New Report on LA Wildfires Recommends Rethinking How Urban Wildfires Are Fought

A new report commissioned by the state of California, examining the successes and failures of the firefighting effort in the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles last year suggests that cities must rethink how they plan for and combat wildfires in wildland-urban border areas.

An analysis of the spread of fire in Los Angeles' devastating twin wildfires last January, and how the City and County of Los Angeles could have done better to prepare for and fight the fires, concludes that many areas of the state remain at high risk for similar sorts of incidents. And, "Long-term risk reduction requires coordinated action that improves wildfire resilience at the community, regional, and state and federal levels."

The new independent report on the Palisades and Eaton fires was done by the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), which also did a similar report on the Maui wildfires in 2023. The report discusses the similar outcomes and fire behaviors in other recent wildland urban interface (WUI) fires, like the Tubbs Fire that devastated parts of Santa Rosa in 2017.

"The Southern California fires got so large, so fast, that they outpaced the capabilities of the very people trained to fight them," said Derek Alkonis, a senior research program manager for the FSRI, in recorded news briefing, per the New York Times. Alkonis added that “Some of the most well-trained firefighters in the world" were deployed to fight the Los Angeles fires, but their training has not kept up with the growing risks of these WUI conflagrations.

The analysis found that the massive destruction wrought by the fires was "influenced by the combined performance of numerous interconnected systems rather than a single point of failure." The report also finds that existing fire mitigation strategies, like maintaining defensible space around individual properties, are not adequate for these types of WUI fires, and "wildfire exposure and structure loss are increasingly shaped by factors at the neighborhood and community scale."

"The fires in Southern California and in communities across the U.S. demonstrate that we are entering a new era of modern conflagration," said FSRI VP and Executive Director Steve Kerber, in a statement. "This report underscores how prevention, preparedness, infrastructure, evacuation, emergency response, incident management, and the built environment collectively shaped wildfire outcomes during the 2025 fires."

Among the reports findings and recommendations are that Los Angeles city firefighters were not trained in techniques for monitoring or fully extinguishing embers in a wildland situation — like the embers from January 1 that have been found to have likely reignited days later to start the Palisades Fire.

The report also found that city fire officials underestimated the risk and potential size of the Palisdades Fire as wind conditions worsened, and failed to deploy enough resources and equipment to the area. Officials, the report says, could have done more to pre-empt fire activity as meteorologists were forecasting the incoming wind storm.

In one particularly glaring failure, the fire department reportedly also failed to hold over a fire crew whose shift was ending, due to concerns about budget and overtime costs.

The Palisades and Eaton fires became the second- and third-most destructive wildfires in state history, after 2018's Camp Fire in the town of Paradise. Over 18,000 structures were destroyed in the Camp Fire, while the LA wildfires destroyed a total of around 16,200 structures. The total property damage from the fires has been estimated at between $28 billion and $54 billion.

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