California Burning: LA Fires, Climate Change, and Insurance Nightmares with Environmental Lawyer Debbie Sivas

Deborah Sivas: The insurance commissioner in California put into place some new regulations trying to stabilize the homeowners’ insurance market. I fear what’s happening in LA….The last I saw, 6,000 structures have burned down there, right? So that’s going to throw that whole thing back into chaos, but it’s not just California.

You’ve got the hurricanes, the flooding, the sea level rise issues and I’ve been thinking that I don’t know that we can really sustain any kind of a private insurance market. Depending on where you live, it’s a different climate disaster, but they’re happening everywhere. And how do we deal with those enormous costs long term?

Pam Karlan: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I’m Pam Karlan. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way you’ll have access to all our new episodes as soon as they’re available.

In her essay Los Angeles Notebook, Joan Didion wrote: “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it.”

Today we’re seeing the effects of that in Los Angeles. As of the time that we recorded this on January 9th, the Los Angeles fires have devastated much of the outer edges of the Los Angeles metropolis.

It’s a frightening reminder of the dangers of fire even in cities. I’m joined today by my colleague here at Stanford Law School, Debbie Sivas. She’s a leading environmental litigator who holds the Luke Cole Chair here at the law school, and she’s the director of the highly regarded Environmental Law Clinic, in which students provide legal counsel to dozens of national, regional, and grassroot nonprofit organizations on a variety of environmental issues.

Her successes on those issues have really spanned the entire range of environmental law issues. And her current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the area of climate change, and the ability of the public to hold policy makers accountable. Debbie is a native Californian, and she grew up in LA.  I’m so glad you’re able to join us on the show today, Debbie. So, thanks for being here.

Deborah Sivas: Thanks, Pam. Glad to be here.

Pam Karlan: So, you’re actually a Los Angeles native, and you were down in Southern California when everything started to blow up. Can you tell us a little bit about why you were there?

Deborah Sivas: Yes, I grew up in Southern California, and was down there on Tuesday when the fire started because President Biden was in town to potentially sign a couple of presidential proclamations declaring national monuments, both one in the Mojave Desert and one up in Northeastern California. But unfortunately, that event was canceled, or curtailed, because he was stuck on the ground at LAX because the winds were. And it was right at that time that the first fires were breaking out, particularly the one in Pacific Palisades.

Pam Karlan: So, these winds, where do they actually … what causes these kinds of winds?

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, so it’s a long-known phenomenon in Southern California called the Santa Ana winds. And they’re the dry winds. So normally you have winds coming off the ocean into the inland. And, but you get these times of year and having grown up down there, it happened every year where you, the winds reverse course, and it has to do with where the high and low pressure systems are sitting and it happens at particular times of year. And people who live there just have an instinct, as Joan Didion did, and they come from the north, the northeast, and they blow from onshore to offshore, and they can be pretty ferocious. And they’re dry and hot because they’re not coming off of the marine environment, they’re coming off the desert, basically.

Pam Karlan: Are they more frequent now? I have a sense that there are a couple of different ways that climate change might be affecting what’s going on here. But let’s start with the winds themselves. Are the winds different? Or is it that the ground over which the winds are coming is different?

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, I don’t know about what the empirical data is showing us about if the winds are more frequent. I do think that they’re potentially getting stronger as weather systems intensify, but I think primarily what we’re seeing is the interaction of this normal wind pattern setting up when climate change is affecting the landscape and particularly California, although here in Northern California, we’ve had a pretty average winter so far in terms of rain and snowfall. Southern California has been dry as a bone, just a little less than like about a quarter of an inch [of rain] or something. So just very parched and that is probably affiliated with climate change.

Pam Karlan: So, you have these winds that are coming and they’re very high; they’re very high velocity winds. You have very dry, land. What actually causes the fire?

Deborah Sivas: Every fire has an ignition source. So, something we don’t … we won’t know. They’ll do forensics afterwards to figure out if it was a human, a spark from somewhere, someone flicked their cigarette, or maybe a power line was down. So that’s as, as you might know, has caused a lot of the Northern California fires over the last few years. So there’s some ignition spark. And then you’ve got these hot dry winds and the fact that it’s dry allows the fire to spread pretty quickly. And then the winds are really the fuel because it kicks up those winds and those embers scatter as the wind picks them up and drops them onto structures and the infrastructure there. And so that’s what really sets it off. It’s amazing to see those pictures about what is burning. It’s mostly ember-driven as the embers fall onto roofs and cars.

