A wildfire in California has forced the evacuation of over 30,000 people in the Pacific Palisades and parts of Santa Monica near Los Angeles as the flames rage out of control. The cause of the fire, which ignited yesterday, remains unclear. Despite the ‘wrath of nature’ narrative that has formed around the devastating fires, a series of human actions could either have caused the wildfires or at least fueled their rapid spread.
The conflagration has been primarily fueled by a months-long drought and powerful Santa Ana winds coming off the mountains to the east, exacerbated by the recent atmospheric bomb cyclone that brought snow to the Great Plains and the northeastern United States. However, state mismanagement may have greatly exacerbated the situation.
STATE MANAGEMENT.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has repeatedly pressed California to focus on forest and brush management as a means of mitigating the massive wildfires that have come to devastate populated areas of the state every few years. A lack of state action has allowed large amounts of debris, including dried leaves, downed trees, and scrub, to build up, which can act as fuel for the fires.
In 2018, then-President Trump chastised Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in the burned-out remains of the Town of Paradise after wildfires destroyed the locality. “You’ve got to take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forests,” Trump said. “You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it’s a whole different story.”
FLASHBACK: Trump stood next to Gavin Newsom and stressed the importance of proper forest management after wildfires swept through California in 2018 pic.twitter.com/tE7ds4mxij
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) January 8, 2025
President Trump repeated his advice again in 2020, after a new round of wildfires devastated parts of California. “I see again the forest fires are starting,” he said. “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” Trump added.
WHAT CAUSED THE FIRES?
The source of the fires is not yet known, but in the past, they have been sparked by any number of natural and human causes. Lighting strikes have kicked off conflagrations, though this does not appear to be the case in this instance. More often than not, wildfires begin because of either an incident of arson—including illegal immigrants starting a campfire or simply flicking a cigarette into the dried brush—or because of high winds down a power line.
Even more troubling, though, is what can cause these fires to spread. Besides the powerful Santa Ana winds, which supercharge the fires and spread embers over vast areas, California’s water management is also partially to blame. Firefighters battling the current inferno have found a number of fire hydrants without water, frustrating their efforts.
The lack of hydrant water, sustained high winds, and months of tried brush fuel built up across the Pacific Palisades resulted in over 3,000 acres being consumed by flames by Tuesday night, even though the wildfires only began Tuesday morning.
