The Los Angeles fires are a national disaster of epic proportions. City officials, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and President-elect Donald Trump have traded accusations about what caused this crisis. But as an engineering professor who lives in Los Angeles and has studied extreme events and natural and human-caused disasters for over 40 years, I believe an event with so many lives lost and damages estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars demands a more substantive response.
Many problems have been cited as alleged root causes of this massive wildfire outbreak. They include mismanaged water resources, misallocation of firefighting resources, fire department funding cuts, poor risk management, reignition of past fires, and climate-driven dry conditions. Rumors and conspiracy theories have also abounded.
I have served as a member or adviser to national- and state-level investigations of events including gas leaks, oil spills, nuclear reactor accidents, refinery explosions and, most recently, aviation mishaps.
In my view, the Los Angeles fires call for a similar investigation that is technically sound, multidisciplinary, unbiased, apolitical and independent. U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff of California has called for convening such a review.
To quote a saying often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.”
Natural events + human responses
Natural disasters such as wildfires, earthquakes and tsunamis often serve as triggers. Devastating on their own, these events can have far more catastrophic aftermaths that are shaped by human choices. Nature delivers the initial blow, but a complex interplay of human, organizational and technological factors can either mitigate or worsen the consequences.
I believe human operators and first responders constitute society’s first and the very last layer of defense against death and destruction in the crucial moments following natural disasters and technological systems failures—serving as our immediate shield, intermediate mitigator and ultimate savior.
I saw this when I served on a National Academy of Sciences committee that studied the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. The explosions and radioactive releases at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were triggered by an earthquake and tsunami, but a Japanese high-level review concluded that this event was a “manmade disaster”—one born of human and organizational failure at the utility and governmental levels.