The accusations spread like fire. Rich and powerful critics say the Palisades Fire, which has ravaged Los Angeles' coastal mountains, would have been less destructive if authorities had done a better job of clearing brush from hillsides.

"We knew the wind was coming. We knew 20 years ago that there was brush that needed clearing," developer Rick Caruso, a former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, told The Times. "This fire could have been mitigated, but it probably couldn't have been stopped."

Elon Musk write on X "The biggest factor, in my opinion, is the crazy environmental regulations that prevent building fire breaks and clearing brush near homes." And actress and producer sarah foster Chimed in X's post: "Our vegetation is overgrown and the undergrowth has not been cleared."

Do these and other second-guessers have a point? Scientists, wildfire experts and fire officials have different views. But several of those experts — including strong proponents of clearing brush — said the winds fanning the flames were so strong and ground conditions were so dry that clearing more brush would not have a significant effect.

"All the work of clearing brush, cutting off fuel, it's very effective on what we would consider a normal day," Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy said. "But what you're talking about here Probably less than 1% of all the fires we deal with in Southern California.”

The Palisades Fire ignited on January 7 amid hurricane-force winds, with gusts as high as 100 mph in some areas.

"You can build a 10-lane highway in front of a fire, but it's not going to slow the fire down," Finnis said.

Vegetation management efforts are often most effective when firefighters are able to take advantage of reduced fire intensity to extinguish the flames.

In this case, Finnis said, the fire spread from one house to the side of the other, with the building itself serving as fuel. High winds grounded firefighting aircraft. As the blaze moved deeper into the community, firefighters on the scene focused on keeping people away from the fast-moving blaze.

Several experts noted that strong wind gusts blew embers miles away from the fire front, essentially spreading the flames through the air rather than through brush. They also noted that landscape-level fuel reduction (i.e., reducing shrubland over large tracts of land) is controversial in Southern California's sensitive coastal ecosystems.

In forests in Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, fires are often sparked by trees and brush piled up by decades of firefighting. Patrick T. Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team, said clearing some of the vegetation could help make these forests more fire-resistant and healthier because large numbers of plants compete for limited resources, making ecosystems more sensitive to drought. at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank.

Brown said the nonprofit's modeling shows that clearing brush — and thus removing fuels — could reduce the intensity of wildfires in the Los Angeles Basin even during extreme weather, although it's unlikely to prevent the kind Pacific Palisades is experiencing now. kind of destruction.

At the same time, he said, unlike forested areas, the reduction of fuels in the area's scrubland could harm the ecosystem rather than make it healthier.

That’s because the Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu Canyon and other wild lands near coastal Los Angeles say Areas often burn too frequently.

This results in native evergreen shrubs that take years to mature and produce new seeds to be replaced by invasive annual grasses that die in early summer, said Helen Holmlund, a professor of biology at Pepperdine University. and more likely to catch fire.

"This will lead to more frequent fires, which will lead to more loss of bushland and more invasive species," she said.

Large-scale attempts to preemptively burn these coastal areas may actually make them more susceptible to burning in the long term, said Max Moritz, a wildfire expert with UC Santa Barbara Cooperative Extension.

"As a society, you have to consider whether the trade-offs are worth it," Moritz said.

Moritz doubts more landscape-level brush clearing would do much to slow the fire's initial spread, given the weather conditions. He also noted that brush management at the landscape level is different from brush clearing around individual homes, which is typically the responsibility of the property owner and can help firefighters have a chance to protect the structure.

Nonetheless, Joe Ten Eyck coordinates wildfire and urban interface projects for the International Association. Firefighters say extreme weather conditions will make brush clearing even more important.

“The more combustion fuels we remove, the more we reduce risk and make individual homes and communities more resilient,” said Ten Eyck, retired director of operations and firefighting for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

In fact, the Getty Villa credits its manicured landscaping and irrigated grounds with helping protect the museum's buildings from the effects of the Palisade Fire.

Ventura County fire officials also said residents are adhering to strictly enforced county ordinances requiring 100 feet of brush clearance around buildings and other fire-resistant building features to help firefighters protect homes from the spread of the Kenneth Fire into the West Hills region The impact of January 9th.

Ventura County Fire Department public information officer Scott Dettorre said that while the winds were not as strong as in previous days, they were still strong.

Los Angeles has similar rules for homes in fire-prone areas, although Fire Chief Kristin Crowley wrote in a Dec. 4 memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners that $7 million in overtime funding was reduced Hindering her department's ability to conduct inspections to ensure residents are complying, among other tasks.

But even these efforts can only be of limited use in the most extreme events, says fire ecologist Jason Moghaddas, a registered professional forester at the think tank Spatial Informatics Group, and his colleagues, said Carrie Levine, the group’s co-head of forestry and agriculture.

Once a fire spreads to a group of buildings, the buildings themselves become fuel, they said. Mogadas noted that the Palisades Fire in the Sunset Strip area destroyed fire-hardened structures, such as concrete commercial buildings surrounded by sidewalks.

"It's all these cascading probabilities - you can improve your chances of survival, you can improve your chances of firefighters protecting your home, you can improve your chances of flame length being shorter... but all of these probabilities occur on the ground in real life, And fire tests them,” he said. "You can see, 'Okay, there's not enough going on to change the outcome.'"

Times staff writers Matt Hamilton and David Zanicer contributed to this report