Exactly a year after the Eaton fire broke out, musicians are banding together once more for an upcoming benefit show, called A Concert for Altadena.
As a way to both raise funds and bring the community together, the night is set to include performances from musicians like Jackson Browne, Dawes & Friends, Aloe Blacc, Jenny Lewis, Everclear, Stephen Stills, Mandy Moore, Judith Hill, Brad Paisley, Ozomatli, Brandon Flowers of the Killers and more.
Many of the featured acts have ties to Los Angeles and Altadena specifically, like Dawes, an indie band from Altadena who notably sang a lively rendition of “I Love L.A.” at this year’s Grammys ceremony. Moore, who is also performing, similarly lost their homes in the fire.
“I’ve seen firsthand how music can mobilize people for good. This concert brings together artists, fans, and neighbors for something bigger than all of us — recovery, hope, and rebuilding lives,” said Grammy winner Eric Krasno. The guitarist, who also lived in Altadena, helped organize the event and is set to perform.
Even behind the scenes, people like Kevin Lyman, who founded the Vans Warped Tour and is a longtime Altadena resident, is working as the event’s lead producer.
“Music has always been a force for community. With this event, we’re not just putting on a show — we’re helping Altadena rebuild homes, restore businesses, and heal hearts. This night is about unity and purpose,” said Lyman.
All of the proceeds from the show will go to the Pasadena Community Foundation’s Eaton Fire Relief & Recovery Fund, which helps provide resources to families impacted, and the Altadena Builds Back Foundation, which focuses on the long-term recovery of housing in the neighborhood.
At last month’s meeting of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force in Redlands, Director Patrick Wright remembered the group’s early days: “Candidly, when I started this job, we got an earful from Southern California.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom created the task force in 2021 and at the time, Southern California’s wildfire experts told Wright that he and other state leaders “didn’t understand Southern California was different. Its vegetation is different. Its fire risk is different.”
It’s true — the coastal chaparral native to much of Southern California is entirely different from the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra.
More than a century of humans attempting to suppress nearly every fire meant the low-intensity burns that northern forests relied on every 5 to 20 years to promote regeneration no longer came through to clear the understory. As trees and shrubs grew in, they fueled high-intensity fires that decimated both the forest and communities.
Meanwhile in Southern California, as humans settled into the wildlands, they lit more fires. Discarded cigarettes, sparking cars, poorly managed campfires, utility equipment and arsonists lit up hundreds or thousands of acres. Here, the native chaparral is adapted to fire coming every 30 to 130 years. The more frequent fires didn’t allow them to grow, make seeds and reproduce. Instead, what’s grown in places where chaparral used to be are flammable invasive grasses.
But when I first moved to Southern California and started covering the wildfires devastating our communities, I had only heard the northern version of the story.
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The fire problem in Northern California is more widely understood. “Smokey the Bear, only you can prevent forest fires — everybody kind of knows, intuitively, what a forest fire is,” said Michael O’Connell, president and chief executive of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy — and one of the people who (respectfully) gave Wright an earful.
Meanwhile, ember-driven fires in Southern California are “like someone lobbing grenades from five miles away,” he said.
The forest thinning and careful reintroduction of intentional “good” fire in the Sierra don’t exactly translate to the Santa Monica Mountains, for example.
The problem here in the south is more vexing: How do we reduce the number of fires we spark?
One way is with groups like Orange County Fire Watch and Arson Watch in Topanga and Malibu, which go out on days when the wind is high and try to spot fires before they start. A new effort, celebrated by the task force, to reduce ignitions along SoCal roadways by clearing flammable vegetation is also underway.
But, while NorCal has a plethora of studies affirming the effectiveness of forest thinning and burning, there is little research yet on SoCal’s proposed solutions.
“We really do, now, understand what the problem is that we’re trying to deal with,” O’Connell said. “How do you get that done? That’s more complicated.”
And the vast majority of state funding is still geared toward northern fuel management solutions — not keeping fires from sparking. (The task force also still measures progress in acres treated, a largely meaningless metric for Southern California’s chaparral.)
Yet, O’Connell is hopeful. At the task force’s first meeting in SoCal — where Wright got an earful — leaders didn’t yet have a grasp of SoCal’s wildfire problem. Now, they’re letting SoCal’s land managers and researchers lead the way.
“If it weren’t for the task force, I think we would be in big trouble, frankly,” O’Connell said. The task force leaders “have not only understood [the problem] but have accepted it and run with that.”
Here’s the latest on wildfires
Federal firefighters are in their third week without pay, as the U.S government shutdown drags on. According to the U.S. Forest Service — the largest federal firefighting force in the country — fire response personnel will continue to work through the shutdown, although prevention work, including prescribed burns and forest thinning, will be limited.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would increase the salaries of Cal Fire firefighters to more closely match those of local fire departments. Meanwhile, efforts championed by the state to build a series of fuel breaks in the Santa Monica Mountains are underway. Some ecologists worry about the damage the fast-moving project could do to the environment; others say the state is not moving fast enough.
Last week, federal prosecutors announced the arrest of a suspect they believed intentionally started the Palisades fire on Jan. 1. The announcement has led to calls for both the Los Angeles Fire Department, responsible for putting out the Jan. 1 fire, and California State Parks, whose land the fire started on, to be held accountable.
And the latest on climate
A turning point and a tipping point: Global energy production turned a corner in the first half of the year, with renewables such as solar and wind generating more electricity than coal for the first time. And, the Earth is reaching its first climate change tipping point: Warm water coral reefs can no longer survive, according to a report published by 160 scientists.
With the 2025 state legislative session wrapped up, some important climate bills are now law. One law extends California’s cap-and-trade program — which limits how much greenhouse gas polluters can emit and enables them to trade emission allowances at auction — from 2030 to 2045. Newsom also signed a bill to make oil drilling in Kern County easier while making offshore drilling more difficult and another to push local governments to increase electrification efforts.
Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required data centers to report how much water they use. He was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements” on the centers, he wrote in a message explaining his veto, noting that “California is well positioned to support the development of this critically important digital infrastructure.”
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
Police say 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht was behind fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood.
Published On 8 Oct 20258 Oct 2025
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Authorities in California charged a man with starting a fire that days later erupted into the most destructive blaze in Los Angeles history and destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, federal law enforcement officials have said.
Authorities accused 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht of lighting a fire on New Year’s Day that was put out initially, but continued to smolder underground before reigniting during high winds, acting US Attorney Bill Essayli said during a news conference on Wednesday.
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Rinderknecht fled the scene of the original fire, but returned to the same trail where he’d been earlier to watch it burn, Essayli said. During an interview with investigators, he lied about his location, claiming he was near the bottom of the hiking trail, Essayli said.
He was arrested Tuesday in Florida and was due to appear in court Wednesday. Essayli declined to say how investigators believe Rinderknecht started the January 1 fire.
The blaze, which erupted on January 7, killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes and buildings in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy coastal neighbourhood of LA. The fire ripped through hillside neighbourhoods, destroying mansions with spectacular views of the ocean and downtown Los Angeles.
Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, is posed after his arrest on charges that he intentionally ignited the Pacific Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, before his first court appearance in Orlando, Florida, US, October 8, 2025 [Department of Justice/Handout via Reuters]
Investigators determined the fire was intentionally lit, likely by a lighter taken to vegetation or paper, according to a criminal complaint.
Authorities first interviewed Rinderknecht on January 24, according to the criminal complaint. He told them he had been in the area on January 1 and did not see anyone else there at that time.
Investigators excluded other possibilities, including fireworks, lightning and power lines. Authorities also looked into whether a cigarette could have caused the fire, but concluded that was not the cause, the complaint says.
Investigators still haven’t determined the cause of a second blaze called the Eaton Fire, which broke out the same day in the community of Altadena and killed 18 people.
Both fires burned for days, reducing block after block of entire neighbourhoods to grey and black debris.
An outside review released in September found that a lack of resources and outdated policies for sending emergency alerts led to delayed evacuation warnings.
The report commissioned by Los Angeles County supervisors said a series of weaknesses, including “outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities”, hampered the county’s response.
The shutdown of the U.S. government has brought work determined by the Trump administration to be “nonessential” to a halt across the country as thousands of federal employees have been furloughed and ordered not to do their jobs.
The shutdown — the first in six years — began late Tuesday and could last days if not weeks. Many employees may not return to work at all, as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget recently advised federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs in the event of a shutdown.
While much of the fallout remains to be seen, federal agencies that deal with wildfires, weather and disaster response — including the U.S. Forest Service, the National Weather Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency — expect to see some impacts.
