In early March, three months after wildfires tore through multiple Los Angeles-area communities, PBS aired a grim retrospective: Weathered: Inside the LA Firestorm (Season 6, Episode 4). Watch here.
Like many other fire survivors, I tuned in with high—if sometimes morbid—expectations.
Even now, four months later, the documentary remains visually striking and emotionally charged. It captures the chaos and devastation that consumed Eton Canyon, parts of nearby Altadena and much of my own coastal neighborhood, Pacific Palisades. PBS deserves special praise for spotlighting the unprecedented challenges posed by these overlapping catastrophes.
But as I noted in an early online critique, the film suffers from journalistic tics typical of television disaster coverage—chief among them, a failure to identify the locations of many of the terrifying images that flash across the screen. This free-floating montage makes it hard to draw coherent lessons from the footage, since every affected community faced distinct, site-specific risks and burdens.
The film briefly features a megadeveloper who famously hired private firefighters to defend his Palisades properties. But it never explores whether this self-serving operation may have drained already overtaxed public water supplies. Nor does it examine the troubling precedent that such privatized firefighting sets for public policy.
There’s also a passing reference to LAFD’S decision not to pre-position extra firefighting equipment in high-risk neighborhoods. But the film makes no real effort to sort through the logistical or moral implications of that call—a conversation future policymakers can’t afford to avoid.
To its credit, Weathered does identify several key “constants” of our new fire era: cyclonic winds, ember storms, highly combustible vegetation, tightly packed urban-wildland zones, and the deep desiccation of the landscape due to global warming. But the firefighting strategies discussed by on-screen experts often harken back to an earlier era—one increasingly out of step with the scale and speed of climate-fueled fires.
As I wrote shortly after the documentary aired: “I wanted to know, first and simply, how and why the recent fires were so uniquely destructive—and secondly and just as simply, what’s now needed to prevent replays.”
The film doesn’t answer those questions adequately. And this shortcoming only deepens the anxiety I’ve felt since the evacuation.
Heal thyself is usually sound advice. Over the past five months, I’ve tried. I’ve pored obsessively over every scrap of reporting and speculation I could find about the disaster, hoping to gain some insight into what upended my life and the lives of so many others.
As a former intelligence officer and longtime investigative journalist, I’m not one to leave any fire-blackened brick unturned.
My original critique of Weathered was a first attempt to fill in the gaps. What follows expands on that effort.
Whether it heals anything, I can’t say.
Apocalypse Awakening
In January 2025, Los Angeles faced the most destructive wildfire event in its modern history—a multiday inferno that erupted simultaneously across Pacific Palisades, and parts of Altadena north of Pasadena. Driven by fierce Santa Ana winds and months of record-dry conditions, the two main outbreaks, flanked by a dozen smaller regional fires, overwhelmed aging infrastructure, splintered interagency coordination, and rendered traditional disaster-response protocols nearly useless.
In Pacific Palisades alone, the blaze—fanned by gusts over 70 mph—killed at least 12 people, destroyed or damaged more than 6,800 structures, and forced over 100,000 residents to evacuate, including yours truly. What began on January 7 in a canyon above the ocean quickly metastasized into a regional emergency—a perfect storm of climate volatility, bureaucratic paralysis, and institutional unpreparedness.
Add the losses from the Eaton-Altadena blazes, and the full toll comes into ghastly focus: over 18,000 structures destroyed, 30 lives lost, more than 200,000 people displaced.
Many Angelenos, the luckier ones, watched the horror unfold on I-phones and TV screens: orange skies over the Palisades, ash coating parts of San Vincente Boulevard, evacuation orders racing up the 10 Freeway.
Embers from Eaton Canyon skittered into Altadena, torching homes within minutes. In the Palisades, flames leapt canyon ridges and forced evacuations down to the Pacific Coast Highway. Bungalows and mobile homes on Malibu’s outskirts were reduced to rubble in hours.
