Los Angeles didn’t just burn because it was hot and dry. It burned where systems meet—at the windowpane, the five‑foot ring around a house, the last mile of a power line, the capacity of a hydrant, the timing of a storm. If we fix the interfaces, we change the outcome

On a January night in Los Angeles, a house can catch fire before the flames arrive. The window cracks first. Heat radiates across a small yard, the outer glass shatters, and embers ride a 70‑mile‑an‑hour wind through the tear. The fire starts inside. From the street, it looks like the house decided to combust on its own. A week later, you walk the block: one home is ash, the next is fine. The difference is not a grand climate policy. It’s the window, and what sat within five feet of it.

January 2025 was supposed to be the sleepy season—the time when the Pacific restores everyone’s confidence that winter still means rain. Instead, L.A. went 24 days with fire as the main character. Fourteen major blazes, ~57,000 acres burned, more than 18,000 structures damaged or destroyed, 29 direct deaths (and hundreds more when you count smoke and indirect causes). By some estimates, the cost sits somewhere between “this will take years” and “this changed the insurance market.”

We all reached for the obvious storyline—climate change, incompetence, arson—because it’s clean. But the pattern on the ground was messier and, I think, more useful. The fires exploited seams: the places where our systems hand off responsibility. When those seams fail, wind becomes a search engine for weakness.

This essay is about those seams, and what to do next—not someday, but Tuesday.

Fire season used to have manners when I had first moved to Los Angeles. Summer would dry the hills, fall would bring the Santa Anas, and winter rains would shove the whole thing off the stage. That script failed. From October through early January, Los Angeles got about 4% of normal precipitation. Then a “particularly dangerous” Santa Ana event arrived with gusts measured in the 60–100 mph range. The air hit single‑digit humidity. A match didn’t need to be struck; infrastructure and chance could handle ignition at scale.

Two facts help frame the problem. First, January wildfire activity around L.A. was an outlier—think “130× the usual satellite fire alerts” levels of weird. Second, even without trends, these Santa Ana set‑ups happen; what changed was the background state of the fuels and timing. We had winter on the calendar but August in the grass.

It’s tempting to outsource this entire story to climate. Don’t. Climate is the field tilt, not the ball. In 2025, warming likely extended the dry window and made the fire weather more probable. But even if you could flip a switch and cool the globe, Los Angeles would still be building in canyons, still stringing power lines across brush, still asking hydrants to do jobs they weren’t built for. The system would remain primed for a bad wind day—just fewer of them. That’s not nothing, but it’s not everything.

If you squint at the burn map, you can see where the city made itself easy to hurt.

1) The disappeared buffers. Fifty years ago you could find orchards at the foot of the San Gabriels—wet edges that stole energy from a flame front. Now the fruit is gone, and stucco is the fuel of choice. Where Eaton Canyon meets Altadena and Pasadena, the wildland touches fences. We didn’t just expand—we erased the pause between mountain and house. Fires love that.

2) The five‑foot rule. The most important real estate in a fire is not the glamorous hillside view or the hundred‑foot defensible space. It’s the “Zone 0” against the wall: the first five feet. That’s where embers land and convert a windy day into your personal disaster—mulch, a wooden fence tied into the siding, a hedge that kissed the window. Take photos after a fire and the pattern is obvious: the houses that lived were boring at five feet. Gravel, stucco, clean gutters, ember‑resistant vents. Not perfect, just boring.

3) The glass problem. Siding in L.A. is often pretty good (stucco doesn’t mind heat), but single‑pane windows and vinyl frames are Achilles’ heels. Radiant heat breaks glass; embers do the rest. Dual‑pane tempered units fail gracefully—they crack but keep integrity long enough to ride out an ember shower. In block‑by‑block comparisons this winter, upgraded windows correlated with survival in situations where the neighboring house failed. Again: an interface. Inside/outside.

4) The grid as a matchbook. On wind days, the last mile of the electrical system becomes a roulette wheel. If a conductor slaps a branch, or a pole hardware fails, dry grass converts sparks into headlines. Utilities know this; Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) exist for a reason. But the January event was so large and so urban that “turn it all off” wasn’t practical. Undergrounding is slow, expensive, and deeply rational in the worst corridors. We’ve been under‑investing in that rationality.

