Why Los Angeles, America’s most fire-ready city, became overwhelmed by flames

The biggest of several wildfires still burning out of control in Los Angeles grew by more than 1,000 acres overnight. At least 319,000 people are now under evacuation orders or in evacuation warning areas. As the firefight continues, questions are beginning to mount about whether L.A. was adequately prepared.

Clayton Colbert has good perspective on that. A Malibu resident of 45 years, he stayed behind when the Palisades Fire exploded, figuring he could pump water from his oceanfront home to douse hotspots igniting from embers.

“That’s our fire hoses there,” he says, pointing to his do it yourself set-up, “we saw this coming.”

Colbert is exhausted, with black rings of ash under his eyes. He’s relieved that his home between Pacific Coast Highway and the beach is still standing. As we speak, his neighbor’s home is engulfed in flames. Two firefighters and an engine can’t save it.

“I’ve been doing this for 48 hours or more,” Colbert says. “There was a period here for 24 hours where there wasn’t a fire truck or firefighter or anybody actually.”

No amount of resources would’ve helped, experts say

You hear this a lot in the fire zones, where even fire hydrants have gone dry. But Colbert isn’t sure anything would have mattered, given the hurricane force Santa Ana winds in the L.A. Basin.

“Listen,” he says, “if you look and see what happened in the Palisades and everywhere else, there could be 6,000 firefighters and it wouldn’t be enough.

Still, the political finger-pointing has begun over whether more could have been done sooner. Asked about recent budget cuts, L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley told CBS News that did hamper some training and disaster preparedness.

“We did exactly what we could with what we had,” she said. “If I had a thousand engines to throw at this fire, I honestly don’t think a thousand engines at that very moment could have tapped this fire down.”

Only recently have winds calmed enough for water-scooping planes to fly over the fires, at least for now.

From the beach here, the view is extraordinary — those planes, flying in pairs, skim the Pacific Ocean filling tanks in their bellies and then fly directly over the Santa Monica Mountains to douse flames. They circle back to do it again and again.

L.A. is a city built out into flammable wildlands, from its famous coast to rugged, densely populated canyons with one way in and one way out roads, to mountains as high as 10,000 feet.

The Los Angeles Fire Department has long been a leader in knocking down urban wildfires. Fire agencies from around the West come here to train.

But this past week has tested the best, says UCLA researcher Edith de Guzman.

“You have embers flying miles apart, fire ignition is extremely difficult to predict or control and it’s happening simultaneously in so many places,” she says.

Climate change and wooden home making the situation worse

De Guzman says climate change is accelerating the extremes. The past two years have been extraordinarily wet here, building up vegetation — but this year? No rainy season at all so far.

Experts say even the most prepared fire agencies in the world can’t do much when infernos like this week’s ignite.

Further complicating things, de Guzman says, are all the wooden homes here, relics of early 20th century construction that focused on earthquake survivability.

“We have infrastructure and development that is a legacy of a period when we had less extreme conditions, climate wise,” she says, “and we also had less, you know, fewer people.”

That’s clear even along the posh coast northwest of Los Angeles, where mansions mingle with older, funkier, modest homes, like in Clayton Colbert’s neighborhood, an eerie shell of its former self.

“There was a three story wood structure house right there between there,” he says, pointing to a neighboring property, “and that went up like a Roman candle.”

Everything, he says, is gone.