Concurrent mini-fires flared near Sylmar, West Hills, Castaic Lake, Acton, Hollywood Hills and Studio City, with the last wisps of smoke dissipating only at the end of the month.
This wasn’t one fire, but a cascading chain of them—what one expert later called “a five-alarm climate wake-up call.”
The lasting emotional shock from the two Mega-infernos reverberates through this sampling of soundbites from survivors —unfiltered, unadorned, still raw.
“The iconic Sunset Boulevard is now a slalom course of downed trees and burning husks of tree stumps spewing embers,” reported ABC News’ Matt Gutman in real time from the heart of the Palisades. “Houses on both sides are engulfed, making passage for first responders treacherous.”
“I keep calling his name, Victor, Victor,” lamented William Jackson of Altadena, remembering his neighbor. “He died with the water hose still in his hands.”
“You have embers coming down, the winds are whipping, you have smoke, you hear these explosions,” recalled Tanner Charles Schaaf, who helped a friend flee the Palisades. “The sound it would make – it’s just really loud. . . It felt like I was in a giant oven.”
“The wind was so bad I thought my car door would fly off,” said Lori Schlachter, an Altadena realtor. “It was apocalyptic outside. But there was never an evacuation order… We feel abandoned.”
“The smoke was so strong and it was pitch black with these whipping winds,” recalled Sigrid Rogers, an Altadena artist, who rescued her crippled husband. “I was barely able to get him up the ramp. The wheelchair weighs 400 pounds, and he weighs 175 pounds. I was so afraid.”
“Mars would be more habitable than this place right now. So, it’s crazy,” said Shaun, a Palisades Bowl resident, gazing at rubble. “There’s absolutely nothing… I’m sorry, this is really hard. I mean, people lost everything.”
“Most of my issues have been mental health issues,” said Donny Kincey, an Altadena schoolteacher. “I feel like I didn’t save anything.”
“For many of us, it was the worst exposure of our careers,” acknowledged Capt. Dave Marquez of the Pasadena Fire Department. “Everybody shared similar symptoms.”
“I was coughing up black stuff probably for about four days afterwards,” added Pasadena firefighter Kevin Adiar. “I couldn’t eat any food for the first day. I was just throwing up and I had to have oxygen on my face.”
“This is like being in a war zone where everything is destroyed,” said jazz legend Bennie Maupin, who lost dozens of instruments and irreplaceable memorabilia in the Altadena fire. “Some of them can be replaced. Some of them cannot… But I’m still alive.”
“You wake up one morning and everything is normal,” said Niki Rifkin of Pacific Palisades. “And you go to bed that night and you have nothing.”
“In a blind panic over the next few minutes, we grabbed what we could,” recalled Corby Gallegos, a high school drama teacher in Altadena. “We just had to make snap decisions.”
Later, standing in the ashes:
“All of our wedding pictures are gone. All of the things tied to the memory of our time in that house. The only reason I want to go back… is to offer gratitude to the space that sheltered us.”
“I went outside Tuesday, and I looked up and the moon was red. I mean it was red red,” remembered Walter Butler, 83, a former track star from Altadena. “The fire then jumped over the mountain, like a shot put… So, we left everything behind, hopped in the car and left.”
Then, surveying what was left:
“Gone. Like gone, gone, gone. I had a new Corvette Stingray… it didn’t exist, man. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Is this real? It can’t be, but I guess it is’.”
“When people say ‘It’s all replaceable,’ I think that is so inconsiderate,” said Jenny Yip, a Palisades psychologist and mother. “Because the truth is, it is not all replaceable.”
“I stepped onto the grounds and fell to my knees and I wailed,” remembered Billy Crystal, after surveying the ruins of his Palisades home. “I am also one of the hurting thousands, asking, ‘Have you seen my school? Have you seen my church? Have you seen my house? Have you seen my town? Have you seen the 29 people who lost their lives? Have you seen them?’”
Instant Blame Gaming
Even as embers swirled, the political fallout ignited.
LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley—just months into her new role—faced blistering criticism. On January 6, the National Weather Service had issued an unusually urgent warning: dangerous Santa Ana winds and red-flag conditions across Southern California. Yet internal LAFD records later obtained by The New York Times showed that only nine additional trucks were deployed citywide—none to the Palisades.
By January 13, an anonymous letter had begun circulating, reportedly signed by current and retired fire officials, accusing Crowley of failing to recall veteran commanders who could have offered experienced on-the-ground leadership. “While no one is saying this fire could have been stopped,” the letter read, “there is no doubt among all of us that if you had done things right… fatalities would have been reduced, and property would have been saved.”
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, tech mogul Elon Musk, and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong joined the chorus. Caruso, whose Palisades properties were shielded by privately hired firefighting crews, blasted his one-time political opponent, LA Mayor Karen Bass, for a “catastrophic failure of planning.” Soon-Shiong pointed to an internal memo from Crowley warning that $7.9 million in budget cuts—including reductions to firefighter overtime—had “severely limited” the department’s emergency response capacity.
Patrick Butler, a former LAFD assistant chief now heading the Redondo Beach fire department, was blunt: “It’s unfathomable to me how this happened, except for extreme incompetence and no understanding of fire operations,” he told The New York Times.
Myths and Misinformation
Where accountability lagged, conspiracy theories abounded.
Some online commentators falsely claimed that billionaire water barons Stewart and Lynda Resnick had “seized control” of California’s reservoirs. Others floated the idea that the shutdown of the Santa Ynez Reservoir—key to Palisades water delivery—was part of a backdoor real estate grab. Anti-Semitic tropes soon followed.
President-elect Donald Trump and his VP pick, J.D. Vance, got in on the act, accusing California of “hoarding water” and blaming environmental regulations for hamstringing fire crews.
Governor Gavin Newsom dismissed these claims as both cynical and uninformed. The real issue, he explained, wasn’t water scarcity but outdated infrastructure incapable of handling climate-era fires.
“Southern California’s water supplies are well-equipped to support local communities fighting the wildfires,” he wrote online January 9. “Urban water systems are built for structure fires and fire suppression, not hurricane-force firestorms.” What exhausted the water supply, he added, was “the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm.”
Arch‑Enemy: Climate Change
With Trump’s reelection, various liberal “woke-isms” dropped from favor, including climate change – the notion that manmade excesses are heating the planet into terminal meltdown. And that, I believe, is why the PBS documentary approached the climate question with discretion bordering on apology.
As I wrote in my earlier critique, “it was disheartening to hear one interviewed fire chief hedging his judgment, as if trying not to offend climate change deniers, while describing what had clearly become a global warming event.” The onscreen bar graphs told one story—rising temperatures, intensifying risks—but the voices behind them seemed unwilling to press the point. Maybe they were aiming for balance. The result was evasion.
The conditions that ignited the January fires are now seen as textbook: First came a lush, rainy winter that blanketed hillsides with new vegetation. Then came a sharp dry spell – no rain for eight months, followed by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds.
It was a classic case of climate whiplash, a term coined by UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain, who viewsthese wild swings from wet to dry —once considered anomalies—as the new norm.
“This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold,” Swain explained recently, “first by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush… then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels.”
Swain also warned of the “expanding atmospheric sponge effect”—a phenomenon in which a warming atmosphere accelerates both flood and drought cycles, wringing moisture from the land faster than it can be replenished.
Net result: Fires ignite faster, burn longer, and spread further.
And, to re-emphasize: the fuel itself is changing.
That’s confirmed by the World Weather Attribution consortium.
Last January, according to its models, vegetation in southern California was twenty-five percent drierthan it would have been without climate change – and fire resulting from heat, drought, and wind thirty-five percent more likely.
So, what happened in the Palisades and its companion disaster zones wasn’t just about desiccated grass and foliage. It was about transformed fuel—thicker, more volatile, and more readily flammable than what fire crews have been trained to handle.
