The Los Angeles fires may have killed hundreds more people than official records show

Washington Post

4 days ago

The devastating January fires that consumed entire swaths of Los Angeles, displaced tens of thousands of people and altered parts of the city's iconic landscape, may have been far more deadly than previously recorded.
While the official death toll was at least 30 people, the blazes could be linked to hundreds of fatalities in the month after the fires first sparked, according to new research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The scientists compared recorded deaths in Los Angeles County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to those of past years — excluding 2020 through 2023 because of the coronavirus pandemic — and estimated that 440 more deaths this year in that time could be attributed to the fires. In total, 6,371 deaths were recorded, compared to 5,931 expected, according to their models.
The findings emphasize how climate-driven disasters can be far deadlier than they initially seem, with ripple effects that extend in the weeks and months after the extreme events. The disasters are linked to lingering environmental damages and social upheaval that result in long-term, dangerous ills for hard-hit communities.
The methodology to calculate excess deaths in the wake of a natural disaster is sometimes used to capture the complete toll of these events — scientists catch fatalities that may not be directly linked to the catastrophe, but were a result of circumstances that would not have otherwise occurred.
'These additional deaths likely reflect a combination of factors, including increased exposure to poor air quality and healthcare delays and interruptions,' the authors wrote.
The amount of excess deaths linked to the Los Angeles fires stunned one of the paper's authors, Andrew Stokes, an associate professor the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Stokes also worked on conducting excess death studies during the coronavirus pandemic, where he and other researchers found an approximately 16 percent increase in deaths than were recorded, he said.
But for the fires, the amount found is more than 10 times the 30 fatalities recorded.
'It highlights that it's very difficult to attribute a death to a natural disaster,' he said. 'Because while some deaths are due to direct exposure others are due to the sustained exposure.'
Stokes also noted the time period of the research was small — less than a month — and effects beyond Feb. 1 are entirely likely but would be missed in their count.
'There's certainly a long tail,' he said, adding first-responders and those living in LA County and neighboring areas may face long-term health hazards given their exposure to the smoke and contaminants.
Similar studies have been done in the wake of other extreme events including heat waves and hurricanes. Researchers found that a European heat wave this summer may have resulted in nearly three-times as many heat-related deaths. And an analysis published last year found that the average U.S. hurricane leads to as many as 11,000 excess deaths.
For the authors, the Los Angeles fires were an opportunity. Often excess death studies linked to disasters are challenging because they rely on robust mortality data that's not always accessible in the rural areas where these events occur.
But when the fires razed parts of one of the largest counties in the country, burning homes, cars, storefronts and nature preserves, there was a chance to show the extent of the hazards.
The hope, Stokes said, is that their results demonstrate that in other places, where you don't have that data, you could still be aware of the harms.
'I worry, for example, that when it comes to wildfires that have occurred elsewhere that we'll never know the full toll of those because the studies haven't been done and are difficult to do,' Stokes said. 'But here we've been able to show this discrepancy between the official toll versus what we believe to be the the true toll and the the differences are quite staggering.'
Brianna Sacks and Kevin Crowe contributed to this report.