Comments
FIRE SAFETY - As reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the City of Los Angeles is being sued for allegedly approving development in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones while ignoring California’s minimum firesafe regulations. The plaintiffs cite 75 examples of permits and plans that, they argue, violate state law.
If even a portion of those allegations are true, this is not a technical dispute. It is a life-safety failure.
The state’s minimum firesafe regulations were not written to score ideological points or slow housing for sport. They exist because California has learned—repeatedly and at horrific cost—that evacuation failure and access failure turn fires into mass-casualty disasters. These rules focus on fundamentals: road width and grade, limits on dead-end streets, emergency vehicle access, water supply, and, critically, spacing between structures to slow structure-to-structure ignition.
That last point matters more than most people realize. The regulations call, where feasible, for at least 30 feet between buildings and property lines—not because plants are inherently dangerous, but because homes ignite other homes. Modern wildfire disasters from Paradise to Lahaina to Pacific Palisades have made this painfully clear: once embers enter dense neighborhoods with constrained access and limited evacuation routes, the fire no longer behaves like a wildland event. It becomes an urban conflagration.
The City of Los Angeles has long known this. So has the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, which mapped and expanded fire hazard severity zones precisely to guide stricter standards in places where mistakes are least forgivable. In 2021, the Legislature made explicit what fire history had already taught us: these standards apply not only to remote wildlands, but to Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones within cities.
And yet, according to the lawsuit, Los Angeles has treated those standards as optional.
The LA Times article does an important service by grounding wildfire risk in land-use decisions rather than homeowner behavior. It documents how agencies struggled—or declined—to produce evacuation analyses required by law, and how responsibility for life-safety planning was shuffled from department to department. For more than a century, Los Angeles has responded to fires by adding after-the-fact protections, while continuing to approve dense hillside development that repeatedly outpaces those measures.
But the article also slips, subtly, into the language that has distorted fire policy for decades. It repeats plant removal (aka “strategic fuel breaks”) as a core safety measure without interrogating whether fuel breaks function as intended in wind-driven ember fires that leap across the fuel breaks and then run house-to-house. That omission matters, because it allows an outdated suppression paradigm to persist—even as evidence continues to show that access, spacing, and evacuation capacity dominate outcomes in urban fire disasters.
More troubling is the article’s fallback framing of this lawsuit as another skirmish in the endless YIMBY-versus-NIMBY war. That shorthand may be convenient, but it is wrong and actively misleading.
This is not a fight over neighborhood character or aesthetic preference. It is a dispute over whether the City is complying with state law designed to prevent people from being trapped on roads during evacuations. Treating enforceable fire-safety standards as mere “local resistance” erases the physical constraints that no amount of pro-housing rhetoric can wish away.
Housing policy and fire safety are colliding in California because we have allowed them to. The public is told—repeatedly—that density, speed, and safety can all be maximized simultaneously, and that anyone who points to building or evacuation limits is simply obstructing progress. Then the fires come, and we act surprised that evacuations were terrifyingly slow—or impossible.
During the Palisades Fire, evacuation routes were already gridlocked before the first evacuation order was issued, with firefighters reporting mile-long backups and abandoned vehicles blocking access—conditions the Fire Safe Regulations were designed to prevent.
Recent investigative reporting has only sharpened these concerns. The Los Angeles Times has also revealed that despite explicit National Weather Service warnings of life-threatening fire weather, the Los Angeles Fire Department failed to pre-deploy additional engines or crews to the Palisades. Firefighters were later ordered to leave the site of an earlier blaze that would rekindle days later, and internal complaints about those decisions were not disclosed publicly.
Even more troubling, the department’s after-action report was substantially edited behind closed doors, softening or reversing findings about command failures. These revelations underscore a broader pattern: when fire safety breaks down, responsibility is deflected — first away from land-use decisions, and then away from institutional accountability.
What makes this lawsuit especially revealing is not that watchdogs sued, but what they allege had to be ignored before they did. According to the petition, Los Angeles approved development in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones without verifying with state fire access, evacuation, and structure-spacing standards—while city agencies repeatedly disclaimed responsibility and failed to notify the state agency charged with oversight.
This lawsuit was not brought hastily. The plaintiffs describe months of investigation documenting repeated permitting approvals that failed to apply state fire-safety requirements. Nor did it come without warning: multiple demand letters were sent to the City outlining the alleged violations and allowing time for corrective action before litigation was filed—yet the practices described in the lawsuit continued.
The irony is that while the City now appears to understand—at least at the homeowner scale—that indiscriminate plant clearance within five feet of a wall is not synonymous with safety, it is simultaneously accused of ignoring fire-safety laws that govern entire hillside communities. The City Council’s Public Safety Committee has voted to oppose the State’s proposed “Zone 0” rule mandating vegetation removal within five feet of homes, instead of adopting an approach that allows healthy, irrigated, low-risk plants close to structures. The direction is telling: the City is capable of recognizing that wildfire safety is not achieved through indiscriminate clearance around individual homes.
What it has not yet demonstrated is the same clarity where it matters most: at the permitting stage, where unsafe access, evacuation bottlenecks, and cumulative development patterns are locked into place for generations.
This contradiction is now playing out at the state level as well. A new law, AB 888, enacted by the Legislature creates a taxpayer-funded “Safe Homes” grant program to help homeowners pay for fire-mitigation measures tied to insurance standards. Its initial funding comes from the state budget — not from insurers, and not from developers whose projects increase evacuation and access risks. In effect, public funds are being used to subsidize private home-hardening, while cities are sidestepping the fire codes meant to prevent those risks from being created in the first place.
If Los Angeles cannot safely evacuate and defend certain hillside and canyon areas under the minimum firesafe framework, then approving additional housing there is not housing progress. It is institutionalizing predictable disaster.
The City does not need new slogans or scapegoats. It needs to enforce the fire-safety laws already on the books governing access, evacuation, and structure spacing, and stop approving development that no amount of after-the-fact mitigation or plant removal can make safe.
And before shifting responsibility onto residents, the City must also restore public trust by confronting documented failures in preparedness, response, and transparency that contributed to the Palisades disaster.
(Diana Nicole is an ecological horticulturist and community advocate in Los Angeles. She writes about fire policy and landscapes that actually work for fire safety at dianaznicole.com. Previous columns are available at the citywatchla archives.)
