LA was sitting on a powder keg ripe for a fire after months of drought. Then it was lit

Southern California had faced drought for months, which helped create the right conditions for a massive fire. Then the Santa Ana wings moved in, and forecasters warned that settings were “about as bad as it gets in terms of fire weather.”

This week, that environmental spark was lit and Los Angeles burned.

Los Angeles has faced days of wildfires that have torn through communities, leaving 10 dead and unimaginable scenes of destruction. An award-winning author has shared with The Independent how the conditions had been forming for months and led to the spate of wildfires.

Humidity below 10 percent, taking moisture from the air, was one of the main driving factors.

“That’s drier than firewood. That’s drier than a matchstick,” said John Vaillant, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World and a part of the inaugural 2024 class of The Independent’s Climate 100 List. “And so, it’s explosive, and there hasn’t been rain in eight months. So, we’re all sitting on this, living this kind of beautiful life ... on top of a tinderbox. We’re sitting on a bomb and a bomb went off in L.A. County.”

Vaillant spoke from Orange County, just 50 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, and has seen few impacts from the massive fires in the north.

“The whole state could burn no problem and nothing has really slowed down. The winds slightly, but they still have to pick up again north of us and can certainly move this way. So, it’s a weird ‘watching and waiting’ time,” he said.

In the hours that followed and after a relatively quiet morning, Los Angeles County residents were starting to return home to survey the utter devastation in their flattened communities. Many returned to the areas where their homes once stood to find absolutely nothing left.

But, fires were still burning there and in Ventura County. As of Friday, five active wildfires have scorched nearly 36,000 acres. The largest, the Palisades and Eaton Fires, are now some of the most destructive in the state’s history. The blazes have put 57, 830 structures at risk, officials said. Some 10,000 properties have been damaged or destroyed, according to initial reports. And, 153,000 people remained under evacuation orders. their futures uncertain due to more critical fire weather conditions and strong wind gusts.

Those dangerous winds that fanned these wildfires are projected to continue on Friday, although offshore winds will continue into early next week.

Explosive wildfire outbreaks are nothing new to Vaillant. However, Vaillant said the only thing he could compare that destruction to was photos he’d seen of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombings of August 1945.

What he saw “scarred” him.

“I’ve walked through those communities, or the absence of them, and it is absolutely shocking — and talked to families who are just looking at where their lives just were,” Vaillant said. “And, it happened so fast. 12 hours earlier, they might have been having dinner together and now it’s totally gone. And so, that is something that you really can’t prepare people for.”

He was surprised that fire-weary Californians were shocked by the speed and force of these wildfires. Human-caused climate change, driven by the production of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels, has made wildfires more frequent and extreme.

Research published in the journal Science last October also found that western wildfires are also spreading faster. In California, the authors found that wildfires spread almost four times as fast in 2020 as in 2001. The state has had dozens of fires in the first nine days of 2025, and a storied history of terrifyingly large burns.

Still, tenured officials and firefighters have repeatedly stated that this situation is new for them.

“I think this is way beyond current politics or climate denial or anything like that. And, I think Homo sapiens, our species, is built for resilience and is built for certain kinds of short memory. And, I think around trauma the natural instinct is to try to move on. And, unfortunately, what we’re finding and what therapists are finding is these events actually generate a lot of PTSD,” he said.

“And so, now you have thousands of Angelenos who have been traumatized one way or the other,” Vaillant continued. “They may not even realize. But, it’s an existential trauma to see your neighborhood rendered unrecognizable in the space of a workday. And, you can’t go back. So, now you really are a refugee in your own country. And, I think it’s fair to call them climate refugees.”

With the wildfire season now year-round, the conditions across California for more blazes will remains - even after the Los Angeles disaster is under control.

With thousands of personnel working to respond to the wildfires, Vaillant said nobody has enough firefighters to deal with climate change and future fire seasons in warmer global temperatures.

“It’s hard to imagine it being worse. I mean, being up there. There’s certainly nothing a firefighter can do. There’s nothing water can do. It’s really like another planet,” said Vaillant. He brought up NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. “You know, when you see Voyager’s pictures of those sunbursts and things like that. Those crazy rays of light spraying out of the body of the sun: that’s what it looks like. That’s what those houses looked like up there and there’s nothing you can do except run away.”