Latest news with #ThomasFire
eNCA
24-05-2025
- eNCA
US power company to pay $82.5m for California wildfire
LOS ANGELES - One of California's largest utilities is to pay the US Forest Service $82.5-million for a wildfire that burned tens of thousands of acres (hectares) of woodland. The 2020 Bobcat Fire destroyed dozens of buildings as it tore through the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles. The US government said Southern California Edison had not properly controlled vegetation near its power lines and the blaze erupted when trees touched a live wire. A 2023 lawsuit claimed damages from the company for the cost of fighting the fire on Forest Service land as well as for remediation of damage caused to campgrounds, trails and wildlife habitats. "This record settlement against Southern California Edison provides meaningful compensation to taxpayers for the extensive costs of fighting the Bobcat Fire and for the widespread damage to public lands," said US Attorney Bill Essayli. "My office will continue to aggressively pursue recovery for suppression costs and environmental damages from any entity that causes harm to the public's forests and other precious national resources." Southern California Edison is no stranger to paying out large sums of money for wildfires where its equipment was suspected to have been at fault. The company handed over more than $2.7-billion in settlements over the 2017 Thomas Fire that tore through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, killing two people and destroying hundreds of buildings. It paid $2.2-billion for the 2018 Woolsey Fire that burned through Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killing three people and damaging more than 1,600 buildings. Investigators probing the deadly Eaton Fire, one of two blazes that ripped through Los Angeles at the start of this year, are homing in on SCE transmission lines as a possible source of ignition.
NDTV
24-05-2025
- NDTV
US Power Company To Pay $82.5 Million For California Wildfire
One of California's largest utilities is to pay the US Forest Service $82.5 million for a wildfire that burned tens of thousands of acres (hectares) of woodland, the government said Friday. The 2020 Bobcat Fire destroyed dozens of buildings as it tore through the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles. The US government said Southern California Edison had not properly controlled vegetation near its power lines and the blaze erupted when trees touched a live wire. A 2023 lawsuit claimed damages from the company for the cost of fighting the fire on Forest Service land as well as for remediation of damage caused to campgrounds, trails and wildlife habitats. "This record settlement against Southern California Edison provides meaningful compensation to taxpayers for the extensive costs of fighting the Bobcat Fire and for the widespread damage to public lands," said US Attorney Bill Essayli. "My office will continue to aggressively pursue recovery for suppression costs and environmental damages from any entity that causes harm to the public's forests and other precious national resources." Southern California Edison is no stranger to paying out large sums of money for wildfires where its equipment was suspected to have been at fault. The company handed over more that $2.7 billion in settlements over the 2017 Thomas Fire that tore through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, killing two people and destroying hundreds of buildings. It paid $2.2 billion for the 2018 Woolsey Fire that burned through Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killing three people and damaging more than 1,600 buildings. Investigators probing the deadly Eaton Fire, one of two blazes that ripped through Los Angeles at the start of this year, are homing on in SCE transmission lines as a possible source of ignition.
France 24
23-05-2025
- France 24
US power company to pay $82.5m for California wildfire
The 2020 Bobcat Fire destroyed dozens of buildings as it tore through the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles. The US government said Southern California Edison had not properly controlled vegetation near its power lines and the blaze erupted when trees touched a live wire. A 2023 lawsuit claimed damages from the company for the cost of fighting the fire on Forest Service land as well as for remediation of damage caused to campgrounds, trails and wildlife habitats. "This record settlement against Southern California Edison provides meaningful compensation to taxpayers for the extensive costs of fighting the Bobcat Fire and for the widespread damage to public lands," said US Attorney Bill Essayli. "My office will continue to aggressively pursue recovery for suppression costs and environmental damages from any entity that causes harm to the public's forests and other precious national resources." Southern California Edison is no stranger to paying out large sums of money for wildfires where its equipment was suspected to have been at fault. The company handed over more that $2.7 billion in settlements over the 2017 Thomas Fire that tore through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, killing two people and destroying hundreds of buildings. It paid $2.2 billion for the 2018 Woolsey Fire that burned through Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killing three people and damaging more than 1,600 buildings. Investigators probing the deadly Eaton Fire, one of two blazes that ripped througth Los Angeles at the start of this year, are homing on in SCE transmission lines as a possible source of ignition.
