Los Angeles is approximately 350 miles from us, and the horrendous fires this week give all of us just pause, in part because they’re a reminder of what we face locally and have faced in the recent past.

The fires torching parts of the LA area, many taking the homes of well-off residents, are no respecter of wealth or geography.

By early Thursday, roughly 30,000 acres were aflame, at least five people dead and more than 200,000 without power across the wider LA area.

Nearly 180,000 residents were ordered to leave their homes, and close to 200,000 were under evacuation warnings. The blazes remained largely uncontained Thursday, stretching the region’s firefighting resources to their limits.

Not even the ocean provided enough of a barrier. Witness the August 2023 Lahaina fires that killed many more people, including the elderly who were trapped in homes and cars.

The Lahaina fires were caused, first, by hurricane-like winds that snapped power poles and sent sparks into dry brushlands. Much like in LA, fire hydrants went dry and first responders were forced to try and quell monstrous blazes without enough water.

Our CZU fires in August 2020 were also weather/climate-related after dry lightning strikes set off fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

That many residents who lost homes in that fire still have not rebuilt, or are awaiting government aid more than four years later, is sobering for when the losses in LA are eventually tabulated.

Predictably, the LA fires have become part of the political rancor. President-elect Donald Trump has been blaming the massive wildfires on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s water policies, claiming Newsom (who he calls “Newscum”) refused to sign a water restoration declaration “that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”

Newsom’s office called Trump’s broadside “pure fiction.” Though Southern California has seen much less rainfall this winter than Northern California, California’s water storage reservoirs throughout the state are mostly at or above their historic averages to date.

Other critics blame LA Mayor Karen Bass, who was visiting Ghana when the fires broke out. Or DEI policies. Or that a Biblical apocalypse has rained down fire and brimstone on “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

The truth is more prosaic: A combination of the ongoing ruinous effects of human-caused climate change, a critical lack of rainfall in an already arid region (and conversely ample rainfall last year that caused weeds and brush to grow), and the inevitable lack of resources in a major conflagration.

The scope of the LA fires is more evidence of the consequences as the planet heats up – consequences for which traditional risk-management tools such as home insurance are increasingly obsolete. And the fires will just exacerbate what is already a crisis in obtaining insurance here and in California.

For Santa Cruz County, while we don’t have ferocious Santa Ana winds roaring from desert regions as they do every winter in Southern California, winds that dry out vegetation on the mountain ridges as they pass and can carry embers over long distances, we are ringed by mountains, where many people live in wooded areas or on narrow roads not easily accessible to fire crews (which have been dispatched to help efforts in LA, including 89 Cal Fire personnel and teams from Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Scotts Valley, and Central Fire).

Some of the most sought-after, now burning, neighborhoods, in LA are on the edges of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountain ranges that are covered in dense vegetation especially flammable during dry seasons.

Fire experts say in hazardous areas where homes meet natural habitats, when a house ignites, fire spreads rapidly.

All the more reason to support prescribed burns, and insist homeowners create safe spaces between dwelling and structures.

Because, tragically, there’s always a fire next time.

— Santa Cruz Sentinel