Is Sepulveda Basin Ready for the Olympics?

For the fire crews who already know it well, that’s going to be strange to see.

More Than a Fire a Day

Most Angelenos know Sepulveda Basin as something they’ve driven past a thousand times: the fields off the 405, the dog park, Lake Balboa, the LA River somewhere behind the trees. It’s a familiar green stretch of the Valley that most people have never really been inside.

You may have heard about the big fires there, like the 60-acre run that shut down the 405 and left a smoke column hanging over the Valley for an afternoon. Those make the news. What most people don’t know about is what happens there the rest of the time.

In 2024, LAFD responded to 452 fires in the Sepulveda Basin, a 2,000-acre park where most of those fires were concentrated in a 600-acre stretch. The pace didn’t let up the next year. At a community safety meeting in late August 2025, LAFD said it had already responded to 254 fires in the Basin through the first 240 days of the year. That’s more than one fire a day, and summer wasn’t even over yet.

These aren’t dramatic wind-driven runs up the hillsides. They’re warming fires, rubbish fires, cooking fires, and vegetation fires, the kind that never make the news or close a freeway, so they don’t figure into anyone’s picture of the Basin. Many are officially listed as cause undetermined. Ask any firefighter who has worked the Basin regularly, though, and they’ll tell you what the paperwork often won’t: a lot of those fires don’t start themselves.

According to LAFD data obtained through a public records request, more than 75 percent of the Basin’s fires since 2020 have been linked to homeless encampments, with nearly half sparked by trash or waste.

What It Actually Looks Like Inside

The Basin’s undeveloped corridors are a lot denser than they look from the freeway. Invasive grasses and riparian growth reach chest height across large parts of the park, thick enough to hide a person, cut off sight lines, and carry fire quickly once the Santa Anas arrive. The neighborhoods of Van Nuys, Encino, and Lake Balboa sit right up against it on every side.

Estimates over recent years have put anywhere from 150 to 275 unsheltered people living inside the Basin at various points. The encampments aren’t on the edges of the park. They run deep into the vegetation, with propane tanks, cooking equipment, generators, and other materials that pile up over time until some camps are closer to permanent structures than campsites.

For fire crews who patrol those areas, the fire risk is only part of it. SCWR personnel have run into people armed with crowbars and machetes on patrol and have watched fires being set deliberately while they were on scene. They’ve come across propane caches, improvised hazardous materials, and setups in the brush that are dangerous for anyone moving through on foot, whether that’s fire crews, park rangers, or sanitation workers.

In June 2024, a half-acre brush fire on West Burbank Boulevard showed everyone how real that danger is. The fire triggered an explosion that sent 11 LAFD firefighters to the hospital, and one was airlifted with significant head trauma. Initial reports identified multiple explosive devices, including what appeared to be a hand grenade, within yards of the Hjelte Sports Complex, where thousands of LAUSD students take part in youth athletics every year. Crews who showed up expecting a grass fire walked into an active explosive hazard with no warning.

For about a week it was a shocking headline. For people who work in the Basin regularly, it confirmed something they already knew.

The Basin Doesn’t Pause for Other Emergencies

January 2025 tested every fire resource in Southern California at the same time. The Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst fires were all burning at once, mutual aid was stretched to its limit, and apparatus had been pulled in from across the state. The Basin kept burning anyway.

On the morning of January 8th, the Woodley Fire started on North Woodley Avenue just south of Victory Boulevard while the Palisades and Eaton fires were both still uncontained. It burned about 30 acres before it was brought under control, and it took a full LAFD response at a time when the region had nothing left to give.

It wasn’t the only Basin fire that week.

Fires in the Sepulveda Basin aren’t driven by the weather. They don’t need Red Flag warnings, offshore winds, or years of drought-dried fuel, and they happen on a Tuesday in March just as easily as during a historic wind event in January. The Basin burns because the things that start fires there are present every day, no matter what else is going on in the city.

SCWR kept up active patrols in the Basin throughout the January siege, monitoring the park and responding to fires in an area most other resources had to leave behind. Being able to do that when it counted came from years of working that ground.

The People Already There

Most people picture wildfire response as the dramatic moments: air tankers dropping retardant on a hillside, engines lined up on a ridge, evacuation orders popping up on a phone. Those moments are real, but they come at the end of a much longer story.

The earlier part is quieter. It’s the patrol at dusk when the brush is dry and the wind is picking up, and the crew that catches a fire at a tenth of an acre before it grows. It’s the people who have walked the same corridors enough times to know where the hazards have moved since last week, which access routes are passable, and what chest-high grass looks like when it’s carrying an ember.

The Sepulveda Basin needs people like that. It needed them before the Olympics made it a story, and it will still need them after the closing ceremony, when the cameras leave and the park goes back to being the green stretch off the 405 that most of Los Angeles drives past without a second thought.

Most of the time, that’s what wildfire reduction really looks like. There’s no ribbon-cutting or press conference, just someone already on the ground, and the open question of whether someone will still be there.

Now picture this. Athletes are mid-competition while smoke rises out of the brush just past the venue fence. The broadcast cameras can’t avoid the column climbing into the Valley sky, and people in the stands have their phones out, filming something that isn’t on the program. The Basin isn’t going to behave any differently because the Games are in town. It will be exactly what it is on any given day right now, only with the whole world watching.

The fires haven’t stopped, and the Olympics are still coming.

Southern California Wildfire Response (SCWR) is a community wildland fire and all-hazard emergency response department serving Los Angeles and neighboring counties, with years of operational experience in the Sepulveda Basin and surrounding WUI.