5) Hydrants are for kitchens. When a dozen engines open nozzles on the same small grid, pressure drops. Videos of crews “using handbags” ricocheted around social networks; the reality was more prosaic and more revealing: water systems in cities are designed for a few structure fires, not a wind‑driven wildland siege. You can’t shame a hydrant into being a tender. You have to pre‑position water or move it deliberately. Systems engineering, not vibes.

6) The human bandwidth limit. A chief said the quiet part loud: there are not enough firefighters in the county to handle a dozen major incidents at once. That’s not dereliction; that’s math. In the first hours of a wind event, triage beats heroics. Evacuate. Hold key lines. Survive until weather changes or reinforcements arrive. Many of the people yelling “why wasn’t there a truck on my street?” misunderstand fire behavior under a Santa Ana. The fire chooses the tempo. We can only choose where to stand

After a disaster, myths do what fire does: they spread along the easiest fuel. Four stood out:

“Climate did this, full stop.” Climate raised the odds and extended the window; it didn’t decide where you planted bougainvillea or whether your eaves had 1/8‑inch mesh. The policy lever for climate is decades long. The lever for your five feet is a weekend. Both matter; only one is yours to pull today.
“If only the firefighters…” They were on it. Pre‑positioned, then overwhelmed. Aircraft grounded by wind. Engines leapfrogging to protect life. It’s insulting to frame a tornado as a management problem. The better question is whether we’ve funded the right kind of capacity for a year‑round fire region (yes, even in January).
“Arsonists.” There were many ignition points, most explainable by wind and infrastructure. A coordinated arson theory makes good television and bad planning. The harder work is line hardening, selective undergrounding, and smarter shut‑off rules.
“Harden everything and nothing burns.” Upgrades shift probabilities; they don’t grant immunity. On a 100‑mph ember day with no resources available, even a well‑hardened home can go if a small flame gets a long tenure. The ROI is still fantastic. The goal is not perfection; it’s to shrink the cone of bad outcomes.

Every myth protects someone from work. The trick is to replace blame with a checklist.

The Narrow Bottlenecks That Decide Whole Neighborhoods

A city is a set of bottlenecks pretending to be a skyline. In January, a few bottlenecks told the tale.

Windows. If you can only afford one big retrofit, this is shockingly high on the list. In post‑fire walkthroughs, you keep hearing the same story: “We lost the glass before we saw flames.” Dual‑pane tempered isn’t cheap, but losing a house isn’t either. If you’re in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, the upgrade is not a luxury. It’s a gatekeeper.

Zone 0. The five‑foot halo is a culture war disguised as landscaping advice. People love plants that touch the house; it looks finished. Ember physics doesn’t care about your aesthetic. Gravel, pavers, bare soil, concrete—these are the couture of a home you want to see next week. Think of Zone 0 as a fuse you can remove.

Fences and decks. If your wooden fence ties into your siding, you built a wick. Break it with a two‑foot noncombustible section next to the house. Consider metal gate inserts. For decks, anything that can catch a wind‑driven coal is suspect. Box the underside, screen the gaps, clean the debris. Small carpentry, large effect.

Vents and gutters. It’s hard to love mesh sizes until you smell smoke at noon. 1/8‑inch ember‑resistant vents and clean gutters are boring in photos and heroic in wildfires. Assume every horizontal surface will be seeded with coals. Remove the kindling now.

Neighborhood water. Firewise communities that pre‑position portable tanks or know where to draft (pools, cisterns) give engines options when pressure sags. This is a conversation to have with your water district before the wind day, not during. Ask them to show you the weakest nodes under peak draw. If they can’t, you’ve found your next meeting agenda.

Egress. Canyon roads plus mass evacuation equals gridlock equals blocked fire access. This is a planning failure that turns into a personal emergency. If your neighborhood has one way out, treat drills and car‑to‑car discipline as seriously as you treat your kid’s first car seat. Communities that practice get out faster. Fire gets less time with your block.

What Everyone Missed

A few uncomfortable ideas fell between the cracks of the discourse:

Winter as a false safe word. Everyone plans emotionally around “fire season,” which is a calendar story. 2025 is a systems story: fire season is whenever fuels are cured and winds align. If October–December act like July, January is eligible. Change your staffing, maintenance, and homeowner calendars accordingly. Weed abatement in November suddenly matters a lot. So does having your go‑bag ready on New Year’s Day.

Hydrant math is policy. The water system performed like it was designed to perform. That’s the problem. If mega‑urban wildfires are now a category, we need wildland‑urban water thinking: auxiliary tanks at the interface, portable pump caches, pre‑planned drafting sites, and hydrant grids stress‑tested for multi‑engine draw during wind events. Water design is wildfire policy in slow motion.

