UCLA experts: Fire and the future of Los Angeles

UCLA experts can provide key perspectives on the wildfires and their impacts on the people, communities and future of Los Angeles County.

'Home-hardening' not enough

Edith de Guzman

De Guzman is an expert on water management, equity and adaptation, heat mitigation, urban forestry and climate resilience at UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation and the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. She can speak to issues related to why the fires have been so unprecedented, water systems and the role of landscaping and urban form in fire risk. She also shares that despite Los Angeles being one of the most fire-ready regions, a trifecta of factors (extraordinarily wet years, the driest start to a rainy season on record and the most intense Santa Ana winds in recent history) pushed the area past its limits.

"In L.A. we are no strangers to earthquakes, and much of our housing stock is built using wooden construction for seismic safety. This further adds to the flammability of the L.A. region. Home-hardening practices - including retrofitting home exteriors with fine-meshed vents and ember-resistant vents and creating defensible space - are generally very effective in protecting property in typical fire conditions. But the trifecta of factors that made this unprecedented tragedy possible pushed beyond the limits of most preparedness measures."

Email: [email protected]

Smoke and air quality

Morgan Tingley

Tingley, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a member of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is an expert on how climate change and other environmental changes impact biodiversity. He can discuss how climate change is connected to wildfires, how wildfire smoke impacts air quality and the harms from fire and smoke on wildlife and wildlife recovery, especially birds.

Email: [email protected]

Fire hydrants are designed to save buildings, not mountains

Gregory Pierce

Water researcher Gregory Pierce is the director of UCLA's Human Right to Water Solutions Lab and a faculty member in urban planning. He co-directs UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation and UCLA's Water Resources Group.

"Urban water systems aren't fully equipped and haven't traditionally been expected to be equipped to fight wildfires. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has flaws, but it is one of the most sophisticated, technically competent water suppliers in the region, and they were as well-prepared as anyone could expect. The Santa Ynez reservoir being offline to ensure compliance was very bad luck, but not something any system would have been expected to handle differently."

"An urban water system is built to handle a house fire, a building fire, or an electrical fire. Municipal water systems have reserve tanks and are overbuilt by 20%-40% to have 'fire flow,' or enough water pressure to fight structure fires. Urban water systems are not designed to fight wildfires and put out mountainsides. Wildfires, especially in mountainous terrain, require more of an aerial approach, with helicopters and fire retardants, not just water."

"We've had two really wet years, and now we're having an incredibly dry year. That's being combined with areas that would be prone to fire even if we didn't have climate change and an extreme wind event that is exacerbated by climate change."

Contact: To request an interview with Gregory Pierce, please reach out to his UCLA media contact at [email protected]

Auto dependence and the streets that put us in danger

Adam Millard-Ball

Adam Millard-Ball is a professor of urban planning and director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. His research focuses on transportation and climate change. He can discuss how the designs of neighborhood street networks may have played a critical role in exacerbating the effects of the fires.

"The Los Angeles neighborhoods at greatest risk from wildfire typically have circuitous streets with dead ends and choke points rather than the gridiron pattern that's common elsewhere in the county. Circuitous streets make it hard to evacuate quickly in an emergency, as we saw so tragically in Pacific Palisades. These street patterns also lock in dependence on the private car and discourage walking, which contributes to the climate change problem that's the root cause of elevated fire risk in California."

Email: [email protected]

Juan Matute

Matute is the deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, which researches public transit, transportation finance and governance, new mobility and parking. He can speak to auto dependence (the reliance on personal vehicles), particularly in relation to evacuation planning, as well as multimodal evacuation planning and rebuilding from disasters in a more sustainable, resilient and equitable manner.

Email: [email protected]

The coming housing crisis and neighborhood impacts

Stuart Gabriel

The director of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, Gabriel can speak about the anticipated impact of the wildfires on housing costs and issues, including rent, affordable housing, the permit process and the barriers faced in rebuilding homes. He is a distinguished professor of finance and the Arden Realty Chair, and his research focuses on topics of real estate finance and economics, housing and mortgage markets, urban and regional economics, and macroeconomics.

Email: [email protected]

Michael Manville

Manville, who is a professor and chair of urban planning at UCLA, can provide comment on the fires' likely impact on housing affordability as well as some aspects of local revenue and taxation. His research areas are transportation, land use and housing, and the interrelationships between those areas.

Email: [email protected]

Jose Loya

An assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA, Loya can comment on the current housing and rental situation as well as the ethno-racial and socio-demographics of the neighborhoods being directly and indirectly impacted by the fires. His research discusses several topics related to stratification in homeownership, including ethno-racial, gender and Latino disparities in mortgage access, and he is a faculty affiliate with the Chicano Studies Research Center.

"These Los Angeles fires have engulfed and destroyed several communities throughout the Los Angeles area. As firefighters continue to fight, control and mitigate further fire damage, many of the residents impacted by the fire will have to find new homes and communities. Unfortunately, this natural disaster will only further exacerbate the housing crisis in Los Angeles. This tragedy will require an overhaul and reevaluation of how and where Los Angeles builds housing, with an emphasis on greater density and affordability."

Email: [email protected]

A local perspective

Zev Yaroslavsky

Yaroslavsky leads the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. An expert on government and politics, he is available to comment on the historic nature of the fires from a local perspective.

"I was a local government elected official in Los Angeles for nearly 40 years. I represented the Santa Monica Mountains, which experienced many destructive fires. The current fire storms are by far the most destructive in Los Angeles history."

Email: [email protected]

Disasters exacerbating inequities

Silvia R. Gonzalez

Gonzalez directs climate, environmental justice and health research at the Latino Policy & Politics Institute, and her team cautions the government and policymakers to move beyond reactive measures that leave communities out of the discussion and decision-making processes. She is also available to do interviews in Spanish.

"During crises like wildfires, the stories and needs of Latino and underserved communities are often overlooked. Yet the prevailing narrative shapes how government resources are allocated. Our study underscores how these communities already face significant health, economic and social vulnerabilities. When a disaster strikes like these wildfires, the lack of adequate safety net resources, health care access and disaster preparedness only intensifies the inequities they face. It is critical that recovery efforts move beyond reactive measures and include proactive, research-driven policies that specifically address the long-standing neglect of these communities and ensure they are not left behind when the next crisis occurs."

Email: [email protected]

More fire in a warming climate

Daniel Swain

Swain is a climate scientist with UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. He has expertise in climate change, extreme weather and atmospheric sciences. His recent research explains how climate change fueled the Southern California fires. More intense wildfires are a consequence of hydroclimate whiplash - rapid swings between extreme wet and dry weather, including an ever-thirstier atmosphere - and that whiplash is accelerating worldwide. Preventive fires offer a safer solution, but his research shows climate change is narrowing the safe window for controlled burns.

"In a warming climate, there's going to be more fire on the landscape, but we have some choice about whether more of that increase in fire is on our own terms in the form of dramatically scaling up prescribed burning or whether it's essentially in the form of these increasingly catastrophic firestorms as we've seen in recent years and now again to just a sickening degree. … But there are real practical constraints, and as much as I hate to say it, in some of the places that burned this week in L.A. County, it would be really hard to do safe and effective prescribed burning. … I still think you could probably justify it given the alternative is what we've seen, where it just looks like a firebombing."

Email: [email protected]or reach out to his UCLA media contact at [email protected]

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Tags: wildfires | climate change | climate | environment