Who's to Blame for L.A.'s ‘Zombie Fire’?

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. It's New Year's Eve 2024, and a 29-year-old Uber driver named Jonathan Rindernack is zigzagging through Los Angeles, picking up and dropping off fares. Jonathan has shoulder-length brown hair and a close-cropped beard, and as far as his passengers can tell, he's not having the best night. He seems agitated. As midnight approaches, he pulls up YouTube on his iPhone and presses play on a French rap song called Uns d'air en tee by the artist Jossemond. Jossemond raps about the bitterness in his head about mistakes and about sparking up a joint to forget about it all, if only for a little while. As the music video plays on Jonathan's phone, the rapper stares at a fire in an oil drum. Jonathan drops off his last passenger of the night and dries up into the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains, past gated communities and luxury estates with Spanish tile roofs, through one of the most postcard-perfect neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles, the Pacific Palisades. Turn right onto Monte Hermoso Drive, then the destination is on your right. Earlier this year, I followed the route Jonathan took that night toward the hills, parked my car in the same tiny lot where Jonathan parked his, and started up a narrow-jurt hiking path called Skull Rock Loop. I am walking into Topanga State Park. To my right, you have the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. You can see almost the whole city from here. On New Year's Eve 2024, Jonathan walks these switchbacks, passing a sign that reads No Fires Slash Smoking. And once the palatial estates of the Palisades Highlands vanish behind the dense brush, he comes upon a small clearing on the top of the hill. What happens next remains a mystery, but according to federal prosecutors, Jonathan Rindernacht pulls out a lighter and minutes later, something starts glowing on a nearby trail camera. By then, Jonathan is rushing back down the trail to his car. He's trying to call 911 to report a fire, but he has no service. Fortunately, someone down the mountain spots the fire and calls it in. Back in his car, Jonathan Rindernacht once again pulls out his phone. This time, it's to ask ChatGbt a question. He types, are you at fault if a fire is lit because of your cigarettes? The AI's response is yes. That night, the Los Angeles Fire Department got to Skull Rock Trailhead quickly and began fighting what was then dubbed the Lockman Fire. And by 4.46 a.m. on New Year's Day, they issued a statement declaring the 8-acre brush fire fully contained. But what no one knew at the time was that the fire wasn't dead. It had simply gone underground, smoldering in the roots and the dry soil almost invisible to the naked eye. It's what's called a holdover fire or a zombie fire because it refuses to die. Sometimes they can live underground for months, waiting for the right conditions to re-erupt. And as climate change worsens and soil becomes hotter and drier, these fires are happening more and more. And in January of 2025, those exact conditions helped that brush fire rekindle, resulting in what would become the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history, the Palisades Fire. From Audible Originals, I'm Zach Goldbaum and this is Lawless Planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it. I pulled up a long drive and I saw the mountain before me and it looked like waves, like literal ocean waves, but they were red and they were flames and they were rolling down the mountain toward us. I'm now driving up through the Pacific Palisades and wow, now that I'm getting a little higher into the hills, you can really see the scale of destruction, but there is a lot of construction happening. I came to LA right around the one-year anniversary of the Palisades Fire. Parts of the city were still in cleanup mode and other parts were beginning to rebuild. These hillsides used to be really densely packed with beautiful California homes and now you see wrought iron sticking up from the ground, some charred fireplaces still standing and a lot of construction fencing. Beyond the burned out lots and the wood frame houses being erected, the other thing you notice is a community that wants accountability. There's a sign, Karen Bass resigned now. You got signs here that say they let us burn. There's a lot of finger pointing, countless lawsuits and of course the upcoming trial of Jonathan Rindernacht, who stands accused of starting the zombie fire that ultimately became the Palisades Fire. So finding justice and assigning blame won't be easy. Thanks to climate change, fires like the one that destroyed the Pacific Palisades are becoming more common. Fire weather days have tripled in the last half century and the number and intensity of wild fires have doubled in the past 20 years. According to historian Stephen Pine, we've entered what he calls the pyro scene, the age of fire, a new geological era where fire will reshape the world. It's why the question of who or what is responsible for the devastating firestorm that consumed Los Angeles in January of 2025 remains a subject of open debate. And that's what brought me to LA to ask the question, who is to blame