When the City Ran Out of Engines:

Most people found out about the January 2025 Los Angeles fires from a phone notification, a news alert, or smoke on the horizon. The volunteers of Southern California Wildfire Response (SCWR) were already in the field when it started.

SCWR had been deployed since December 30th. The National Weather Service was forecasting critically low fuel moisture, historically dry vegetation, and Santa Ana winds that could reach hurricane force. SCWR watches state operations centers and local departments every day during high-risk weather, and nobody had to squint to see what the numbers were saying in late December. Crews pre-deployed across the major wildland-urban interface areas of the San Fernando Valley on behalf of the City of Los Angeles, covering close to 24 hours a day out of the Hansen Dam Park Ranger Station in the northeast Valley.

The Palisades Fire started at 10:30 on the morning of January 7th. It was later determined to be a rekindle of an earlier arson fire that firefighters had believed was out. By then, SCWR crews had been on patrol and on the radio for more than a week.

The weeks that followed tested everyone in the organization. There weren’t many dramatic rescues. Most of the work was holding the line in a part of the city that everyone else had stopped looking at, and in a lot of ways that was harder.

Serial Arsonist, Rinse and Repeat

SCWR’s first nights in the Valley were spent on fires that never made the news: small ones, set on purpose, one after another, after dark.

At Hansen Dam Recreation Area, crews kept finding them. A 10-by-10-foot brush fire burning in the middle of the park. They’d put it out, go back to patrol, and ten minutes later find another one within a hundred feet of the first. Then another. It went on like that night after night, someone walking through the park lighting fires and then disappearing. The crew tried staging quietly in different spots to watch for movement. They never caught the person.

Every resource in the city was already committed to bigger incidents, so there wasn’t much point in pushing it up the chain. SCWR kept chasing it on their own.

Meanwhile, 50 to 70 mph gusts were tearing the city’s infrastructure apart. Traffic signals were ripped off their mounts and sent tumbling down streets. Intersections went dark and accidents piled up at unmanned corners. Homeless encampment fires started along flood control channels and in open space. 911 had a 20-minute hold time, with another 30 minutes of response delay behind that. SCWR crews directed traffic, cleared fallen trees, dragged traffic signals out of intersections, and cleaned up parks. None of it was glamorous, but a lot of what kept the city functioning that week looked exactly like that.

On clear nights, standing on top of Sepulveda Dam between calls, you could see the Palisades Fire burning miles away, an orange glow over the Santa Monica Mountains that kept getting bigger. From up there, with the brush rigs idling, the radios on, and an assignment that kept them in the Valley, it looked a lot bigger than it did on TV. The whole horizon was on fire, and they were watching it from the wrong side.

“Send Everyone We Got”

As the Palisades Fire tore through Pacific Palisades and took out entire blocks of homes in a matter of hours, nearly every major resource in Los Angeles started moving west. Engines, helicopters, hand crews, and battalion chiefs all headed for the coast, where close to 105,000 people would eventually be evacuated and more than 6,800 structures would burn.

That left the San Fernando Valley, with over 1.7 million residents and one of the most fire-prone urban interfaces in the country, exposed.

A little before 10:30 that night, one of the crew members was in the bathroom at the Hansen Dam station when someone laid on the airhorn. Hurry up. We’re going.

The Hurst Fire had just started near Diamond Road in Sylmar, a few miles northeast, in the hills above Oakridge Mobile Home Park. The Sayre Fire nearly wiped out Oakridge in 2008, and the people who live there haven’t forgotten it. Within minutes the fire was running toward the 210 Freeway corridor. Evacuation orders would eventually cover more than 44,000 people, with 40,000 structures threatened.

What the crew remembers most from that night is the radio.

In several years of running fire calls, nobody on the crew had heard a command officer sound like that. It wasn’t a normal size-up of resources and conditions. The battalion chief was pleading, barely holding it together, with a kind of desperation you don’t expect to hear from someone in that seat. 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 rolling. They made it from Hansen Dam to Sylmar in eight minutes.

Right around then, a city council contact messaged asking how things looked in the Valley. The reply, sent a few minutes before the call broke: “Been chasing our tails with a serial arsonist all night at Hansen. Sepulveda has shown quiet.”

A few minutes after the Hurst transmission came the follow-up: “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 council contact wrote back: “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 🙏”

The crew joined the evacuation operation as soon as they arrived, working with LAFD and LAPD to get residents out ahead of the fire. The Hurst Fire burned 799 acres in the end. Oakridge was spared.

Granada Hills, 8:11 PM, January 8th

The CAD log has it at 8:11 PM on January 8th: a structure fire in Granada Hills.

SCWR got attached because a unit happened to be driving past a block away. The crew saw it before dispatch confirmed it. The house was fully involved, with flames through the roof, and they knew right away there was nothing on the rig that could fight it.

They pulled their gear anyway and walked over to the family standing on the sidewalk watching their house burn. The questions came fast, the way they’re trained: Is everyone out? Is anyone still inside? Make sure everyone’s accounted for.

An older woman was having trouble from smoke inhalation, badly enough that she needed transport. SCWR medics stayed with her until LAFD arrived with one engine. That crew did everything they could, but the whole department was stretched past its limit. A working structure fire normally gets ten or more units. There wasn’t enough of anything to change what happened to that house, and the family knew it as well as the crew did.

Scenes like that leave you with two feelings at once. One is helplessness, which you expect. You’re a trained firefighter with no water, watching a structure burn past the point where anything can be done. The second is harder to put a name to. It’s being helpless while people watch you be helpless: standing next to a family in full gear, in front of their burning home, while the one engine that could make it does what one engine can do against a fully involved structure.