Unless we acknowledge this shift, we’ll keep treating each catastrophe as an outlier—until there’s nothing left to salvage.
An Infrastructure Too Old to Fight
If climate change lit the fuse, California’s aging infrastructure all but guaranteed the flames would run rampant.
To be honest about it, the conflagrations last January not only busted our defenses but blew us raspberries in the process. As wind-driven blazes scythed through communities, critical utilities buckled. In the Palisades, firefighting demand for water surged to four times the normal draw in a crisis, rapidly draining the three dedicated water tanks —each holding roughly a million gallons. By sunrise, said LADWP’s Janisse Quiñones, all three hillside tanks “went dry.” With hydrants sputtering and no pressure left in the lines, crews were left scrambling for water.
The crisis was worsened by timing: the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir—one of the region’s largest sources—had been taken offline for routine maintenance just days earlier. But even if it had been operational, it wouldn’t have met demand. “You could fill a Rose Bowl with water and it wouldn’t have been enough,” said Tom Majich, general manager of the Kinneloa Irrigation District which fought the Eaton fire.
Governor Newsom, as noted above, has acknowledged that the state’s infrastructure, while once adequate, is no match for the ferocity of climate-driven disasters. The systems we’ve relied on, he warned, were designed for a different era—and are now collapsing under modern strain.
Experts across the board have echoed his assessment.
“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” remarked Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
“This caught everyone off guard,” agreed Gregory Pierce of UCLA’s Luskin Center.
“Local water systems are usually designed to fight local, small-scale fires over a limited time period,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “They are not generally designed to fight large, long-lasting fires.”
But the infrastructure breakdown extended far beyond water. Region-wide, emergency systems cracked. Dispatch centers jammed. Evacuation corridors gridlocked.
Aerial suppression efforts—critical in both the Palisades and Altadena—were crippled by 70-mile-per-hour gusts. In the predawn hours of the second day, L.A. County fire officials temporarily grounded wind-whipped aircraft, further handicapping ground crews already strapped for water. “Air support is so critical to the firefight,” declared Mark Pestrella, director of LA County Public Works, “and unfortunately, wind and air visibility have prevented that support.”
In the hills above Altadena and Pasadena—where the Eaton Fire burned—wind gusts were so sustained that firefighters couldn’t contain the blaze on the first night. “Those embers were jumping miles ahead,” recalled Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin. “With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire.”
The mismatch between threat and technology laid bare by the January firestorms now defines the challenge ahead. “The urban interface is changing and we’ve designed for classic fires, not a wildfire blowing through a community,” said DWP veteran Adams. “We need to think about fire protection and what firefighters really need if this is going to be the way of the future.”
And it won’t be cheap.
To support continuous firefighting through hydrants, the LADWP would need to maintain far larger water reserves near likely fire zones, Greg Pierce of UCLA noted. That level of readiness, in his view, would be “incredibly expensive,” especially in mountainous or hilly terrain where pumping water uphill adds complexity.
“There is a theoretical world, and maybe a world we’re entering into,” he said, “where we could pay much, much more to have redundant water and power supply — because you need both, especially in terrains like this.”
But would such added protection have improved the outcome this time?
“I’m not even sure that would have made a difference when it comes to these types of wildfires,” said Pierce, “but that’s possible.”
Policy Challenges: Life vs. Property, Equity vs. Privilege
The January 2025 wildfires didn’t discriminate. From Altadena to Pacific Palisades they ripped through rich and poor communities with equal fury. But while the devastation was widely shared, the aftermath exposed a deepening divide— a growing disparity in how Angelenos prepare for and survive disaster.
The Los Angeles Fire Department and other public agencies deployed resources where the fires advanced fastest. There is no evidence that affluent neighborhoods received preferential treatment. In fact, Pacific Palisades—despite its wealth—suffered such catastrophic damage that it may not fully recover for ten years or more, if ever.