for a fire? Who is to blame for a fire when the earth is now a tinderbox? From the Palisades, I headed north along the Pacific Coast Highway past Malibu to a little outposts of the Forestry Division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department in the Santa Monica Mountains. When you pull in, you see a friendly face, smokey the bear, indicating that the fire danger that day was low. But that wasn't who I was there to see. Zach. Brett. Good to meet you. Thanks so much for doing this. For sure. Yeah. Brad Weishop is the assistant chief of the Forestry Division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, which means his focus is on fire prevention, as in everything that happens before a fire starts. He's tall with graying curly red hair, and when we met, he was wearing his Dark Navy Forestry uniform and hiking boots, which was a good call because he took me up a small trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. This is as steep as it gets. It's... I'm okay. Okay, good. Yeah. Okay, I wasn't that winded, but it was steep. And that's one of the reasons this area is so prone to fire. Obviously, the steeper, the slope, the faster a fire is going to grow because it preheats above it and heat rises. The other two elements of what Brad called the fire behavior triangle are fuels and weather. And in the months leading up to the Palisades fire, all of those pieces were coming together. California had experienced two very wet years in a row, but then the rain stopped. Southern California hadn't seen a drop of rain, and it was January, and our rainy season starts in October. So all the vegetation that grew during those wet months dried out. Then came the Santa Ana winds, the mythic California windstorms that bring hot dry air from the desert to the coast. And on January 6th, six days after the small fire that Jonathan Rindernack allegedly started, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning. It's a serious alert saying the conditions are just right for something very bad to happen. We're right in front of fire station 88 here in Malibu where firefighters are gearing up and getting ready for this extreme wind event that begins. Hurricane force winds up to 100 miles per hour could sweep across the San Gabriel Valley. We never know how Mother Nature can act. It can change quickly, which could lead to high fire dangers. The National Weather Service, they issued the particularly dangerous situation warning. I remember seeing a lot of news on it, and that Tuesday morning I was leaving for work and I told my wife, I was like, hey, I don't think I'm going to come home tonight. As Brad arrived at work on the morning of January 7th, a debate was playing out at both the LA County Fire Department and the LA City Fire Department about how to prepare for a fire that could start anywhere. Even though a fire hadn't broken out yet, Brad's outfit, LA County, decided to have a staggering 900 firefighters stay on overtime duty. LA City, which has its own separate fire department, chose not to. It was a decision that many later questioned because as the winds picked up, they fanned the embers of the still smoldering Lachman Fire, and at around 10 30 a.m. the hills of the Pacific Palisades erupted. What is the address of the emergency? I left the Ager Maratha across the hill from us and I backyard the huge fire. The Ager Maratha in Highland? And it's a huge fire coming towards us more. Roughly 18 minutes after the 911 call you just heard, LA firefighters arrived on the scene. The mountain was already on fire, and it was up to the wind where the blaze would go next. From my office window, I saw the plume of smoke out in the Palisades, and I just packed my truck. You know, knowing that it had started in LA City, so they have command over that fire, but it was approaching the county line so that we were obviously going to be involved in that fire. And I just touched base with the other planning section chief and the incident commander to find out where everybody was meeting. I packed my bags and headed that way. In downtown Los Angeles, roughly 20 miles east of the Palisades, a group of local politicians were gathered in City Hall. It was a council meeting day, and so, you know, I had driven from Venice to downtown. That's Tracy Park, the councilwoman for District 11, which includes the Pacific Palisades. She's a former lawyer with short dark blonde hair, and Park was elected in 2022, pitching herself as a kind of no-nonsense, tough-up, crime conservative Democrat, which appealed to the affluent residents of West Side neighborhoods like Brentwood, Venice, and the Palisades. On that blustery January morning, the council is about 30 minutes into their normal meeting when Tracy Park is interrupted by an urgent call. It's the LA Fire Department's chief, Kristen Crowley, calling with news that a fire was moving quickly through the Hills and Parks District. So, I immediately came to the West Side, and already a plume of smoke could be seen from downtown Los Angeles, the entire drive west down the 10 freeway. You could just see this menacing, menacing, ugly, black plume of smoke. By then, firefighters from the nearest station had arrived on the scene. And by late morning, just under an hour after