Here’s what we know:
The U.S. Forest Service will shut down activities on more than 193 million acres of land across 46 states, including at least 154 national forests, according to the agency’s most recent contingency plan, published in September. Hundreds of recreational sites and facilities will be closed, while work on operations such as timber sales and restoration projects will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The Forest Service — the largest federal firefighting entity in the country — will continue its work geared toward responding to and preparing for wildfires, according to the plan. However, the agency will reduce some work related to fire prevention, including prescribed burns and the treatment of vegetation to reduce fire risk.
What’s more, the shutdown will delay state grants for forest management and wildland fire preparedness; delay reimbursement for ongoing forest management work on non-federal lands; and may affect states’ ability to train firefighters and acquire necessary equipment, among other impacts, the plan says.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection works closely with the Forest Service to manage fire preparation and response. Cal Fire officials said it does not anticipate any impacts to its ability to respond to blazes, and that the agency is fully staffed.
However, effects may be seen when it comes to federal grant programs that support fire prevention work in the state. For example, private property owners in California who rely on federal funds to conduct vegetation reduction work or create defensible space on their land may have to “front the money themselves” while they await reimbursement said Jesse Torres, deputy chief of communications with Cal Fire.
“The other thing is there are a lot of unknowns,” Torres said. “We don’t know what this is going to look like — is it going to be two days, two weeks, two months?”
Other agencies that play key roles in California’s disaster response and preparation — including the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — are largely deemed essential and will face fewer interruptions, according to their contingency plans.
“We are still operating in our core mission function and providing most of our normal services,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. That includes weather forecasts and extreme weather watches and warnings.
“The things that we do for public safety will continue as normal,” Kittell said.
About 84% of FEMA employees, meanwhile, are exempt from shutdown-related furloughs, according to its plan, which provides few additional details about which operations will cease or proceed.
Officials with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said FEMA staff have advised them that they will continue to make payments for existing disaster declarations made by President Trump, but there’s no guarantee that new or additional disaster declarations or funding will be made available.
FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund — the main source of funding for response and recovery efforts following major disasters — is also running low and is not likely to be replenished during the shutdown. It requires congressional approval for additional funds.
What’s more, FEMA, the National Weather Service and the Forest Service have already been affected by significant budget cuts and layoffs this year as part of the Trump administration’s larger reorganization of the federal government, which it says will help save taxpayers money.
These agencies, including NWS’ parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have lost thousands of employees to layoffs and buyouts and have experienced reduced operations, grant cancellations and the closure of offices and research arms.
The same is true for the EPA, which has undergone staff cuts and layoffs in addition to a considerable shift in its organizational priorities. The nation’s top environmental agency has spent the last several months loosening regulations that govern air and water quality, electric vehicle initiatives, pollution monitoring and greenhouse gas reporting, among other changes.
Experts said the shutdown could further weaken the EPA’s capabilities, as nearly all of its employees — about 90% — will be furloughed. While the EPA’s imminent disaster response work will continue, such as work on oil spills and chemical releases, longer-term efforts including research projects and facility inspections will halt, according to the agency.
Meanwhile, H.D. Palmer, a spokesman with the California Department of Finance, said impacts to the California EPA’s environmental programs should be minimal if the shutdown is brief, but that problems could arise if it drags on long enough to create backlogs and funding lapses.
The average length of government shutdowns over the last 50 years was seven days, Palmer said. However, he noted that the most recent federal shutdown from December 2018 to January 2019 — during Trump’s first term — lasted 35 days.
PARADISE, Calif. — When Jen Goodlin visited Paradise six months after the 2018 Camp fire, she thought she was saying goodbye.
A town native, Goodlin was living in Colorado with her husband and four children. She wanted to witness the devastation that wiped out 10,700 homes, including the small white cottage where she grew up, and turned the dense forest of her youth into a bleak landscape. But once she arrived, she was surprised at her reaction. She could envision so much more than the burned trees and abandoned businesses around her.
Here, she saw, her family could live on a big piece of land as they’d always wanted. Her husband thought she was crazy, but they ran the numbers, bought a 1.2-acre vacant lot and put a trailer on the property. A few years later, they moved into a new, four-bedroom house.
“It took the fire to bring me home,” said Goodlin, 43, who now runs a local wildfire recovery nonprofit.
Jen Goodlin, executive director of the Rebuild Paradise Foundation, in Paradise, Calif., in June 2024.
(Nic Coury / Associated Press)
Young families like Goodlin’s are coming to Paradise, shifting the town’s demographics away from the retirees who once lived there. Attracted by cheap land — lots cost less than a mid-range car— newcomers can build a larger home on larger parcels for less than buying a house in Chico, a city of 100,000 people 15 miles away.
Though Paradise’s current population is less than half of what it was, the local Little League already has more kids than before the fire.
Nearly a decade of megafire in California has brought profound changes to recovering communities. Paradise has become younger. Some rebuilt areas have become wealthier. Renters and people on fixed incomes have found themselves pushed to more urban locales. Both devastated neighborhoods and fire survivors face an unpredictable future that, given the recent intensity of wildfires in California, many more areas will have to face.
Reminders of fire are inescapable in Paradise, from the roadside signposts that designate evacuation routes to the alarm that blares at noon on the 15th of every month, a test of the system that will tell everyone if they need to flee once again. At the same time, the activity in the town belies the desolation implied by building data that show only 30% of destroyed homes have been replaced. Dog walkers and parents with small children play in refurbished parks. At lunchtime, construction workers in reflective vests gather around taco trucks.
A deer treks over an empty lot as homes continue to be built throughout Paradise years after the Camp fire.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Local boosters tout that for every year after the fire, Paradise has been one of the fastest-growing communities in California. Another half-dozen homes are being rebuilt each month, according to a Times data analysis.
But as shown in Paradise, the statistics tell only part of the story. The Times found that of the nearly 22,500 homes lost in the Camp fire and California’s four other most destructive wildfires from 2017 to 2020, just 8,400, or 38%, have been rebuilt.
Given the time that has already passed, it’s unlikely that some places — the forests below the northern Sierra Nevada, parts of the Santa Monica Mountains, pieces of old Shasta County mining towns — ever will have the same number of homes as before. In Paradise, it’s essentially guaranteed. Many returning homeowners purchased their neighbors’ burned out lots to build a larger house or simply expand the size of their property.
Instead of simply repopulating these areas, there has been a subtle shift toward living in more urban communities, especially for renters or homeowners who couldn’t afford to rebuild. In Butte County, disaster relief dollars from both the Camp fire and North Complex fire, which destroyed 1,500 homes in even more rural areas two years later, have been funneled toward affordable housing projects largely in Chico and smaller nearby cities untouched by the blazes. Not one such development has been proposed in the North Complex burn scar.
The rationale is straightforward: More people can be housed more safely and sustainably in cities than in mountainous, fire-prone tracts with little public infrastructure. The urban developments also provide access to grocery stores, public transit and other amenities that give them a higher chance of winning state financing competitions and being completed.
Local officials welcome the investments but feel uneasy about what’s happening. Katie Simmons, deputy chief administrative officer overseeing recovery efforts for Butte County, said many rural fire survivors don’t want to move to the city. She called the new developments “displacement housing” that doesn’t address the needs of those in remote areas who continue to “flounder in disaster-caused homelessness.”
As time wears on, fewer and fewer people find themselves in positions to return, sometimes despite extraordinary efforts to allow them to do so.
Palm trees rising over the vacant lot in November 2020 where Journey’s End Trailer Park once stood in Santa Rosa.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In Santa Rosa, the 2017 Tubbs fire wiped out Journey’s End, a 162-space mobile home park next to a hospital and the 101 Freeway. A partnership between the landowner, the city and for- and nonprofit developers led to plans for more than 400 apartments on the site, including full replacement of 162 units for low-income seniors.
But it wasn’t until summer 2023 that the first apartments opened. Journey’s End residents, so long as they qualified under the age and income restrictions, could return if they wanted.
Few did. About three dozen expressed interest, 12 initially moved in, six of whom remain.
A lot of her former neighbors from the mobile home park died waiting, said Pat Crisco, 75, one of the Journey’s End residents who came back. Others didn’t want to live in apartments. More had settled elsewhere and didn’t want to uproot themselves again, she said.
Pat Crisco is a former resident of the Journey’s End mobile home park that burned in the Tubbs fire. Crisco is now living in the affordable housing apartment development that was built on the site.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The stray cats Crisco used to feed at Journey’s End are gone and when the hot wind blows outside her apartment building she gets the “heebie jeebies.” But she feels great about her decision to return. The location is close to the bus, her doctors and grocery stores.