Some residents in high-income areas took matters into their own hands, remaining on site long enough to tap into public water sources or cajole the LAFD into prioritizing their properties. Billionaire developer Rick Caruso hired a private fire crew to defend his commercial real-estate inside Palisades Village.
Other wealthy homeowners and celebrities have used such services in past fires. Insurance giants like AIG and Chubb routinely offer high-end wildfire protection to elite clients in places like Malibu, Napa, and Montecito — sometimes including fully equipped subcontracting firms. During the Woolsey fire, one such company, working for a dozen different insurers, reportedly deployed 53 engines to protect 1,000 California homes. Among the apparent beneficiaries were Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, who hired a private team through their insurer to defend their Hidden Hills mansion.
This practice —legal but ethically fraught—raises a fundamental question: what happens when public safety becomes something you can buy?
Private firefighting contractors answer only to their clients. Their goal is not to assist in mass evacuation, contain broader threats, or save lives across a community. It is to save specific real estate. That shift in priorities—from collective safety to private property—would be troubling enough. But when these crews potentially draw from public water systems already strained by failing infrastructure, the inequity becomes more than symbolic. It becomes dangerous.
In the Palisades, where hydrants dribbled dry within twenty-four hours, any such diversions for private use – even agreed sharing arrangements — could have gravely hampered public response, especially in neighborhoods where municipal fire crews were late arrivals or understaffed.
The equity issue has also surfaced in a high-profile dispute over contingency planning.
In mid-February, when Mayor Bass finally ousted Chief Crowley over her controversial handling of the fires, she criticized the department for failing to pre-deploy surplus firefighters after the initial severe weather alerts. The Los Angeles Times—Patrick Soon-Shiong’s mouthpiece —then ran a series of stories highlighting the lack of such reinforcements in the Palisades.
“The LAFD could have sent at least 10 additional engines to Pacific Palisades before the fire — engines that could have been on patrol along the hillsides and canyons,” the Times reported, based on leaks from Bass critics inside the department.
The argument had merit. But it overlooked a deeper reality. In today’s fire environment, where multiple communities can ignite at once, reinforcing one neighborhood in advance may mean shortchanging others. That’s a dangerous precedent—especially when prepositioning decisions start to align with property values.
Emergency resources should be allocated based on risk and need—not affluence or media pressure. And fire protection should not be parceled out by ZIP code.
That’s not just a policy issue. It’s a civic one. The more we allow the wealthy to opt out of the public system—through private firefighters, exclusive insurance plans, and influence over deployment—the more we erode the principle that public safety is a shared obligation. If only some people can buy their own fire department, we’ve moved from disaster response to disaster apartheid.
Pacific Palisades did not burn because it was wealthy. Altadena did not burn because it was not. Both burned because our public systems are underfunded and our climate is accelerating past our preparedness.
But only one of these communities has enough deep pockets among its citizenry to bankroll a legion of private firefighters next time the need arises.
That fact should sober us. Because if we continue down this path—where some can buy safety while others wait in line—we will find ourselves not just facing more fires, but losing the very idea of a public we’re meant to protect.
Federal Sabotage, Local Costs
When the fires erupted January 7, Donald Trump wasn’t yet back in the White House. But by the time the embers had cooled, he was—and almost immediately, his administration began undoing what California and other frontline states had spent years trying to build.
To understand the stakes, it helps to start at the beginning. During Trump’s first term, the federal government withdrew from key climate agreements, dismantled the original Clean Power Plan, curbed scientific communication within government agencies, and slashed funding for disaster mitigation. The message was clear: mitigation and adaptation were luxuries, not imperatives.
The Biden administration took a sharply different approach. In the years between Trump’s terms, it moved to restore much of the federal climate architecture—rejoining the Paris Agreement, tightening vehicle emissions standards, expanding FEMA’s BRIC (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities) grants, and recommitting to international climate cooperation. That work didn’t reverse the damage, but it gave states like California a foundation to build on.
And California didn’t waste time. Under Governor Newsom, the state has led one of the most ambitious wildfire preparedness drives in the country—combining climate adaptation with high-tech firefighting reform.
