Nature's Fury Meets Human Limits
Examining misinformation, leadership, and systemic challenges in the Los Angeles fire crisis
Now we know for sure what hell looks like.
For families in the Los Angeles area who have lost their homes and businesses, it’s a literal hell. For the public officials and first responders navigating this crisis, it’s a figurative one — facing overwhelming challenges with limited resources as their community burns.
As of Tuesday, at least 25 lives have been lost, more than 12,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and 39,000 acres burned in neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades and unincorporated communities like Altadena. More than 153,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.
Wildfires like these are a stark reminder of nature’s overwhelming power and the limits of even the most advanced human response systems. The instinct to assign blame often overshadows the complexity of such situations, but what’s needed most is compassion — for the firefighters risking their lives to save others, for the families now displaced, and for the leaders trying to bring clarity and calm amid chaos.
One of my oldest friends, who lives in Los Angeles, offered a deeply personal perspective when I checked in with him last week:
We’re good! Lots of ash and debris everywhere but there was never any real threat to our part of town as far as flames jumping over or evac orders. I have friends in Malibu and Palisades who didn’t fare well. And Altadena too. Was really feeling the sadness yesterday.
His words are a sobering reminder of the uneven impact of disasters and the importance of solidarity in times like these. This week’s TL;dr focuses on three key themes: the realities of large-scale disaster response, the challenges of combating misinformation, and the lessons in leadership and resilience we can learn from this tragedy.
Before we dive in, let me offer this disclaimer: I’ve sifted through countless reports and stories across the media landscape to provide a comprehensive yet digestible summary. There’s still more to learn, and the picture will evolve in the days and weeks ahead. My goal is to make some sense of it all for those of us committed to the pursuit of good governance.
The Magnitude of the Problem
First, let’s think about this: We spend immense resources in local government to give ourselves the ability to send well-equipped first responders to help someone suffering a health crisis or extinguish a structure fire within 4 to 6 minutes of receiving a 9-1-1 call. Now multiply that by thousands of properties and hundreds of thousands of residents affected in the span of hours and you have the hellscape of L.A. This image illustrates the dilemma.
The truth is, there is no system on earth capable of responding adequately to a crisis of this magnitude.
The Limits of Human Response
Disasters of this scale exceed the capabilities of even the most prepared government agencies. What makes the problem facing the good people of L.A. so tragic is that it was predictable. Certainly, local firefighters knew the risk, as a clip from a July podcast makes plain. Former L.A. resident and podcaster Joe Rogan — who happened to be wearing a Los Angeles Fire Department T-shirt while speaking with fellow comic Sam Morril — recalls what a Southern California firefighter once told him about wildfire risk.
(I)t’s just going to be the right wind and fire is going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through L.A. all the way to the ocean and there’s not a thing we can do about it. I go, Really? He goes, Yeah. We’re just, we just get lucky. He goes, we get lucky with the wind.
That luck ran out last week.
Which begs the question of why we allowed allow that scale of development to occur if we knew there was a reasonable chance these kinds of wildfires could burn it all down in a matter of hours. We have some terrific insights on that below. I hasten to add this problem is not limited to California. I think of where I grew up, in Texas, where the problem isn’t wildfire but hurricanes. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped 40 inches of rain over four days and overwhelmed the dams and drainage systems in the Houston area designed to handle heavy downpours. Mother Nature overwhelmed those systems, and the resultant flooding was responsible for more than 100 deaths and $125 billion in damage.
This isn’t a red state problem or a blue state problem. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. More on that below, as well.
The Misinformation Challenge
A good chunk of GGF readers are government communicators, so I know you’ll appreciate a Jan. 11 article in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Fighting Fires—and the Rumor Mill—as L.A. Burns.” Here’s the lede:
Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott has one of the most intense jobs in the nation right now: trying to distribute accurate public information during a historically destructive urban fire in America.
On Thursday, a new unexpected foe cropped up: Alex Jones, among the world’s most notorious conspiracy theorists, was posting on X that L.A. firefighters were battling the blazes using ladies’ handbags as buckets because officials had donated equipment to Ukraine. The post has been viewed 29 million times.
Scott, the LAFD public-information officer, quickly explained publicly that the “handbags,” were actually canvas bags routinely carried by firefighters to douse small fires, because that is easier and faster than hauling out and connecting hoses.
