The start of the Palisades fire was initially 10 acres when it was reported around 10:30 a.m.
Fire Victims are being blamed for the fires that destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed 25. City and State officials maintain that the Palisades/Eaton Fires were once in a life-time event because of climate change, and once the victims use proper building materials and eschew vegetation, there will be no more conflagrations.
Today, July 1, L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath made a motion that “comes as a result of expert findings recently released in the final report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery and UCLA.”
The document reads “The January 2025 fires changed the face of Greater Los Angeles and Southern California, representing one of the worst climate disasters in U.S. history in terms of cost and serving as a harbinger of future risks facing the region in terms of extreme drought, weather, heat, and fire.”
The facts missing in the report is the weather/wind/moisture data surrounding the start of the fire and how it could have been stopped.
One Palisades resident, Michael Kureth, has done a detailed analysis of wind conditions and speeds during the Palisades Fire and compared them with prior years click here.
“Drawing from 48 regional weather stations, historical wind records, drought trends, and official forecasts, the analysis finds that the fire occurred under conditions that were historically consistent, predictable, and well within the thresholds of manageable wildfire behavior,” Kureth said.
“During the critical period of potential containment from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. (6 hours), when Cal Fire reported the fire expanding from 10 to 200 acres, weather conditions remained manageable,” he said and pointed out. “The highest sustained wind speed was 35.7 mph in Malibu (8.6 miles from the fire origin), with the highest gust reaching 44 mph in the Santa Monica Mountains (14.4 miles away from the fire origin).
Hurricane-force winds are defined as beginning at 74 mph. The recorded winds on January 7 were well below this threshold. Kureth concludes it was false claims that the fire spread under hurricane-strength conditions or that it was unmanageable due to record-breaking wind speeds.
The photo of the fire above Marquez area of town was taken around 1:30 p.m. Note the large pine trees around the pole-top distribution station by the high school.
Next he looked at the Burning Index (BI) and Fuel Moisture (FM) and noted his “report does not assert that climate change is not real or is not impacting fire risk.” Instead, the report uses 46 years of scientific data to demonstrate that Pacific Palisades has, in fact, experienced far greater fire risks in the past, characterized by more extreme BI values, lower FM and higher wind speeds. [The Burning Index is a number related to the contribution of fire behavior to the effort of containing a fire. The BI (difficulty of control) is derived from a combination of Spread Component (how fast it will spread) and Energy Release Component (how much energy will be produced).]
Drawing from high-resolution, hourly observations collected at five fire weather stations within a 30-mile radius of the fire’s origin, Kureth’s report finds that the Burning Index peaked that day at 380, with wind speeds reaching a maximum of 38 mph.
At about 10 a.m. on January 7, when the fire erupted, the maximum Burning Index reported was 200, with wind speeds of 18 mph and wind gusts of 28 mph. Are these records exceptionally high?
No, the values are consistent with moderately high fire danger levels by Southern California standards and collectively rank the January 7 peak during the Palisades Fire at approximately #135 in terms of overall fire risk (data from June 1, 2007, to January 7, 2025), when considering both Burning Index and wind data click here.
Ranked #1 was November 25, 2021, which had the highest BI recorded since 2007.
Kureth tracked Fuel Moisture since 1979 and showed the FM during the Palisades Fire was not unprecedented and was less of a risk than previously in history.
If the wind speeds, BI and FM, were all consistent with Southern California, why did this fire “get out of control?”
One only has to look in the Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Archives of the 1961 Bel-Air Fire – (Los Angeles Brush Area Conflagration November 6-7, 1961), the recommendations to prevent conflagration were not in place click here.
Kureth concludes, “While fire victims are doing their part, rebuilding with fire-hardened materials and creating defensible space, our city and government have failed to act on their responsibilities.”
