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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We'll talk now about the devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles. We'll have an urban wildfires expert join us in just a second here. This segment is also largely for you to call in on if you are in the area. Now, I know we have Southern California listeners or if you know anyone there to talk about the impact on people. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Help us report this story and say anything you want to say on the radio about how you're being affected or anyone you know is being affected. 212-433-9692, call or text.

Of course, anyone not connected to LA can call in as well if you want to ask a question. 212-433-WNYC. As your calls are coming in and your texts. I'll give you some of the stats as of this morning from various news reports. The LA Times identifies four major fires, named the Palisades, Eaton, Sunset, and Hurst fires. They report 2,000 structures burned so far, 130,000 people have been told to evacuate their homes. At least five people have been reported killed. That's considered low and good, they say, considering the extent of the fires. It's still five lives lost.

An entire neighborhood, Pacific Palisades, has been destroyed. NBC News says 23,000 people lived there until this week. They report on a number of celebrities who have lost their homes. Michael was just mentioning some of them as well, Billy Crystal, Paris Hilton, John Goodman, among others I've heard. Naming those well-known names just as an indication that even wealth and fame and the privilege of living in an exclusive area where they can afford whatever prevention money can buy haven't insulated people in this case.

In fact, the New York Times reports that residents of Pacific Palisades had been asking authorities for years for better evacuation planning and escape routes. That story describes people stuck in gridlock yesterday as so many were trying to flee at once, with the fires catching up to their cars and police telling those people to just run from their cars on foot toward the beach. Furthermore, it has hardly rained in LA since April. Ironically, though, back in April, a Washington Post headline read, Here's Why California is Drought Free for a Second Straight Year.

The article included a section called Southern California Drenched. It said El Nino, the pattern associated with warmer than normal ocean temperatures over the tropical Pacific drenched the southern part of the state this year, causing significant local flooding in San Diego, Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara. It describes a serious storm that dropped more than 8 inches of rain on Los Angeles between February 4th and 6th, the second highest three day rain total for the city. The region also saw damaging waves and landslides that often accompany an El Nino winter.

That was from the Washington Post less than a year ago. Now they have drought and record wildfires. Listeners connected in any way to the area, we invite you to help other listeners understand this apocalyptic event or anyone can call in and ask a question of our guest. 212-433-WNYC. Hello to any of you in the 213, call 212-433-WNYC 433-9692. Call or text from anywhere, really. Joining us now is Dr. Augustin Guibaud, a fire expert in the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the Department of Mechanical and aerospace engineering, specifically. Dr. Guibaud, we appreciate your time today and under these circumstances. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: Good morning, Brian. Thanks a lot for having me.

Brian Lehrer: How does an urban wildfire get started? Is it different from what we might call a forest fire if we were out in the woods?

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: You're saying two words that are very important here, which is the urban and wildland complexity. What we're seeing here in California this week is a wildfire in nature in that it started in the wildland area and we don't know the causes yet, but that's likely an accidental or arson situation. It would have started small, and it then moved towards inhabited areas. This is the moment that wildfires become problematic. To put it simple, wildfires are part of nature. They would happen in an environment that corresponds to the vegetation we see in California.

This is something that is part of the ecosystem of these areas and something that to a certain extent we can tolerate until they reach areas that are inhabited. This is where this week has been particularly problematic because the fires started very close to the city and they grew extremely fast, fanned by hot winds, fanned by very high temperatures, and fanned by this drought that you talked about, which is unique. This combination created a situation that was untenable from a firefighting perspective, which meant that we had to resort to evacuation. The priority in this situation is really to save lives.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Miles in Brooklyn who I think wants to read a text from a friend who's out there. Miles, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Miles: Hey, how you doing, man?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right.

Miles: My friend, I checked in. I said, "Bro, you out in Cali?" He says, "Hey man, thanks for checking in. We had to evacuate last night. Altadena's scorched. Houses, schools, businesses, all gone. It's terrible."

Brian Lehrer: Miles, thank you for sharing. Where did he go if, you know, if he had to evacuate?

Miles: I didn't ask. I said, "Hey, oh brother. So sorry." He says, "Yes, man, it's crazy. Still went up. It all went up so quickly. Still reeling."

Brian Lehrer: Miles, thank you very much. Miles' friend and 130,000 other people who are under evacuation orders. I've been in Pacific Palisades, Professor Guibaud and Santa Monica and around there, but only once. Explain the topography of the area if you can. It's like a low lying basin surrounded by hills as you move inland from the ocean. It's the hills where the conditions allow these fires to start, and then spread lower down. Is it something like that?

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: It's something like that, yes. You have a complex topography, and you have this brush vegetation that's covering the hilltops. You have this continuity of vegetation that encorches into the built environment. You are in a situation where all these homes find themselves close enough to trees and brushes that can be burning. This is the problem because the fire is going to spread in three different ways. Fire is going to spread, I would say, from bush to bush. If you think about a field of grass, for instance, is going to move continuously through vegetation and maybe at some point it's going to hit a home.

