — who dragged hose through neighborhoods that looked like war zones, who worked until they couldn't stand, who came home to their own families smelling like someone else's burned home — they did everything they could with what they had.
We owe it to them to make sure they have more next time. More staffing. More resources. More support. Because "next time" isn't a question of if. It's a question of when.
The wind will blow again. The question is whether we'll be ready.
Stay safe out there. And if you're thinking about joining our ranks, here's how to get started.