Taken together, all results indicate that climate change plays an important role, and researchers trust the findings that warming increases the possibilities of such fires.
Many other regions at risk
The researchers could also demonstrate that the impacts of fires disproportionately affected the elderly and people with disabilities, such as those with limited mobility, as well as population groups that received late warnings. They were observed that some of these effects will exacerbate historical economic disparities so that it can persist a lot in the future.
“The neighborhood of Altadena with a large black population was on the path of fires, which destroyed the main source of generational wealth for many residents who had previously faced discriminatory practices of the red line,” the scientists wrote in the report.
The fires presented the critical weaknesses in the water infrastructure, which is “designed for routine fires instead of the extreme demands of large -scale fire, and shows the need for investments in resistant water systems and other measures of climatic adaptation and Emergency preparation to address more frequent.
“This was a perfect storm of climatic fires and driven by the climate that impacted the built environment,” said co -author John Abatzoglou, a professor of weather at the University of California, Merced.
There are similar communities prone to fire in other regions, he added, including Boulder County, Colorado, where the Marshall 2021 fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes. Similar disasters have recently developed throughout the world, including the 2023 Lahaina fire on the northwest coast of Maui and the fires of July 2024 in Viña del Mar, Chile.
Williams said recent fires around Los Angeles do not even approach the ranking in the top 10 for their size.
There are many neighborhoods in southern California located in the mountains very vegetated from Santa Barbara county to Ventura County, Los Angeles County, Orange County and San Diego County that could be the following, he said.
“I would say that a large number of neighborhoods have a similar risk for the small number of neighborhoods we saw exposed to fires this year,” said Williams.
This story originally appeared in Internal climatic news.