When the City Ran Out of Engines:
How SCWR Held the San Fernando Valley During LA’s Worst Fire Disaster.
Most people learned about the January 2025 Los Angeles fires the way the rest of the world did: a phone notification, a news alert, smoke on the horizon. For the volunteers of Southern California Wildfire Response (SCWR), the disaster didn’t begin with an alarm. They were already there.
SCWR had been in the field since December 30th. The National Weather Service’s forecast data showed critically low fuel moisture, historically dry vegetation, and Santa Ana winds projected to reach hurricane force. SCWR monitors state operations centers and local departments daily during high-risk weather windows, and what the data was showing in the final days of December wasn’t subtle. Crews pre-deployed throughout major wildland-urban interface areas of the San Fernando Valley on behalf of the City of Los Angeles — roughly 24 hours of coverage per day, staged out of the Hansen Dam Park Ranger Station in the northeastern Valley.
When the Palisades Fire ignited at 10:30 on the morning of January 7th — later determined to be a rekindling of an earlier arson-caused fire that firefighters believed was out — SCWR wasn’t scrambling to respond. They were already on patrol. Already on radio. Already watching.
What came next would test every person in the org — not through dramatic rescues or heroic last stands, but through something arguably harder: holding the line in a city that had forgotten to look in their direction.
Serial Arsonist, Rinse and Repeat
The first nights of the response in the Valley weren’t defined by the fires people saw on the news. They were defined by fires nobody heard about — small ones, set deliberately, over and over, in the dark.
At Hansen Dam Recreation Area, SCWR kept finding fires. A 10-by-10-foot brush fire burning in the middle of the park. They’d extinguish it, return to patrol, and ten minutes later there’d be another one within a hundred feet of the first. Then another. Night after night, the same loop — someone moving through the park, lighting things, disappearing. The crew tried staging quietly in different positions, watching for movement. They never caught the person.
With every resource in the city already committed to larger incidents, there was little point in escalating further. SCWR kept chasing it themselves.
Meanwhile, the 50-to-70 mph gusts were taking the urban infrastructure apart piece by piece. Traffic signals were being ripped from their mounts and tumbling down streets. Intersections went dark. Accidents stacked up at unmanned corners. Homeless encampment fires ignited along flood control channels and in open space. 911 was running a 20-minute hold time with a 30-minute response delay behind it. SCWR crews directed traffic, moved fallen trees, dragged traffic signals out of intersections, cleaned up parks. The unglamorous connective tissue of a city trying not to come apart.
On clear nights, standing on top of Sepulveda Dam in the western Valley between calls, they could see the Palisades Fire burning from miles away. An orange glow above the Santa Monica Mountains, growing. From up there — brush rigs idling, radios live, assigned to the Valley — the scale of it registered differently than it did on a screen. It wasn’t a news story. It was a horizon on fire, and they were watching it from the wrong side.
“Send Everyone We Got”
As the Palisades Fire exploded through Pacific Palisades and consumed whole blocks of homes within hours, every major resource in Los Angeles began moving west. Engines, helicopters, hand crews, battalion chiefs — the city’s apparatus pulled itself toward the coast, where nearly 105,000 people would ultimately be evacuated and over 6,800 structures would burn.
The San Fernando Valley, home to over 1.7 million people and one of the most fire-prone urban interfaces in the country, was left exposed.
Shortly before 10:30 on the night of January 7th, a crew member was in the bathroom at the Hansen Dam station. Someone laid on the airhorn. Hurry up. We’re going.
The Hurst Fire had just ignited near Diamond Road in Sylmar — a few miles northeast, in the hills above Oakridge Mobile Home Park, a community that had been nearly destroyed by the Sayre Fire in 2008 and still carried that memory. Within minutes the fire was racing toward the 210 Freeway corridor. Evacuation orders would go out for over 44,000 people. Forty thousand structures were threatened.
But the most telling thing about that night wasn’t the fire. It was the radio.
In several years of fire response, it was unlike anything the crew had heard from a command officer — a size-up that wasn’t a professional assessment of resources and conditions. It was a plea. Barely controlled, shot through with a desperation that doesn’t belong in a battalion chief’s voice. Send everyone we got. I don’t care who it is. Send them all. Pickup trucks. Water tanks. Anything.
