As bad as the fires in the Los Angeles area have been: more than 12,000 structures burned, about 180,000 people evacuated, more than 35,000 acres burned and at least 25 deaths – could have been even worse. Officials noted that they did not “have enough fire personnel… to handle this”, but in a way we Angelenos were lucky.
Today, fighting wildfires in the United States relies on a complex network of local, state and federal agencies that often must support each other, traveling long distances across state lines to do so. That's how firefighters from neighboring states like Nevada and Arizona can be found on the fire lines in Los Angeles today, and why the planes overhead sport liveries from nearby Orange County and distant Quebec. North American wildland firefighting systems rely on this type of mutual aid for backup, and it was pure luck that many agencies, both near and far, had spare capacity right now. As of Tuesday afternoon, when numbers began to slowly decline, there were 5,123 firefighters assigned to the Palisades Fire and 3,408 assigned to the Eaton Fire, according to status reports.
But a system based on luck is not a lasting system. It is already under pressure and risks collapsing in a world of bigger and more frequent wildfires.
In the United States, the federal forces that form the backbone of the wildfire suppression system are the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, along with a handful of smaller agencies. Everyone is overworked, due to a long history of overloading and underpaying a workforce that is mostly seasonal. Those agencies face deep and ongoing staffing shortages, leading to a wildfire workforce in the United States facing mental and physical health crisis and even homeless people.
The best-supported and most stable state and local agencies must necessarily focus first on their local jurisdictions. The only reason Orange County can send so much help to Los Angeles right now is that there are currently no major fires in Orange County. If the Canadian wildfires were burning, we couldn't have counted on the Quebec Super Scooper plane we see skimming Pacific water to fight the Palisades fire.
Los Angeles County already hosts some of the highest (and highest quality) concentrations of firefighting resources anywhere in the world. More personnel or equipment would not have meant that the Palisades or Eaton fires would have been extinguished in a day or two. Given the severe drought and winds, along with a lack of beneficial natural or prescribed burns on the landscape that have racked up what experts call the region's fire debt, this month's ignitions were perhaps destined to spark large fires. .
Even if nothing could have stopped those fires, Los Angeles barely escaped further destruction due to numerous new fires that started after the Palisades and Eaton fires were already out of control. As is normal in our current system, additional firefighters arrived from outside the local area to support the initial responders when they were exhausted after their 24- or 48-hour shifts. Those relief firefighters also helped ensure that new fires did not get out of control.
As a former firefighter, I have long preached the benefits of mutual aid and resource sharing systems. However, our world is changing and firefighting tactics must follow. Our firefighting systems are still organized around seasonal staffing increases, but as these January fires make clear, there is no such thing as “fire season” anymore.
Land managers, researchers and advocates correctly point out the urgent need to reintroduce fire to western landscapes to repair some of the damage caused by more than a century of mismanagement. But prescribed fire in densely populated Altadena or Santa Monica is a complicated task and limited in scope. As fires in the so-called wildland-urban interface become increasingly destructive, fighting them often remains the only response that protects lives and property.
And fighting them requires that we have the workforce to do so. We need that workforce to be stable, year-round, and localized. This means exploring options such as perpetual National Guard activations with a focus on firefighting. It could even mean implementing local or national voluntary service models that channel Americans' desire to help in these overdrawn and overwhelmed systems. None of this would replace the mutual aid we see when communities share resources; those systems should also be expanded.
Whatever the new system looks like, it can't keep doing the same thing we've done every fire season, because if the usual response didn't work in Los Angeles, it won't work anywhere.
Jay Balagna, a former wildland firefighter, is an assistant policy researcher at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Rand. He lives in Los Angeles near the Eaton Fire.
