As Santa Ana winds whipped sheets of embers over the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California last night, the palm trees along the beach in the Pacific Palisades ignited like torches scaled for gods. The high school was burning. Soon, the grounds around the Getty Villa were too. The climate scientist Daniel Swain went live on his YouTube channel, warning that this fire would get worse before it got better. The winds, already screaming, would speed up.
Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since last May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since record keeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on.
You'd have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season, Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me. Then the colder months brought the Santa Ana winds: stuff of legend, the strong downslope gusts that suck humidity out of the air, if there was any to begin with. This time, the winds were stronger than average too.
A parched landscape; crisp-dried vegetation; strong, hot winds: 'The gun was loaded,' as the climate conditions combined to create a perfect storm for fire hazards.
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