2025 is off to a bleak start. The wildfires that are still burning in and around Los Angeles are already shaping up to be the costliest in U.S. history. Thousands have lost their homes, and roughly 150,000 remain under evacuation orders.
The scale of the fires is unprecedented. Southern California is having one of its driest-ever winters, and the powerful Santa Ana winds are far stronger than normal, with some gusts reaching hurricane-force at near-100 miles per hour.
In these conditions, most utilities proactively shut off parts of their systems to avoid sparks from power lines. But reporting from the Wall Street Journal found that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power didn’t take those safety protocols, and in fact hasn’t developed a plan for proactive shutoffs at all. It was the windstorm itself, and not the utility, that took out power to tens of thousands of the utility’s customers this week. (The specific causes of the fires that have killed at least 10 people remain under investigation; it’s unclear whether power lines played a role.)
Each year, California utilities and fire services are amassing more wildfire monitoring and prevention resources — but this week is demonstrating the limits of those attempts to adapt.
The limits of imagination
“Fire tech” is more popular than ever with investors. Both hardware and software companies are using advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to prevent, detect, and contain wildfires. The push to fight fire with innovation has secured these companies both venture capital money and contracts with utilities, especially in the last year.
Many of those are startups, like Bellwether, which spun out from Google’s X moonshot factory and applies AI to huge amounts of Earth data to help people prepare for, predict, and recover from disasters.
And there are also veterans in the space, such as the 27-year-old data company Technosylva, that are increasingly partnering with utilities and fire services to better equip them for fire season. Cal Fire uses Technosylva’s algorithms to identify patterns in fire behavior; CEO Bryan Spear said the market for this kind of data has only started to take off in the last year or two, as utilities recognize the “risk at the asset level” that wildfires pose.
This comes as a part of the industry’s recent embrace of the need for adaptation. Investors are increasingly seizing the “unavoidable opportunity” of a market for adaptation solutions that is expected to grow to $2 trillion per year by 2026. While crucial, deploying more clean energy alone won’t prevent crises like the one unfolding in LA. The climate has already changed, and nowhere is guaranteed to be safe.
Of all the software solutions that have caught the climate tech industry’s attention this year, it was the non-profit-created Watch Duty app that has proved most useful. Its real-time monitoring of the fire’s movements has led it to overtake ChatGPT to become the Apple app store’s most-downloaded free app this week. It’s a prime example of the technologies that will become invaluable as we feel the true impacts of the climate crisis.
On a more personal note: I love Los Angeles. I used to live there, in the hills near Dodger Stadium, and friends and family still do. And every one of them is in some degree of shock. These urban-dwellers are used to smoke on the horizon, summer days with air quality alerts, and reading about destructive fires unfolding elsewhere in the state.
But as one told me this week, they were living under the assumption that “there’s no way the city burns!” Many of those friends have now evacuated the city, armed with a suitcase or two.
The need for public-private partnerships
In the last six months — especially in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and now with the LA wildfires — it has become clear that many people who control key resources have yet to reckon with climate change’s worst case scenario.
That includes the energy sector. Yesterday, President Joe Biden said that some LA County fire hydrants were running dry, because when utilities cut power this week, it also “cut off the ability to generate pumping the water.” The lack of water in the moment of highest need was not just a resource failure, but also a failure to really imagine what would be required in a potential worst case scenario.
Meanwhile, a fact that has been much-circulated on social media is that LA Mayor Karen Bass last year approved roughly $23 million in budget cuts to the LA Fire Department. (Though, as the New York Times pointed out, the actual budgeting mechanics are more complicated than an Instagram post can capture.) Prophetically, the city’s fire chief warned last month that overtime cuts were already creating problems, including for planning for big emergency events.
So yes, most utilities and their customers are becoming more accustomed to emergency shutoffs in fire season. And yes, the climate tech sector is developing tools to prevent, and endure, future blazes. But there is a limit to what the private sector can do. When disaster does break out, fire departments are still under-resourced — to the point where incarcerated people are still being sent to the frontlines — and communities are still relying on mutual aid.
Scientists and activists have warned for years how bad natural disasters could become. But the reality is manifesting in ways that outpace both our imagination and government budgets, to devastating effect.
It’s public officials who have the power and responsibility to build the infrastructure to match the new reality, whether that means requiring emergency shut-offs or back-up battery power for pumping stations, expanding rather than cutting fire department budgets, or else partnering with the startups that are already developing the tools we need (with significant money behind them).
As Sonia Kastner, CEO and founder of firetech company Pano AI, said in September, “we don’t have to solve climate change to address the wildfire crisis. Investment in wildfire prevention technologies must become a public/private partnership — and a priority.”
