Inside the Fight Against California’s Wildfires

On the seventh day of the Eaton Fire, the most lethal of several wildfires burning in Southern California, I woke up in a tent at the Rose Bowl, which had become a staging area for first responders, called “fire camp.” At 7 A.M., an emergency-management team known as incident command gave a briefing at the stadium entrance. We were told that the blaze now encompassed fourteen thousand acres and was only fifteen per cent contained. It had risen into the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and spread into the suburbs to the south. “It does not get much worse than it’s going to be the next few days,” an expert on fire behavior warned us. “We could have rapid fire spread in basically any direction.”

At eight o’clock, I climbed into one of several white pickup trucks as part of a twenty-person handcrew, a team of wildland firefighters who dig lines around fires to contain and control them. (If fire engines are the artillery of firefighting and airtankers and helicopters are the air force, handcrews are the infantry.) Our caravan drove east to Sierra Madre, a community of about eleven thousand in the foothills of the mountains. Police officers, parked on the streets to enforce mandatory evacuation orders, waved us through, and we unloaded at the eerily vacant Eaton Canyon Golf Course. Behind us, the houses were untouched, but we knew that in front of us hundreds of homes had been reduced to rubble. Nearly everyone in the crew carried hand tools, and two people, designated sawyers, carried chainsaws. We shrugged on our backpacks—which included silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames—and lined up. “Assume you’re not coming back to the trucks till tonight,” our captain instructed. “Stay vigilant! Stay alert!”

We began to hike along the edge of the burn scar, the charred area that a fire leaves behind. Our job was to cold trail—to scour the boundary where the fire had stopped, looking for hot spots that could reignite. Walking side by side, we marched into drainage ditches, scaled chain-link fences, crossed culs-de-sac, and passed through back yards that sloped steeply upward, toward the mountains. Each of us was responsible for scanning the ground for anything that might hold heat. At one end of the line, a crew member shouted, “Feel all white ashes! Don’t pass the person on your left!” Each firefighter repeated the message, one person to the next, as though it were an echo.

When we saw ashes, we touched them gently with the backs of our bare hands to detect warmth. If we felt any, we shouted “Hold for heat!,” and the line stopped long enough for us to dig the hot spot out of the earth and cool it in the open air. Cold trailing is extremely dirty and laborious work, but this is by design. Aerial imaging can detect hot spots and show crews like this where to look, but every inch has to be checked by a person in order for an area to be declared fully contained. The perimeter of a wildfire is typically walked over three or four times, and sometimes more.

By California standards, the Eaton Fire was not especially large. It wasn’t even close to being a megafire, which is generally defined as one that burns at least a hundred thousand acres. But it was already the fifth deadliest fire in the state’s history, with a confirmed death toll of seventeen, and authorities were still searching for victims. The destruction in parts of Altadena, a few miles to the west of Sierra Madre, and Pacific Palisades, which had burned in a separate fire on the other side of Los Angeles, made these areas appear bombed out. Sierra Madre looked more like a place where missiles had fallen here and there; the damage was not total. We would circle the charred husk of a house and find a back-yard pool whose water was black with ash, yet neighboring homes would be unscathed.

A chief with Cal Fire, the state agency that fights wildfires, drove by the crew and stopped to talk to the captain. Some of the homes in the neighborhood had basements, he said, and this raised concerns that people had sought shelter underground and perished. (As of January 2srcth, there were more than twenty people missing.) Looking inside the burned homes, I found it difficult to recognize anything at all, but one time I saw what looked like a blue-and-white vase. Miraculously, it was still upright. When I looked closer, I realized that it might be an urn—a container for ashes in the ashes.

The handcrew I had joined referred to its captain as D. At midday, D instructed everyone to break for water and food in the back yard of a burned house. I peeled the first of two mandarin oranges that I’d plucked from a tree. We’d seen lemons whose rinds had started to melt away, but these were perfect orange orbs. After eating the first, however, I thought of the toxic air—chemicals from burning houses and cars—that had swirled around the fruit for hours. I threw the second mandarin into some bushes.

D began his career as a firefighter in his late twenties, when he was serving time in state prison. (More than a thousand of the firefighters who have worked Southern California’s deadly fires this year are currently incarcerated; in an emergency like this, they might earn a few dollars an hour.) Unlike the vast majority of wildland firefighters, he is Black. While we rested, he leaned against his pack, a gray helmet on his head, but he didn’t eat or drink anything. As a practicing Muslim, he chose to fast on Mondays and Thursdays—a reminder, he told me, of those who have no food or water. After seven years of fighting fires, he had recently decided to move on. The Eaton Fire would be his last assignment. He had a baby girl at home and another child on the way, and he wanted to spend time with them. He planned to focus on a side business—cleaning windows and gutters—and a Ph.D. in Islamic studies.