the fire had been called in, it had left down the mountains and was now engulfing homes. I was getting a lot of inbound communication from panicked residents who weren't sure what to do. The power was out, so the traffic control lights weren't functioning properly, and that was causing a tremendous amount of gridlocking. By the time an evacuation order finally went out, traffic on the only two main roads that connect the Palisades to the rest of Los Angeles had already ground to a halt. People had to get out, but how? By 11.17, the elementary school sent us a message that says you have 13 minutes to come pick up your child. We are evacuating to Brentwood. If you do not pick up your child in 13 minutes, they will be on a bus to Brentwood. That's Palisades resident, India Bradley, who full disclosure I've been friends with since college. As the fire grew, her son, Beau, was a few miles away from their home in kindergarten. We had our nanny Nancy there, and I said, Nancy, please go get Beau. India and her husband Kevin furiously started packing their car, medicine, family photos, the kids' drawings, whatever they could grab. As soon as Beau got home, they planned to pick up their daughter Pippa from daycare, which was further downhill from the fire. But then... I get a call from this woman at Pippa's school, and she is the mother of another child. I'm not sure if she's the one who's going to call me, but I'm sure she's the one who's going to call me. And she is the mother of another child in Pippa's class at the time. And she said, I just picked up my daughter. Pippa is the last one here. Do you want me to take her? And of course, I thought we had more time. The evacuations had just really stalled. People were unable to get out as the fire was jumping the hillsides up Palisades Drive. Councilwoman Tracy Park again. People abandoned their cars and ran on foot. People were just fleeing in mass out of the Palisades, walking towards the beach. It was just the strangest sight you could ever imagine. As waves of evacuees flooded the streets, they were met with the sounds of sirens, a haze of smoke, and ash raining from above like snow. In one truly apocalyptic scene, a reporter on Palisades Drive wearing an N95 and ski goggles walks in front of rows of abandoned Mercedes and Teslas. Yeah, I want to take you here live right now. So this is Pacific Palisades. All of these cars were ditched. So all of the drivers panicked. They took their keys. It's midday, but it looks like sunset and a huge red bulldozer from the LA County Fire Department is shoving the cars out of the road. If this is your car, unfortunately, it's an emergency situation and this is what they have to do. As residents desperately fled downhill, more and more firefighters from across the city streamed in the opposite direction toward a conflagration that was growing with each passing minute. Engine 565, man-hella spots for the Palisades incident. Bravo. Firefighters will tell you that they've never stopped a fire when the Santa Ana winds were blowing. And that day, they were raging. In minutes, they had breathed terrifying life into the smoldering remnants of the zombie fire started on New Year's Day. Now it was reborn and consuming entire mountaintops, flames stretching 100 feet into the air being blown sideways by 60 mile an hour winds, launching fist-sized embers more than a mile away. By midday, the fire had moved out of the hills and was barreling down the main road of the Palisades. It had gone from burning brush to swallowing hillside mansions to jumping from home to home in more densely packed residential neighborhoods, where each huge home gobbled up by the fire only made it more ferocious. It was no longer only a wildfire, but an urban conflagration. Firefighters could only save a house here and a house there. And just before 5 p.m., even that became impossible. Because as firefighters crouched with their hoses, nothing came out. The hydrants had run dry. As the afternoon transitioned into evening, of course, all the communications were down. You couldn't get a hold of anyone on the phone. And my team, was on the ground going door to door doing evacuations. Later, Councilwoman Tracy Park arrived at an impromptu incident command center erected on a beach in Malibu. In the hills overhead, the fire had advanced in just about every direction and was now ripping through iconic beachfront properties. On a normal night, when the lights are on, you can see the landmarks on the hillside to orient yourself and know what you're looking at. But on that particular night, there was just this crazy orange wall of fire that came roaring down the hillside. There were waves of it, sheets of it, blowing across streets. There were embers and chunks of ash whizzing through the air. The wind was gusting in all directions and fires were just erupting and emerging everywhere. The trees that caught fire, some of them, the palm trees were just matchsticks in the air like someone had taken a blow torch to them. It was the most terrific, terrifying thing I had ever seen. The blaze was overwhelming firefighters and they were about to be even more strained because in another community, east of the Palisades, a second fire had just ignited. After spending time in the