Pam Karlan: So, this is a fire that’s happening in what’s essentially an urban area. If you think back to some of the disastrous fires we’ve had recently here in Northern California, there was a lot of discussion of, “Well, maybe people shouldn’t have been building in those areas …” but this is an area that’s been built up for a century.

Deborah Sivas: That’s right. Although if you look at where the fires are, they’re in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains. Those are areas where the very intense development in the urban area starts to creep up the canyons. It’s at what we call the “wildland urban interface.” And so that’s where you’re mostly seeing…. Although those…they’re still part of the urban environment, but they’re the suburban environment because they’re not in the most heavily, intensely developed areas, but creeping up the canyons. And that’s where all that really dry brush is that can carry those embers forward.

Pam Karlan: And there are  now five or six of these fires in different areas. And at least the last time I looked online, a lot of them were 0 percent contained. What does that mean?

Deborah Sivas: That means that they’re still moving, and they haven’t gotten the lines around them where the fire fighters can cut them off and create fire breaks and other things to keep them contained. And so, I think that’s right. I think I count five as well. And something over 30,000 acres already burned, but a lot of a lot greater area evacuated.

Pam Karlan: What are the prospects for this? How long does this go on? Because there seems to be a huge amount of fuel available. And the winds are presumably the combination of the Santa Ana winds and now the winds that are created by a firestorm itself.

Deborah Sivas: That’s right. One of … some of what one we’re seeing with climate change is the fires can actually create their own windstorms, right? So it’s self-perpetuating. I think what we’re likely to see in Southern California is those winds will die down. They’re just periodic, right? So, as they die down, I think there’ll be an ability to get some control over these fires.

One of the problems is that there’s … the city’s not really prepared for five or six fire major fires at a time. And so the pressure of the water system is not what it should be. So, a lot of these firefighters are saying they go open a hydrant and there’s not enough water pressure to be fighting the fire. So that’s contributing to the problem as well. I suspect the winds will tamp down and then they’ll get some better control over these fires. But you’re right that the dry vegetation is still there. So, the next Santa Ana event, which could be next week or next month, could kick them all back up again.

Pam Karlan: And is there anything that should have been done that wasn’t done that would have made this less likely to happen? Other than we should have cured our climate change issues. I realize there’s the sort of big picture, long term issue, which is, can we sustain human habitation and human economy in parts of the world that are subject now to extreme weather events that wouldn’t happen? But short of that …?

Deborah Sivas: That’s right. That’s the big picture. I think one of the things that the more recent studies are showing is there may be nothing you can do where there’s a high wind velocity and it’s an ember-driven fire … for some of this. In the Pacific Palisades, it burned right down to the ocean, right? Even the lifeguard towers were on fire. On the sand. So, there’s not much you can do about that. I would say, though, that in us as a society, thinking about what we can do, we have a lot of existing infrastructure, obviously, in places like Los Angeles, and one is to really start taking more seriously, how can we build defensible space around property? So that, obviously, the materials and the building structures: So new buildings are held to higher fire standards, retrofitting houses and other buildings. It’s expensive to do that work.

But that’s one thing to be thinking about. And defensible space is really important. And I used to hear that you needed 100 feet on all sides of defensible space. And that’s hard in an intense…

Pam Karlan: What do you mean by defensible space?

Deborah Sivas: That’s where you have brush cleared away and vegetation from the house so that you like create a buffer away from what might burn, so that it doesn’t get your house. As I said, if it’s a high windstorm, the embers are going to reach your house anyway. But in a lot of fires, if you have enough space around that doesn’t have a lot of vegetation in it, you can try to protect the structure that way. Here’s the good news, I think: We used to hear about “It’s 100 feet of defensible space—clear vegetation around 100 feet.” I don’t even think I have 100 feet around my house, right? If you’re in an urban area. But there are now the studies are showing it’s really the vegetation and also importantly, the wooden fences that are up against your house. So, if you have a 10-foot area where you have no dried vegetation and you don’t have your wooden fences touching up against your house, those are two effective ways to reduce the risk in some of these wildfire events.