The fire can also jump a certain distance. If there is an entire fire burning, you're going to see some brushes that can be pretty far or homes that can be pretty far ignite. The equivalent is, I would say, if you're burning a piece of toast in your toaster, there's no flame that's directly touching, but the radiation are so high that you can ignite something at a distance. The last element, which is the most problematic and which is why all these evacuations are taking place now and it's very important to really follow the orders that are being issued, is that you have a lot of embers flying.

Embers are going to be a real problem in this situation because all of a sudden you have these high winds that are projecting these small hot burning particles in a shower all over the city, and we don't know which of them are going to cause a secondary fire. They can land in your home, they can land on your roof and ignite maybe some dead leaves that are in that area, or they can land in your garden and they can start a new fire locally that's going to burn a structure.

One thing that I think is very important to consider as we are talking from New York is that these orders are very hard to hear for the people in the area. I totally understand how if you're told to evacuate your home and there's already 1,000 plus structures that have burned, you know that you're being told to leave this place because it's likely going to burn in this fire. For many people, that's their most important investment. We're not just talking money. It's also where they've built their families, they've built their memories, and they're told to leave because potentially nothing's going to be there when they come back.

I think it's very important to emphasize that as you said at the beginning, there's five lives that have been lost, and that's very tragic. Given the scale of the fire and how fast it has spread in these densely populated area, this is a very low number now. The priority today is to keep this number as low as possible. We can rebuild, we can find ways of funding and reconstructing areas and making sure that people can get back to a home, but we can't bring back lives. This is really where today when we heard this message about evacuation, I understand completely the distress in the tone of the message.

I understand also how we don't think immediately about where are people going. This is something that is a very complex task from a logistics perspective. The report that we've heard, and I think you mentioned it before, about people having to flee even their car as they evacuate, it's something we're keeping a very close eye on. The fire research community is very aware of these problems. Firefighters are very aware of these problems. We've seen in fires, for instance, in Greece, lots of people unfortunately dying as they evacuated the burning area. Because you find yourself in your car, there's a traffic jam, everyone's on the road at the same time, and then the flames start to reach the area where the cars are.

It's very hard to take the decision of leaving your car and going on foot. Fortunately, if understood correctly, there was one of these situation in the past 24 hours. Some officers were here to direct people and tell them to leave their cars. No one lost their life in one of these traffic jam situations.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Peter in Manhattan calling to report on a friend in California. Peter, you're on WNYC, thank you for calling.

Peter: Thanks for picking up the call, Brian. Yes, I just have been maintaining a correspondence with a friend of mine who lives with his family, wife and two children in the Malibu Canyon Calabasas area, which is right behind the Pepperdine University. He said in his text to me, "Peter, it's really bad. The second time we've had to evacuate in two weeks," because they had a prior fire a couple of weeks ago and they had a three o'clock in the morning then, now he said it's really bad and they've had to leave the area, and they moved up to a place called called Oxnard where they have a friend who put them up for a couple of days and then he's going to move to West Hollywood to a friend who's got an empty house that they can stay in for a little longer.

The worst part about it is that the roads to their house is completely blocked off. They're not allowing anybody to go near that Malibu Canyon area, so they don't even know if their house has been burned to the ground or not. I just thought I'd call in and mention that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, thank you. It puts another individual human face on this tragedy. Here's a text message from a listener who says, "This is Heather in Brooklyn. So far, I have six friends who have lost their homes in the fires, all renters. None of them have renters insurance because what low income person has renters insurance? Friends have started GoFundMes for them in the last 24 hours which have all been really successful so far. I'm so thankful that resource exists for them. It's so depressing that that's where we're at right now. The world is burning because of climate change caused by the rich. Low income, uninsured renters lose their homes and it's up to the rest of us to crowdfund their recovery."

Professor Guibaud, I want to ask you a climate change question in a minute, but a number of people are texting or calling to ask what can we do to help from here. I feel so helpless as I watch this. I know you're an academic who's a fire safety expert, not necessarily a relief expert, but do you have anything for those listeners?

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: Thanks, Brian. That's two very valid points. These tragedies encompass two, or cover two very big questions. It's a social problem. It's a real social problem. We see a lot of social disparity in who gets affected. I think as Heather pointed out, if you're already vulnerable, a situation like this makes everything worse, and you don't have a safety net. There's a big question today in regions like California regarding responsibility. Insurance companies have sometimes deserted some areas where they just basically don't think that it makes sense to insure homes anymore.

The big question today is how much should the state of California step in to insure people's home and to insure renters who would not have the means to do it on their own. That's a big problem. Now from afar it's pretty difficult to do something. I think if you know people who are in the area, the best thing to do is, like all the listeners who have been contributing, stay in touch with them first, get some news, see if you can provide anything for them.