Palisades, I headed east to a small, unincorporated community in Los Angeles County called All-Ireland. I was able to see the fires of the Palisades, and I was able to see the fires of the Palisades. I was able to see the fires of the Palisades, and I was able to see the fires of the Palisades. I headed east to a small, unincorporated community in Los Angeles County called Altadena. It sits in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, 25 miles east of the Pacific Palisades. And 14 years ago, when Nick Arnzen and his husband were house hunting, they knew instantly this was where they wanted to start their family. Altadena has very much that small town feel, both in, you know, you wave at your neighbor, you know your neighbor, and everybody gets into each other's business probably more than they should. It's a diverse community in every sense of the word, and even though it's still attached geographically, it feels like you get off the freeway, you come up to Altadena and you've left a lot of the city behind. Nick's a writer, actor, organizer, and the chair of the Altadena Town Council. And just after 6pm on January 7th, as the fire continued to rage in the Palisades, Nick got notice that a new fire had broken out in the hills above their home. I sat there, I swear it had to be about five minutes. I just didn't know what to say. It's a little emotional because this is the moment my life changed. Then Nick sprung into action. I gathered myself and my family, and I went to them and said, hey, we need to prepare for leaving. This might seem unbelievable, but you know, this is going to be a pretty intense event. So I'm just giving you a heads up, a fire started in Eaton Canyon, five miles away. It would come to be called the Eaton Fire. And as it spread rapidly through the canyon and into the town below, harrowing 911 calls started coming into the Sierra Madre Police Department near Altadena. Police, dispatch your errands. You guys, I need the fire department on Riviera Drive. There's houses on fire. There's no f***ing anybody here. What is the address ma'am? 1470. 1470. Get him here now. Houses burned like paper. They're siding, peeling and curling and melting. And as firefighters arrived, they often sped right by burning homes. They were triaging, saving what they could, but the sight of firefighters abandoning homes that couldn't be saved, astonished witnesses. And with each passing minute, the blaze crept closer and closer to Nick Arnson and his family. When the evacuation order came close to nine or shortly after, I told them we are going. And it was a little difficult for us. We have two dogs, a bunny, a cat, and two teenagers who, now in retrospect, I find out were high. Maybe for the best. So Nick and his husband load the car. They filled it with all the essentials, except one important thing. They were worried that moving the family rabbit would be traumatizing. So they left him behind. We probably got a mile away and I still saw flames dropping and I thought this is not looking good. So as the family continued on, Nick returned to his home to retrieve the bunny. I was just seeing people desperately getting out. I was seeing embers flying much further. People were panicking. People were pulling into driveways really quick to pack up and hitting other cars. I pulled up a long drive and I saw the mountain before me. And it looked like waves, like literal ocean waves, but they were red and they were flames. And they were rolling down the mountain toward us. And the reason it looked like that is because I wasn't seeing the flames on the ground. I was seeing them lifted off the ground with chunks of the ground and flying toward the town. By then the power was out. I had to fumble to find a box. I quickly got the bunny in it. I heard thumping and I looked at the window and those embers were just heading against our window and dropping into the pool. And I think I knew it was over, but I still wasn't believing it. We're finally actually seeing what was burning overnight. And the term the word warzone is such a cliche, but this does look like an area that has been bombed. As the sun rose on January 8th, 2025, the fires were still 0% contained. Plains and helicopters were grounded due to wind, so there was little firefighters could do to control the blazes. Those not yet under evacuation orders feared that they could be next. And as evacuees woke up that morning, they wondered if their homes were lost and if not, how bad the damage was. We were glued to the news basically to get any insight into if our house was standing. That's my friend, India Bradley again. After picking up her daughter from the family that had evacuated her from school, they'd first driven to the San Fernando Valley. But when it seemed like the fire could come over the Santa Monica Mountains, they'd moved once again all the way to San Diego, more than 100 miles away. We were just in this limbo. We didn't know what was going on. And people couldn't get back in. On the 8th, we saw the KTLA had their van drove down sunset, and there's a video of the house next to ours in flames. And so I was like, our house is done. But one of our friends got on his bicycle and he biked through the neighborhood and he took a picture of our house. So