“This is brand spanking new,” Crisco said. “And everything is very convenient.”
Before the Tubbs fire, Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park subdivision was middle-class, with its tract homes routinely going for around $500,000. Nearly all the 1,300 houses lost have been rebuilt. Residents were astounded recently when they began selling at more than $1 million.
Jeff Okrepkie, 46, a Coffey Park renter who used his insurance payout as a down payment for a new home on his old street, said it’s undeniable that the neighborhood is more upscale now, with amenities hard to find elsewhere.
“This is the cliche, Americana, suburban single-family-detached homes,” Okrepkie said. “It’s 1980s-style lots, 1980s-style streets with 2020s-style houses.”
Jeff Okrepkie outside his rebuilt home, second from left, in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa.
(Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
What’s happening in Paradise and Santa Rosa provide continually evolving answers to weighty questions: When has a community recovered? And what does recovery even mean?
That’s why local leaders are pushing for a new sewer system as part of an expanded town center to attract restaurants and business that would make more young families want to live there. The lack of one limited the commercial district in the past.
For Paradise officials, recovery is when the community can sustain itself once again.
“It looks like it’s going to serve us for 25 years,” said Colette Curtis, the town’s recovery and economic development director, of the PG&E settlement.
Some residents of communities reshaped by fire have found themselves both drawn and repelled by the place they call home.
Roger and Lindy Brown lived in Paradise with their daughter before the fire and their home burned. Their daughter went to Chico State, and Roger and Lindy moved to Oregon. Roger and Lindy moved back to a rebuilt home near their old one a couple of years ago.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Roger and Lindy Brown had lived in Paradise for 12 years when the Camp fire struck. After the blaze, the Browns rented an apartment in Chico so their daughter could finish her last year at Paradise High School, which held classes in a mall and then a warehouse in Chico.
Roger, 60, worked in heating and air conditioning and had to return to the town often. He couldn’t take seeing the burned-out trees, cars and homes. The couple took their insurance money and moved to a small town in Oregon. From a distance, the upkeep on their vacant lot proved to be too much so they sold that too.
But Paradise pulled at them, especially Lindy, 66. Their daughter never left, attending Chico State, where she recently graduated. Some of their friends had rebuilt. To her, Oregon felt lonely. Paradise, she said, was their community.
Tom and Diane Boatright built back their home in the second-fastest time after the Camp fire using a modular homebuilding company.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, Roger and Lindy bought a house in Paradise, a newly built, blue, two-bedroom with a white picket fence. The home had all they wanted. Solar power. A large lot. Apple, cherry and peach trees in the back. And they were overwhelmed with the thought of starting from scratch.
They’ve kept a Little Free Library on their lawn stocked with books. In the spring, they traded their extra peaches for eggs from their neighbor’s chickens.
On a recent weekday afternoon, Roger and Lindy stood in their frontyard admiring the finishing touches on their only major construction project. They were replacing some of the landscaping with gravel, a decision that made their home more fire-resistant and cut their insurance costs in half.
Roger still felt unsure about returning. Before the fire, he would go to breakfast with the town’s classic car club every Saturday. The 1971 Chevy Nova Roger had restored was lost in the blaze and the car club was no more.
“It’s never going to be the Paradise it was,” Roger said to Lindy.
His wife turned to him. “It doesn’t have to be,” she said.
California electric customers would pay $9 billion more to shore up the state’s wildfire fund under a last-minute deal reached behind closed doors that was introduced as legislation on Wednesday.
Southern California Edison, and the state’s two other large for-profit electric companies, had been lobbying Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders, urging them to pass legislation to replenish the state’s $21-billion fund that pays for damages of utility-caused fires.
State officials have warned the fund could be wiped out by damages from the Eaton fire, which killed 19 people and destroyed a large swath of Altadena on Jan. 7.
Customers of the three utilities are already on the hook for contributing $10.5 billion to the original fund through a surcharge of about $3 on their monthly bills.
If approved, the bill amendments made on Wednesday would have customers pay $9 billion more by extending that surcharge by 10 years beyond 2035, when it was set to expire.
Under the deal, the three electric companies’ shareholders would also pay an additional $9 billion into the fund. That means the fund would increase by $18 billion if the legislation, known as SB 254, passes.
Consumer advocates and environmentalists tracking the bill said they were still trying to understand all the provisions of the 229-page bill, which had been debated in hearings in recent months, but was then significantly amended without public input. The new draft of the bill was published at 9:12 a.m. on Wednesday.
“It’s a complete gut and amend,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group. “It’s an end run around the normal legislative process.”
The complex proposal was introduced just days before the state legislature’s session ends, which means it may receive little public debate.
The session was scheduled to end on Friday, but any amendments must be public for 72 hours, which would push a vote to Saturday morning.
Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group, said he was disappointed that ratepayers — who are already paying the country’s second highest electric rates — would have to pay more. But he pointed to some measures that could help reduce the upward pressure on bills.
For example, utilities would be required to finance some expensive transmission projects through a lower-cost method of public financing that legislators said could save ratepayers $3 billion.
Toney said after reviewing the bill’s language his group planned to support it even though it “falls short of addressing the growing affordability crisis.”
Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), the bill’s co-author, defended the last minute amendments, saying the legislature needed to move quickly to bolster the fund as the wildfire season begins in California.
She said many of the provisions added to SB 254, including the public financing of transmission lines, had been included in other bills that had been repeatedly been debated in public hearings.
Petrie-Norris, who is chair of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, defended the process and said that she believed electric customers were getting “a good deal” since half the $18 billion addition into the fund would come from utility shareholders.
Also, under the plan, she said, the three utilities must spend billions of dollars more on wildfire prevention costs, which they can’t earn a profit on.
The share prices of Edison International, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Sempra, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric all rose Wednesday on the news.
Newsom and lawmakers created the state wildfire fund in 2019 through a bill known as AB 1054 to protect the three utilities from bankruptcy in the event their electric lines sparked a catastrophic wildfire.
Under the law’s protective measures, Edison could pay nothing or just a fraction of the damages for the Eaton fire if its equipment is found to have sparked the fire.
A representative for Newsom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The investigation into the fire is ongoing. Edison has said a leading theory is that a century-old transmission line, not used since the 1970s, somehow re-energized and sparked the blaze.
The insured property losses alone could be as much as $15.2 billion, according to an estimate released in July by state officials. That amount does not include uninsured losses or damages beyond those to property, such as wrongful death claims. A study by UCLA estimated losses at $24 billion to $45 billion.
Damages from the Palisades fire, which also ignited on Jan. 7, are not covered by the state wildfire fund. The city of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power, a municipal utility, services the area of Pacific Palisades destroyed by that fire.
Only customers of Edison, PG&E and San Diego Gas & Electric pay to support the wildfire fund. And only those three utilities are covered by its protections.
Two firefighters helping to fight a wildfire in Washington state were arrested this week by federal immigration officials, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed. Photo courtesy of Washington state Department of Natural Resources
Aug. 30 (UPI) — Two firefighters helping to fight a wildfire in Washington state were arrested this week by federal immigration officials, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed.
The two Mexican nationals were arrested and detained by federal agents around a mile from the frontline of the Bear Gulch wildfire in Olympic National Forest.
The blaze was first reported on July 6, has burned more than 9,200 acres and was 13% contained, according to the latest update from the Washington state fire officials.
The fire is currently the largest actively burning in Washington state.
Federal officials pulled aside 44 people to verify their identity this week, ultimately arresting the two men.
The fire’s Incident Management Team later said the arrests did not hinder firefighting capabilities.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the arrests in a post on X, but said the two men were not frontline firefighters.
“The two contracted work crews questioned on the day of their arrests were not even assigned to actively fight the fire; they were there in a support role, cutting logs into firewood. The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time,” the department said in the post.
“No active firefighters were even questioned, and U.S. Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.”
“Deeply concerned about this situation with two individuals helping to fight fires in Washington state. I’ve directed my team to get more information about what happened,” Gov. Bob Ferguson, D-Wash., said in a post on X.
“Donald Trump ran his campaign on sending out the worst of the worst. I’m not sure who’s more the best of the best than our firefighters, actively fighting the largest fire in Washington,” Ferguson said in a separate post.
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Many fled when wildfires devastated Los Angeles earlier this year, but Guillermo del Toro rushed back in, determined to save his lifelong collection of horror memorabilia.
It’s the same loyalty that finds him making another tough decision to protect the items he loves like family: letting some of them go.