Washington Post
06-04-2025
- General
- Washington Post
I'm a disaster reporter. But I was not prepared to watch my city burn.
I should have known better. I have seen what wildfire storms can do to cities and entire towns: Santa Rosa, Paradise, Redding, Malibu, Berry Creek, Greenville, Lahaina. As a climate disaster reporter, I know how quickly special places disappear. I routinely walk through their leveled remains. I grew up in Malibu, the so-called wildfire capital of North America, which some say should just be allowed to burn. Every fall, it seemed, we'd look up at an anxiety-inducing orange sky, wondering if this was it. I remember as a 6-year-old stuffing my toys in the one black plastic bag my mom said I could take, and sobbing hysterically as police blared that we had to get out now. My father, a second-generation immigrant and attorney from Upstate New York who has no business fighting fires, was one of those who always refused to leave. I used to wonder if the last time I'd ever see him would be from the back seat of our packed station wagon as he sat on our wood-shingled roof in the smoke-obscured dark, holding a garden hose. That's California for you. But something shifted in our consciousness when the Tubbs Fire ripped through Santa Rosa one October night in 2017, burning apartment complexes, supermarkets and gas stations. Then, a few months later, the Thomas Fire stunned us. Those firestorms, experts say, marked the beginning of the modern era of fire. Wildfires that sparked in brushy rural hillsides could reach cities in a matter of hours, catching thousands of people completely unprepared. A year later, I watched the Woolsey Fire explode in the hills, jump a freeway and barrel into my hometown, turning the tree-filled canyon road where my dad taught me to ride a bike into a battleground. (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post) Within days, I flew to Paradise to cover the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and is still the deadliest fire in the state's history. I followed search-and-rescue crews as they looked for bone fragments and other tiny pieces of human remains in ash-filled lots and in vehicles where people trying to escape might have hidden as flames overtook them. I knew these were warnings. We have been inching toward the reality that Los Angeles could burn from the foothills to the ocean for a long time. The same mix of natural and human-made ingredients that turn brush fires into urban conflagrations have only become more potent. I've lost count of the number of veteran firefighters, their eyes bloodshot from working 48 or 72 straight hours, who have told me, 'I've never seen fire behave like this before.' Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Each major, once unfathomable disaster has been laying out the truth in clear, plain terms: In this era of climate change, there are fewer and fewer safe places. Great loss, for many of us, is inevitable: You may watch your home, your childhood and your community get wiped out, perhaps more than once. There is so much science signaling the risks, so many maps and models pinpointing Zip codes that could be wiped off the map. I know all this. I am supposed to be prepared. I wasn't. I never could have imagined Los Angeles burning the way it did: two fires sparking on the same day, on opposite ends of our sprawling metropolis, essentially taking out two whole towns, killing 29 people and counting, in one of the most climate-conscious states in the U.S. Nothing prepares you, I've learned, to watch so many homes and histories you know intimately go up in flames — especially your father's. (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post) How is this happening? This can't be happening. This is not supposed to happen. I could not process what I was seeing. Sunset Boulevard, that famous thoroughfare that cuts nearly straight across L.A., where I grew up driving, and where my dad now lived, was on fire. The Palisades blaze had sparked about 24 hours earlier, on the morning of Jan. 7, miles away in the highly flammable Santa Monica Mountains. Now flames were flashing out of living and bedroom windows, swallowing homes I had seen standing safe the evening before when I had been out reporting. I didn't see any firefighters around. Instinctually, I headed north, toward my dad's house, where I could tell the fire was active because the black smoke got thicker. A few cars were burning. As I drove, I started having flashbacks: embers covering my windshield like confetti, driving through a hometown canyon that had become an unrecognizable inferno, watching houses I could draw with my eyes closed go up in flames. It was 2018, and I was back in Malibu, swerving around power lines on my smoking childhood street, praying. No no no no — Not again, not again. There's something primal and simple, yet inexplicable, about home — that one corner of the world that holds and reaffirms your history, your existence, no matter how much time passes. Even if it hurts, even if the memories are bad, we want to hold on to it. (Illustration by Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post; Brianna Sacks family photo) Home, for me and my family, has been a painful, tender subject for a while. In 2014, my parents suddenly separated, and it tore our once tight unit apart. Eventually, they rented out our home, storing all of 'us' — our report cards, trophies, framed photos, yearbooks, the imprint of my first