Pam Karlan: I just … you’re right that for a lot of people, the idea that they would have that kind of space around their house seems unlikely. We are living cheek by jowl in a lot of these places. Let me turn to the air for a moment, which is, what are the effects of this fire on, air? Even in the places that aren’t themselves on fire. I remember when we had the fires up here, I guess it was in 2020 or 2021, it was orange for several days outside and they told us not to go out. What happens when it’s in a place like Los Angeles, which has a fair amount of industry in it as well?

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, and it’s really interesting. A lot depends on the weather patterns, right? And so last night I was looking on … you can look on Purple Air because that’s the particulate emission count, and that tells you something about how much smoke is in the air, and I was looking at Pacific Palisades, which looked fairly good. But what was happening is the smoke was blowing off of Pacific Palisades, down the coast, and then looping around to Palos Verdes, which just happens to be where I grew up, and it was intensely red and very poor air quality there. But that wasn’t because there was a fire there, that was because the winds were whipping around, right? And so you see that … it’s unpredictable because, especially in these Santa Ana events, the wind shifts around quite a bit. And so, and also up in Pasadena where the that Altadena fire is burning, there are heavy emissions there. And so it’s hard because especially in some of … so Pacific Palisades is a pretty affluent area, but in some of these inland communities that might be get the smoke effects, they may well be in housing that’s not all that smoke proof. And so they may even be exposed inside. So it creates a real hazard. And I would say that the recent studies, including from some of our colleagues here at Stanford, are showing that when you have urban areas on fire, so houses and cars and those kind of things on fire, you’re burning a whole bunch of plastics and other….

Pam Karlan: Yeah, I was going to say, I just think about what your kitchen is like. It’s filled with, you know, all of those plastic containers. Cars are filled with plastic seats and …

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, so it turns out that that kind of smoke can be much worse for you than other than other situations where it might just be a campfire or something. And so when you’re running these infrastructure components…. Yeah, and people are trapped. You’re trapped in the LA Basin. People are evacuating the areas that are immediately on fire, but most people aren’t leaving LA So they’re still breathing in all that.

Pam Karlan: How long after a fire like this gets contained, is the air still going to have, still be problematic?

Deborah Sivas: Probably a couple of days. It falls out after a while. Because we’ll get …what will happen is once the Santa Ana conditions die down, we’ll get the normal breezes coming off the ocean, and that’ll start to push the smoke.

Pam Karlan: So, the smoke’s going to end up in, say, Ohio?

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, exactly. And that’s what happened when we had those bad fires up here in Northern California, it all blew out to Montana and Colorado and kept going to the Midwest.

Pam Karlan: With these fires, it’s not clear when they’re going to get them actually contained. It’s not clear whether there’ll be another group of them. It’s not clear where else might be vulnerable to this. And yet at the same time, we’re having this unbelievable weather on the East Coast: massive storms, especially in the Southeast, really unpredictable ones. We had hurricanes. Is this the new normal that we should just be assuming there’s going to be some extreme weather crisis somewhere in the United States virtually every year?

Deborah Sivas: I think absolutely. Yes, unfortunately. And you think about the extraordinarily cold weather, and out here we have hot weather and these hot winds, and that is all the same. It’s all just different manifestations of our changing climate. And you’ve got different things in the Gulf, right?

I think one of the … I’ve been thinking about this since the LA fires because I’ve done some work on wildfires and starting to look at wildfire insurance issues in California. As you might know, there’s already a crisis from our earlier fires, so the insurers have tried to … a lot of them have started pulling back from California because of the wildfire risk. And it is hard for insurers to have any kind of actuarial predictions going forward since what was normal in the 20th century is no longer normal. So how do they predict those consequences?

And just last week, the insurance commissioner in California put into place some new regulations trying to stabilize the homeowners’ insurance market. I fear what’s happening in LA. … The last I saw, 6,000 structures have burned down there, right? So that’s going to throw that whole thing back into chaos, but it’s not just California, right? You’ve got the hurricanes, the flooding, the sea level rise issues, and I’ve been thinking that I don’t know that we can really sustain any kind of a private insurance market. Depending on where you live, it’s a different climate disaster, but they’re happening everywhere. And how do we deal with those enormous costs long term?