Del Toro partnered with Heritage Auctions for a three-part auction to sell a fraction of a collection that is bursting at the seams. Online bidding for the first part on Sept. 26 started Thursday and includes over a hundred items, with more headed to the auction block next year.
“This one hurts. The next one, I’m going to be bleeding,” Del Toro, 60, said of the auction series. “If you love somebody, you have estate planning, you know, and this is me estate planning for a family that has been with me since I was a kid.”
Del Toro is one of the industry’s most respected filmmakers, whose fascination with monsters and visual style will shape generations to come. But at his core, the Mexican-born horror buff is a collector. The Oscar winner has long doubled as the sole caretaker of the “Bleak House” — which stretches across two and a half Santa Monica homes nearly overflowing with thousands of ghoulish creatures, iconic comic drawings and paintings, books and movie props.
The houses function not just as museums, but as libraries and workspaces where his imagination bounces off the oxblood-painted walls.
“I love what I have because I live with it. I actually am a little nuts, because I say hi to some of the life-size figures when I turn on the light,” Del Toro told The Associated Press, sitting in the dining room of one of the houses, now a sanctuary for “Haunted Mansion” memorabilia. “This is curated. This is not a casual collection.”
The auction includes behind-the-scene drawings and one-of-a-kind props from Del Toro’s own classics, as well as iconic works like Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations for “Frankenstein” and Mike Mignola’s pinup artwork for “Hellraiser.”
A race to save horror history
In January, Del Toro had only a couple hours, his car and a few helping hands to save key pieces from the fires. Out of the over 5,000 items in his collection, he managed to move only about 120 objects. It wasn’t the first time, as fires had come dangerously close to Bleak House twice before.
The houses were spared, but fear consumed him. If a fire or earthquake swallowed them, he thought, “What came out of it? You collected insurance? And what happened to that little segment of Richard Corben’s life, or Jack Kirby’s craft, or Bernie Wrightson’s life?”
An auction, Del Toro said, gives him peace of mind, as it ensures the items will land in the hands of another collector who will protect the items as he has. These are not just props or trinkets, he said, but “historical artifacts. They’re pieces of audiovisual history for humanity.” And his life’s mission has been to protect as much of this history as he can.
“Look, this is in reaction to the fires. This is in reaction to loving this thing,” Del Toro told the AP.
The initial auction uncovers who Del Toro is as a collector, he said. Upcoming parts will expose how the filmmaker thinks, which he called a much more personal endeavor. The auction isn’t just a “piece of business,” for him, but rather a love letter to collectors everywhere, and encouragement to think beyond a movie and “learn to read and write film design in a different way. That’s my hope.”
A house full of ‘unruly kids’
Caring for the Bleak House collection feels like being on “a bus with 160 kids that are very unruly, and I’m driving for nine hours,” Del Toro said. “I gotta take a rest.”
The auction will give the filmmaker some breathing room from the collection’s arduous maintenance. The houses must stay at a certain temperature, without direct sunlight — all of which is monitored solely by Del Toro, who often spends most of his day there.
He selects the picture frame for every drawing, dusts all the artifacts and arranges every bookshelf mostly himself, having learned his lesson from the handful of times he allowed outside help. One time, Del Toro said, he found someone “cleaning an oil painting with Windex, and I almost had a heart attack.”
“It’s very hard to have someone come in and know why that trinket is important,” he said. “It’s sort of a very bubbled existence. But you know, that’s what you do with strange animals — you put them in small environments where they can survive. That’s me.”
Each room is organized by theme, with one room dedicated to each of his major works, from “Hellboy” to “Pacific Rim.” Del Toro typically spends his entire work day at one of the houses, which he picks depending on the task at hand. The “Haunted Mansion” dining room, for instance, is an excellent writing space.
“If I could, I would live in the Haunted Mansion,” he said. “So, this is the second best.”
Building a mini Bleak House
In selecting which items to sell, Del Toro said he “wanted somebody to be able to re-create a mini version of Bleak House.”
Auction items include concept sketches and props from Del Toro’s 1992 debut film, “Cronos,” all the way to his more recent works, like 2021’s “Nightmare Alley.”
The starting bids vary, from a couple thousand dollars up to hundreds of thousands. One of Wrightson’s drawings for a 1983 illustrated version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is the highest priced item, starting at $200,000.
The auction also includes art from legends like Richard Corben, Jack Kirby and H.R. Giger, whose work Del Toro wrote in the catalog “represent the pinnacle of comic book art in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”
Other cultural touchstones in illustration that are represented in the auction include rare images from the 1914 short film “Gertie the Dinosaur,” one of the earliest animated films, and original art for Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” by Eyvind Earle and Kay Nielsen.
“As collectors, you are basically keeping pieces of culture for generations to come. They’re not yours,” Del Toro said. “We don’t know which of the pieces you’re holding is going to be culturally significant … 100 years from now, 50 years from now. So that’s part of the weight.”
Border patrol officers swoop in, make arrests as firefighters prepare to tackle 3,600-hectare blaze in Washington State.
Published On 29 Aug 202529 Aug 2025
Two firefighters who were part of a crew trying to help put out a wildfire in the US state of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula were taken into custody by United States Border Patrol agents, federal authorities said.
The US Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol said in a statement on Thursday that border patrol agents found that two of the workers, who were hired by private firefighting contractors, were in the US illegally and detained them during the operation to put out the blaze.
It was reported that federal agents held crews from private fire contractors for several hours on Wednesday as they were preparing to help tackle the 9,000-acre (3,600-hectare) Bear Gulch Fire in Washington state.
The immigration raid was unusual in that such operations have customarily not been carried out around natural disasters or sites of emergency, according to reports.
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said its officers were requested by forestry rangers to verify the names provided on contractor firefighter rosters.
“Several discrepancies were identified, and two individuals were found to be present in the United States illegally, one with a previous order of removal,” CBP said in a statement.
Authorities also said the US Bureau of Land Management terminated contracts with two contractor firms at the site and escorted their 42 firefighter staff off federal land.
The two firefighters without proper documentation were arrested and taken into custody on charges of illegal entry and re-entry to the US.
During the arrests, border patrol agents reportedly lined the 44 firefighters up and ordered them to produce identification, according to The Seattle Times, with crew members telling how they were not allowed to film the encounter.
“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter, who was not named, told the paper.
“This is how they treat us.”
Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden posted on the social media site X that one of the arrested firefighters was from his state and denounced the immigration arrest, saying it made communities less safe.
Washington’s Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson said he was seeking details about the immigration operation.
“Deeply concerned about this situation with two individuals helping to fight fires in Washington state,” he wrote on social media.
The Bear Gulch Fire erupted in July, caused by human activity, official information shows. Just 13 percent of the blaze has been contained as it continues “creeping” through mature conifer woodland.
Roberto Delgado and his wife were praying the rosary on the night of Jan. 7 when they heard two loud booms that shook their Sylmar home. Then came a flash of light so bright that in the dead of night they could briefly see out their window the rocks and gullies of the San Gabriel foothills behind their house.
Seconds later, Delgado said in an interview, the couple saw flames under two electric transmission towers owned by Southern California Edison — even more shocking because they had seen a fire ignite under one of those towers just six years before.
“We were traumatized,” he said. “It was almost the exact same thing.” In both fires, the family was forced to race to their car and flee with few belongings as the flames rushed through the brush toward their home, which survived both blazes.
Edison’s maintenance of its power lines is now under scrutiny in the wake of January’s devastating Eaton fire, which destroyed a wide swath of Altadena and killed 19 people. Video captured by eyewitnesses shows the Eaton fire igniting under Edison transmission towers.
A lawsuit making its way through Los Angeles County Superior Court is raising new questions about Edison’s role in the 2019 Saddle Ridge fire in Sylmar and whether the company was transparent about the cause of the blaze. The fire killed at least one person and destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures. Firefighters were able to contain the more recent Sylmar fire, called Hurst, before any homes were destroyed.
The lawyers contend that both fires were caused by the same problem: an improperly grounded transmission line running through the foothills of Sylmar that Edison failed to fix, which the company denies.
In a court filing, the lawyers included a deposition they took of an L.A. Fire Department captain who said he believed that Edison was “deceptive” for not informing the department that its equipment failed just minutes before the 2019 blaze ignited, and for having an employee offer to buy key surveillance video from that night from a business next to one of its towers.
Edison has flatly disputed the lawyers’ assertions, calling their claims about the 2019 fire an “exotic ignition theory” based on “an unproven narrative.”
Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said that the utility had complied with the requests of investigators looking into the two fires and that “there is no connection” between the incidents.
