California fires: Why firefighting was no match for a disaster decades in the making
As the California fires burn, experts say firefighters can only do so much in extreme conditions. Instead, people must understand that homes are the fuel in these disasters.
There’s a hard math behind the Los Angeles-area firestorm: When a two-story house is on fire under normal circumstances, three engines and a minimum of 16 crew members are generally dispatched.
But as Pacific Palisades homes began to catch fire on Jan. 7, “there were probably at least, within the first two hours, 100 structures fully involved,” said Jack Cohen, a research scientist who spent decades studying fire dynamics with the U.S. Forest Service.
“You can’t dispatch and organize enough engines to keep up,” he said — let alone fit that many vehicles on the region’s narrow, hillside roads.
In other words, when 70 mph winds are raining embers into suburban communities so achingly vulnerable to fire, extreme blazes are an inevitability that no number of firefighters can control. What begins as wildfire becomes an urban conflagration, with homes serving as the main fuel.
To Cohen, the finger-pointing that has ensued since the deadly fires broke out in Southern California — amid reports that hydrants ran dry, a reservoir was empty and extra firefighters were not positioned where fires erupted — is “nonsense.”
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