After a fire, plants like this scrub oak will re-sprout from their still-living roots.
Southern California, with its hot, dry weather, has always been fire prone. Summer fires, which burn from June through September, are calmer and generally not propelled by wind. But in autumn, the Santa Ana winds really pick up, blowing hotter, drier air from the desert down the coastal slopes of our local mountains. They can occur throughout the year but are worst October through April and can generate devastating wind-driven fires. Though the two types of fires have very different temperaments, this means fire season in Southern California lasts from June through April. Be thankful for May.
In 1933, Los Angeles was, like the rest of the country, in the depths of the Great Depression. A government program loaned LA County money to pay unemployed workers forty cents an hour to clean up horse trails in Griffith Park, carve out new roads, and remove weeds. That fall Los Angeles was walloped by hot, dry, west-blowing winds from the deserts in the east: the infamous Santa Anas. Months without rain turned the grassy slopes of the park dry. It seemed they could ignite if you just looked at them wrong.
Nearly four thousand workers were in the park on October 3. By mid-day, temperatures in downtown Los Angeles hit 100 degrees. Workers on their lunch break listened to the radio as the New York Giants defeated the Washington Senators in the first game of the World Series. Two hours later, they noticed smoke rising from the north side of the park.
It seemed there was enough manpower to fight the fire, but the workers—who were either forced or asked to help, depending on who you ask and what you read—were armed only with shovels and weren’t trained firefighters. The Santa Ana winds whipped the fire up further, and flames multiplied faster than workers could beat them down. Trained firefighters eventually showed up, and the fire was controlled later that evening.
By the time it was put out, the fire had claimed the lives of at least twenty-nine workers—because recordkeeping was poor, it’s difficult to establish how many people were working in the park that day, and how many survived—some estimates suggest the death toll was closer to fifty-eight. It remains the deadliest fire in LA history, and to this day, nobody knows how it started.
In 2007, the skies above the Observatory were dark orange the night that Griffith Park burned again. This time, the brushfire scorched more than 800 acres, about a fifth of the park. But by the time five hundred firefighters contained it after two brutally hot days, not a single person was seriously injured and the observatory, zoo, and merry-go-round escaped unharmed. At the time this book was published, the 2018 Medocino Complex Fire to the north of Los Angeles had become the largest in California history. We may be getting better at saving lives and structures, but we’ll always have fire.
Griffith Park and the historic Griffith Observatory have faced the threat of fire multiple times throughout their history.
In the immediate aftermath of wildland fires, the landscape appears charred, still, and lifeless. Fallen ash gives the soil a gray tint. Any trees still standing are often blackened beyond recognition.
Poodle-dog bush is a fire follower—it only grows the first few years after a fire. Despite its cute name and purple flowers, keep back. Touching any part can give you a serious rash.
But fire has a way of making the landscape stronger, and without it, many animals and plants wouldn’t survive at all. The endless loop of burning and recovery is called the fire cycle, and plants have come to depend on its predictability.
Plants that need exposure to smoke or fire to trigger the release or sprouting of seeds are called pyriscent. For example, lodgepole pines, which grow at high elevation in our local mountains, have cones that open in response to fire, releasing their well-protected seeds. Most Southern California fires occur in summer and fall, before winter rains. Once the rains arrive, the seeds of pyriscent plants kick into action. Many manzanita species need a fire to tell them to sprout and grow fast while there is little competition for space. Their seeds are hiding just below the surface, and they’ll only start to grow if the ground above them burns. Some seeds can last a hundred years or more, patiently waiting for fire.
Similarly, most chaparral shrubs have a structure at the base, just above the root system, called a burl. The burl stores water and energy. Once it detects that a fire has burned the above-ground portion of the shrub, the burl gets to work, sending new growth up through ashy soil. It only takes two months for new green shoots to push through the charred soil after a fire. These shoots give way to flowers, followed by new trees and shrubs. Eventually, these plants will burn again, and the cycle will continue.