The Fire Integrated Real-Time Intelligence System (FIRIS) now provides live aerial surveillance and geospatial data to track fire behavior with unprecedented precision. The Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center, launched in 2021, was designed to close longstanding communication gaps between firefighting agencies and jurisdictions.
The recent firestorms tested these systems but didn’t invalidate the investment. The firefighting problems were unique in scale and intensity and merely underscored the importance of building out from these innovations to keep pace with the escalating challenges of global warming
At the same time, California has poured billions into structural upgrades and land-use reform. The Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program has funded defensible space projects, prescribed burns, and community-level wildfire planning. And the state’s 2021 Wildfire Resilience Budget Package—still unfolding—has committed over $2.7 billion toward community hardening, vegetation management, and infrastructure retrofitting.
Now, in the wake of controversies involving private firefighting teams during the January blazes, lawmakers have introduced a new draft law —Assembly Bill 1075—that would prohibit such crews from tapping into public hydrants. The proposal, still pending, aims to preserve municipal water pressure during emergencies and ensure that public resources aren’t diverted by private interests.
But these state-led efforts don’t exist in a vacuum. They depend—heavily—on federal coordination and support: from FEMA, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s what makes Trump’s return so consequential.
Barely months into his second term, he and his administration are already moving to repeal Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0. Fuel efficiency targets are again being rolled back. And early signs suggest FEMA’s BRIC program may be downsized or quietly shelved.
More ominously, Trump’s newly passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” along with his FY2026 budget proposal, dismantles clean energy tax incentives, slashes NOAA’s climate science funding by as much as seventy-four percent and eliminates environmental-justice initiatives.
These reversals blunt the very tools that states like California rely on to prepare for climate-driven disasters. Without matching federal funds or aligned national goals, the state’s preparedness initiatives become harder to scale. Instead of serving as a national model, California risks becoming a regional outlier—fighting 21st-century fires with 20th-century backup, while Washington turns its back on the future.
The deeper danger isn’t just financial. It’s ideological. Trumpism doesn’t merely reject climate science. It treats adaptation itself as a form of surrender—a political heresy rather than a practical necessity. That’s the real sabotage. Not through a single sweeping order, but through procedural choke points, withheld grants, and strategic silence.
Preparing for the Next Big One
By the end of January 2025, the fires had revealed what we’d long refused to admit: we’re living in a new era of disaster, armed with outdated systems and no unified plan for what’s coming next.
But if there’s a lesson in the ashes, it’s this: we can’t afford another season of improvisation.
Adapting to this new fire reality means rethinking nearly everything—how we build, where we build, how we manage land, and how we weigh life against property. It means treating fire not as a seasonal nuisance but as a structural threat, embedded in climate volatility, economic inequality, and political dysfunction.
We need a firefighting paradigm that starts before the first spark. That means pre-positioning resources based on vulnerability, not property value. It means imposing strict limits on development in fire-prone wildland-urban interfaces. It means investing in hardened water systems, redundant power grids, and real evacuation routes—not just for the hillside homeowner, but for every renter, every retiree, every Angeleno living on a cul-de-sac with one road out.
It also means confronting uncomfortable truths about the privatization of safety. When private fire crews are deployed to protect assets, public responders are left to save lives—often with less water, less equipment, and less support. That imbalance is not sustainable. Nor is it moral.
To prevent that outcome, Los Angeles and other wildfire-prone cities must act now. Private firefighting teams should be required to coordinate with public agencies, avoid drawing on public resources, and disclose their operations during emergencies. Pre-positioning decisions must be made transparently, with public oversight. And the state should consider establishing a public wildfire insurance program—ensuring fire defense isn’t just a luxury for the insured elite.
And above all, we must start telling the truth. About climate. About risk. About who suffers when leadership fails and systems collapse.
The January fires weren’t a fluke. They were a preview.
The only question now is whether we’ll keep rewriting the same story—or finally start preparing for the fire next time.