step, locks of our baby hair, family heirlooms — in a backyard shed. When the Woolsey Fire roared through our wooded canyon in November 2018, it burned down my neighbors' homes but somehow only drew a definitive black line around ours. When I pulled up that day while out reporting on the disaster, I went limp with relief. Then I walked up the driveway, stood in the scorched grass and stared at a blackened pile. The ash, all that remained of the shed, was still warm as I dug through it, looking for anything salvageable, any tangible piece of us. A few years later, my parents sold the house. This past June, my dad, now 80, moved to Pacific Palisades. It was the happiest I'd seen him in years, and it felt like a homecoming. After a rough period, he'd finally found a place that felt like him, with a backyard for his dog, a sprawling tree he dubbed 'the wisdom tree,' and space for him to lie in the sun — his favorite pastime. This house, he declared, was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post) Driving slowly down Sunset, I squinted to find his evacuated house in the swirling dark smoke. I made out his bright red, often broken-down 1988 Mercedes 560 SL convertible — which we've called 'the red car' since I was 2 years old — in the driveway. Immediately, I saw us in it: my dad squeezing me and my brother into the cracked brown-leather back seat, playing the Beatles before dropping us off at preschool; my dad, always with the top down, teaching me how to drive in a beach parking lot. Staring at the red car, my eyes finally registered the flames behind it. They were dancing in his living room, which he'd filled with all his books and our childhood portraits — where, in December, we had thrown a big party for his birthday. I could see my bedroom burning: my college journals, my mother's artwork. My breath turned ragged, but I couldn't stop watching the flames. They were hypnotic, and everything around me disappeared. A popping sound from a swinging power line brought me back to reality. I knew I shouldn't be there. A police cruiser roared up; the officer gestured at me through the smoke, his eyes bulging. I turned around and started driving. House after house was gone. I stared at my hands on the steering wheel as if they were someone else's and began to hyperventilate. This must be a panic attack. When I made my way back down to Pacific Coast Highway, I picked up my phone, trying to calm my breathing. After so many years walking up to still-smoking piles of disintegrated walls and twisted metal, I've learned how to tell people they have lost everything. They rarely cry, the shock is so sharp. My dad didn't either when I said, hollowly, 'I'm so sorry.' All he could say was, 'Thank you for letting me know.' (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post) I was watching a Chase bank burn on Sunset Boulevard when I got my friend's text. 'Our house is gone.' She lives about 40 miles away, on the other side of L.A. in Altadena, a historic, racially diverse, beautiful, ramshackle gem of a town at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. The community, with its hilly, tree-canopied streets, was another home for me. I'd recently lived there with my friend and her partner in their cozy house filled with plants, books and dogs. Like my dad in the Palisades Fire, they took only a duffel bag as they fled the Eaton Fire. They'd been through wildfires before, but they'd never expected a fire to swallow half a town before it reached them. In the following days and weeks, I watched my city become the latest historic American tragedy. Scores of disaster response and recovery groups and nonprofits, including those I often work with, set up their usual aid distribution depots. This time, my sources were the ones calling me, sending me their '5 tips to deal with trauma.' Those pamphlets are hard to follow, I've learned, when you intimately know the places where so many people died. In Altadena, the bulk of the deaths were clustered around my former address, on streets where I had run and walked every day. I wondered if I had waved at Lora Swayne or Evelyn McClendon or Unidentified Doe No. 37 in the mornings, because their homes were on my usual route. Maybe I had stood in line behind Anthony Mitchell at Unincorporated Coffee. Or perhaps I'd smiled and said hi to Unidentified Doe No. 49 or 50 or 54 at West Altadena's weekly Buy Nothing Group grocery giveaways. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Along with the extinguished lives, there is the mounting, crushing tally of all the lost landmarks that you didn't realize were landmarks until other newspapers started writing about their ruins: diners, historic homes, divey seafood shacks that tethered my childhood. I will never get to show them to my children. That loss is brutal. But it's nothing compared with the suffering that comes next. The real disaster, people who do this work know, doesn't start until Day 30. That's when the adrenaline ebbs and the oppressive nightmare of the new reality hits. Insurance payouts are never enough. Residents whose homes survived will start to wish they'd burned down because of smoke contamination. Many families who were doing just fine before the fire will not be able to afford anything close to the lives they once had. This is the part of the disaster we often don't talk about: the long aftermath, and how paralyzing it is, especially for those already living on the edge. One Paradise Fire victim