Here’s how we can stop LA firestorms from happening again

By Chad Hanson, especially for CalMatters

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One year ago in early January, the Eaton and Palisades fires devastated the communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Driven by extremely dry, warm and powerful winds, the fires destroyed more than 10,000 homes and claimed at least 31 lives.

How can we be sure it won’t happen again?

The good news is that science has a clear answer: The only effective way to protect homes and lives from wildfires is enforcement direct measures to create fire-safe communities — including home hardening, protected space pruning near homes and businesses, and evacuation planning and assistance.

This community-based approach has been very successful in saving cities from firestorms.

Importantly, evidence also shows that removing and managing vegetation beyond 100 feet of homes and other structures provides with no additional safety benefit.

More bad news: state and federal politicians from both parties are supporting the wrong things.

At the state level, only 2% of all wildland fire funding is allocated to proven community fire-safe measures, while the remaining 98% is is spent inefficiently, mostly on wilderness activitiessuch as logging and removal of chaparral away from homes.

And at the federal level, there are no requirements that wildfire funds be spent on community fire prevention measures. The Infrastructure Act 2021 includes hollow language about protecting the community from wildfires, but focuses on logging into the “urban-wilderness interface.”

Not only does the law ignore many at-risk communities that aren’t near forests — like Altadena and Pacific Palisades — but it also defines the urban-wilderness interface so broadly that it allows logging on public lands miles from the nearest home.

Even after the massive loss of homes and lives in the Eaton and Palisades fires, Congress’s response so far has been the so-called “Our Forests Act,” proposed legislation currently in the Senate that would repeal environmental laws to accelerate taxpayer-subsidized logging of mature rural trees and clear-cutting on public lands—in the name of wildfire management.

More than 100 environmental groups are adamantly opposed it. Disturbingly and ironically, the act would removing the environmental analysis itself which would inform land managers about whether a particular logging or chaparral removal project would worsen wildfires and increase threats to nearby communities.

This is not just an academic concern. Many of the US Forest Service’s own scientists are sounding the alarm as evidence mounts that “thinning” and other logging activities are eroding the natural wind protection that denser forests have. causing fires to spread much faster and more intensely.

This means fires can reach cities faster, giving people less time to safely evacuate and first responders less time to arrive and help.

Likewise, an abundance of science shows that removing chaparral—natural shrub habitat—in the name of reducing wildfires tends to turn landscapes into much more flammable, invasive grasslandswhich could carry the flames more quickly to nearby homes and businesses in Southern California.

like warned hundreds of scientistsrecent wildfires have gone through large areas of “thinned” forests and “fuel breakthroughs”, burning entire communities.

The truth is that most people do not have the knowledge or resources to make their homes and communities fire safe. Many people need help. Elected officials—Democrats and Republicans—must change course. Rather than progressing legislation that satisfies timber industry campaigners, they should prioritize measures that directly help create fire-safe communities. Otherwise, the devastation of January 2025 is almost guaranteed to happen again.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.