Quotes
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has officially requested the support of the California National Guard for both fires. They will be assisting us with traffic control and critical infrastructure protection,
Luna said
It looks like an atomic bomb dropped in these areas. I don't expect good news, and we're not looking forward to those numbers,
Luna told a press conferenceThere is great concern that fire weather conditions could become exacerbated given the antecedent conditions, little rain across the area since the spring of 2024, and another offshore wind event on top of all of what we have seen,
the National Weather Service said
I told the governor, local officials, spare no expense to do what they need to do and contain these fires."
After a meeting with senior advisers at the White House, Biden said
We have been building homes deep into the fire zones. We know they’re fire zones, we know they’re dangerous, and yet City Hall and county government has constantly greenlit development in places of greater and greater risks,
Miller said
There’s just a long list of these chaparral-driven fires, causing immense damage to built-up areas,
Gray said,L.A. County and all 29 fire departments in our county are not prepared for this type of widespread disaster. There are not enough firefighters in L.A. County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,
Marrone said, notingThe public has a perception that public agencies can always protect them. As an incident the size of the Woolsey Fire shows, this is not always possible,
the report said, lauding first responders for limiting the number of deaths to threeThese are areas that are usually better protected,
said Robert Fovell, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University of AlbanyClimate change is increasing the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions later in the season and the occurrence of these wind events,
he said in a recent YouTube address
It was not if, it was when
said Joe Scott, the chief fire scientist at Pyrologix, a wildfire risk consultancy that worked on the federal analysisThis whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold,
Swain said in a news releaseIt would be fair to characterize this as well-anticipated from a meteorological standpoint.”
He addedRight now, Southern California — especially that coastal part — has not received much rain, so it was very vulnerable with those low humidities and fast winds to be receptive to a wildfire,
Anale Burlew, chief deputy of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said at a meeting of California’s wildfire task force after the Franklin Fire scorched more than 4,000 acres near Malibu last monthEven if the current fire weather cycle stops, it will return,
it saidWe now face wildfire conditions across the state that really never relent through 12 months,
he saidWhen that happens and a fire is ignited, there is no stopping it,
he saidIf your neighbor doesn’t do it and your neighbor’s house catches on fire, the radiant heat alone will negate it,
he saidIn California, we used to think of fire as a late-summer occurrence, but now fire season is extending into January,
Bhattacharya saidThe low-moisture content in the vegetation that we get in these extreme dry periods leads to these highly, highly vulnerable conditions,
said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council