CODES
BY JESSE ROMAN
Reprinted with permission from NFPA Journal © 2025 NFPA®
As Los Angeles County tries to pick up the pieces after one of the most destructive wildfire events in U.S. history, local leaders are confronted with urgent challenges and immense decisions, chief among them, rebuilding areas that were destroyed. NFPA’s director of wildfire, Michele Steinberg, a former IAWF board member, provides perspective on the wildfires, the tortured response, and what needs to happen as the region undertakes the largest reconstruction project in its history.
By now, we all know about the hell on earth that Southern California endured in January when two enormous wildfires, the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, reduced large swaths of Los Angeles County to rubble and ash. The fires, driven by hurricane-like 100 mph wind gusts, moved so voraciously over the parched landscape that, by the fourth day, fire had consumed some 40,000 acres – an area larger than the city limits of San Francisco.
As of Jan. 15, at least 12,000 structures had been destroyed and 25 people had died, but officials warned that both numbers would likely rise. As of Jan. 22, neither the Palisades fire nor the Eaton fire had been fully contained.
The unrelenting winds made fighting the fires from the air impossible for days. Efforts to fight them on the ground were hampered by the famously hilly Southern California topography and by major water supply issues. Fire crews complained repeatedly about hydrants having either low water pressure or no water at all, which stalled their efforts as the fires grew.
Outrage and finger pointing over who was to blame for the catastrophe began within days of the fires igniting. Angry residents, shocked at the magnitude of the destruction, lashed out at firefighters and politicians for not putting the blazes out faster, and the media pursued city and state governments with questions about the lack of water needed to fight the blazes. Behind much of the vitriol is a sense of disbelief. How could a disaster like this happen in the Los Angeles area, one of the wealthiest and most glamorous spots in the world?
“These fires echo what we heard after the Valley fire and the Tubbs fire,” said Michele Steinberg, wildfire division director at NFPA, referring to extremely destructive wildfires that leveled communities in Northern California in 2015 and 2017, respectively. “In those fires, I remember veteran firefighters and people in the fire industry saying to me, ‘We didn’t think this could happen here.’ Around Los Angeles, there’s been a bit of disbelief over how bad it’s been. But these disasters have long setups, and I think it’s important for people to understand why we’re seeing what we are in terms of loss.”
The main issue, Steinberg said, is that communities across the country continue to build vulnerable structures in places where wildfires are inevitable –only to act surprised when wildfires arrive and destroy homes and other structures.
That’s why Steinberg and her wildfire peers were dismayed when, just a week into the fire, California’s top officials made it clear that they may not fully understand that central issue. In mid-January, with the fires still raging, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order waiving certain requirements for rebuilding, including provisions of the state’s building code “that can safely be suspended or streamlined to accelerate rebuilding and make it more affordable.” At the same time, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive order clearing the way “to rebuild all the homes just as they were,” even though experts say a big reason the fires were so destructive is because vast portions of the building stock in fire-impacted areas were built without wildfire protections. The new buildings would be just as vulnerable as the ones that burned.
Steinberg, one of the world’s foremost experts on community wildfire mitigation strategies, was not shocked by this news. She has seen it many times before, not only in California but in Colorado, Oregon, Tennessee, and other states.
As the LA-area wildfires were still burning, NFPA Journal spoke with Steinberg to get her perspective on the unfolding catastrophe, the troubled response, and what local and state officials can learn from the mistakes made by other jurisdictions as they rushed to rebuild after devastating fires.
It’s hard to put these kinds of things into historical context in the moment but based on what we know and based on your years of working in wildfires, help us understand the historic significance of the LA wildfires.
Clearly these are among the worst fires by any metric that you could think of. I hate to use that term “the worst” because sadly, the kind of damage that we’re seeing is not necessarily unprecedented. It reminds me a bit of what has happened in Northern California over the last several years.
Why was this event so bad?
In this case, we saw a perfect set of conditions that allowed the fires to grow fast and spread fast. Before these fires started, CAL FIRE had put out warnings that, should an ignition happen, we would see very significant wildfire spread – and that’s exactly what happened. In addition to the winds, there hadn’t been significant rainfall since October, so conditions were ripe for wildfire from Santa Barbara all the way down to San Diego, which is an enormous area.
The reason we’re seeing such incredible damage is because we’ve built homes close together with relatively little attention paid to how they’re going to resist exterior exposure to flames and embers. The damage is driven by the fact that we have so much development in these wildfire-prone areas, with so many people and structures at risk. Historically – and not just in California – Americans have built with very little attention paid to wildfire. We need to stop looking at wildfire as a fluke or a once-in-a-generation issue and understand that this is a natural phenomenon that we’ll continue to see.