LAFD transported the woman, and she was in good hands. The crew never found out whether she made a full recovery.

First On Scene

Later in the response, around 1 AM, the crew was finally heading back to Hansen Dam to drop their gear and go home for a few hours of sleep before doing it all again. Then a call came in for a rubbish fire at Sepulveda Basin. They had left there ten minutes earlier. All night they’d been running down smoke reports that turned out to be drift from the Palisades Fire blowing across the Valley, and there was a short, quiet debate in the rig about whether this was just another one.

The chief decided to turn around. Nobody was thrilled about it, since everyone was exhausted, but they looped back.

Coming down Balboa Boulevard toward the far end of the park, someone spotted flames through the windshield. Real flames, visible from the opposite end of Sepulveda Basin.

They floored it.

It turned out to be a 100-by-100-foot brush fire in dry grass, moving with the wind, nowhere near the size of a rubbish fire. They called for an upgrade and started suppression. City resources showed up 10 to 15 minutes later, with LAFD crews stretched thin across simultaneous major incidents all over the county. The fire was held and fully put out within a couple of hours.

Nobody got home early that night, and nobody complained about it.

Keeping Moving

By the second week, SCWR shifts had settled into a routine. Command staff were working 17- and 18-hour days. Line personnel, most of whom also hold full-time jobs, were putting in at least ten hours a day out of Hansen Dam, going home, and coming back. Over three weeks, the organization logged about 2,500 member hours.

At 2 AM, between calls, they patrolled. With 911 hold times over 20 minutes and response delays stacked behind them, having eyes on the ground was the most useful safety net the Valley had. The crew drove through parks, along flood control channels, and back past the spots at Hansen Dam where the arsonist had been the night before.

Staying on the move helped in another way too. When you keep driving, you don’t have to sit with what you’ve seen. Long shifts came with their own ways of coping: dark humor, 3 AM conversations in a parking lot, and the story of whoever had to sprint out of the Hansen Dam bathroom when the airhorn went off. The whole thing was too big to process in real time, so they kept moving and dealt with it later.

During the Hurst Fire evacuation, two Type 3 engines came down the road toward the SCWR rig running Code 3, lights and sirens at full response speed. The SCWR unit eased right to give them room. The BMW directly behind the marked rig saw it slow down, decided it wasn’t going to wait, and swung left into the oncoming lane, straight into the path of both engines. The engines had nowhere to go and neither did the BMW, so everyone stopped, and the evacuation corridor was blocked because one driver couldn’t wait thirty seconds. Somehow nobody hit anybody, and the evacuation eventually got moving again.

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 alongside them, pushing out real-time fire locations, aircraft tracking, evacuation status, and live radio traffic to the public and to first responders. During January 2025, LAIT911 was the most up-to-date authoritative source on fire activity in Los Angeles County and was regularly ahead of official channels, because the people running it were either monitoring the fireground live or standing on it. At peak, tens of thousands of people, and possibly more than 100,000, were relying on it, including hundreds of working firefighters.

Official alerts that month didn’t hold up nearly as well.

On January 9th, when the Kenneth Fire broke out in Woodland Hills, an evacuation alert meant for roughly 50,000 residents near Calabasas and Agoura Hills went out to every smartphone in Los Angeles County. Close to 10 million people got an evacuation order that wasn’t meant for them, in a city already on edge after two days of catastrophic fires. LA County’s own Office of Emergency Management was so stumped by the malfunction that, three days into the crisis, they emailed a generic FCC inbox at 3 AM about an “unknown system error” that kept sending unsolicited countywide alerts through the night, and asked for help shutting it off. The system that was supposed to calm things down was making them worse.

So while LAIT911 was showing 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 operations toward the end of January after running continuously since December 30th: three weeks and about 2,500 member hours across the San Fernando Valley.

The public response was the biggest the organization had ever seen. Donations came in, media coverage pointed people to SCWR and LAIT911, and volunteer applications spiked.

Then the fires dropped out of the news.

When SCWR followed up with that wave of applicants three to six months later, about 95 percent had moved on. Most of them wanted to be on a fire line within days of signing up and help end the disaster. Volunteer wildland firefighting actually requires the same academy as a career firefighter, with the same physical standards and certifications, and months of commitment before anyone hands you a tool anywhere near an active fire. In rigor and time, it’s a second full-time job. Comparing it to walking into a hospital after watching a YouTube video and asking to scrub in on a surgery isn’t much of a stretch.

“People are quick to donate during fires,” one SCWR leader says. “But we need people to know that this support is needed before the fires.”

That gap, between the attention a disaster brings and the steady, unexciting funding that prevention and readiness actually need, is the biggest resource problem organizations like SCWR face. The January fires made the need obvious. A city with a 20-minute 911 hold time, sending one engine to a working structure fire and nothing at all to a brush fire because there’s nothing left to send, needs trained and equipped supplemental response capacity pre-deployed in its WUI areas every Red Flag day. That should be treated as part of the city’s infrastructure, not as a novelty.

The January 2025 fires showed Los Angeles exactly what a disaster like this demands from 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 partly because small fires stayed small and a serial arsonist decided to call it a night. Mostly, though, it got through because trained people were already in place, pre-positioned and watching.

That’s the job SCWR exists to do: twenty volunteers, short on sleep, watching the horizon burn from the top of Sepulveda Dam and ready to roll the second the radio called.

They’re still out there, and they’ll be there next time too.

Southern California Wildfire Response is a community wildland fire and all-hazard emergency response department serving Los Angeles and neighboring counties. Support our operations before the next fire at socalwildfire.org/donate. Download LAIT911 for real-time Los Angeles emergency alerts.