How L.A. Bureaucracy Made It Harder to Clear Flammable Brush
A mishmash of government agencies failed to keep public lands safe from deadly wildfires, residents say
As explained below, Western wildfires are symptoms of gross rangeland and forest mismanagement.
NOTE: this article was originally published to WSJ.com on January 18, 2025. It was written by Jim Carlton, Mark Maremont and Dan Frosch.
LOS ANGELES—Barry Josephson enjoyed a peaceful life in his hilltop home in the Pacific Palisades, save for one constant worry: the highly flammable brush that clogged the surrounding government-owned land.
“We all take a risk living here,” the producer of films including “Enchanted” said. “But that land should be maintained.”
There have been at least five fires in the area since Josephson moved there eight years ago. Most were fueled by brush, which consists of drought-resistant shrubs that burn easily and intensely.
Impatient with government bureaucracy, including a $150 fee for permission to remove brush from state parkland, some of Josephson’s neighbors cleared it on their own.
They might have saved some of their homes. Of 81 houses in the vicinity, Josephson said 54 are still standing amid the wreckage of this month’s Palisades fire, including his. It is particularly remarkable because investigators believe the blaze could have started a few hundred feet away, around a popular hiking destination known as Skull Rock.
As Angelenos absorb the impact of two massive wildfires that killed at least 27 people and damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 structures over the past two weeks, many are asking why so much flammable material was allowed to build up around now-devastated communities. It was particularly dangerous this winter, as vegetation grew quickly following last year’s record rains and dried out in the subsequent drought.
Fire experts said no amount of brush clearing could have stopped flying embers driven by hurricane-strength winds from igniting many buildings that are now rubble and ash.
But better maintenance of the wild lands could have slowed the fires’ growth, providing critical time to first responders and evacuees. And the lack of preventive work despite pleas from residents and warnings from people inside the government demonstrate how little officials did ahead of a foreseeable disaster.
The delays were caused by a slow-moving tangle of government agencies that own or regulate Los Angeles’s undeveloped land and are tasked with mitigating wildfire risks, according to a review of public records and interviews by The Wall Street Journal.
In the Palisades, the city and county of Los Angeles, the state parks department, the California Coastal Commission, and the National Park Service all have a say in what happens on land surrounding residential areas.
They don’t always work well together. In several instances, the Los Angeles Fire Department has issued citations to the state parks department for not clearing vegetation from its property, according to records of community meetings and a person with knowledge of the matter.
A spokesman for California State Parks said the department wasn’t aware of any recent brush clearance violations in the Palisades area and its staff have “quickly investigated and resolved any issue brought to their attention.”
The buildup of brush and other vegetation has been a factor in wildfires all over the country. In Maui, flammable grasses fueled the 2023 inferno that wiped out Lahaina and killed 102 people. Overgrown forests near Paradise, Calif., spread the 2018 Camp Fire that leveled that city and left 85 dead.
Similar fire threats face communities adjoining wild lands from California to Texas, and often it has proven hard for public and private landowners to work together to clear vegetation. “You have state lands next to federal lands next to private lands, and historically, it has been incredibly difficult for those there to work together,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, chief executive of After the Fire USA, a nonprofit that helps communities rebuild after disasters.
Raising funds to clear public land
Los Angeles has some of the toughest vegetation-management rules in the country, requiring property owners in high-fire-hazard zones to clear brush within 200 feet of any structures and 10 feet of roads or combustible fences. City officials frequently cite owners for failure to clear brush and send crews to clear the land of those who fail to comply, with the owners responsible for the cost.
But Palisades residents have long complained local and state governments don’t follow the same rules on their nearby land.
“They neglect it,” said Bart Young, president of a Palisades neighborhood group that became so fed up with official inaction that it raised $140,000 to fund its own brush cleanup.
The group hired private contractors to pull out dead trees, rake pine needles and clear vegetation on nearby state park land.
