How to help your audience understand the unprecedented LA fires

Following a disaster on the scale of the Los Angeles fires, journalists work to answer immediate questions about what happened and what people need to know to be safe. Hasty framing of immediate questions can miss important context.

Media coverage of disasters follows predictable patterns, many of which are known to misconstrue the larger picture. The interdisciplinary field of hazards and disaster research can help journalists consider how to ensure audiences are fully informed about what's happening and why. I dug into the disaster research literature and spoke to two disaster researchers in southern California to highlight underreported health topics related to the LA fires.

What became clear: Journalists need to help audiences understand how new and different these fires are, and what that means going forward.

Reconceptualizing fighting fires

It's an understandable psychological response for people to ask how the fire started and why the response to it wasn't better. But journalists need to make sure any coverage that addresses these questions also emphasizes a more systemic lens: These fires are difficult for most audience members to conceptualize because they are so unlike any past fires. Existing strategies to deal with a wildfire, such as thinning forests and using helicopters to dump fire retardants on the burning area, would not work on an urban firestorm of this scale.

Residents, emergency responders, local government officials and researchers are all coming to grips with a new reality, one that will require a massive reconceptualization of what it means to fight fires.

In my recent article on climate and health stories of 2025, I recommend helping readers understand that what used to keep them safe will not necessarily work in our new normal of constant change; this is a devastatingly apt example.

Compounding and cascading disasters

In disaster research, there are two concepts relevant for reporting on the LA fires: compounding climate disasters and cascading disasters. They sound kind of similar, but they are distinct. "Compounding disasters" have to do with causes, and "cascading disasters" have to do with effects. In compounding disasters, more than one disaster that climate scientists have forewarned of are possible to occur simultaneously, with a result that is far more catastrophic than each would have been alone.

Eric Holthaus explains in The Guardian that in the case of the LA fires, more extreme drought and intensifying Santa Ana winds compounded one another to create "conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history." Holthaus continues, "As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance."

Kim Fortun, Ph.D., an environmental justice researcher at the University of California, Irvine, applauds Holthaus's framing and said that much of the coverage has emphasized the dry conditions and wind.

"It's really important to expand that to other systems beyond natural systems," she said. For example, why are these neighborhoods in a fire-prone landscape, and why is the infrastructure the way it is? Andrew Lakoff, Ph.D., an expert on health security and disaster prevention at the University of Southern California, also recommends digging into the history of the area and debates about sprawl.

In a cascading disaster, one shock leads to another. For example, in LA, an unprecedented firestorm caused an unparalleled demand on the water system, so that fire hydrants in several areas ran out of water, sparking criticism of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass.

"This is an old struggle in the field of resilience, which is how much can you invest ahead of time to make a system redundant and have failsafes," disaster researcher Daniel Aldrich told Northeastern Global News, the newspaper on his campus. "The fact is there is only so much water infrastructure you can build in - and there's only so much ability to pull water from the system at one time without spending a lot more."

Preparing for unprecedented compounding disasters that could happen simultaneously, but may never happen, is expensive and politically fraught.

Fortun hopes journalists continue to look for other cascading downstream effects. For example:

• What are the implications for health care when many health care workers are unable to work at the same time that emergency rooms are inundated?
• What happens to children who normally receive resources and care through school when their schools are closed for an extended period of time?
• How are governments and other relief operations bounding the disaster, and who is left out?
• Who couldn't get information about the fires because they didn't have internet access?

Long-term repercussions of toxic air and water

The smoke from past large wildfires, which mostly burned through forests and brush, is dangerous - but not nearly so toxic as the smoke produced by the LA fires. When a huge number of houses and cars go up in smoke, we know many toxic things burned, but not exactly what they were or how much, making their long-term effects on people unknown right now, Lakoff explained.

"What does that mean for the 10 million people living in this county, not to mention all the other places that the smoke has gone?" he said

Lakoff urged reporters to look to past large-scale environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, rather than past reporting on wildfires.

"We're all inhaling whatever burned and we don't know what burned," Lakoff said.

Past measures to keep people safe from wildfire smoke, like masks and air purifiers, will help but may not be enough when toxic gases are present. "Do Not Drink" notices have been released in parts of the water distribution system that have burned, and the water is not safe to use for any purpose because of the volatile organic compounds that it could release. Ashes may be toxic and fall on houses, yards, gardens, and waterways. Toxic ashes and dust can enter houses and can be carried on wind gusts far from their point of origin.

"We know that this ash has a lot of toxic, carcinogenic material in it," Scott Epstein, the air quality assessment manager for the Air Quality Management District, told the New York Times. "The instruments that typically measure air quality don't measure ash. However, it tends to be big enough to be able to see with the naked eye."

Data gaps

Not knowing where the ash is blowing is a data gap. It's possible that researchers and community members can fill information blackouts when they become aware of them. For example, during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, when information on where the oil was drifting was scant, community members organized to collect their own aerial images using kites and weather balloons jerry-rigged with digital cameras. This effort grew into the environmental justice nonprofit Public Lab, which could serve as a resource for residents in LA who want to fill data gaps.

The contaminated ashes and smoke will have long-term effects. For example, under high heat, harmless chrome in the soil can transform into the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, which has happened during wildfires in Northern California. It's not yet known whether this has happened in LA and whether it poses a significant risk.

"The temporal and spatial extent of risk and damage is distinct when you have this kind of urban firestorm," Lakoff said. Journalists are going to need to keep tracking this topic; research will be unfolding for a long time after the fires are out.

Social inequality of pollution exposure, vulnerable communities

This long-term exposure affects some populations more than others. For example, air pollution exposure during gestation cancause pregnancy complications and health challenges for the newborn. Fortun notes that certain weeks of fetal development are known to be especially vulnerable to air pollution, and pregnant people need to have that information.

After the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires in Australia, a cohort study on the effects on pregnant women and their unborn children began, and the researchers leading that study may have initial results that are relevant to the implications of the LA fires. Researchers leading a long-running study at the University of Southern California on the effects of air pollution on children can also speak to this issue.

What's more, all of the people who are supporting the firefighters and emergency responders will be affected by smoke exposure. "There's a lot of labor out there supporting this response effort, and so a lot of exposure," Fortun said.

The neighborhoods that burned the most - Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena - are wealthy (upper middle class to super wealthy). The construction, landscaping, and domestic help workers in these neighborhoods are mostly immigrants who live elsewhere. Not only are they grieving what has happened to the families they have long worked for, but they also cannot afford to stop working. People are working outdoors in these conditions.

Journalists can also ask: What can be done to help and protect this especially vulnerable group? Who is offering help and information to immigrants and outdoor workers, and how can such efforts be amplified?

Fortun said, "ICE has been picking people up in Northern California, so [undocumented] people are afraid to go out. Are they going to risk seeking health services?" This population needs to know where they can safely access care.