Orchards are infrastructure. We let buffers convert into cul‑de‑sacs. There’s a case for strategic buyouts in the hair‑on‑fire canyons and rebuilding greenbelts as literal firebreaks—irrigated, maintained, maybe multi‑use parks by day and defensive lines by night. It sounds radical until you price the 2025 losses: tens of billions in direct property damage, and years of knock‑on effects. We keep choosing the expensive option.

PSPS politics is avoidance. Shutoffs are blunt, hated, and sometimes the right answer. The alternative is a long capital program to underground or harden the half‑percent of line miles that create a huge share of the risk. We treat this as a “someday” project. Winter 2025 argues for a list, a budget, and a five‑year clock. Pick the corridors where a spark becomes a headline. Spend there first.

Insurance as regulator of last resort. When insurers retreat or spike premiums, they are not being mean; they’re pricing the part we ignored. In practice, this forces retrofits and land‑use decisions more efficiently than law. The danger is inequity. The opportunity is to tie affordability to mitigation: lower rates for Zone 0, window upgrades, ember‑resistant vents. If we don’t, the market will do redlining by topography

Some moves are policy. Some are personal. Both start now.

For households (this month):

Walk the ring. Five feet around your home: remove anything that can burn. Mulch is future ash. Wood fence touching siding? Break the connection with a noncombustible insert. Potted plants? Move them. It will feel empty. That’s the point.
Glass audit. Identify the weakest windows and doors. If you can’t replace them all, triage: biggest panes, bedrooms, and faces to likely fire approach first. Keep the old frames if budget demands; prioritize tempered dual‑pane glass.
Gutters and vents. Clean them. Screen them. Put “clean again” on your calendar for the day before the next red‑flag forecast. This is tedious. It also works.
Ladder fuels. Trim the shrubs that would carry a flame to eaves. Think of fire as a climber and take away the holds.
Go‑bag at the door. Assume January counts now. Update meds, hard drives, masks for smoke. Practice opening your garage manually. You’ll feel silly. Then grateful.

For neighborhoods (this quarter):

Map your bottlenecks. Where will cars jam? Where is pressure lowest? Who has a pool you can draft? Which cul‑de‑sacs trap heat and ember rain? Draw it. Plan around it.
Form a Fire Safe group. One motivated neighbor can move a block. Set up chipper days. Bulk‑buy vents. Share a contractor list for window retrofits. The social proof matters more than the brochure.
Drill egress. Pick a Saturday. Drive it as if the canyon is smoky. Time it. Compare notes. Decide who checks on whom. The first time you do this should not be at 1 a.m. with sirens.

For cities and agencies (this year):

Treat January as in‑season. Staff year‑round. Pre‑position resources for winter wind events. Align weed abatement schedules with the new reality, not the old calendar.
Upgrade the hydrant playbook. Add portable tanks at the interface. Stage tenders and pumps at known low‑pressure nodes on red‑flag days. Test the grid under simulated fire draw, not lab assumptions. Publish the weak points; fix them.
Codify Zone 0 for existing homes. New construction rules help in 2050. The risk is the legacy stock. Tie compliance to point‑of‑sale or insurance discounts. If you can, help pay for it—grants beat mandates in neighborhoods on the edge.
Prioritize the riskiest line miles. Build a ranked list for undergrounding/hardening where wind + fuel + consequence multiplies. Do those first. The rest can wait. The math won’t.
Design for egress. No new subdivisions with single‑exit geometry in Very High zones. Where that pattern already exists, invest in secondary access, signal control plans, and resident drills. Road width is a fire tool.
Greenbelts as firebreaks. Start the hard conversation about buyouts in the hairiest canyons and re‑establish buffers that double as parks. The money is scary until you put it next to the 2025 bill.

The Economics of Not Burning

We talk about wildfire in the language of nature, but the ledgers are human. The 2025 fires left economic losses in the tens of billions—property, output, jobs—plus a shadow invoice for health and displacement. That’s before you count the multi‑year drag from an insurance market that was already wobbling. The spending we avoid upfront (windows, Zone 0, corridors of undergrounded line, greenbelts) comes due with interest after a wind day. A city can amortize safety or compound loss. It’s the same money either way—just different timing and morale.