Animals have evolved to take advantage of the fire cycle too. After a fire, small rodents take advantage of the open ground to forage for seeds hiding in the soil. Rabbits munch on green shoots pushing through the soil. Birds of prey hunt across the now open ground for the lizards, snakes, and rodents that survived but are now conspicuous as they search for their own food. Deer can often be found at the edges of burned land, using surviving chaparral for cover from predators, while also eating the fresh new vegetation. If burned and unburned areas are found close together, deer reproduction and survival is especially high.
The decade following a fire is a period of change, with different kinds of plants dominating at different times. Changing plants offer changing leaves, seeds, flowers, and fruits, which all attract different sorts of insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Some of these plants and animals can’t survive in fully recovered chaparral. These critters depend on routine fires for their very existence.
Geological evidence shows that Southern California chaparral was burning up to twenty million years ago. But archaeological evidence indicates that fires began to change eleven thousand years ago, when people showed up. As humans got better at setting and putting fires out, Southern California and its wildlife communities changed forever.
In an effort to save our homes and businesses, we try to extinguish wildfires as soon as they begin—a practice called fire suppression. The problem is, when we put out fire this efficiently, large areas don’t burn for a long time. Instead, they accumulate fuel. When they finally do light up, the resulting fire is much more intense, aggressive, and hotter than it would normally be.
Fire suppression might actually make things worse, because infrequent, large fires are more dangerous than frequent, smaller fires. Fire-prone chaparral and active fire suppression can be a dangerous mix.
A helicopter draws water from the LA Aqueduct to battle the 2009 Station Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains.
On the other hand, a group of scientists recently pored through nearly one hundred years of California fire records and found that large, hard-to-control wildfires have always been a feature of the Southern California landscape, and that fire suppression activities have little impact on them. The increase in wildfires, they say, instead reflects an increase in the number of smaller man-made blazes. Ending fire suppression protocols would not necessarily mean that wildfires would suddenly become more manageable.
When it comes to fire in Southern California, two facts remain:
1. Where there is chaparral, there will be fire. It’s both inevitable and necessary.
2. The number of human-caused fires is increasing, and they aren’t so easy to put out.
The natural cause of fire is lightning. Because lightning strikes are more common on California’s interior mountains and at elevations above five thousand feet, most lightning-ignited wildfires begin inland and may be swept toward the coast by wind. These natural fires tend to burn for only a short time before they’re naturally extinguished.
These days, lightning is the least likely firestarter—behind arson, careless cigarettes and campfires, car fires, and other human activities. While natural fires mostly happen in the mountains, human-caused fires occur at lower elevations, near cities, and along freeways. And while natural fires are seasonal, people can spark fires all year long. We have changed both where and when fires happen.
It’s not just people today. In the past, Native Americans were frequent fire starters too. They burned brush to drive wildlife into open fields where they could hunt easily. They used it to burn off some plants in order to strengthen others useful for food, tools, and medicine. They also knew freshly burned areas supported different plants and animals than older, unburned areas. A combination of burned and unburned habitats ensured diverse resources. Part of today’s Southern California nature was a product of Native American landscape management through fire.
Even natural fires burn differently nowadays. The plants we’ve introduced often provide better wildfire fuel. The grasses of Southern California used to grow in bunches, with plenty of open dirt between them. But a look at our hillsides in July or August today shows a continuous blanket of dry, brown grass. These are mostly non-native species, introduced to Los Angeles from around the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Unlike bunchgrasses, which can survive season to season, non-native grasses sprout after winter rains, release their seeds in summer, then die with the hope that those seeds will begin the cycle again after next year’s rains. Most of these grasses were introduced by Europeans exploring California—probably accidentally as supplies and people (with their mud-encrusted boots) came on and off ships along the coast. Unfortunately, the carpet of dead, brown, exotic grasses provides more fuel and allows fire to spread much better than land sprinkled with living, green, native bunchgrasses.
Though it can seem scary, destructive, and even cruel, fire is an essential element of life for most plants and animals in Southern California, including humans. As with most natural elements of Los Angeles, people have changed the way wildfire works, but we’ll never eliminate it entirely.
