Fire Sale

When the Eaton and Palisades fires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, they did so on a scale the city had never before endured. Fire, of course, is not anomalous in Los Angeles. It is a recurring and constitutive feature of the region's ecology. What distinguished these fires was their magnitude. The Eaton and Palisades fires displaced more people than any California fire in over a century, including the 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state's history—and other conflagrations over the past decade. Over the course of twenty-four days, roughly 150,000 residents were forced from their homes. More than 16,000 buildings—among them over 13,000 homes—were destroyed. Two neighborhoods were effectively erased. Thousands of firefighters were brought in from outside the region as the disaster exceeded the city's capacity to contain it. In scale, cost, and consequence, the Great Los Angeles Fires marked a turning point.