How to measure the damage from the Palisades and Eaton fires?
The Palisades fire as seen from Playa Vista
Lives lost, damage done, money spent.
There are any number of ways to assess the impact of a wildfire. However, for the still ongoing blazes in Los Angeles, none seems to capture fully the level of destruction.
So far, more than 180,000 people have been ordered to evacuate since the first fire ignited on Jan. 7. The total population of Altadena is 45,800; the Pacific Palisades has 23,505 residents. It’s still unclear how many will be able to return.
To try to make sense of the situation, Crosstown has compiled several charts on how much the city of Los Angeles spends on its fire department, large fires in recent history and the number of acres burned in California.
Paying for fire
Even during the most intense days of the fires, accusations about whether the Los Angeles Fire Department (which is separate from the L.A. County Fire Department) had enough money and resources grabbed headlines.
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Figuring out how much is allocated and spent should be easy to determine. But in Los Angeles, as is the case with many big city governments, budgets are like a hall of mirrors. A recent Los Angeles Times story examined assertions that the LAFD’s 2024-25 budget had been cut by $23 million. The report showed that while Mayor Karen Bass did initially call for a 2.7% reduction in spending, at the same time negotiations for firefighter raises were ongoing. Those pay increases, and additional funds for fire trucks and other resources, would actually boost fiscal year spending by 7%.
The chart above, using city budgets available on the City Controller’s website, shows the adopted LAFD budget each fiscal year going back to 2017 (the fiscal year runs July 1–June 30), as well as the actual expenditures in that 12-month period. (Actual expenditures for the current year are not yet available.)
During that period, the LAFD budget rose by 25.6%. The city’s overall budget for all its departments (not including self-funded entities such as the airport, port and the Department of Water and Power) increased 30% in that time. The much larger Los Angeles Police Department budget also rose by 25.6% in that period.
The worst fires ever
How do we place the current fires in California history?
The Dixie fire in Northern California, which ignited in July of 2021, went on to consume 963,309 acres, an area greater than the state of Rhode Island, making it the largest on record. But because it burned in the largely rural counties of Butte, Plumas, Lassen and Tehama, the loss of life and property was relatively modest. The 2018 Camp fire (also in Butte County), which destroyed the town of Paradise, claimed 85 lives, even though it burned only a fraction of the land torched in the Dixie fire.
The Eaton and Palisades fires have already broken into the top five of the most destructive fires in California history, measured by structures destroyed, according the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention. Generally, the more structures burned, the greater the overall price tag.
It appears likely that these fires will become the two most expensive in the state’s history. While burning less acreage than other significant wildfires in California, the Pacific Palisades and Altadena are both densely populated and contain thousands of single-family homes and apartment buildings.
It’s still too early to assess the property damage from the two fires, but a preliminary estimate from analysts at J.P. Morgan place the damage at $20 billion or more. Other estimates are higher.
The Woolsey fire in 2018, the last significant wildfire to affect the greater Los Angeles area, was estimated by the California Public Utilities Commission to cause around $6 billion in property damage. It consumed almost 97,000 acres.
How many acres?
The entire state of California covers about 100 million acres. Approximately one third of that land is classified as forest. Wildfires are a fact of life. But the amount that burns can vary tremendously, depending in no small part on the rain the state receives. In 2020, a series of lighting strikes, predominantly in Northern California, lit up more than 4.3 million acres. The storms of 2022 and 2023 helped reduce the burned acreage to less than a tenth of that.
Here is a chart of the acres burned, according to the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
How we did it: Crosstown examined nine years of budgets for the city of Los Angeles and consulted data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to compile the charts.
Have questions about our data? Write to us at askus@xtown.la
