In a state that averages more than 7,500 wildfires a year some California homeowners keep helmets and fire hoses handy.
However, the Los Angeles fires demonstrate a new reality: Wildfires in the state are growing larger and more ferocious and burning into suburbs and cities more often, experts told USA TODAY.
“We really are dealing with a new wildfire paradigm,” said Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire expert with the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.
People are used to thinking of fire in terms of either structure fires or wildfires in rural areas, but in recent decades, the lines have blurred. More intense wildfires burn into neighborhoods where flames quickly spread from cars and homes, Kearns said. “That becomes “a very, very different kind of fire to fight, and also a very difficult kind of fire to fight.”
Since 2014, the 10-year average number of acres burned by wildfires each year in California.
The highest speed Santa Ana winds usually are isolated to the mountains, but this time unusually powerful winds expanded across the area, said Kristan Lund, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Los Angeles. Observations of 80-100 mph winds were reported from the foothills of Altadena and across the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley, both areas usually only minimally affected by the Sana Anas.
To make things worse, the drought and high temperatures followed two very wet years that promoted plant growth in the surrounding chaparral and coastal sage scrub, said Glen MacDonald, a professor of geography at University of California Los Angeles. All that extra plant growth had time to really dry out, leaving it primed to burn.
When the high-velocity winds arrived, all it took was a spark in just the wrong place, MacDonald said, and “a perfect fire storm” drove the fire into the Palisades. Flames raced westward until the fire reached the Pacific.