Dunleavy said Edison did not tell the fire department about the failure of its equipment in 2019 because it happened at a tower miles away from where the fire ignited. And she said it is common for any investigator to seek to obtain video that could aid in an investigation. “SCE’s investigator did not offer to buy surveillance video,” she said.
“We follow the law. Period,” she said.
Dunleavy said the company has completed tests that show the transmission line is safe. She declined to share the results and pointed to testimony by Edison’s expert in the case — Don Russell, a Texas A&M professor of electrical engineering — who said the line was properly grounded.
As for the Jan. 7 Hurst fire, the utility told regulators in a February letter that it believes its equipment “may be associated with the ignition” of the blaze. The letter said the company found two conductors on the ground under a Sylmar tower. The repairs, the letter said, included replacing equipment at several towers and more than three miles of cable.
Delgado and Perez say that on the night of the fire they heard two loud booms and a flash of light so bright they could briefly see out their window the rocks and gullies of the San Gabriel foothills.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Undergrounding of towers questioned
In dispute is whether the failure of steel equipment at the top of an Edison transmission tower on the night of Oct. 10, 2019, caused a massive power surge across the system, resulting in multiple towers becoming electrified and intensely hot.
The tower, where the steel part known as a y-clevis broke, sits just off the 210 freeway in Sylmar on land shared with a nursery. The Edison tower behind Delgado’s home where investigators say the 2019 fire ignited is more than two miles away from the nursery.
The attorneys said in court filing that Edison made a “cost-saving choice” when building the transmission line in 1970 to not include “any purposeful grounding devices” that would enable power surges to dissipate down the tower and into the earth. Instead, the company used “only insufficient concrete footings,” the lawyers said in their filing.
Mark Felling, an electrical engineer and paid expert in the case, testified that he found that the size of the cement footings under the towers along the line varied by a factor of 10. The size of the footings, he said,affects whether the tower is properly grounded.
Felling said he believed that a sudden power surge could cause some towers to become “electrified and potentially very hazardous.”
Edison has disputed that theory and said in court that the electrical surge caused by the failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery safely dispersed. The utility said it was scientifically impossible that the electrical surge caused a fire 2½ miles away.
“The undisputed material facts cannot support plaintiff’s theory that SCE caused the Saddleridge fire,” the company wrote in a motion this month, which asked the judge to dismiss the case. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for Oct. 6.
Edison’s motion included a copy of the L.A. Fire Department’s investigation, which included new details of how the company responded to fire investigators days after the 2019 fire.
Delgado said his rosary and prayers were important to surviving the fires.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Failure to report power surge
L.A. Fire investigator Robert Price arrived at the dirt road leading up to the hillside transmission line where the fire had ignited the night before to see the yellow crime scene tape lying on the ground and an Edison truck driving out, Price said in his report.
Price also wrote that Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m. But the company did not tell the Fire Department about the fault, Price wrote.
Instead, L.A. Fire Capt. Timothy Halloran learned from a news report that Sylmar resident Jack Carpenter had recorded a large flash of light on his dashboard camera at 8:57 that night as he was traveling west on the 210 freeway.
Halloran traced the flash to a transmission tower built on land used by Ornelas Wood Recovery Nursery. Halloran interviewed employees at the nursery, who told him that an Edison employee had offered to buy the surveillance footage from the nursery’s camera, according to a deposition Halloran later provided to lawyers representing the victims.
A nursery employee also had taken photos of the broken steel equipment he found at the foot of the tower, according to Price’s report. The employee told Halloran that an Edison crew came the day after the fire and cleaned up the shattered pieces.
Halloran said in the deposition, according to a June court filing, that the company’s failure to report the fault and its offer to buy the nursery’s surveillance video made him believe that the company’s actions were “deceptive.”
Price said in his report that he also saw Edison crews cleaning the towers along the line three days after the fire’s start. An Edison employee told him that the utility cleans the towers once a year but had decided to clean them that day “because they were dirty from the smoke and fire,” Price wrote.
The cleaning did not prevent fire investigators from finding burn marks at the bottom of a second tower not far from where Delgado and his wife live, which Price said may be related to the “catastrophic failure” of equipment at the tower by the nursery.
In his final conclusion on the fire, Price wrote that it was “outside my expertise” to determine whether the failure of equipment at the tower above the nursery “could cause high voltage to travel back through the conductors … and cause a fire, possibly through the tower’s grounding system” more than two miles away.
“Therefore the cause will be undetermined,” Price wrote.
Dunleavy said that Edison had notified the California Public Utilities Commission about the fire before it began cleaning up the broken pieces of equipment found under the tower at the nursery. That cleanup and the company’s repairs, Dunleavy said, were needed to “ensure safety and reliability” of the line.
She added that it was common practice for utilities to wash down equipment after a fire before the system was reenergized.
According to an L.A. Fire investigator, Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
State utility investigators find violations
Also investigating the 2019 fire in the days after its start was Eric Ujiiye at the Public Utilities Commission.
The commission’s safety staff investigates fires that may have been caused by electric lines to determine whether the utility violated safety regulations.
Ujiiye said in his report that he found that Edison violated five regulations, including failing to safely maintain its equipment at the tower by the nursery.
Even though Price’s investigation for the L.A. Fire Department stated that the cause is undetermined, Ujiiye said in his report that he believed that the failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery “could have led to a fire ignition” at the pylon more than two miles away.
The commission’s staff asked Edison to perform tests to show that the towers on the line were properly grounded. According to a written response from Edison, the utility objected to the request as “vague and ambiguous.” But the company agreed to do the tests, which would be observed by the commission inspectors.
Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the commission, said that the agency’s staff was planning to meet with Edison at the transmission line to witness the tests. However, COVID-19 pandemic restrictions delayed that meeting and the requested undergrounding tests. She said that commission staff later learned that Edison had performed similar tests soon after the fire. Those test results “sufficed,” Prosper said, and the company “was not made to re-do the tests.”
Prosper said the commission did not fine or otherwise penalize Edison for the five violations because the LAFD report said the cause was undetermined. She said company had corrected the violations.
April Maurath Sommer, executive director of the Wild Tree Foundation, which has challenged Edison’s requests to have utility customers pay for fire damages, questioned the commission’s handling of the 2019 fire.
“You would think that the Public Utilities Commission would use fines to address really egregious behavior in the hope it would deter future behavior that causes catastrophic fires,” she said.
Maurath Sommer noted that Edison has been repeatedly found to have failed to cooperate with investigators looking into the cause of devastating fires. For example, commission investigators said in a report that the utility refused to provide photos and other details of what its employees found at the site where the Woolsey fire ignited in 2018. The Edison crew was the first to arrive at the scene of the fire that destroyed hundreds of homes in Malibu. Edison argued that the evidence was protected by attorney-client privilege.
Edison’s Dunleavy said the allegation by commission investigators was later resolved. “We take our obligation to cooperate with the CPUC seriously,” she said.
Prosper of the commission said, “Public safety is, and will remain, our top priority,”
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1.Fire fighters kept an eye on the wild fire burning behind Olive View Medical Center.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)2.A firefighting plane drops red Phos-Chek, a fire retardant, to protect Olive View Medical Center from wind driven Saddle Ridge wild fire in October 2019.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)3.Interstate 5 and California State Rute 14 were closed to traffic through Newhall Pass due to the Saddle Ridge fire.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)4.Firefighters cleared brush and mopped up a hillside along California State Highway 14 due to fire in 2019.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
Another fire in Sylmar
At about 10:30 on the night of Jan. 7, Katherine Twohy heard a loud crack and saw a bright flash. Edison’s transmission towers in Sylmar skirt around the edge of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park, where Twohy, a retired psychologist, lives.
“I was just coming in my back door and there was just this incredible flashing of white lights,” Twohy said. “Incredibly blue-white lights.”
She walked to her living room window where she can see two Edison towers, which are separated by more than a hundred yards. Twohy said she could see flames at the base of each one.
“The fires had made little circles around the base,” she said.
Twohy said she saw flames under the same towers the night the Saddle Ridge fire ignited in 2019.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, it’s just like last time,’” Twohy said.
In court, lawyers representing victims of the 2019 fire have seized on Edison’s admission that its equipment may have sparked the Jan. 7 fire.
“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner” as the 2019 fire, they wrote in a June court filing.
Delgado’s home sits next to the dirt road leading up to the towers. The Jan. 7 fire melted his backyard fence but did little more damage. In the days after the fire, he found that some of the same Edison employees he spoke to in 2019 as a witness reappeared.
“I saw the exact same people from Edison show up,” he said. “I told them your towers almost killed my family again.”
Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots.
In January, Bradford’s house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders.
Despite it all, he’s still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.)