we knew on, I want to say the ninth that our house was standing. Meanwhile, the chair of the Altadena Town Council, Nick Arnzen and his family were rising from a sleepless night at a friend's house. We got around, I want to say, in the 11 o'clock hour, the 11 o'clock in the morning. So this would be, you know, 11, 12, 13 hours after we were evacuated. We got the most heartbreaking video from our neighbor. And I won't try to repeat it because it's really tough to watch. In the video, a woman pans her phone around. The sky is in eerie orange, smoke is everywhere. There's a family standing in front of a stone arch, the only part of their house that's remaining. You guys, our house is gone. It's the vocal that breaks my heart because I can hear her and I've laughed with her and we've had holiday parties together and we wave at each other every morning and she's showing me that view. Then the video reveals where Nick's home had stood. The ground is still smoldering and all that's left are some blackened trees and a single charred stone wall. And again, 13 hours after the fire started, it was gone. Everything was gone. But Nick needed to see it for himself. And when he did finally return, nothing made sense. On one hand, it's a gut punch, but on the other hand, it's confusing. Well, this isn't our town. Again, you can't wrap your head around it. You're like, I know this is my property. I know that's my neighbors. Why am I seeing miles in the distance? Because houses block that all the time. Now I see fields and fields of debris and rubble. If people drove by their properties, not knowing they already drove by, they went down their blocks and they're like, oh, we missed it. We just drove three houses too far. And then there's no touchstones. There's no landmarks. For Councilwoman Tracy Park, who had spent the night at the Incident Command Center, reality was beginning to sink in about what had happened to her community, which was 25 miles from Nick's but looked similarly devastated. I didn't know what catastrophic meant. And it was honestly not until the next morning when the sun came up and we got our first glimpses of it in the daylight that the gravity and the scope of it really started to set in. And there are just no words to describe it looked like a nuclear bomb had exploded. Everything had been leveled. Just piles of rubble and ash and debris, the brick chimneys sticking up like gravestones in every direction, cars that had melted into puddles of metal on the streets. It was just absolutely horrific, just terrific. And there is nothing that can ever prepare your heart or your mind for something like that. The Palisades was treated like an active crime scene, cordoned off with checkpoints monitored by the National Guard, which only added to the feeling that parts of LA were now a war zone, or that there was some sort of cover up going on. But the truth was that the burnt areas were blanketed in all kinds of toxic substances, refrigerators, entire cars, plastic piping, electronics, all of that had been incinerated. But it did not stop people from returning. There was a need to see it, to know for sure, and to bear witness to it. And so we as a council office organized police escorts because of the mandatory evacuation orders. But you know, I walked the line of cars waiting to get in to warn people, this is going to be very, very difficult to see. Somewhere in that line of cars that day was India Bradley and her husband, Kevin. By that point, the National Guard had come in and there were at least three checkpoints. And so we sat there for about two hours, and we were probably the last group that they took that day. And then they finally arrived at their house. We were able to go in, and it was smoky inside. It was it was very eerie. It smelled chemically. It smelled toxic. It was like plastic had burnt in the microwave smell sort of thing. Eventually, the EPA got involved and started classifying homes based on their damage level. And even though India's house had obvious smoke damage, her fence melted, and there was toxic residue everywhere, the EPA classified it as having no damage. So India called to try to understand. And they said, we can't do anything about it. This is something that is the EPA has given this information from the LA Department of Forestry. They said, call this guy. And it was Brad. So I was a damaged inspector on the fire. That's Brad Weishaupt again, assistant chief of the LA County Fire Department's Forestry Division. Thousands of structures were lost in LA County. And when you went to the county recovery website, it was my phone number. So I answered a lot of phone calls. We ended up putting a team together doing a few different follow up inspections to check on damage. Brad visited India's house, and he confirmed that based on the structural assessment, the original classification was correct. Somehow her house was deemed not damaged, even though her family couldn't live in it. Still, other houses had fared even worse. What did it look like when you when you were doing inspections? There wasn't much left. What was left? Rubble. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to get too into it. I should mention that there was a lot that Brad couldn't get into. He hadn't been authorized by his public information officer to cover certain aspects of the fire. And whenever I did try to talk about the fire or the response, this is what happened. Not going to touch that one, Zach. Okay, fair enough. That's because as people started to pick up the pieces, the fire became a legal matter and is still the subject of multiple ongoing investigations. Lawsuits have popped up, naming everyone from the LA Fire Department to the city of Los Angeles, to the state of California, and beyond. In working on this story, I was shut down by multiple state and city agencies for interviews. It is frustrating as a journalist, but I can only imagine how maddening it is for residents who are seeking answers. In no time, people seized on that anger to score political points and spread misinformation. The whole thing is a complete disaster. A lot of it comes back to DEI. The good news is our fire chief is a lesbian. They spent $24 billion last year on the homeless. Yeah. And what did they spend on preventing these wildfires? Zero. Zip. This is a crew tragedy and it's a mistake of the governor. They don't have any water. In the events like this, you sort of look, well, is it on purpose? The fires were still burning when this cynical blame game began. But I remember watching all of this unfold from afar and feeling like, what is actually going on? Was the fire department hamstrung because of budget cuts? Were parts of the city being left to burn? Was the state of California diverting water during a state of emergency to protect an endangered fish called the Delta smelt? And for the sake of a smelt, they have no water. Well, no, the Delta smelt are not to blame. And the truth, it turns out, is much more complicated. At the height of the fire, hydrants in the Palisades did run dry. But while Trump and others blame the governor of California's water policies or DEI, the reality is that the water system simply wasn't designed to handle that level of demand. Imagine every hydrant hose and sprinkler in the city running at full blast, PVC pipes melting in the blaze, sending more water gushing out. Ultimately, the system buckled, leaving firefighters defenseless. To make matters worse, LA's Department of Water and Power would reveal that the 117 million gallon Santa Inés Reservoir, the closest to the Palisades, was offline and empty as the fires raged. It had been sitting dormant for months, awaiting repairs. A state report later determined that even if the reservoir had been full, it wouldn't have prevented the hydrants from running dry. But by then, legitimate concerns about government failures had morphed into conspiracy theories and misinformation. AI generated images circulated online of the Hollywood sign on fire and rumors swirled on Facebook that the fire was started by the U.S. government with directed energy weapons, which used concentrated electromagnetic energy in warfare. These conspiracy theories, they've emerged really during every recent major fire that makes big inroads into populated areas. That's University of California weather and climate scientist Daniel Swain. After the fire started, he spent hours online, live streaming, to try to dispel conspiracies. I remember consuming all of this and watching all of it unfold. And in fairness to the conspiracy theorists, I also struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. I think what it really comes down to is a fundamental mismatch of scale in terms of people's perceptions about the dynamics of a wind-driven wildfire, particularly once it's reached the urban interface. Once you have hundreds of structures or even thousands burning simultaneously, you can't fight a multi-thousand degree fire that's surrounding you with the water that's in your personal fire vehicle. What you have is a fire that's moving, you know, football fields per minute in terms of its forward spread through a neighborhood. It wasn't enough to say that this fire was just too severe, that it overwhelmed firefighters with the water system. People were angry, and they had a right to be. They wanted accountability and they wanted justice. Tonight, nine months and one day since the start of the Palisades fire, federal authorities arresting 29-year-old Jonathan Rendernect, charging him with arson for allegedly setting the deadly blaze. Jonathan Rendernect, the Uber driver who had gone hiking on New Year's Eve in the mountains above the Palisades, was arrested on October 7th, 2025. He was charged with starting the Lockman fire. That's the zombie fire that was never fully extinguished and rekindled to become the Palisades fire. Jonathan is the son of Baptist missionaries. He's fluent in French and English and comes from a big family. When he was questioned by investigators, Jonathan lied about where he'd been in relation to the fire. Then, when they searched his chat GPT history, they found images he generated months before the Lockman fire, depicting a city in flames. Later, authorities say he sent another message to chat GPT, this time writing that he burned a Bible and quote, it felt amazing. Jonathan Rendernect is set to go to trial on June 9th of this year, and he's been behind bars since his arrest. But complicating the prosecution's case are the mistakes made by both