They will likely have evacuated their homes very rapidly with limited amount of stuff, just clothing and maybe some precious souvenirs or elements from their homes. They may need some things that are very basic. If you know people who are close enough but not at risk of the fire, you can put them in touch just so that they can find potentially a place to stay for a while. Of course, this is an emergency situation and the government will respond. You know how a personal intervention goes, usually a long way, and that can be a great thing to do.

It's difficult to do anything else as a private citizen living maybe on the east coast. You can't go there and fight the fire. That's not something you should do. You can contribute to GoFundMes if you find something you want to contribute to. Similarly, I think it's important to use this tight knit networks of friends and help the people that you know I think first because they're going to need your help.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "The air is so bad--" They're out there. I'm not sure exactly where. "The air is so bad, we're using N95s but they only help so much." Another listener writes, calling from Pasadena where cell service is spotty at times. "The these homes are not the wealthy homes of Palisades. Altadena is full of middle class families who primary asset is their home inherited between generations. Housing in California is so expensive already, it will be near impossible to rebuild for many." That listener adds, "We have not slept well at all. My family is two miles from the evacuation zone. My aunt is one block from the zone. We are having to check every minute to see if we need to leave." Laura is calling from Santa Monica. Laura, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Hello from New York.

Laura: Hi. I lived in New York in East Harlem, in Brooklyn for nearly a decade with my family and have been out in Santa Monica for about six years. We live about a mile and a half from the evacuation zone. We have been on just high alert monitoring for the past couple days.

Brian Lehrer: Anything you want to add specifically about the situation?

Laura: Yes, absolutely. We're having to be very cautious about the air quality out here. Starting to get all kinds of smells of burning electronics out here. We're seeing reports of schools just being gone, institutions along the coast and homes just wiped off the map. We do not know what the landscape is going to look like out here. A lot of people are asking what we need. We are blessed to have not needed to evacuate yet.

What people need is a place to go outside of the range where they won't have to reevacuate. Airbnb had been offering credits for people to use if they were in an evacuation zone and needed to leave. I think those are now gone. If there are any organizations or people listening who can continue to create those opportunities for people, especially families and people with pets, to have a place to go, that's very much needed.

Brian Lehrer: Laura, thank you very much for that report and also for sharing what some people can do. Our next caller, I'm happy but sorry to say, is our own Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab, who I'm told had to evacuate his home. Latif is good enough to be calling in right now. Hey, you there, Latif? Hi?

Latif Nasser: Yes, I'm here. Thanks for taking my call, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: This is crazy. Tell me what's going on.

Latif Nasser: Yes, so my family and I, we live in Eagle Rock near Pasadena, near the Eaton fire that's going on right now. It's just so surreal how quickly it went from-- it was just like, "Oh, okay, this notification is going to be an especially windy day," to, "Oh, the power is out," to at three in the morning, "Oh, why does it smell like smoke?" To at five in the morning getting the evacuation order on the phone and just-- at pursuit, there was, at least for us, it's like, "Oh, on the map it doesn't look like we're on the evacuation. I just have to stay on my phone. What should we do? Should I wake the kids? Is this the right time? Should we wait and see?"

Then I was just like, "No, let's just get out of here." We were really lucky enough, we're just in a storm of texting to find a friend who had some space for us in Santa Barbara. We just got in the car, we just threw everything, whatever we could, just boxes of documents. We took whatever and medicines and whatever, and just got in the car and gunned it.

Brian Lehrer: What a thing to have to decide on a moment's notice, "What do I really need to take with me if I'm never going to see anything else of mine again?" Right?

Latif Nasser: That's right. That's exactly what it was. Also, I don't know, we live in California, we know about the wildfires, they happen periodically, but it's never happened so close to us. Just to hear so many of our friends that we've been texting with over the last few days that people have lost their homes, people have lost their places of worship, people have lost their businesses, it really, really has-- It's just staggering to think of how much can happen in so short a time. How much devastation can happen in so short a time.

Brian Lehrer: Latif, I know you as a, for one thing, a science journalist on one level and a very community minded person, is there anything that you would like to say either about your understanding of what the heck is going on here or how people can support each other?

Latif Nasser: I think even just your prior caller was saying, I'm even getting a call right now, so many people are checking up on us. That's been really, really heartening in the face of something so sudden and shocking and depressing. That's been nice, people checking up, but also that opportunity for helping people. We were lucky enough to have these friends who invited us up here. For those who are in a position to give people families, marginal, immigrants or unhoused people. People who are in a position to give somebody an escape, I think that right now is worth everything.

Brian Lehrer: Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab. The whole extended Radiolab family, which I'd count as millions of listeners, is thinking of you right now. Thank you for checking in with us.