At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ Home,” a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity.
“That’s all I have left,” Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years old. I don’t have years to wait around to rebuild.”
For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It’s his and his wife’s fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they’ve done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage.
Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he’d run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles.
“We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn’t spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,” Bradford said. “We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”
L.A.-based jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford plays the cornet while rehearsing his original composition in his Altadena home in 2019.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
These days, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. “The company said they won’t insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,” he said, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”
But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age.
“It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford said. “How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”
The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him.
With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette played with so much raw feeling,” Bradford said. “He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning.
American jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford performs onstage circa 1980.
(David Redfern / Redferns)
He’s equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery’s field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.
“You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,” he said with a laugh. “But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.”
He’s been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena’s Ice House in the ’70s.
Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I remember someone coming into our club in the ’70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and he said, ‘Well, everything.’ I told him, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You can’t live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.”
Bobby Bradford rehearses in Pasadena.
(Michael Rowe / For The Times)
He’s worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one’s life and community are vulnerable.
Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly “woke” history.
“I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,” Bradford said, shaking his head. “But now we’re back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.”
Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything.
“You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a hit,” he said. “Folks said, ‘Oh, it’s so sad. We told you he couldn’t play on a professional level.’ But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn’t get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.”
We asked L.A. Times readers: “Thinking ahead to 2050, how might you reconfigure the city so it is a sustainable home for everyone?” Here is a sampling of their comments:
Use the Chicago riverfront, apartments, architecture, etc., as your example. We could have a thriving green space with the L.A. River, bike paths, community parks, gardens, etc.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
Go international and use Florence or Tokyo as your examples. Enact beautiful single-stair buildings, public art, clean sidewalks and streets that are protected in the city budget, and reliable automatic trains that run every four minutes so people don’t feel trapped by their cars.
Our legislators must enact public policy and change their cities for the better. Instead, the L.A. City Council allows a literal dirt space behind City Hall to be used for random events instead of new housing or a shared, protected public park.
— Rachel Smith
I would put an emphasis on clean air in every public space. Whether the concern is viruses or wildfire smoke or anything else, no public space should have poor air quality. We need to be monitoring air quality levels in all public spaces and putting in appropriate air filtration.
The Pacific Palisades house is clad in fiber cement. The roof is made of fireproof TPO (thermoplastic polyolefin), the deck is made with specially treated wood for fire resistance and a fire suppression system in the back of the house sprayed fire retardant onto the vegetation.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
— Annette Majerowicz
I do not live there, but hope to retire there. I want walkable areas with maintained sidewalks and shade.
Now we find a region that has begun to stagnate as fires continue to pound on its doors and its residents are questioning their future and safety there, all the while fighting rising prices.
There is much opportunity that comes with building up, the ability to reshape the city, bring forth high density, sustainable, residential buildings that can alleviate the housing crisis and even reduce traffic as some studies have shown. An emphasis on land management and parks can open up city spaces while protecting it from the threat of wildfires.
— Matthew Perez
For the love of God, can we just get some bike lanes?
— Evan Gillespie
Landscaping? Yes, but make sure it’s drought-tolerant and geographically appropriate.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
To transform Los Angeles into a sustainable and equitable city by 2050, we need a holistic approach that addresses climate challenges while fostering community well-being. My vision is rooted in architecture, landscaping, neighborhood planning and inclusive design practices.
Resilient Architecture and Housing: Buildings must be designed to withstand the increasing threat of wildfires and other climate-related events. This means using fire-resistant materials, integrating green roofs for natural cooling and air quality, and designing adaptable, modular structures that can be quickly reconfigured or relocated if needed. Housing should be dense but human-scaled, with flexible spaces that accommodate changing family structures and community needs.
Sustainable Landscaping and Urban Ecology: Landscaping in 2050 Los Angeles will move away from water-intensive practices, embracing native, drought-tolerant plants that support local biodiversity. Urban forests will play a crucial role in reducing heat islands, while community gardens and urban farms will become integral to neighborhood identity, providing both food security and green space.
Connected and Climate-Conscious Neighborhoods: To minimize car dependency, neighborhoods will be designed as walkable, bike-friendly hubs that mix housing, workspaces, and recreational areas. Public transportation will be integrated seamlessly into these communities, encouraging active mobility and reducing emissions. We will rethink zoning to allow for more live-work spaces, eliminating long commutes and fostering local economies.
Community-Centered Planning: Planning will be community-driven, prioritizing equity by involving residents in decision-making processes. Each neighborhood will develop its own identity and purpose — some focusing on water management and treatment, others on urban agriculture or community energy production. This localized approach will build social cohesion while addressing specific climate challenges.
Welcoming and Inclusive Urban Fabric: By 2050, Los Angeles will embrace its diverse population by valuing skills and contributions from all residents, including immigrants. Adapted housing and support systems will ensure no one lives on the streets, and public spaces will be accessible and inclusive
Could AI robots pick up all our trash in the future?
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
— Ena (Ana) Yanchapaxi
Stop catering to developers, large corporations and monopolies. We need to prioritize citizens and businesses so people can stay locally.
— Josh Walters
*Use AI Robots to pick up and organize all trash 24/7.
*Double-decker light rail on the 10 and 405, 105, 101, 5. Put light rail on every major east to west artery.
*Close all oil refineries
*Move the airport outside the city.
*Make coastal areas into massive wetland / chaparral ecosystems.
*Return Altadena and Pacific Palisades into a chaparral ecosystem.
*Expand sidewalks / pedestrian access; create plazas to increase walkability.
*Reduce water imports to help the rest of California and make it more resistant to climate change.
*Create more freeway overpasses for wildlife.
*Replace gas stations with state-run electric charging stations
*Fruit trees throughout the city
*Dense communal living options.
Plant more fruit trees? Why not?
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
— Matt Ceran
Repeal and phase out Prop. 13, and rezone most of the city so we can build multi-family housing, more walkable communities. Just build more housing and see how a majority of the city’s problems will diminish or disappear altogether. Oh, and plant more trees. I think it’s a tragedy that the city with the most incredible weather in the world was made so un-walkable.
— Michele Medina
Los Angeles needs to rethink its car-first history first and foremost if we are ever going to make inroads toward a more sustainable future. Fighting constantly for better public transit is the easy answer as we see Metro working in new projects, but there also has to be a hyper-local push toward smart density, advocating for more walkable neighborhoods, fewer single-family housing developments, and completely redesigning towns and cities so folks can access what they need without needing to drive everywhere.
— Charles Vignola
I think Los Angeles needs to make more space for people and nature, and less for cars. Tons of apartments everywhere, bike and bus lanes, trains, and parks. A lot of that is hard, small work you see on a neighborhood scale, but there’s one big project I’d like to see: burying the 101 and building a linear park in the Cahuenga Pass. This would give more people access to a giant park, reduce car pollution, and provide safe passage for mountain lions to cross into Griffith Park. The views of the valley and the basin would be spectacular, and it would be a refuge, a reconstruction of the ancient Tongva walking path.
France’s most devastating wildfire in decades remains active despite being brought under control, officials announced, as firefighting efforts continue with hundreds of personnel.
The massive blaze in Aude has scorched more than 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) – an area larger than Paris – killing one person, injuring another 13 and destroying numerous homes.
Approximately 2,000 firefighters remain deployed to combat the flames, which were declared under control on Thursday night.
“The fire will not be declared extinguished for several days,” said Christian Pouget, Aude’s prefect. “There is still a lot of work to be done.”
Officials have restricted access to the devastated forests until at least Sunday due to hazardous conditions, including fallen power lines and other dangers.
Pouget confirmed that roughly 2,000 evacuees still await clearance to return home, with hundreds sheltering in school gymnasiums and community centres throughout the region.
This wildfire is the largest in France’s Mediterranean region in at least 50 years, according to government monitoring agencies. The southern area is particularly susceptible to such fires.
At its peak, the blaze consumed about 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) per hour, Narbonne authorities reported. Shifting strong winds over two days made the fire’s behaviour unpredictable.
A 65-year-old woman who refused evacuation orders was found dead in her burned home, while 13 others were injured, including 11 firefighters.
Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, visiting the affected area on Wednesday, called the wildfire a “catastrophe on an unprecedented scale”.
“What is happening today is linked to global warming and linked to drought,” Bayrou said.
Environment Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher wrote in a post on X that this was France’s largest fire since 1949. The country has experienced approximately 9,000 wildfires this summer, primarily near the Mediterranean coast.
Aude has seen increasing burn areas in recent years, exacerbated by reduced rainfall and vineyard removals that previously helped slow fire progression.
In Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, the hardest-hit village, thick smoke continued rising on Thursday from pine-covered hills overlooking vineyards where dry grass still burned.
With Europe facing new August heatwaves, many regions remain on wildfire alert. Portugal extended emergency measures on Thursday due to heightened fire risks.
Near Spain’s Tarifa, fire crews secured areas around tourist accommodation after controlling a major blaze that destroyed hundreds of hectares.
Climate experts indicate that global warming is driving longer, more intense and more frequent heatwaves worldwide, creating more favourable conditions for forest fires.
Aug. 5 (UPI) — A wildfire that ignited Friday in Southern California has exploded to tens of thousands of acres as nearly 2,000 firefighters work to get the blaze under control.
The Gifford Fire, burning in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, about 90 miles north of Los Angeles, has prompted officials to issue evacuation orders throughout both regions.
“Immediate threat to life. This is a lawful order to LEAVE NOW,” Cal Fire said in an update, adding that several other areas, mostly in San Luis Obispo County, are under evacuation warnings.
Some 1,910 firefighters were on the ground, as the blaze threatened 872 structures, officials said.
As of Monday evening, it had grown to 72,460 acres with only 3% contained, according to Cal Fire.
The Los Padres National Forest said the blaze began shortly before 4 p.m. PDT Friday as multiple wildfires along Highway 166, west of Cuyama. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Highway 166 between Highway 101 and the southern junction of Highway 33 remains closed.
Officials said it is feeding on grass fuels, which are plentiful and susceptible to spotting. Hot, dry weather, combined with the fuels, has contributed to its rapid growth, they said.
The National Weather Service in Los Angeles is warning the public about smoke spewing from the fire, saying it “will impact portions of southwest California.”
An air quality alert has been issued for the Cuyama area by the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District, while an air quality watch has been issued for the rest of Santa Barbara County.
Blazes across several Canadian provinces and territories pose health risks to Canadians and their southern neighbours.
Smoke from wildfires burning in Canada has triggered air quality alerts over the border in the United States.
Several blazes continued to rage across Canada on Saturday, sending smoke wafting over several states in the US Midwest and bringing warnings of unhealthy air for at least the third day.
Air quality alerts were in effect in the US states of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as eastern Nebraska and parts of Indiana and Illinois.
Conditions were especially dire in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with the Switzerland-based air quality monitoring database IQAir reporting that the US city had some of the worst air pollution in the world since Friday.
The Air Quality Index (AQI), a system used to communicate how much pollution is in the air, is expected to reach the red or unhealthy category in a large swath of Minnesota, and will likely remain so through Saturday.
“We’ve sort of been dealing with this, day in and day out, where you walk outside and you can taste the smoke, you can smell it,” said Joe Strus, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.
Forecasters warned that smoky skies would remain across the Midwest for much of Saturday, but could start to dissipate before spreading as far south as Tennessee and Missouri.
The poor air quality poses particular risks for people with lung and heart conditions, as well as children, the elderly and pregnant women.
This is not the first time that Canadian wildfires have prompted air quality alerts in the US and further afield. In 2023, a record early wildfire season sent smoke across the Atlantic into northern Europe.
On Saturday, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported “out-of-control” blazes in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, as well as in Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
The centre said that 717 fires were active across the country.
Environment Canada also said “extremely high” levels of air pollution were present in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the Northwest Territories, according to a report by The Canadian Press news agency.
Areas in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec were also under air-quality watch, though risks to health were reportedly lower.
Environment Canada said reduced visibility and poor air quality would persist into Sunday.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is preparing draft legislation that would add an additional $18 billion to a state fund for wildfire victims that officials have warned could be exhausted by January’s deadly Eaton wildfire.
Under Newsom’s plan, customers of the state’s three biggest for-profit utilities would pay another $9 billion to supplement a state fund created in 2019 that holds $21 billion.
The other $9 billion would come from shareholders of Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric, according to a draft of the proposal.
“We continue to work with the Legislature on policy that will stabilize California’s Wildfire Fund to support the recovery of wildfire survivors and to protect California utility consumers — even as wildfires become bigger and more destructive due to climate change,” Newsom’s office said in a statement Thursday.
Customers of the three utilities are already on the hook for contributing half of the original $21 billion fund through a surcharge of about $3 on their monthly bill. The proposal would have customers pay $9 billion more by extending that surcharge by 10 years beyond 2035, when it was set to expire.
“We’re very disappointed to be at a point where there is even talk of more ratepayer money going to the wildfire fund,” said Mark Toney, executive director of the the Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group.
Utility executives also criticized the plan, which was reported earlier by Bloomberg, for proposing that their shareholders pay additional amounts into the fund.
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, told Wall Street analysts on a conference call that the company has told Newsom and lawmakers that any legislation to shore up the fund “would not have a shareholder contribution.”
“We will need to see the balance of an ultimate package,” Pizarro said.
Newsom’s plan has been circulating with legislative leaders and others and would require approval of the state Senate and Assembly. Under the draft proposal, the $18 billion would go into a new “Continuation Wildfire Fund.” The new fund would not be created until the administrator of the state’s original wildfire fund determines additional funds are needed.
Newsom and lawmakers created the $21 billion fund in 2019 to protect utilities from bankruptcy in the event their equipment sparks a devastating fire.
Toney said said state officials told him then that there was a 99% chance the fund would last 20 years. Now it could be wiped out by a single fire.
He said he believes there needs to be limits on the liabilities that the fund will pay for. “We can’t go back every three or four years and put more money in,” he said.
Since the fund was created, electric customers have also paid $27 billion for tree trimming and other work aimed to prevent wildfires, which is fast driving up electric bills, Toney said.
The investigation into the Eaton fire, which killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in Altadena, is continuing. Video captured the fire igniting on Jan. 7 under an Edison transmission tower.
Pizarro has said a leading theory is that a dormant Edison transmission line, not used since 1971, somehow became electrified and sparked the blaze.
The insured property losses alone could be as much as $15.2 billion, according to an estimate released by state officials last week. That amount does not include uninsured losses or damages beyond those to property, such as wrongful death claims. A study by UCLA estimated losses at $24 billion to $45 billion.
Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to issue an executive order Wednesday allowing Los Angeles-area governments to limit development in wildfire-affected neighborhoods by exempting them from provisions of a landmark housing law, a spokesperson for his office said.
The proposed order would let the city and county of Los Angeles and Malibu restrict construction that was allowed under Senate Bill 9, a 2021 law that allows property owners build as many as four units on land previously reserved for single-family homes.
The order would apply to Pacific Palisades and parts of Malibu and Altadena — areas that burned in January’s Palisades and Eaton fires that are designated as “very high fire hazard severity zones” by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said.
The decision came after concerns about the potential of a significant population increase if there were widespread use of SB 9 developments in rebuilding areas, making future fire evacuations even more difficult, Gallegos said.
The governor’s plan follows pressure this week from elected officials in Los Angeles. On Monday, City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades, sent a letter to Newsom requesting that he suspend SB 9, warning that otherwise there could be “an unforeseen explosion of density” in a risky area.
“When SB 9 was adopted into state law, it was never intended to capitalize on a horrific disaster,” Park wrote.
On Tuesday, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass released a statement supporting Park’s request, citing similar concerns about SB 9 straining evacuation routes and local infrastructure in the Palisades.
“It could fundamentally alter the safety of the area,” Bass said.
Local media report that 24 firefighters and rescuers were trapped by the wildfire, and that victims were ‘burned alive’.
At least 10 firefighters and rescue workers were killed and 14 others injured while battling a wildfire in Turkiye’s northwestern Eskisehir province, authorities said, as several fires rage in central and western areas of the country where temperatures are soaring.
Turkish Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Ibrahim Yumakli said on Wednesday that five forestry workers and five rescuers trying to tackle the blaze were killed when 24 firefighters became trapped in the wildfire earlier in the day.
Winds whipped up by the flames suddenly changed direction, and the fire engulfed the group of firefighters, who were swiftly transported to hospital, where 10 of them died.
Fourteen others are still receiving medical treatment, the minister said.
“Unfortunately, we have lost five forest workers and five [rescuers],” Yumakli told Turkish television broadcasters.
Turkish news website BirGun reported that the group were trapped by the fire and “burned alive”.
Local lawmaker Nebi Hatipoglu wrote on X that there are “no words to describe our grief”.
Flames and smoke rise from a house in Selcik village after a forest fire in the Bilecik area of Turkiye on July 23, 2025 [Sergen Sezgin/Anadolu]
Turkiye has been sweltering since Sunday under high temperatures and strong winds that have fanned wildfires between Istanbul and the capital, Ankara, with the spreading blazes threatening homes and forcing the evacuation of several villages.