“We’re trying to battle the most devastating natural disaster in Los Angeles history,” Scott said by phone on Saturday while driving to base camp on the fifth day of the wildfire ordeal. “It takes people and time to track down or debunk social media rumors—it takes us away from doing more important things.”
Alas, amidst the chaos, L.A. County Office of Emergency Management on Jan. 10 mistakenly sent out an evacuation notice to the entire county. That’s 10 million people. To their credit, they issued a correction immediately and the director explained what went wrong. Turns out it was a technical error in the notification software, not human error, that caused an alert intended for a specific neighborhood to go to the entire county. Here’s the explanation Director Kevin McGowan gave, which I believe is a great example of how you handle a mistake of this nature.
“We are working with the software, currently. Troubleshooting it,” McGowan said, noting that his office has sent out other alerts throughout the recent wildfires without incident. However, the director also admitted they “do not understand” what went wrong in this case.
“We do not understand, at the moment, what caused that error,” McGowan said. “(But) It wasn't a human error. The correct zones were initiated. So we are working to troubleshoot that to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
He was honest, provided details, and then moved on. Here are more best practices cited in the WSJ article, which looked at effective communications techniques used at other recent high profile crisis events as well:
Be proactive: Directly address rumors on the platforms where they originate. Create a webpage that lists all information relevant to the crisis at hand, and keep it updated.
Transparency and timeliness: Las Vegas police, in the aftermath of the New Year’s Day explosion of the Tesla Cybertruck, held detailed press briefings. They acknowledged uncertainties while sharing verified facts which helped dispel conspiracy theories.
Use social media strategically: Monitor platforms for misinformation and engage directly with users to clarify issues; empower multiple team members to respond promptly.
Prioritize public safety messaging: Emphasize essential information to help people make decisions during emergencies, such as evacuation orders or hazard updates. Officials like Capt. Scott focused on “signal over noise” to minimize distractions and misinformation.
Acknowledge public distrust: Recognize skepticism about government information and counter it with straightforward, verifiable details. The North Carolina Department of Public Safety explicitly addressed public doubts about conspiracy theories during Hurricane Helene.
Visual and data-driven verification: Use imagery, data, or expert verification to dispel rumors, such as showcasing Tesla engineers’ data to refute claims of autonomous driving prior to the explosion.
Humanize the response: Leaders like Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill balanced professionalism with a personal tone, making their communication relatable and credible.
If you’re a PIO, the entire article is worth your time.
The Role of Leadership
Effective leadership during crisis requires transparency, clear communication, and a focus on solutions rather than blame. I’ve tried to avoid pointing fingers in today’s TL;dr, but there are a couple of items worth noting.
An Angeleno friend said Mayor Karen Bass had promised not to do international junkets during her term. Clearly, that campaign pledge was broken as she was attending a presidential inauguration in Ghana when the fires started. He wrote:
“While no one expects the mayor to fight the fires or even direct the firefighting operation, she is a symbol, and her absence created a vacuum into which lots of misinformation flowed.”Speaking of misinformation, Gov. Gavin Newsom has also faced withering criticism (President-elect Trump referring to him as “Governor Newscum” is just repugnant and wholly unhelpful), mostly about the availability of water and cuts to state funding for fire services. Newsom has pushed back forcefully, and one of the responses was to set up a fact check website, californiafirefacts.com. As noted above, creating a webpage like that is a best practice in an extended emergency like this one.
However … when I navigated to californiafirefacts.com it redirected me to a page at gavinnewsom.com, which is funded by Newsom for California, a political action committee. The facts are still there, but it appears the governor is playing politics instead of providing important information to his citizens. FFS, why can’t that information be hosted on the well-designed CalFire website?
Lessons for Future Resilience
I found a couple of articles on what can be done in the future to limit the chances of this kind of catastrophe happening again. Naturally, they look back at zoning and regulatory mistakes made along the way, sometimes decades ago.
Writing in The Atlantic, urban planner M. Nolan Gray critiques the policies that exacerbate wildfire risks, including zoning laws and suppressed insurance premiums.
Gray argues that policies such as Proposition 103, which artificially suppressed insurance premiums, have encouraged risky development in fire-prone areas and discouraged homeowners from investing in fire-resistant measures. Additionally, restrictive zoning laws and environmental regulations have limited housing development in safer, urbanized areas, pushing residents to settle in wildfire-prone suburbs on the edges of cities.