Latif Nasser: Thanks so much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Guibaud, before we run out of time, two science meets policy questions. One, what role can we say climate change has played in setting the stage for these fires? So many people are calling and texting saying, "Climate change, climate change, climate change." People can get confused about whether the same changes in the climate can bring both drought and floods, for example, in the same area in one year's time. I never want to mindlessly say climate change every time there's an extreme weather event or fires like these. If climate change has set the stage, we definitely should say that.

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: Yes. Thanks a lot, Brian, for this question. It's a point I really wanted to make. Latif was saying, they happen, wildfires happen, and everyone knows that, and climate change is making them worse, and they're going to happen and they're going to happen more frequently. We see rising temperatures globally. That's undeniable, and that's been tracked very precisely for decades. You can really see this increase all year round, which is a problem because we're unfortunately discussing a wildfire in January. That's not exactly the season when these fires are supposed to happen.

You should have in this area a relatively wet and mild winter. What I'm saying, it's a couple of inches of rain, maybe. Now, we've barely had a fifth of an inch over the past six months. This is a consequence of climate change. You have higher temperatures, you have a change in rain patterns. You also have these hot, dry winds, the Santa Ana winds, that are going to happen at a more intense level at moments where the vegetation is already very dry, and they're going to create this perfect storm for wildfires.

Now, the problem is climate change is happening, but what we haven't done yet is an attitude change, because we know these wildfires are going to occur, and they're going to occur in populated areas. What do we do to reduce the risk that they pose to the community? What do we do to also make sure that people don't get affected directly or indirectly? Laura before was talking about the smoke, and we've seen that in New York as well. New York hasn't been exposed to these wildfire hazards, even though we start to see wildfires in the parks.

We've seen the wildfire haze from Canada a couple of years ago. This is something that we're going to have to address through a change in policy, through a change in how we also build our environment, and how we manage the forest as well. We cannot live in a world where if Latif had been told two months ago to prepare the few boxes he needed to throw in his car and just drive away with the family, I don't think that's a situation anyone wants. You don't want to live in a home where you know that at any moment you would need to evacuate. Regardless of the level of preparation that you have, I think it poses a more fundamental question of how do we protect our homes?

Brian Lehrer: Very briefly, there are presidential politics involved here too, or at least President-elect politics, because Donald Trump criticized California Governor Gavin Newsom in a social media post yesterday, saying Newsom, "Refused to sign a water restoration declaration. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California." Quote from Truth Social. Is there a there there?

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: I'm going to make sure I don't step too much into the politics side of it because that's really far from my expertise. One thing that I noticed is in the answers from the Newsom communications director, there's apparently no such document as the water restoration declaration. Now, beyond that point, I think there's a question on what would you do with more water? In this situation, there's two things I'd like to emphasize. First, water from North California doesn't flow today to South California. Most of the water that comes to LA comes from the east, actually.

Having any change in the water management in the north of the state today wouldn't affect the amount of water available in the south. Now, if you had more water in the south, there's a question of what would you do with it? Does it mean you're going to basically sprinkle vegetation all winter around so that you can create an artificial amount of rain, or do they mean more water for firefighters? In the present situation, something to understand is that the amount of water for firefighters would not have made much of a difference in the first hours of the fire. The fire grew too fast.

In the 20 minutes between the moment the fire was reported and the first team could effectively intervene, the fire grew by a factor 10, which means that the few firefighters who were on site were already facing a mega fire that was too large to contain. From that point onward, the strategy is not to extinguish the fire, it's to contain it. You may have seen some media reports and listeners may have read or heard that we're talking today about a 0% contained fire, which is, of course, a terrifying figure. This is the reality on the ground.

We're not trying to extinguish the fire. We want to draw a border and say the fire is not going to go out of this border. A 0% contained fire means that today we don't know where this border is going to be. This is what the fire department is working on today, figuring out where to draw this border and how to build it. Now, of course, you could put tons of firefighters with next to fire hydrants and create a water barrier. You can also rely on existing natural barriers like rivers or deserted areas or artificial ones like roads and highways that create a gap in the vegetation.

This is the attitude today. I would say that all these debates around politics, that's going to come around, of course, in the heat of the moment, there's lots of things that are going to fly. The most important thing is going to be to analyze afterwards what the situation was, what we learned from that fire. I wouldn't say what could have been done different because we are learning a lot today about all these tragic situations. Every fire that we see, we try to tackle it in a better way. I just want to emphasize again, there's going to be a need for an attitude change in how we perceive wildfires and how we respond to wildfires, because climate change is happening and these fires are going to multiply in the coming years.

Brian Lehrer: Augustin Guibaud, a fire expert in the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Dr. Guibaud, thank you for joining us for a while today under these circumstances.

Dr. Augustin Guibaud: Thank you so much for having me.

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