Dispatch came back: We don’t have any resources to send you.
The SCWR crew was already moving. Hansen Dam to Sylmar in eight minutes.
At almost exactly that moment, a message came in from a local city council contact asking how conditions were looking in the Valley. The reply, sent in the minutes before the dispatch broke: “Been chasing our tails with a serial arsonist all night at Hansen. Sepulveda has shown quiet.”
Then, within minutes of the Hurst transmission: “All LAFD resources are assigned to incidents and are struggling to find units to respond to a very large brush fire that just broke out in Sylmar. Multiple evacuations.”
The response: “I just got the alert about the Sylmar fire, this is absolutely insane. Thank you for all you and LAIT do. I pray no more fires break out 🙏”
Nobody needed the reply to understand what was happening. They’d heard it in the battalion chief’s voice. The crew integrated into the evacuation operation immediately upon arrival, working alongside LAFD and LAPD to move residents out of the fire’s path. The Hurst Fire would ultimately burn 799 acres. Oakridge was spared.
Granada Hills, 8:11 PM, January 8th
The CAD log records it precisely: a structure fire in Granada Hills, dispatched at 8:11 PM on January 8th.
SCWR was attached because a unit happened to be in the area — a block away, driving past. They saw it before the dispatch confirmed it. A house, fully involved. Flames through the roof. The calculation was immediate: there is nothing to fight here with what we have.
They pulled gear anyway and walked up to the family on the sidewalk, watching their home burn. The questions were fast and practiced: Is everyone out? Is anyone inside? Account for everyone.
An older woman was struggling — smoke inhalation, significant enough to need transport. SCWR medics stayed with her until LAFD arrived — one engine, its crew doing everything they could under conditions that had stretched the entire department to its limit. A working structure fire normally draws ten or more units. There wasn’t enough of anything to change what was happening to that house. The family knew it. The crew standing next to them knew it.
There are two feelings that come with a scene like that, and they sit in uncomfortable combination. Helplessness is expected — you’re a trained firefighter with no water, watching a structure burn past any point of intervention, and there is genuinely nothing to be done. The other feeling is harder to name. It’s the feeling of being helpless and being watched being helpless. Standing in full gear, next to a family, in front of their burning house, as the one engine that could come does what one engine can do against a fully involved structure.
LAFD transported the older woman. She was in good hands. Whether she fully recovered is something the crew never found out.
First On Scene
Later in the response, close to 1 AM, the crew was finally heading back to Hansen Dam to dump their gear and go home — to sleep a few hours and do it all over again the next day. A call came in: a rubbish fire reported at Sepulveda Basin. They’d just come from there ten minutes earlier. All night they’d been responding to smoke reports that turned out to be drift from the Palisades Fire, carried across the Valley on the wind. The debate was brief and quiet: what are the odds this is another false call?
The chief made the call to turn around. A reluctant one — everyone in the rig was spent. But they looped back.
Coming down Balboa Boulevard, approaching the far end of the park, someone saw it through the windshield. Not smoke. Flames. Actual flames, visible from the opposite end of Sepulveda Basin.
They hit the pedal.
What they found was a 100-by-100-foot brush fire burning in dry grass, moving with the wind — not a rubbish fire. They called for an upgrade and started suppression. Another ten to fifteen minutes passed before city resources arrived, LAFD crews stretched to their limit across simultaneous major incidents throughout the county. The fire was held and fully extinguished within a couple of hours.
Nobody went home early that night. Nobody complained about it either.
Keeping Moving
By the second week, the rhythm of a SCWR shift had found its own logic. Command staff were running 17 and 18-hour days. Line personnel — most of them holding down full-time jobs between deployments — were pulling a minimum of ten hours out of Hansen Dam each day, going home, and coming back. Across three weeks of operations the org logged approximately 2,500 member hours.
At 2 AM, between calls, there was patrol. With 911 hold times past 20 minutes and response delays stacked behind that, eyes on the ground was the most functional safety net available. The crew kept moving — through parks, along flood control channels, back past the spots at Hansen Dam where the arsonist had been the night before.
The motion served a second purpose, less operational and more human. When you keep driving, you don’t sit with what you’ve seen. The camaraderie of long shifts — dark humor, conversation at 3 AM in a parking lot, the person who had to sprint out of the Hansen Dam bathroom to an airhorn — was its own maintenance. The calamity was too large to process in real time. So they kept moving, and processed it later.