Pam Karlan: You were talking about the insurance issue here. I take it that most … if people are going to get a payout here, it’s going to be from their private insurance.

Deborah Sivas: Mostly that is the case. Although recently California’s also started up this FAIR program, which is trying to pick up where private insurance has been canceled, which is happening more and more in California. So there is a state program. It’s just in a nascent state and I fear that this could just this could just completely destroy that program because I don’t …

Pam Karlan: Is that a program where people essentially are paying a premium to the government rather than … so people are still paying in a premium, this isn’t like just plain simple disaster relief?

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, and it’s and it’s a pretty high premium, actually. So it’s for folks who live in fire-prone areas where their private insurance has been non-renewed, and then they’re looking to protect their property, and so it’s an insurer of last resort, a little bit like we have earthquake insurance in California because the industry is too scared to do most of the … if there’s a big earthquake, and it’s happening with fire, too, and so that’s more recent in California, but it’s just getting off the ground. Of course they have not amassed a huge bank of money to start paying these things out. So I think that’s going to be very problematic.

Pam Karlan: And the assumption behind insurance, of course, is generally that your house will burn down, but not your neighbors, right? And so if you’ve got whole areas where the likelihood is if one house burns, they all burn, what does that do to the insurance market?

Deborah Sivas: I think that’s actually really happening because there’s some ways you can try to protect your home, and as we talked about earlier, defensible space, certain materials and stuff, but I’ve also heard in the insurance market that people do all of those things and maybe spend the money to upgrade and clear their space, and then the insurer says, yeah, but your neighbor hasn’t done it, so we’re not, we’re still not ensuring you. So it’s a problem, right? And where we live, as you said, we live close together. And it means that the whole area is at risk.

Pam Karlan: Talk me through what happens, after the fires are put out and everything. Like how does rebuilding occur in a place that’s as devastated, say, for example, as Pacific Palisades? You look at the before and after pictures in the newspaper and it’s, it looks like Dresden after the firebombing.

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, no, it’s awful. Yeah, I think that’s a big question. People are going to be displaced maybe for years. We have some examples of the earlier fires from a few years ago in California where there’s still lots of those areas are still only now starting to rebuild. So, the first thing that happens is you, if you have private insurance, you have to start making your claims to the insurance company. And that’s a long process. And then, you have to get  … even if you’re getting a payout on your insurance, then you have to look at the building. And what’s happened in some of these places is that the prices of building have gone up because there’s excess demand.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, if everybody has to rebuild, contractors are going not going to be as available. And then … I don’t know whether it’s right to speculate  about this on top of everything else, but with the President-elects’ threats to essentially deport. all of the people who are in the country without documentation. What does that do to the construction industry?

Deborah Sivas: It’s huge. The construction industry is one of the industries that uses a lot of migrant labor, right? And so maybe there’ll be some reaction to this that we shouldn’t be deporting,everyone or getting rid of visas for people to come in. But I think it could have a big effect. A I said, I think it’s there’s thousands of structures now. Some of them might not be rebuilt. I think one of the questions is: a place like Pacific Palisades, which most of the town has burned down, like will rebuilding happen, right? There’s a fair amount of value in the land itself. And it’s a very desirable place because you overlook the ocean. But I think it remains to be seen whether it’ll come back together as a town. But in any event, people won’t be living there for quite a while.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, and earlier you were talking about when people’s houses burn all of the chemicals let off. But now in thinking about if you have to clear these areas of the debris and the like, is that going to cause its own set of environmental problems?

Deborah Sivas: There’s a lot of stuff in that debris, right? And we can look at other examples like the town of Paradise up in Northern California that burned. The effort to clean up that just the debris: What do you do with all of that? Where’s their landfill space for all of that? It’s a giant environmental undertaking.

Pam Karlan: I mean, it sounds to me almost like it’s like a circular site.

Deborah Sivas: It’s almost is. And of course, if you want to put people living back there, you want to actually clean it up. And depending on how hot those fires burned, like that stuff can be quite deep in the soil even.