The Blue Ribbon Commission, an assembly of by academics, concluded, “The January 2025 fires changed the face of Greater Los Angeles and Southern California, representing one of the worst climate disasters in U.S. history in terms of cost and serving as a harbinger of future risks facing the region in terms of extreme drought, weather, heat, and fire.”
Kureth points out “In places like Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena, where recent fires have already destroyed homes and businesses, the probability of another catastrophic fire is 100% once rebuilding is complete, not due to the actions of residents, but due to the absence of infrastructure upgrades, outdated emergency protocols, and blatant refusal by officials to address known risks.”
It’s not that hard folks. Follow what worked in the past for 50 – 55 years from 1961 to 2014 or so, and stopped being followed around 10 years ago – it seems. Maybe earlier. You thought government was here to help you, protect you, be there planning and pre-planning. They use to. But then it all seems to have stopped. Without notice they just seemed to have slowly turned their back on history. We were not told. We were not given notice. Nothing was said. Until January 7th. Then the mountains roared. And they want to blame us! Of course they do.
Per usual, I thank you for doing the real work of journalism. Keep up the good work Sue!
This is incredibly valuable reporting… Also incredibly disturbing… Thank you
It is not true that these fires are once in a lifetime. We lived in the Malibu La Costa neighborhood in 1993 when our house and neighborhood were burned. Then again, 31 years later, in 2007…the La Costa neighborhood burned in the Palisades fire.
The La Costa neighborhood had underground utilities. It burned anyway.
One or two weeks after the fire in 1993, a friend and I hiked up Carbon Canyon to take photographs. As I walked around I encountered extreme heat coming up through the dirt. I believe these are called “hot-spots”.
There’s only one reason the fire consumed our village: The LA Fire Department abandoned the Palisades around 2 pm on January 7 without telling anyone. Fire unopposed burns all fuel until there’s no fuel left.
The fire was obviously very easily contained by private contractors for their assigned blocks and houses so it wasn’t a question of “missing water” or the “mayor was in Africa.” Some private citizens successfully fought the fires just using their hands and feet to stamp out the ash!
So why did the LA Fire Department refuse to act and leave 40,000 of us homeless? They’re still trying to hide the answer by refusing to release the call logs and sat positioning of their trucks (though those of us who were here for all three days could see them parked on the beach and at Paul Revere High School so we don’t really need to know their positioning).
But what on earth were they all saying to each other on their radios for three days as they passively watched us burn and refused to render aid, even as victims were desperately tapping at their windows as they drove through the disaster areas to take selfies???
Their cowardice and inaction remains the number one mystery in this catastrophe.
Is this the same Panel out of UCLA that produced the report extolling the virtues of the Mansion Tax?
To my knowledge, none of the members of the “Blue Ribbon Commission” lost their homes, and most of the people I now hear extolling the virtues of the Commission’s report did not lose their homes either. There are some interesting ideas in the report, but I am very wary about supporting the establishment of yet another level of government with ‘power’ to impose ideas upon homeowners who are trying to rebuild.
LADWP already has plans to replace water infrastructure, and place power and communications utilities underground. Good. What we really need the government to do is remove red tape from the permitting process, the City and State to do the basic regular brush clearance that wasn’t done for years, and for the California insurance commissioner to incentivize insurers to return to our market. Any economically rational home and business owner will rebuild each of their properties with modern fire-resilient materials. In my opinion, we do not need a grand, centrally-planned, utopian new Commission dictating how to rebuild our town in a fundamentally different way.
I had a Davis Weather Station at my house in the Huntington Palisades where I saw and recorded the beginning of the Palisades Fire at 10:35am on Jan 7. The wind speeds at my location ranged from 3-12 mph from that time all the way until 5pm that evening. My house is around 330 feet altitude there and the fire began a bit higher at say 1000-1500 feet. My weather station location is probably within 1-2 miles away from the fire location as the crow flies.
This is an excellent article refuting the narrative that the loss of our homes was due to unprecedented high winds, but the wording of headline is unclear.