Days before the deadly wildfires broke out in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Jan. 7, a group of interdisciplinary journalists at the New York Times began writing about dangerous fire conditions in the area driven by extreme wind forecasts.
By the time 100 m.p.h. gusts whipped flames across the county, that coverage morphed into maps documenting evacuation orders. Over the following days, that reader service grew into a comprehensive tracker with live fire maps, smoke forecasts, wind animations and an address lookup feature for evacuations.
The tracker was a central element of a broad newsroom effort that featured exclusive scoops, reader service tools and a variety of storytelling forms to ultimately explain how the fires became so deadly and devastating.
By Thursday, The Times used satellite data, aerial imagery and on-the-ground reporting to produce one of the earliest estimates of the structural damage wrought by the Palisades and Eaton fires, using detailed maps, close-up video from the scene and visceral before-and-after photography.
Days later, a team of more than two dozen reporters, graphics journalists, video editors, photographers, researchers and others produced a sweeping reconstruction of the first 24 hours of the disaster — an ambitious and authoritative multimedia narrative that told the story of how poor planning by officials, delayed evacuations, strained resources and treacherous conditions allowed firestorms to overrun a region that thought it knew how to fight wildfires.
At the same time, a group of reporters began chasing leads on the origin of the Eaton fire, eventually leading to scoop after powerful scoop that put the possible cause at the feet of Southern California Edison, the large investor-owned utility operating the area. A crux of the reporting relied on securing exclusive footage that showed flashes of light in the vicinity of three high-voltage electrical towers — often signs of power equipment failure — where flames erupted moments later.
The cause, however, may not rest entirely on the power utility. Even for an area familiar with fire, the fierce Santa Ana winds in January were worrisome — though not entirely surprising. Fires driven by Santa Ana winds account for about 90 percent of the area burned in the fall and winter in Southern California since 1950, Times maps showed. High winds, a study found, are the most important factor for explaining whether large fires destroy homes and other structures — not dry weather, not dense vegetation and not the fire’s proximity to areas where human settlements and wild spaces commingle.
The Times’s visual explainer on wind ultimately raised the question: If there was a body of research to suggest that dangerous fires in January may not be anomalies when Santa Winds below, why did Los Angeles officials appear to be so unprepared to respond?
“We know that the fire is going to re-burn in these locations, and we know it’s going to do it every so many years,” a former battalion chief with the Orange County Fire Authority told The Times. “We can’t continue to put people in harm’s way.”