There’s a second ledger: trust. If residents believe the alert system will reach them, if they know which road will be open, if they’ve watched a hydrant deliver when it matters, the panic curve flattens. Panic is expensive. So is cynicism. Both are preventable.

The Limits of Heroics

You can learn a lot from how professionals talk about bad days. Ask firefighters what worked in January and they’ll tell you: triage, pre‑staging, and a hundred small saves that don’t make the news. Ask what didn’t and the list gets systemic: weather grounded aircraft, water systems sagged, simultaneous starts outpaced human bandwidth, evacuations choked on roads designed for a sunny Sunday. None of this is a knock on the people in yellow. If anything, it argues for changing the playing field so their work has leverage.

We have a cultural habit of assuming that if only we were braver or faster, we’d beat physics. Wind events don’t care. The right question is: where does one dollar or one hour convert into the most avoided ash? The answers are not glamorous. They rarely involve a ribbon‑cutting. They look like gravel, tempered glass, metal mesh, a second exit lane, a shut‑off at the right moment, and an orchard where a cul‑de‑sac wanted to be.

A Different Kind of Resilience

Resilience is a word that dies of overuse, but it’s handy here. Not the poster— the practice.

Make the invisible visible. Draw the five‑foot zone in chalk. Label the weak windows. Mark the fence break. Tape a map of drafting sites to the firehouse fridge. Publish the low‑pressure hydrants. Nothing changes until the seam is seen.
Change the default. Zone 0 by default. Tempered glass by default. Ember‑resistant vents by default. Secondary egress by default. Undergrounding where the risk math screams. Defaults are quiet revolutions.
Practice out of season. Do the things in November, not August. When January pretends to be July, you’ll be early instead of late.
Pay for the boring stuff. Budgets love novelty; fires love neglect. Shift money to the unphotogenic line items that decide outcomes. You will not go viral. You will sleep better.

What surprised me most this winter was not the intensity. It was the specificity. A whole region burned, yet the differences that saved homes were shockingly small. Five feet. A pane. A fence detail. A vent screen. The story is not “nothing could be done.” It’s “we did the big things and skipped the small ones, and the fire slipped through.”

There’s humility in that. It means we don’t wait on a legislature to rescue us. We walk outside and start. It also means we can hold two thoughts at once: yes, emissions and policy and markets; and yes, gravel and tempered glass and a gap in the fence. The second set doesn’t trivialize the first. It operationalizes it.

Los Angeles is a coastal desert city. We keep forgetting the desert part. January reminded us. The next reminder is already on the calendar; we just don’t know which month it borrowed. The question isn’t whether that calendar is fair. It’s whether our seams will be.

[This article was originally published in Nat Wittasek’s Substack.]

Seen something similar where you live—good or bad? If this changed how you think about risk at home, visit my Substack, subscribe and reply with your best micro‑fix. I read every note.

Notes & Sources

Primary analysis synthesized from: “Why Los Angeles Burned: Analyzing the Causes of the 2025 Wildfires and Assigning Responsibility” (2025)—a comprehensive review of the January fires covering weather and drought, climate context, WUI exposure, home‑hardening evidence (windows, vents, Zone 0), fire response constraints, ignition sources (especially electrical), water‑system limitations, and economic loss estimates. This essay draws on its data and case details throughout.

Method and framing informed by “Appendix A: Detailed Instructions and Examples”—on using specific anecdotes, quantifying risk, and privileging practical interfaces over generalities.

Selected references cited within the source paper (non‑exhaustive, listed here for reader orientation; no hyperlinks):

World Weather Attribution (2025). Climate change increased the likelihood of wildfire disaster in highly exposed Los Angeles area.
World Resources Institute (2025). Four Graphics Explain Los Angeles’ Rare and Devastating January Fires.
University of California / Keeley, J. (2025). How Santa Ana winds fueled the deadly fires in Southern California.
LA Economic Development Corporation (2025). Impact of the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires.
UC ANR Fire Network / Senate NR&W (2025). Lessons from the 2025 LA Fires (home ignition: windows, vents, Zone 0).
IBHS (2025). 2025 LA County Wildfires—Early Insights (building performance).
AP News live updates and after‑action press materials (Jan 13, 2025) on deployment scale and operational challenges.
L.A. County After‑Action Review materials on alerts and evacuations (2025).
NOAA NCEI (2025). Assessing the U.S. Climate in January 2025.

Acknowledgment: Any errors of emphasis are mine. If you lived through these fires and your block tells a different story, please reach out to me via my Substack.