Minister Yumakli said extreme heat and volatile wind conditions were also expected on Thursday.
“Starting tomorrow, we are facing extraordinary temperatures and extreme wind shifts. Once again, I call on all 86 million citizens to be vigilant and exercise extra caution,” he said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised the victims who fought “to protect our forests at cost of their lives”.
“I pray for God’s mercy on our brothers and sisters who fought at the cost of their lives to protect our forests, and I offer my condolences to their families and our nation,” Erdogan said in a message posted on social media.
Two prosecutors have been assigned to investigate the incident, the country’s justice minister said.
The deaths on Wednesday bring the number of deaths in wildfires so far in the country to 13 this year.
An elderly man and two forestry workers were killed in a wildfire that raged near the town of Odemis, in the Izmir province, earlier this month.
An aircraft drops water over a forest fire in the Kayapınar neighbourhood of the Yunusemre district in the Manisa area of Turkiye on Wednesday [Berkan Cetin/Anadolu]
This week, reality TV show star Spencer Pratt posted multiple videos on social media savaging a proposed state bill on wildfire rebuilding. In one, Pratt told his 2 million TikTok followers that he consulted an artificial intelligence engine about Senate Bill 549. He said it told him the legislation would allow L.A. County to buy burned-out lots in Pacific Palisades and convert them to low-income housing, strip away local zoning decisions and push dense reconstruction. He urged people to oppose it.
“I don’t even think this is political,” Pratt said. “This is a common sense post.”
None of what Pratt said is in the bill. But over the last week, such misinformation-fueled furor has overwhelmed the conversation in Los Angeles, at the state Capitol and on social media about wildfire recovery. Posts have preyed on fears of neighborhood change, mistrust of government authorities and prejudice against low-income housing to assert, among other things, that the wildfires were set intentionally to raze the Palisades and replace the community with affordable housing.
The chatter has unmoored debate over a major rebuilding proposal from L.A. County leaders. Under the plan, a new local authority would be able to buy burned lots, rebuild homes and offer them back at discounted rates to the original owners. The idea is to give property owners struggling to rebuild another option to stay in their communities. There are no changes to any rules that require zoning amendments or approvals for individual housing developments.
State Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica), the author of SB 549, which creates the local authority, said he understands legitimate policy disagreements over the new powers granted in the bill.
But those discussions have been overshadowed, he said.
“It’s become this total meme among the right-wing blogosphere and, unfortunately, picked up by some lazy-ass journalists that don’t bother to read the bill that say this bill seeks to turn the entire Palisades into low-income housing,” Allen said.
Some of his own friends who lost homes in the Palisades, Allen said, have been texting him asking why he’s trying to force low-income housing into the neighborhood.
“People are saying I want to put a train line in there,” Allen said. “It’s insane.”
The frenzy, in part, is due to an issue of timing. Last month, a 20-member expert commission impaneled by L.A. County proposed the local authority as a key recommendation for rebuilding after January’s Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed 18,000 homes and other properties.
Commission leaders then approached Allen about writing a bill that would allow for its implementation. Allen wanted to do it, but deadlines for introducing new legislation had long passed.
Instead, Allen took SB 549, which had nothing to do with wildfire rebuilding but was still alive in the Legislature, and added the rebuilding authority language to it. This is a common legislative procedure used when putting forward ideas late in the year.
Allen decided as well to keep the original language in the bill, which called for significant spending on low-income housing in an unrelated financing program. Multiple news articles conflated the two portions of the bill, which added to the alarm.
The version of SB 549 with the wildfire rebuilding authority in it had its first hearing in a legislative committee on Wednesday. Allen spent much of the hearing acknowledging the confusion around it.
State housing officials carved out $101 million from long-planned funding allocations for low-income housing and dedicated it to building new developments in Los Angeles.
The money will be used to subsidize low-income apartment buildings throughout the county with priority given to projects proposed in and around burn zones, that are willing to reserve a portion to fire survivors and are close to breaking ground.
“Thousands of families — from Pacific Palisades to Altadena to Malibu — are still displaced and we owe it to them to help,” Newsom said when unveiling the spending.
Like the proposed rebuilding authority, the funding does not change any zoning or other land-use rules. Any developer who receives the dollars would need separate governmental approval to begin construction.
Nevertheless, social media posters took the new money and the proposed new authority and saw a conspiracy.
Newsom called the situation another example of “opportunists exploit[ing] this tragedy to stoke fear — and pit communities against each other.”
“Let’s be clear: The state is not taking away anyone’s property, instituting some sort of mass rezoning or destroying the quality and character of destroyed neighborhoods. Period,” Newsom said in a statement to The Times. “Anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or deliberately lying. That’s not just wrong — it’s disgraceful.”
Not all of the debate about the rebuilding authority is based on false information.
Allen and local leaders acknowledged the need for more consensus over its role, especially given the sensitivities around recovery. Still unresolved were the authority’s governing structure, and whether it would encompass the Palisades or be limited to Altadena and other unincorporated areas.
Pratt lost his Palisades home in the fire and has sued the city, alleging it failed to maintain an adequate water supply and other infrastructure. In social media videos this week, Pratt said he and other residents didn’t trust the county with increased power over rebuilding when he believed leaders failed to protect the neighborhood in the first place.
“We’re a fire-stricken community, not a policy sandbox,” Pratt said. “We do not support the county becoming a dominant landowner in the Palisades.”
Representatives for Pratt could not be reached for comment.
By the end of Wednesday, Allen conceded defeat on SB 549. There were many legitimate hurdles to the bill passing before the Legislature adjourns in mid-September, he said. Notably, a representative for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told the legislative committee that she was opposed to the bill because the city had yet to be convinced of its efficacy.
But the misinformation surrounding the bill made it even harder to envision its success, he said. Allen decided to hold the bill and have it reconsidered when the Legislature convenes again in January.
“If we’re going to do this, I want the time to do it right,” he said.
About 50 to 80 other structures also destroyed as two wildfires burn at or near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim in Arizona.
Wildfires have engulfed a historic lodge, destroying it and dozens of other structures along the Grand Canyon’s North Rim in the state of Arizona in the southwestern United States, park officials say.
Rangers were forced to close access to that part of the Grand Canyon National Park on Sunday. Superintendent Ed Keable said the Grand Canyon Lodge was consumed by flames.
He said a park visitor centre, petrol station, wastewater treatment plant, administrative building and employee housing were also among the 50 to 80 structures lost.
Two wildfires are burning at or near the North Rim. They are known as the White Sage Fire and the Dragon Bravo Fire. The latter is the one that destroyed the lodge and other structures.
Started by lightning on July 4, the Dragon Bravo Fire was initially managed by authorities with a “confine and contain” strategy. However, due to hot temperatures, low humidity and strong winds, it grew to 20 square kilometres (7.8 square miles), fire officials said.
No injuries have been reported so far.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs urged the federal government late on Sunday to investigate the National Park Service’s response to the wildfire.
“They must first take aggressive action to end the wildfire and prevent further damage,” she said in a post on X. “But Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.”
I am incredibly saddened by the destruction of the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, and my heart goes out to every person impacted by the Dragon Bravo Fire near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.
Thank you to every firefighter and first responder taking action to combat the flames.
— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) July 14, 2025
Millions of people visit the park annually with most going to the South Rim. The North Rim is open seasonally. It was evacuated on Thursday because of the wildfire and will remain closed for the rest of the season, the park said in a statement.
The Grand Canyon Lodge was often the first prominent feature that visitors would see, even before viewing the canyon.
“It just feels like you’re a pioneer when you walk through [the lodge],” said Tim Allen, an Arizona resident and yearly visitor to the Grand Canyon. “It really felt like you were in a time gone by.”
Caren Carney, another visitor to the park evacuated with her family, said she was heartbroken to hear that such a “magical place” had burned down.
Firefighters at the North Rim and hikers in the inner canyon were also evacuated on Saturday and Sunday. The park said that beside the fire risk, they could also potentially be exposed to chlorine gas after the treatment plant burned.
Aramark, the company that operated the lodge, said all employees and guests were safely evacuated. “As stewards of some of our country’s most beloved national treasures, we are devastated by the loss,” spokesperson Debbie Albert said.
One of the greatest wonders of the natural world, the Grand Canyon is the result of the Colorado River eating away at layers of red sandstone and other rock for millions of years, leaving a gash up to 30km (18 miles) wide and more than 1.6km (1 mile) deep.
Last year, almost five million people visited the site.
