• Amy Laskowski

    Senior Writer Twitter Profile

    Photo of Amy Laskowski. A white woman with long brown hair pulled into a half up, half down style and wearing a burgundy top, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Amy Laskowski is a senior writer at Boston University. She is always hunting for interesting, quirky stories around BU and helps manage and edit the work of BU Today’s interns. She did her undergrad at Syracuse University and earned a master’s in journalism at the College of Communication in 2015. Profile

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There are 8 comments on How and Why the LA Wildfires Grew So Fast—and Lessons for the Future

  1. Wildfire events need to be studied both the natural and artificial disasters.thus, vegetations,soil materials, pipelines, mineral resources, visual materials and mining activities could encourage the dried wind to ignite fire when it touches any soft, liquid and gas materials at strong wind diretion!

  2. I have lived in California all my life since before 1960. There have always been fires. This “fires everwhere” thing can not possibly be natural causes in all instances. Over the years we would have seen this many times if that were true. Nice story with some room for consideration.
    The firebugs love windy days.
    The lawyers love to accuse deep pockets believing that they will give up without a fight and pay without blame.

    When we were young in Ventura County there was a requirement to keep land cleared. If someone failed to clear land they paid a person or team of people to handle the weed abatement and put it on the tax bill for the property owner. Every year the land was cleared and even though the periodic cleansing fire came, the house loss was limited if not non existent.

    As people from the other parts of the nation and world began to populate California the practical thinking seemed to disappear.

    “We want” is the theme of the foreign invader. I lived with one for 5 years and decided I could not stand her eastern city concept of reality. I watched as some very horrible people who took money from others to buy a $3 million home about 10 years ago when $3 million was still a lot of money worked to encourage the wild overgrown look of their property and then watched on satellite television as it burned to the ground and their stupidity was rewarded with insurance pay offs that allowed them to build an even more expensive and more dangerous home in the same place.

    Those who come here with stupidity and help to create these fire hazards should be punished and should not be allowed to make the same mistake in more grand fashion and cause the balance of humanity to pay higher insurance premiums as a result.

    What ever happened to enforcing rules that require homeowners to build responsibly and maintain responsibly? It was destroyed by ignorant people from big cities dragging their city ideas here with no oversight. And now their homes have burned and we will have to pay the bill.

  3. Natural causes? There was no lightning within 300 miles of that area the days the fires were started. I don’t know what natural causes he is referring to. Power lines do not start fires unless they are improperly maintained.

    The dry weather and winds don’t start fires. The ignition temperature for wood is 540 degrees Fahrenheit, the air temp in that area was a high of 70 and lows in the 40s. The fires were started by humans, either one of the hundreds of homeless people wandering that area or an environmental nutjob( which are prevalent in that area) started it to draw attention to their cause.

  4. I don’t think this article or his comments are balanced. For example you have made insurance companies sound like the poor suffering business. When in fact, the reinsurance companies worth 1.3trillion will be better off.

    Also I do not believe calling speculation by the public as“batsh$)” conspiracies is respectable. In fact that goes against your own web guidelines around comments being respectful.

    People are asking questions about how six fires ignited simultaneously. Still authorities don’t know or haven’t released this information.

  5. Los Angeles County is comprised of 88 cities, many of which even people in LA are unfamiliar with. Some of those cities rely on the Los Angeles Fire Department and some do not. Fire prevention is handled differently by the 88 cities.

    From the early 1970s until 2017 we had 1.7 acres in Hacienda Heights on a steep hill overlooking the San Gabriel Valley, an area in Los Angeles County that is quite hot, especially in the summer. The house was at the top of a hill which was heavily planted with fruit and nut trees, avocado trees, and well-established oaks with an undergrowth of flowering plants and ivy.

    Early every May the Hacienda Heights Fire Department inspected our land. Dry grass and weeds or any dead trees initiated a second inspection by the end of the month. If we failed the second inspection, an unforgiving team would cut down all growth they deemed possibly flammable.

    We watched the year-to-date rainfall regularly in the LATimes and watered accordingly. If we lost the trees and plants, we knew they would have to come out by May.

    While Los Angeles was notably dry in January 2025 and my heart breaks for those in the Palisades and Altadena, the choices that other cities in LA County made for fire protection may have made a difference.

  6. More on the political organization of Los Angeles County fire departments:
    Not only is there a variety of fire departments in the county, they exchange and support each other differently, which greatly affects their budgets, as well as their abilities. Some cities within the county own all their own equipment, which can be expensive. Some share equipment — often specialized pieces — and some do not or share only certain assets. Also, the need for certain equipment varies from one department to another. Not every city within the county has a building over 3 or 4 stories high, for example. Few cities have a hospital, which has its own set of needs. And, some cities agree beforehand to support a neighboring city (and probably share some assets as well as expenses) and other cities choose not to respond to a neighboring city’s fire alarms.

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