In January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires revealed a new and unsettling chapter in California’s fire history. Instead of the vegetation-driven wildfires that dominate the state’s past, these two events unfolded as urban conflagrations—fast-moving, wind-driven structure fires where houses, fences, decks, and cars became the primary fuel. Under extreme Santa Ana winds, a handful of initial ignitions in both regions rapidly escalated into firestorms that tore through dense neighborhoods.

In Pacific Palisades, embers lofted far ahead of the flames, igniting roofs, vents, and attached wood fences across entire blocks. Hydrants failed, evacuation routes gridlocked, and firefighters were forced into defensive positions as burning structures produced heat and ember output far exceeding anything seen in a typical fires. Likewise, in the Eaton Fire above Pasadena, the fire spread laterally from home to home, jumping streets and leaping built barriers—not because of flammable vegetation in residential yards, but because the built environment itself provided the fuel.

Residents in both fire areas reported flames running along wooden privacy fences and roof-to-house ignition, homes igniting from embers, hydrants running dry, low water pressure, firefighters unable to defend homes even when present.

What we witnessed in these fires was that Southern California’s most destructive modern fires can erupt within urban neighborhoods, far from the traditional wildland edge, when extreme wind, topography, and housing density align. The Eaton and Palisades fires made clear that in wind-driven events, the space between homes and city infrastructure—not vegetation —determines whether communities can withstand the first critical hours of a firestorm.

No. However, special interests have long offered vegetation clearance as a way to limit or prevent fires and, in turn, limit home loss and community destruction.

The public generally perceives vegetation removal as the primary actions we can take to keep us safe. Recent state fire policies have focused on scaling up vegetation removal and passing that cost onto homeowners.

Protecting homes and communities through more vegetation removal has also been a dominant narrative advanced by insurance industry and commodity interests.

The reality is that most expenditures to address home and community losses have principally been focused on vegetation removal and not home and community ignition resistance or home hardening. The focus on vegetation is disproportionate to both the probability of success and the cause of loss during extreme fire conditions in the urban environment.

Not having a flammable wood roof; removing flammable debris from the roof, from rain gutters, on decks; and covering vents with 1/8 inch mesh screen can significantly increase home ignition resistance. Clearing the yard of healthy vegetation is not necessary.

No. Disastrous home and community fire destruction occurs during extreme wildfire conditions. And it occurs regardless of whether yards have been thinned of vegetation or have continuous canopies.

Thinning or removing vegetation around homes can help create operable space for firefighters in favorable conditions. But efforts to remove healthy vegetation have proven themselves to be irrelevant to preventing destruction of homes and communities in extreme conditions in the urban environment.

Fire destruction of homes during extreme fire events is a home ignition problem that can be prevented by readily addressing home ignition vulnerabilities. The principal factors that determine home ignitions and disastrous community destruction during extreme fire conditions are the vulnerabilities of the structures themselves to ignitions.

As fire scientist Dr. Jack Cohen has said: “Wildfires initiate ignitions but communities continue burning without wildfire influence.” Remember the homes lost in the Palisades and Eaton fires burned in dense urban and suburban neighborhoods — not grasslands, shrublands or forests. Once embers enter the urban environment there are enough structures to generate fire.

Firefighters work is nothing short of heroic and fire suppression efforts are extensive and heavily reported on. Tens of thousands of firefighters and hundreds of fire engines are utilized along with helicopter and airplane water-retardant drops. Heavy equipment like bulldozers, masticators, and fellers created fire breaks. Back fires can help but often produce severe fire damage.

Increasingly, however, we are seeing the limits of firefighter efforts and, in the aftermath, we see they are often futile.

Both the Palisades and Eaton fires were classic urban conflagrations — wind-driven structure-to-structure firestorms where homes, decks, fences, and building materials became the fuel. The most significant risk factors were ember storms, home-hardening vulnerabilities, combustible fencing, response delays, and infrastructure failures such as hydrants and evacuation bottlenecks. This is also why defensible space for firefighters would not have prevented widespread loss.

Is your landscape well maintained ? Are there dead or dry trees, shrubs or limbs overhanging structures, are the plants healthy and well-hydrated?

Consider the metaphor you’re working on: a dry ornamental landscape may align with a sense of water conservation but may not integrate into a fire‐resilient property that can buffer fire.

Instead consider designing native plant communities that are adapted to local fire/eco‐hydrology conditions and provide habitat.

Homeowners should view their yards not as hazards but as something that can actually suppress fire and protect the home from flying embers.

In documentation, the fires showed that it’s the small things close to the house (siding, vents, fences) that often decide survival. So plants aren’t the enemy, especially if those plants are well maintained, hydrated, and wildfire adapted.

We have seen that power companies and arsonists continue to ignite fires in extreme conditions. We have seen policies that blame plants.

These were urban firestorms, not brush fires or wildfires. Both fires demonstrated that once a few homes ignite under extreme wind, the homes themselves become the fire’s fuel, producing enormous heat, long-distance embers, and fire spread that no amount of “vegetation clearance” can contain.

Homes burn homes. This is the defining feature of modern California fire disasters in the wildland urban interface. The few surviving homes in the Palisades burn footprint weren’t saved by bare dirt buffers — they were saved by WATER.

Evacuation delays were catastrophic. Both fires revealed confusing or conflicting evacuation orders, long delays between field warnings and official alerts, gridlocked choke-points in hillside neighborhoods, poor communication between agencies.

In the Eaton Fire, firefighters warned command repeatedly about the fire’s escape potential before official action was taken.

This matters because Sacramento’s current fire policy focuses almost exclusively on vegetation — while the real life-safety failures are occurring in response, alerting, and evacuation. Hydrant failures and water-pressure problems increased structure loss.

Again — a systems failure, not a landscaping failure. The “fuel” was structural density + extreme wind + structure vulnerability.

The 2025 fires reinforce a key truth:

Our greatest fire risk is not vegetation — it’s the way we build in wind-exposed terrain. Vegetation removal plans (like Zone 0) target the wrong fuel source in urban firestorms.

The the single biggest lesson from these fires for homeowners is that the most dangerous fuel in a wind-driven fire is your own house — and your neighbor’s house, especially when those houses are less than 30-feet apart. Not the vegetation.