used to call or message me on Facebook in the middle of the night. She'd tell me she wanted to give up. What was the point of living this way? Another woman, a former addict, would count off how many times she'd come 'this close' to using again. She started drinking heavily. After Hurricane Ian, an 84-year-old man living alone in his torn-up home would text me about the pain he was in: 'My daughter removed all the guns from my house so I don't pull the trigger and end it all.' (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post) Then there's the PTSD: For weeks or months, many people see fire when they close their eyes. Others feel their anxiety spike when they hear a helicopter, when the wind picks up or when they smell smoke from a cigarette or a barbecue. After 2018, I'd drive by familiar hillsides and see flames that weren't there. We are well past the two-month mark, and some people are just now able to cry. It's been curious, they say, what triggers the tears. One man who lost everything broke down while buying cans of soup at the grocery store, realizing the last time he'd done that he'd had a cupboard — his cupboard — to put them in. Even though I got my car deep-cleaned twice and changed the filters, I still smell sharp, acidic smoke when I turn it on. Often, without warning, the image of my dad's burning house flashes before my eyes. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, I took my father home for the first time since he'd evacuated on Jan. 7. It was jarring. Driving past his barely standing neighborhood dry cleaner, he mentioned that he still had a few sweaters there and 'a good shirt.' 'I wonder if I could pick them up?' he said quietly. In my experience with previous fires, families had usually found pieces of themselves in the ash: a ring dish, a heart-shaped ceramic bowl, a bracelet. Outfitted with shovels, boots, gloves and white protective Tyvek suits, we hoped to unearth my grandmother's 100-year-old engagement ring. (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post) Staring at the sodden layers of stucco, the tile roof, metal pipes and stone, it was hard to remember that this used to be a bright yellow two-story home filled with Jewish history and meditation books that my dad had been carrying around since I was born. We tried to map out where in the debris his bedroom might be. The toxic chunks of nail-laden wood and drywall made it impossible. My dad said little. At one point, he put his glove-covered hands on the cracked remnants of his office wall and bowed his head. 'My whole life went up in smoke,' he said. (Illustration by Matt Huynh For The Washington Post; Rachel Gray) We're in uncharted (though predicted) wildfire territory now. I keep asking myself what it means that we are here. For my father, it means letting go of that kind of home. Like so many others, especially residents in the last chapter of their lives, he's choosing not to start over. He got some insurance money, but he will spend an unknown amount of time living in a client's house, wearing mostly donated clothes. It's just easier, he said. Because of that loss, though, I have spent more time with my dad these last few weeks than I did in most of last year. We lie side by side in the sun and talk like we used to. We spend weekend nights together watching movies. I go with him to the farmers market, like when I was younger. One afternoon, I asked him how it was for him, to see all that devastation. It was strange, he said. When we were in the rubble, as he was watching me walk across the nail-filled boards and shards of roof, he saw me when I was little: a toddler marching across every wall I could find when we'd go on walks together — a 4-year-old pretending to be a gymnast, balancing on the back of our couch, reaching for his hand. I squeezed it. (Matt Huynh/For The Washington Post)
Associated Press
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Lawmakers discuss audit that found California was unprepared to help vulnerable people in disasters
Five years ago, as COVID-19 hit the state, legislators cancelled a hearing to discuss a state audit that found the state's office of emergency services and at least three California counties weren't prepared to help vulnerable people during natural disasters. That hearing finally took place Wednesday. It was co-led by Assemblymember John Harabedian, who chairs the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, and whose district includes neighborhoods impacted by the Eaton Fire in Southern California in January. He said a disproportionate number of deaths from that fire were older residents and people with disabilities. Those include the deaths of Altadena residents Anthony Mitchell Sr. and his son Justin, who had cerebral palsy. The two died waiting for assistance to evacuate. Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Democrat from Stockton who chairs the emergency management committee and who co-led the hearing, said the goal of having the hearing now was to discuss what had changed since the audit, and what gaps remained. 'Four years ago, the state auditor issued a stark warning: California was not prepared to protect its most vulnerable residents, even in a disaster. That report exposed critical life-threatening gaps,' she said, adding that the Legislature had taken some steps to address them. 