Pam Karlan: Oh, wow. Wow. And the discussion about migrant labor leads to another issue, which is who’s fighting these fires now? I mean, who fights these fires?

Deborah Sivas: So it’s usually so there’s the local firefighters in LA, which is an urban area. They are all hands on deck in terms of getting those local firefighters distributed, but that’s not enough. The tradition and the norm in firefighting is for other areas to send whatever firefighters they can spare. And so they come from as far away as other states. Northern California has already sent a big contingent down, and they can come from other states. I think they come all the way from Canada for the most urgent thing, just to get enough firefighters on the line.

The interesting thing is that what happens in the summer where you get these wildfires in the forest, less developed areas, is it’s very….The firefighters are spread out. I think the one thing about this fire is it’s happening in a non-fire season for the mountains, right? So LA, as we talked about, because it’s hot and dry, it actually is fire season year round there. But the one good thing is I think there’s a lot … there’s firefighters that can come from more remote areas where there’s the fire risk is low right now because there’s snow on the ground. And so those are the people who are flocking here. Although, it’s a big workforce and it moves around.

Pam Karlan: And then in California also we use a lot of people who are incarcerated.

Deborah Sivas: We have historically, which has its own set of problems of requiring that inmates go do this fire. So, there is a move to get rid of all of that. It’s hard in a time like this where we could probably use them. There’s also good reasons for not requiring prisoners to actually do the dirty work.

Pam Karlan: Does the fact that there, there are these winds make it impossible to do the sort of firefighting from the air that you often see in the national forests?

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, and that happened in LA, in this series of fires where they just couldn’t go. They usually they use small light planes and then helicopters to some extent, and it was too dangerous at the start for most of those aircraft to get up at the early time. And yes, and so the high winds can be a problem in that sense to not only driving the fire, but preventing that aerial attack. And that actually is the way the wildland firefighters like CALFIRE is the big state agency and the Forest Service, where you’ve got federal public lands, those agencies like to do a lot of fighting from the air. It’s just hard to do in the early hours of the LA fires because of the winds.

Pam Karlan: Yeah and also a lot of …when you read about it and when they’re doing the fires in the Sierras and the like, they’re scooping up the water from the lake, taking it not very far and dumping it on the fire. And here…. You don’t take ocean water and do that, right?

Deborah Sivas: I don’t think so. I’m not sure where they’re getting the water. And as we talked about the pressure throughout the whole system is low, but there are some reservoirs there. So that might be where they’re taking it out of.

Pam Karlan: And we’ve got 100, 000 people that have been evacuated at this point.

Deborah Sivas: I read 180,000 was the last thing I read.

Pam Karlan: And where do those folks go?

Deborah Sivas: I think they go to friends and family. Hotels. Our colleague, Buzz Thompson, his daughter lived in Pacific Palisades and her house burned down and she’s living in Palo Alto right now with her family.

Pam Karlan: Yeah. And of course, as you say, Pacific Palisades, relatively affluent place where it’s likely many people have friends or relatives. And they have their own assets for taking care of themselves. But some of these areas that are going to burn are going to be working class and non-affluent areas. And also a lot of jobs are being destroyed.

Deborah Sivas: Yeah, that’s right.

Pam Karlan: So, we saw those little storefronts and things that were burned down.

Deborah Sivas: The entire commercial district in that town was burned out and I think as well over in the Altadena fire, I think it burned the downtown of Altadena down, there’s a lot of little mom- and- pop-type businesses.

Pam Karlan: And those businesses are entitled to SBA disaster loans or?

Deborah Sivas: I think that’s right. So, I think Biden has declared a disaster here, which is a good thing, because it’s not … in the last Trump administration, we saw him withhold disaster relief. So, it’s important to get that moving. The the problem is it’s fine to move in with relatives or friends for a few days, but if your house is burned down, that’s a long-term prospect.

Pam Karlan: There’s a lot to think about here. And I’m sure this is not … that this is the only the beginning of a very long process to rebuild and to make decisions about how to go forward on things.

I want to thank you so much Debbie for coming to speak with us today. This is Stanford Legal. If you’re finding the show useful and informative, please tell a friend and leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback improves the show and helps new listeners to discover us.

I’m Pam Karlan, see you next time.