During the Hurst Fire evacuation operation, two Type 3 engines came bearing down the road toward the SCWR rig, running Code 3 — lights, sirens, full response speed. The SCWR unit nudged right to give them clearance. The BMW directly behind the marked SCWR rig saw the slowdown, decided it wasn’t waiting, and pulled left into the oncoming lane — directly into the path of the two fully activated fire engines heading straight at them with speed. The engines had nowhere to go. The BMW had nowhere to go. Everyone was now stopped, blocking the evacuation corridor, because one driver couldn’t wait thirty seconds. Somehow it resolved without impact. The evacuation eventually continued.
It wasn’t the strangest thing anyone saw that week but it was close.
Intelligence in the Dark
While ground crews worked the Valley, SCWR’s LAIT911 platform was running in parallel — delivering real-time fire location data, aircraft monitoring, evacuation status, and live radio traffic to the public and to first responders. During January 2025, LAIT911 became the most current authoritative source on fire activity in Los Angeles County, consistently ahead of official channels, because the people running it were either monitoring the fireground live or physically on it. At peak, tens of thousands of people — and potentially north of 100,000 — were relying on it. Hundreds of active firefighters used it alongside the public.
The contrast with official alert infrastructure that month was stark.
On January 9th, as the Kenneth Fire broke out in Woodland Hills, an evacuation alert intended for roughly 50,000 residents near Calabasas and Agoura Hills was sent to every smartphone in Los Angeles County. Nearly 10 million people received an evacuation order not meant for them — in a city already on the edge after two days of catastrophic fires. LA County’s own Office of Emergency Management was so confounded by the malfunction that, three days into the crisis, they emailed a generic FCC inbox at 3 AM describing an “unknown system error” that was causing their alert system to continue sending unsolicited countywide notifications throughout the night, and asking for help stopping it. The error compounded the chaos that official alerts were supposed to contain.
LAIT911 was telling people what was actually happening. The official system was pinging millions of phones at random.
The Surge That Wasn’t
SCWR stood down from active operational posture toward the end of January, having run continuous operations since December 30th — three weeks, approximately 2,500 member hours, across the length and breadth of the San Fernando Valley.
The public response was the largest the org had ever received. Donations came in. Media coverage directed people toward SCWR and LAIT911. Volunteer applications surged.
And then the fires left the news cycle.
When SCWR reached back out to the wave of post-fire applicants three to six months later, roughly 95 percent had moved on. What they’d wanted was to be on a fire line within days of signing up — to be the person who ends the disaster. What volunteer wildland firefighting actually demands is the same training academy as a career firefighter, the same physical standards, the same certifications, measured in months of commitment before anyone hands you a tool near active fire. It is, in rigor and time, a second full-time job. Showing up to a hospital and asking to scrub in on a surgery after watching a YouTube video is not an unfair comparison.
“People are quick to donate during fires,” one SCWR leader reflects. “But we need people to know that this support is needed before the fires.”
That tension — between the surge of attention disasters generate and the sustained, unsexy funding that prevention and readiness actually require — is the central resource problem for organizations like SCWR. The January fires made the need visible. A city running a 20-minute 911 hold time, sending one engine to a working structure fire, dispatching no resources to a brushfire because there are no resources to dispatch — that city needs trained, equipped, pre-deployed supplemental response capacity in its WUI areas on every Red Flag day. Not as a novelty. As infrastructure.
Los Angeles got a clear look at what the January 2025 fires demanded — of its career firefighters, its emergency managers, its infrastructure, and the volunteer organizations that filled in where they could. The San Fernando Valley got through it, in part because small fires stayed small and a serial arsonist decided to stop for the night. But mostly it got through it because trained people were already there — pre-positioned, pre-deployed, watching.
That’s what SCWR is built to do. Twenty volunteers, running on limited sleep, watching a horizon on fire from the top of Sepulveda Dam — and ready to move the moment the radio called.
They’re still out there. They’ll be there the next time, too.
Southern California Wildfire Response is a nonprofit volunteer wildland fire and disaster response agency serving Los Angeles. Support the operations, before the next fire at socalwildfire.org/donate. Download LAIT911 for real-time Los Angeles emergency alerts.