The common perception is that a wildfire moves through urban areas almost like a wave, burning everything in its path. But you’ve described these losses in urban areas as fire spreading mostly through house-to-house ignition rather than from the wildfire sweeping through. Is that what we’ve seen in the LA fires?
Absolutely. Rather than a wave, it’s more like dominoes, where fire spreads from structure to structure very rapidly. Topography is also a factor; if we have houses up on the hill that are burning, that burning material is coming down and blowing into communities, and then you have the horizontal urban conflagration that happens on the flat land. That’s how the Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa was destroyed in the Tubbs fire.
One way to demonstrate this: in aerial photos of burned areas in Pacific Palisades, you see block after block of burned-out houses, but you also see green trees interspersed among the burned homes. That’s because the homes themselves were more vulnerable to ignition than the trees around them, which happens all the time in wildfires. It usually blows people’s minds when you point out unburned trees because, like you said, they’re visualizing a wave that destroys everything in its path, and that’s actually not what’s happening.
There has been a lot of public criticism and media attention about the response to this event. Some are claiming that fire crews did not respond fast enough. Others are outraged that municipalities, at times, evidently ran out of water to fight the fires. Do you think these are fair criticisms?
It’s nonsense. Just about every story I’m reading keeps circling back to, “Well, how come the firefighters didn’t put it out?” and “Why didn’t we have water pressure?” First off, you can’t safely fly helicopters in 80 mph winds. Again, there was a perfect set of conditions to make these fires really horrible, including having so many houses exposed at the same time. Firefighters mentioned running out of water – I wasn’t there on the ground, and I don’t want to speak to the specific conditions of what happened or what didn’t. But if you think of your own municipal water supply, wherever you live, it’s not designed to fight fire on hundreds of structures simultaneously for days at a time. At some point you’ll run out of water and that’s the end of that.
Trying to blame the damage on not attacking the fire fast enough or strongly enough, or because there weren’t enough resources or enough water, is not how we should be thinking about this, because it isn’t possible. It’s not possible, with the resources we have, to expect that we’re going to fight the fire at every structure when we have a fire of this magnitude. What responders have been able to do, remarkably and thankfully, is get most people out of harm’s way. And that’s been a daunting task. I think our first responders deserve a lot of credit for being able to save lives and reduce injuries. We’re very grateful for that.
Are the expectations we have for fire departments too high when it comes to combating these modern wildfires?
So often it seems like the expectations for a municipal fire department are, “Well, we pay taxes, therefore you are going to perform miracles and save us from everything.” But people don’t understand what a miracle it really is, how dangerous and difficult it is for firefighters when wildfires impact neighborhoods. They don’t understand that, in order for firefighters to do their jobs and save you, you’ve got to do something, too.
One thing that jumped out to me was that, according to CAL FIRE’s incident site, the vast majority of structures in the Pasadena / Altadena area where the Eaton fire struck were built before 1939. Those are communities that value older structures. I get that – I live in a community that values its older structures, too. But we know that older structures – if they’re not retrofitted, mitigated, and maintained over time to deal with the exterior exposure – are very vulnerable during a wildfire. If any structure was not built to code in the first place to deal with the wildfire risk, they’re much more likely to suffer damage and destruction.
We know that Southern California is in a fire environment. So, the residents and municipal governments need to ask the question, “How do we, as a community, protect those resources?” That’s about being prepared in a long-term way, not about how you attack a wildfire when it arrives in your community. How do we put preparedness and safety into people’s minds so that it’s just as much a part of their habits in maintaining a home as everything else they do? Wildfire mitigation is on ongoing, long-term process, and it’s not all on the fire department.
As we talk in mid-January, this is still a very fluid situation, but I want to talk a little bit about what happens next during the recovery and rebuilding phase. California’s governor and the mayor of Los Angeles have both suggested that they are willing to waive or suspend certain permitting requirements and possibly parts of the state’s building code during this massive rebuild. What is your reaction to that?
Applying the building code is absolutely critical during the rebuild. California is one of only two states (the other being Utah) to use a statewide wildland-urban interface code that is consistently enforced. The current code in California, Chapter 7A, also known as the California Wildland / Urban Interface Code, applies to buildings built after 2008 in high-hazard areas. It incorporates all the best science on how you build a home to resist wildfire ignitions from embers and flames. It is really well done. And as California builds new homes in areas with wildfire risk, they apply it, they enforce it, and they inspect to it. My strong, strong recommendation is that local and state officials not waive those requirements in the rebuilding. Apply them and use them.