'Yet today, we confront the same harsh realities … California is still not protecting the most vulnerable residents from disasters.' The December 2019 audit assessed preparedness for vulnerable populations — older adults, those with disabilities or those with limited English proficiency — in three counties that had seen the most destructive or deadly wildfires in the state's history at that time: Ventura County, where the 2017 Thomas Fire took place; Sonoma County, where the 2017 Sonoma Complex Fires took place; and Butte County, site of the 2018 Camp Fire. Among the findings by then-Auditor Elaine Howle: 1. The three counties didn't have complete or updated plans for alerting residents, evacuating or sheltering them. 2. Butte and Sonoma counties did not use available technology that could have sent warnings to all cellphones. Instead, officials sent alerts to landlines and mobile alerts only to those who pre-registered. 3. In the alerts that were sent, Butte County did not make clear that the message was coming from a credible source, and Sonoma County didn't say what the threat was in the alert. 4. The alerts were only sent in English. 5. Counties hadn't completed assessments of the county's residents to find out who would be most at risk or what resources were available to help them, such as accessible transportation or shelter space. No officials representing the counties named in the audit appeared at the hearing. County officials did not respond to requests for information from CalMatters. And while the state designates local governments as being primarily responsible for emergency responses, the state auditor also noted that the Governor's Office of Emergency Services failed to provide necessary resources to help counties with planning — including some measures required by law. Howle found that the office didn't provide guidance on identifying people with special access needs and did not publish reports on lessons learned from other natural disasters, for example. 'No amount of planning will guarantee success during a disaster, but I think a lack of planning is a contributing factor to failure during a disaster,' Grant Parks, who took over as state auditor in 2022, said at the hearing. Assemblymember Tom Lackey, a Republican from Palmdale who requested the original audit, said he was glad the Legislature was re-upping the discussion. 'Fires are going to continue to blaze, and we need to be making sure that we're not letting people die when we could have protected them through public policy and through processes,' he told CalMatters. 'We need to make sure that we're having these discussions so that we can continue to protect our people.' Have emergency evacuations improved? While the Legislature hasn't revisited the report in five years, the state and the selected counties have taken some steps to fulfill the auditor's recommendations. The Legislature passed a law in 2020 requiring the Office of Emergency Services to review at least 10 county plans each year to ensure that local governments were prepared to protect those most at risk during natural disasters. The agency reported that it has since done 32 reviews. And in 2020, the agency created a task force that includes people with access and functional needs, and has since created training programs and published guidance documents for local governments, according to Vance Taylor, head of the emergency services department's Office of Access and Functional Needs. The agency also developed a program called Listos California that created fliers and videos in different languages, and partnered with local communities to distribute information on emergency preparedness. Still, the storms that flooded parts of the Central Valley in 2023 showed there's more work to be done, including having enough staff who are competent in different languages, said Noé Páramo, project director with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. Legislators flagged other areas they felt still needed more work. Harabedian said that while 32 counties' emergency plans had been reviewed, that leaves 26 counties outstanding. 'That's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of folks with vulnerabilities who still may be in harm's way,' he said. Ransom noted that while the state agency created resources such as training courses, there was no requirement that counties participate, and no consequences for those that don't have up-to-date or adequate emergency plans. 'I know you all keep mentioning you're not a regulatory agency. I totally get that,' she said to representatives from the Office of Emergency Services. 'But there's still an opportunity to provide some oversight.' According to the state auditor's tracker of recommendations completed by counties, Butte and Ventura counties partially implemented its recommendation to update emergency plans and Sonoma County fully implemented it. Sonoma County also adopted an ordinance that emergency plans be reviewed at least once every five years. Butte and Ventura counties declined to adopt that recommendation. All three counties declined to commit to following the best practices from state and federal emergency offices. Still, while progress has been made, Harabedian flagged that similar issues arose in the recent fires. Taylor, with the Office of Access and Functional Needs, said counties have made considerable improvements over the last decade and California now leads the nation in preparedness for vulnerable people. 'We're not ready to hang the mission accomplished banner,' he said. 'We've done a lot, but a lot still needs to be done.'