He also critiques the state’s reliance on the California FAIR Plan, which has left taxpayers exposed to potentially trillions of dollars in liabilities. He also examines how zoning and development restrictions have exacerbated the housing crisis, making it difficult to build infill housing in safer, more resilient urban areas.
I asked friend and longtime Los Angeles-area resident Neal Payton — an urban planner extraordinaire who GGF readers met here and here — for his take on the article. He wrote:
The Atlantic article was spot on except for one tiny error. The problem was not a shortage of water, but a shortage of water pressure, a very different thing ...
Indeed, I would argue, the article only covered part of the problem as it focused mostly on fire insurance, which is crucial, but not the complete picture. The other issue is that California’s environmental review process, known as CEQA, (which was anything but environmental) that actually made suburban development that sprawled into forest areas simpler because of the traffic analysis required, which always made urban infill look worse than suburban sprawl because they measured LOS (levels of service) and not VMT (vehicle miles traveled). Thankfully that has changed, but that’s a very recent fix.
The other issue with the article, as spot on as it was, is that it failed to acknowledge that, one of the areas that burned, Pacific Palisades, at its heart it’s a pretty tight walkable grid. Arguably, given its setting, at the top of a hill surrounded by forests, it shouldn’t have been developed, but you’ll have to go back to the 1930s to correct that mistake.
Neal said coverage of the event by the Los Angeles Times has been excellent, for the most part, “with real journalism and not much hype.” He said this particular article, “Inconvenient truths about the fires burning in Los Angeles from two fire experts” gets into the minutiae of the problem. The two fire experts are Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne, who have studied the history and behavior of wildfires for decades. It’s worth a full read, especially if you’re in an area prone to wildfires. Here are a few excerpts from the article that caught my attention:
Respected by fire agencies across the country, Cohen and Pyne have found their straight-talk admonitions often disregarded or dismissed. Sensitive to losses and suffering, both said they are motivated by the belief that magnitude of destruction this week in Los Angeles and Altadena is not a foregone conclusion. “I’m compelled to continue pursuing this issue because it is so solvable if we determine to do it,” Cohen said.
When catastrophic fires occur, experts often blame the so-called wildland-urban interface, the vulnerable region on the perimeter of cities and suburbs where an abundance of vegetation in rugged terrain is susceptible to burning. Yet the fire disasters that we’re seeing today are less wildland fires than urban fires, Cohen said. Shifting this understanding could lead to more effective prevention strategies.
More recently, fires devastated Gatlinburg, Tenn., in 2016, the towns of Superior and Louisville in Colorado in 2021 and Lahaina, Hawaii, two years ago. “It’s not just a California quirk,” Pyne said. “California, I think, gets there first in exaggerated forms, but this is a national issue.”
For Cohen, shifting the conversation away from climate change is important because it gives us more control over our fire environment and will ultimately make us less vulnerable to these disasters. “We don’t have to solve climate change in order to solve our community wildfire risk problem,” he said.
“We don’t necessarily need a trillion-dollar program and a fire czar to get control of the fire problem,” Pyne said. “What we need are a thousand things that tweak the environment in favorable ways such that we can prevent these eruptions.”
Neal shared another article from Bloomberg that’s worth your time, or to share with friends and colleagues who work in planning, development and/or architecture. I found it fascinating. These Homes Withstood the LA Fires. These Architects Explain Why.
Stronger Together: The Heroes Behind the Response
To end on positive note, the collaboration of firefighting agencies appears to be exemplary. Working under a unified command, more than 15,000 firefighting and emergency personnel have been deployed. Crews from eight other states, as well as Canada and Mexico, have also joined the fight. Say a prayer for these folks, as the Santa Ana winds that stoked the blazes last week are expected to pick back up.
Finally, there’s been an outpouring of love and support for the fire’s victims by their neighbors in L.A. Here’s a video from The Free Press showing the magnitude of volunteer effort.
Final Thought
Disasters of this magnitude reveal the limits of our systems but also the resilience of our humanity. While there’s much to learn about how to rebuild and prevent such tragedies in the future, let’s not lose sight of the moment we’re in now — a time to come together, extend support, and focus on healing.
When nature’s fury meets human limits, compassion is our most powerful response.
Onward and Upward.