Deployed on the ground by the thousands, firefighters are experiencing the worst difficulties in containing the flames ravaging the Los Angeles region. Complications notably caused by the famous Santa Ana winds.
For almost a week, the city of Angels has been transformed into a fiery hell. The firefighters deployed are trying as best they can to fight the fires which have killed at least 24 people, devoured tens of thousands of hectares and destroyed more than 12,000 homes or buildings, according to the latest report established on Sunday January 12.
But how can we explain that the thousands of fire fighters working in Los Angeles are having so much difficulty putting out the fires, or at least containing their spread? On Sunday, on his Truth Social account, Donald Trump judged that local politicians were responsible for the situation, calling them “incompetent”.
“It’s one of the worst disasters in the history of our country. They can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?” said the US president-elect. .
The Santa Ana winds, a “giant hairdryer”
On the ground, several factors complicate the firefighters’ task. The first cause is the wind and more precisely the so-called Santa Ana winds, which the Washington Post compares to a “giant hair dryer”.
The Santa Ana winds should not be on the agenda at this time of year since they usually blow between the months of September and May. They occur when cold air accumulates in neighboring states, Utah and Nevada, before this mass, drying and warming as it travels, hurtles down the California mountains.
Santa Ana winds have several deleterious consequences for firefighters. First, they create favorable conditions for the outbreak of forest fires by drying out vegetation which has hardly been watered by a single drop of rain in the space of eight months. They then have the annoying habit of carrying the hot embers to other areas of vegetation still spared by the flames.
While this “hair dryer” blew up to 160 km/h last week, unheard of since 2011, the meteorological services expect these winds to strengthen until Wednesday. They could reach 110 km/h from Tuesday morning and be the cause of “extreme fire behavior”, according to meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld, cited by AFP.
As Jess Torres, the battalion chief of the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, pointed out last week to the New York Times, the Santa Ana winds make the use of aerial means to fight the flames even more difficult. .
The fire hydrants in question
Without being able to count as much as they would like on the support of planes dropping retardants or water, Los Angeles firefighters often have to rely on fire hydrants… affected by shortages of water. This was particularly the case in Pacific Palisades, one of the main neighborhoods affected by the fires.
To understand how such a situation could have occurred, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom called on Friday for the opening of an investigation.
“Although the water supply from fire hydrants is not designed to suppress fires over large areas, not being able to get water from these hydrants likely hurt efforts to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” Gavin Newsom said in this document.
The fire chief criticized a drop in numbers
The water supply is not the only subject of controversy concerning fire management over the past week. On a local television channel, the head of the Los Angeles fire department, Kristin Crowley, said she deplored a persistent lack of “personnel, resources and funds” for fire fighters.
In a memorandum to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass last month, Kristin Crowley warned that the city’s declining firefighter shifts and elimination of overtime were causing “operational challenges without precedent” and “severely limited the department’s ability to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”
On Saturday, during a press conference with Kristin Crowley at her side, Karen Bass tried to downplay these tensions. She assured that political leaders, emergency services and security were “all on the same wavelength”.
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