What do you say to the arguments that applying these codes will only slow down recovery and make rebuilding more expensive for people who just lost their homes?
It is worth pointing out that the wording of the governor’s executive order suggests that he does not intend to weaken safety provisions in the building code, which is good. It is not going to do people who have been victimized by this fire any favors to say, for whatever reason, that we’re going to weaken the code to rebuild your home. It makes no sense to put these homes back in a condition that is as bad or worse than they were before in terms of their risk. If they’re building something that is known to be substandard, i.e. not meeting code, that is also going to imperil the homeowner’s ability to get insurance. Insurance companies are only insuring properties in at-risk areas that are built to the best standards. California has some of the best, and they need to be used.
Why do we see governments, time and again, do away with wildfire protections after they’ve seen their communities destroyed by wildfires? You’d think the opposite would be true, that they’d see the errors of the past and build back stronger.
One of the big things that we see post-fire is municipalities suddenly saying, “Wow, we’ve lost so many homes. That’s property tax we’re not collecting! That is not good for the city or town!” And that’s absolutely right – it’s not good. But attempting to speed up the rebuilding by waiving all these requirements doesn’t work. There’s just that knee-jerk reaction. And we’ve seen that happen now in several fires that I could name where local officials have taken that tack to attempt to speed up the process of getting people back in place, and it just doesn’t work.
I also think that there’s a real misconception out there that somehow building to safety standards is unattainable or unaffordable. That could not be more incorrect. We’ve been preaching it for years with our Firewise USA™ program. A home that’s built with wildfire resistance is not all built out of concrete or steel or other expensive materials – it’s not a bunker. We’re talking about reasonably affordable materials. A Class A roof, which is the highest rating for fire resistance, is the No. 1 thing, and that is widely attainable. Most people have it. Then it’s about exterior walls and the design of the home so that you don’t have anything that can burn within five feet of the house. That is key, and it’s something we’ve understood for a long time. Those embers are going to land, roll off the roof, and hit the flammable mulch, shrubs, or other things piled up against the house, and that’s going to carry fire to the structure. You have to eliminate that pathway. So, it’s relatively simple to achieve, and California’s building code helps people achieve it. And it’s not like it’s free to rebuild a house without the California code – it’s going to cost you money regardless. So, I strongly advocate that officials do not waive that requirement and that we collectively look at ways to support individuals who aren’t financially prepared to rebuild for whatever reason.
I can hear the argument already: “If this building code is so good, why did we just lose 12,000 structures?” How would you respond?
I’d say look at the Eaton fire statistics. Almost 14,000 structures in those communities were built in 1939 or earlier and did not meet code, at least with the basic structure. We’re talking about a very small percentage of the houses that burned in this fire that met the current code, because the code has only been in place since 2008.
We’re going to have to wait and see to determine how the houses that did meet code performed in this situation. We have to acknowledge that, even when we have an individual structure on a parcel that’s come up to code or has been built to code, if it’s 20 feet away from a massive burning structure that isn’t extinguished because there are hundreds of other buildings on fire and not enough water, the new building isn’t likely to survive that impact, even if it did meet code. Proximity of those burning structures matters, and it’s very challenging. We’ll potentially see buildings that were built to code that were destroyed because of that issue. Obviously, that does not mean that the code doesn’t work or that we should abandon it.
Do you think there’s anything that wildfire educators should be using or doing in this moment to drum up more momentum for action in their own communities?
Absolutely. I have heard from my colleagues in other parts of the country saying that they are getting deluged with media calls asking what’s going on with wildfire preparation. I think there definitely is that heightened awareness that this is a national and global phenomenon. This is not just isolated to one area of the country; we need to pay attention. For people in the prevention world and in the wildfire world, it is an opportunity to say, “Here’s what we’re doing in our community. Here’s what we need. Here’s where we could do more.” Rather than bash on people in a situation thousands of miles away from us, let’s focus on what we can be doing in our own community. I think that’s the best pivot that we can make on this. When we have the heightened awareness, let’s help people understand this is the moment to educate and to advocate.
Any other key takeaways?
One of the great questions a reporter asked me was, “What’s so special about the California building code? I keep hearing how great it is.” My response was that there’s nothing magical about that code. It’s the same principles, the same science that’s in NFPA 1140, Standard for Wildfire Protection. The difference is that California actually uses it and enforces it. The reality is that you could have the best content in the world, but none of it works if we don’t use it and enforce it and inspect to it. That’s really my biggest call for action: let’s not continue to perpetuate this problem as we continue to build in areas that are exposed to wildfire risk. Let’s use the code.