Young said he lost his home in the fire, but about 250 of the 300 houses in his immediate neighborhood survived. “It was a good investment on our part,” he said of the brush clearance.
Meeting minutes of the Pacific Palisades Community Council, a volunteer group that represents the area, are filled with discussions of brush-clearance issues.
At a 2023 meeting, a representative from the California State Parks agency said that, for environmental conservation reasons, the state doesn’t typically remove brush. But any concerned citizen, he said, could remove dry vegetation close to their own property after obtaining a permit.
The permit application requires property owners to schedule a visit by a state parks representative, takes up to eight weeks to be processed and costs $150.
The spokesman said the parks department takes wildfire preparation seriously and “the notion that State Parks could have done more in this instance to save homes from the recent firestorms is inaccurate.”
A plan in limbo
After the 2018 Woolsey Fire killed three people and destroyed some 1,600 structures, Los Angeles County commissioned a report with ideas to reduce future wildfire risk.
The report was issued in 2020. More than four years later, many of its recommendations still haven’t been implemented.
Consultants recommended that the county of 10 million people limit development in areas at high risk of wildfires and bolster brush-management requirements for new buildings.
It also said the county should develop “Community Wildfire Protection Plans” for unincorporated areas—a category that includes Altadena, which was devastated by the recent Eaton Fire, as well as land near the Palisades.
Such plans have become standard for communities around the U.S. They help identify areas that need brush cleared and who is responsible for the work. They are particularly useful when different government agencies and private entities that own or oversee adjoining property need to coordinate their efforts.
Molly Mowery, a consultant who worked on the Los Angeles County report, said she was surprised to find it didn’t already have community wildfire plans. “Given the fire history in that area, it was more like, ‘What was keeping them from having these in the first place?’” she said.
More than four years after the report, neither the plans nor a proposed ordinance that includes many of the report’s recommendations on new developments has been finished.
Thuy Hua, a supervising planner for the county planning department, said the pandemic limited opportunities to engage with residents on where to give priority to brush clearing and officials had to balance wildfire protection plans with other projects.
The ordinance was poised to go to the county board of supervisors for approval in 2023. But it was put on hold, county officials said, after they learned the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection first needed to update its wildfire hazard zone maps for the first time in 15 years. The ordinance still hasn’t been passed.
A Cal Fire spokesperson said the agency finished updating its maps last year and told local jurisdictions it would transmit recommendations to them this month.
‘What ends up happening is nothing’
David Barrett is executive director of MySafe:LA, a nonprofit that works with the city fire department to make neighborhoods less prone to fires.
He said there are defined rules, inspection processes and fines to compel residents to clear brush off their land, but the process is less predictable on government property. In some cases, it is tough to determine who owns the land because there aren’t clearly marked boundaries.
“What ends up happening is nothing, and I don’t mean that nobody cares. It’s just that it’s hard to know whose dirt it is and so there’s ongoing issues,” he said.
After four years of effort, Barrett’s group recently received a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop a community wildfire plan for the city of Los Angeles.
“I wish that I had been funded years ago, because then it would have been in place before the fires,” he said.
aryam Zar was president of the Palisades Community Council at the time of the 2023 meeting, where she quizzed the state parks official about parkland overgrown with shrubs and weeds near her neighborhood.
Soon afterward, she said, a crew arrived to clear the land. Another crew came back a few weeks before the Palisades fire began nearby.
While evacuating, Zar saw “open flames on the mountains above us. I thought, there’s no way the street was going to survive.” But her house and most of her neighbors’ are still intact. “I’m not saying it’s because of the brush clearance, but there’s no fuel on that mountainside,” Zar said. “Maybe it saved a few homes.”
Zar believes officials might have done the clearance work because of her council position, and she criticized public agencies for not doing more. “How can the state of California spend so much time and money on fire mitigation, but you don’t do the most basic thing, which is to clear brush on your land that’s near homes?”
— Brian Whitton and Jack Gillum contributed to this article.