Is Sepulveda Basin Ready for the Olympics?

Is Sepulveda Basin Ready for the Olympics?

In 2028, the world will watch athletes compete at the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. For most people watching, it will be their introduction to the place.

For the fire crews who know it, that will be a strange thing to witness.

One Fire Per Day. Every Day.

Most Angelenos know Sepulveda Basin the way you know something you’ve driven past a thousand times — the fields off the 405, the dog park, Lake Balboa, the LA River somewhere behind the trees. A green stretch of the Valley. Familiar without being known.

You may have heard of the big ones — the 60-acre run that closes the 405, the smoke column that hangs over the Valley for an afternoon. Those make the news. What most people don’t know is what’s happening on the days that don’t.

In 2024, LAFD Chief Jaime Moore confirmed that his department responded to 452 fires in the Sepulveda Basin — a 2,000-acre park, with the majority of those fires concentrated in a 600-acre stretch. Through the first 240 days of that year alone, 254 fire responses had already been logged.

That’s more than one fire per day. Before summer was over.

These aren’t dramatic wind-driven runs through the hillsides. They’re warming fires, rubbish fires, cooking fires, and vegetation fires — the kind that don’t make the news, don’t close freeways, and don’t show up in anyone’s mental picture of the Basin. Many are officially listed as cause undetermined. Ask any firefighter who has worked the Basin regularly 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 dense in a way that surprises people who’ve only seen it from the freeway. Invasive grasses and riparian growth reach chest height across large portions of the park — thick enough to swallow a person, limit sight lines, and carry a fire fast when the Santa Anas arrive. The residential neighborhoods of Van Nuys, Encino, and Lake Balboa sit close on every side.

Between 150 and 275 unsheltered people have been estimated living inside the Basin at various points over recent years. The encampments don’t sit at the park’s edges. They run deep into the vegetation, sustained by propane tanks, cooking equipment, generators, and materials that accumulate over time into something that looks less like a campsite and more like an infrastructure problem.

For fire crews who have patrolled those areas, the environment is not simply a fire risk. It is an unpredictable hazard zone. SCWR personnel have experienced firsthand individuals armed with crowbars and machetes throughout patrols. They’ve witnessed fires being set deliberately while on scene. They have encountered propane caches, improvised hazardous materials, and configurations in the brush that create real danger for anyone moving through on foot — fire crews, park rangers, sanitation workers.

In June 2024, a half-acre brush fire on West Burbank Boulevard made that danger visible to everyone. The fire triggered an explosion that sent 11 LAFD firefighters to the hospital, one 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 participate in youth athletics programming each year. Crews who arrived expecting a grass fire found themselves in an active explosive hazard environment without warning.

It was a jarring headline for a week. For people who work in the Basin regularly, it was a confirmation of something they already knew.

The Basin Doesn’t Pause for Other Emergencies

January 2025 tested every fire resource in Southern California simultaneously. The Palisades Fire. The Eaton Fire. The Hurst Fire. Three catastrophic incidents burning at once, mutual aid stretched to its limit, apparatus committed from across the state.

The Basin kept burning.

On the morning of January 8th, the Woodley Fire ignited on North Woodley Avenue just south of Victory Boulevard — while the Palisades and Eaton fires were simultaneously uncontained. It burned approximately 30 acres before being brought under control. It required a full LAFD response on a night when the region had nothing left to give.

It was not the only Basin fire that week.

The conditions that produce fires in the Sepulveda Basin are not meteorological. They don’t require Red Flag warnings or offshore winds or years of drought-dried fuel. They exist on a Tuesday in March the same way they exist during a historic wind event in January. The Basin burns because the circumstances that produce ignition are present every day, independent of what else is happening in the city around it.

SCWR maintained active patrol in the Basin throughout the January siege — monitoring the park, responding to fires, and operating in an environment that most other resources had to leave behind. That’s not a footnote. It’s what years of presence in a place actually looks like when it counts.

The People Already There

Wildfire response in the public imagination tends to look like the dramatic moments — air tankers dropping retardant on a hillside, engines lined up on a ridge, evacuation orders rolling across a phone screen. Those moments are real. They’re also the end of a much longer story.

The earlier part of that story is quieter. It’s the patrol at dusk when the brush is dry and the wind is picking up. It’s the crew that catches a fire at a tenth of an acre before it becomes something else. It’s the people who have walked the same corridors enough times to know where the hazards 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. It will 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.

That’s what wildfire reduction actually looks like, most of the time. Not a ribbon-cutting. Not a press conference. Just someone already there — and the question of whether that someone will be.

Picture it for a moment. Athletes mid-competition while smoke rises from the brush just beyond the venue fence. Broadcast cameras that can’t avoid the column climbing into the Valley sky. Crowds in the stands, phones out, filming something that isn’t on the program. The Basin doesn’t suspend its reality because the Games have arrived. It will be exactly what it is on any given day right now — just with the whole world watching.

The fires haven’t stopped. The Olympics are still coming.

Southern California Wildfire Response (SCWR) is a volunteer wildland fire nonprofit based in the Los Angeles area with years of operational experience in the Sepulveda Basin and surrounding WUI.