What the Los Angeles and Palisades Fires Say About Public Attitude Toward Fire Preparedness

What the Los Angeles and Palisades Fires Say About Public Attitude Toward Fire Preparedness

By Ted Rosenthal

In January 2025, the Palisades Fire tore through the hills above Los Angeles, reducing thousands of structures to ash. Entire neighborhoods, built decades before the implications of wildfire vulnerability were fully understood, were gone within hours. What made the disaster so devastating wasn’t the wind or drought, but the accumulation of small failures in policy, enforcement, and community preparedness. Untreated vegetation, homes without ember-resistant features, and years of delayed prescribed burns aggregated into what was a human failure in many regards. 

Understanding how we got here and treasuring our mistakes is the first step toward a better future. 

A disaster caused by decades of half-measures

California has defensible space laws on the books. It has building codes for wildland-urban interface construction. It even has a prescribed burn program. The problem is that almost none of these were functioning at the scale or urgency they required when the fires ignited.

Defensible space is a prime example. State law requires property owners to clear a 100-foot buffer around their homes, with a near-zero ember zone in the first five feet and more aggressive clearing from five to thirty feet out. In practice, enforcement has been spotty at best. Many homeowners weren't even aware of the specific requirements, let alone actively maintaining them. The policy language itself was vague: "fuels shall be maintained so that a wildfire would be unlikely to ignite the structure" was regarded as a suggestion.

California's Chapter 7A building code, passed in 2008, mandates ignition-resistant construction for new homes in fire-prone areas. Structures built to this code are measurably safer: research shows they're 22–40% less likely to burn during a wildfire (CBC Ch. 7A). The vast majority of homes in the Palisades, however, were built long before 2008, and there is no law or incentive compelling owners of older structures to retrofit. 

No prescribed burns were carried out by the U.S. Forest Service in fall 2024, allowing dry vegetation to accumulate into perfect fuel for disaster.

Perhaps the most preventable failure contributing to the disaster: the absence of prescribed burns. Controlled burns have been used in America for thousands of years and are one of the most effective tools for reducing wildland fuel loads. When done in the right window — typically late spring or early fall — they create burn scars that can slow or stop a wildfire in its tracks. In June 2024, a prescribed burn near Angelus Oaks did exactly that, helping firefighters contain a September wildfire before it reached the community. But no burns were carried out in the fall of 2024. By January 2025, dry vegetation had accumulated to dangerous levels across the Los Angeles basin, and the Santa Ana winds did the rest.

Controlled burns stall because they require coordination across agencies, liability waivers, air quality permits, and favorable weather windows. Even when all conditions align, a single complaint from a neighboring jurisdiction can halt the process. Advocates argue that the regulatory overhead has made prescribed burning far less common than it needs to be, especially as climate change tightens the viable windows for safe burns.

Policy levers that can change the outcome

1. Expand prescribed burning programs

Los Angeles and surrounding counties need to dramatically increase the pace and scale of prescribed burns, with streamlined permitting and coordination between agencies. The San Francisco Bay Area has successfully been using this tool since the 1970s, and Southern California needs to catch up. Clearing even a fraction of the accumulated dry brush could make the difference between a manageable wildfire and a catastrophe.

2. Strengthen defensible space enforcement

The 100 ft requirement is a sound idea that needs clearer standards, better outreach, and genuine enforcement. Research by fire engineer Vytenis Babrauskas confirms that fire damage decreases significantly when defensible space exceeds 100 feet and when less combustible vegetation is used in landscaping. Los Angeles County should consider expanding minimum clearance requirements in high-risk zones and coupling them with subsidized compliance assistance for lower-income homeowners.

3. Incentivize retrofitting older homes

Chapter 7A only applies to new construction. A retrofit incentive program (tax credits, low-interest loans, or direct subsidies) could help homeowners upgrade vents, roofs, and exterior cladding on older structures. Banning wooden roofs, as some jurisdiction has done in high-risk zones, would be a strong starting point to make infrastructure less vulnerable. 

4. Community-level wildfire preparedness plans

Neighborhoods in high-risk zones need their own wildfire plans: evacuation routes, communication trees, shared resources, and designated fire-safe zones. Bay Area cities have built neighborhood emergency response teams that have proven effective. This model should be scaled and funded across Southern California, with city council fire preparedness meetings as a regular community touchpoint.

5. Address the climate accelerant

Research published in Urban Climate in 2025 pointed directly to rising average temperatures and depleted soil moisture as key drivers of the Palisades fire's intensity. Any serious wildfire strategy has to include a climate strategy. Cities and counties can lead through investments in public transit, emissions caps on local businesses, and sustainable rebuilding standards.

Preparedness is everyone’s problem, not just the government

Policy is necessary. Enforcement is necessary. But the fires also exposed something that laws alone can't fix: a widespread lack of cultural urgency around wildfire risk. Many residents in the Palisades had lived there for years without thinking seriously about defensible space or evacuation plans. This is a predictable outcome of inadequate public education and a sense that it probably won't happen here. 

Changing that requires investment in awareness. Public education campaigns, printed materials, neighborhood events that help residents clear brush together. These strategies work. The communities that survived the fires best were the ones that had already discussed, planned, and taken action as necessary when the wildfire was at their doorstep. 

Los Angeles is not done with fire. Neither is the Bay Area, the Central Valley, or the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The 2025 fires gave us clarity about what needs to change, and evidence that the right interventions actually work. 

You might be wondering what you can do to address these concerns. Inform yourself! Inform yourself and share your knowledge with your community. The main goal now is for these strategies to enter public conscience, and for the sense of urgency to outlast the news cycle.