I asked D if he would miss firefighting. “Yes,” he said. “If I was rich, and I could choose anything to do for a living, I would choose this work.”

“What have you learned about fire?”

“I view it as a kind of animal. If you take away the air, it dies. You can feed it by giving it more fuel. It can sleep. That’s basically what we’re doing now—finding dormant fire. It’s an entity that you have to respect, not just some dumb element that, if you put water on it, it stops.”

As he spoke, I realized that we were sitting in front of what had been someone’s bedroom. The blackened timbers of the roof had caved in on a scorched mattress and a blue bedspread.

If we are going to live in places where fires like to burn, D went on, we need to become comfortable with small or controlled fires that consume accumulating fuel. “Fire was here before us,” D told me. “It’s good for the earth. Everything grows back better. It keeps the tree density down. We interfered with that and created these conditions.” Research has shown that during the twentieth century a combination of aggressive wildfire suppression, temperature increases, and water scarcity encouraged the growth of smaller, more tightly clustered trees across much of California. “Now, when wildfires start, they’re hard to stop,” D said.

Our break was almost over. We had half a day of cold trailing ahead of us. Before we got back on our feet, D asked a question: “How do we live in peace with fire?”

I spent three nights at fire camp, embedded with a private wildland firefighting company that had been hired as a contractor. (Several of my sources requested that I use only their first names.) I had previously trained as a wildland firefighter and maintain my qualifications, so I worked alongside the crew when I wasn’t reporting. We slept in the Rose Bowl parking lot, not far from supply depots, laundry and shower facilities, therapy dogs, and kitchens that fed more than two thousand first responders. Almost every major fire has a camp like this one—a fairground or a sports field where a command center can operate and people can recuperate between shifts. Of course, most fires are not ten miles from downtown Los Angeles. The community affected by these blazes in some way encompassed millions of people, including many who were wealthy and influential; the national news coverage and the public’s response were unusually intense. At one point, the rapper the Game brought firefighters coffee and paid to have fire engines detailed. At breakfast one morning, I heard a rumor that Angelina Jolie had attended one of the incident command’s briefings, and she was photographed at the stadium alongside World Central Kitchen workers.

The handcrew had difficulty believing that they were being treated so well. A McDonald’s trailer showed up at the stadium and handed out free breakfasts. Food trucks doled out burgers and tacos. Locals arrived with portable grills and fed anyone who passed by. “It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen on a fire,” I overheard a crew member say. Out on the line one day, a firefighter expressed his shock that he had been given a pillow and, moreover, that it was still sealed in plastic. “It was brand new!” he said. Another jokingly compared these offerings to the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

At night, the temperature was near freezing. I pulled my sleeping bag over my head to keep warm and looked at my phone. I wanted to understand how people outside the camp were processing and extracting meaning from the fires. An interview with the actor Dennis Quaid, looking shaken as he evacuated his home, seemed weirdly profound.

“We’ve all had a really big lesson,” he told a TV reporter.

“What is it?” the reporter asked.

“That our experience of reality can change in a moment.”

An entire city, maybe an entire country, was starting to appreciate the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit. Dirty work is often assumed to be unenlightened work, but wildland firefighters have a unique empirical understanding of natural forces. This includes troubling facts, such as the distance that floating embers can travel (miles) and the speed with which a wind-driven fire can move (about ten per cent of prevailing wind speeds). Firefighters also have access to a ground truth that is out of reach for the general public, and even for many scientists, about how our world is changing. In the past ten years, they have witnessed new and dramatic kinds of weather, unfamiliar fire behavior, and blazes that grow to an unprecedented size and intensity. Firefighters told me again and again how much they loved their job: the physical labor, the adrenaline, and the freedom of working outdoors. But they expressed how frustrated they were that, as a society, we are not doing routine work—creating defensible space around communities, managing landscapes, igniting prescribed fires—to help prevent such devastation.

The most visible part of the Eaton Fire was in the suburbs, where it destroyed thousands of structures. The largest part of the fire, however, was burning through woods and chaparral—shrubland—in the mountains, largely out of sight of the public. Many firefighters were working in the Angeles National Forest, miles north of Sierra Madre and Altadena. This is the landscape that gives wildland firefighters their name.