the fire department and city officials between the time Jonathan Rendernect returned to his car and the Palisades fire began. After they thought they'd extinguished the Lockman fire, firefighters returned the following day to do something called cold trailing, meaning they used their hands to feel for heat and dig out hotspots. But according to text messages obtained by the LA Times, before firefighters had finished checking for hotspots, the battalion chief ordered them to leave. Then more missteps occurred, even as the National Weather Service issued their red flag warning. On the morning of the fires, LA fire commanders made the fateful decision not to pre-deploy roughly a thousand available firefighters and dozens of engines. These choices, as well as decisions at the state and local level, have become the basis of a dizzying number of lawsuits. But what complicates this litigation, as well as the trial of Jonathan Rendernect, is just how easy it was for a fire to start under these conditions. Take the Eaton fire and Altadena. While the cause of that fire is still under investigation, it was most likely not arson, but sparks from a power line. In fact, in the three days after the Palisades fire began, seven named fires burned across Los Angeles County. The LA City Fire Department turned me down for an interview, but I talked to two veteran firefighters on condition of anonymity who told me that this fire was more than anything they were equipped to handle. We're designed to fight urban fires, one told me. But this, this was something different. They said conditions were apocalyptic and that trees were going up like candles. We got our asses kicked, one told me. Human failure no doubt contributed to the scale of this disaster. And those mistakes are being called out loudly in the media, in courts, in an investigation by Republican senators by Donald Trump just about everywhere. In my conversations with people in LA, the laundry list of culpable parties included the LA Department of Water and Power, California State Parks, LA City Fire Department, Fire Chief Kristen Crowley, LA County Fire Department, the local utility company Southern California Edison, Governor Gavin Newsom, Mary Karen Bass, but glaringly in a blame game that has spared next to no one, one culprit seemed to get a pass. Climate change. Some people will say this is climate change and other people will say no, this has nothing to do with climate change. And the real answer ends up usually being somewhere in between. That's climate scientist Daniel Swain again. That extreme ambient level of dryness is absolutely connected to climate change. The likelihood that we have such a thirsty warm atmosphere in the months leading up to these wind events is directly related to climate change. We are seeing an increased trend towards increasingly wide swings between wet and dry conditions in Southern California, which is also consistent with expectations in a warming climate. A recent study found that warming made this particular LA firestorm twice as likely and 25 times larger. And yet, our warming planet hardly factored into conversations about accountability. What happened on January 7th was catastrophic failure and to pretend otherwise is just insulting. On January 7th, 2026, Palisades Councilwoman Tracy Park spoke at a rally called They Let Us Burn to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the fires. You did not imagine what happened and you are right to be angry. It wasn't an act of nature. It wasn't some storm of the century. And it wasn't climate change and don't let anybody try to tell you otherwise. I saw your speech at the They Let Us Burn rally. You said, this wasn't caused by climate change and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Can you just tell me what you meant by that? I am in no way trying to say that climate change isn't real. Of course it is. We all see and feel the impacts of that. But we have decades of accumulated dry fuel here because of intentional land management choices. And so what I was trying to suggest to my constituents is don't let government officials gaslight you and try to distract you by blaming something when what happened here was man-made, it was known, it was predictable. These mega fires aren't a once in a lifetime thing anymore. They aren't a once in a century storm anymore. These are multiple times a year all over California incidents. Largely because of climate change? Well, I think it's because of the ongoing periods of drought, the accumulation of fuel loads, inadequate infrastructure, and building in places where it's not appropriate. It is all of those things. But in the accountability conversation, is climate change a part of the equation? Yes, but here's the thing. Given that we all recognize that climate change is real, it's here, it's happening right now, we can't keep blaming climate change when the fires happen. My point is that we need to change our policies in the way that we're dealing with it because it's here now. That's what I'm trying to say. It's true, climate change is here and we have to figure out how we are going to respond to it. But it could also get much, much worse. And by surrendering to the climate crisis and accepting the age of fire as our new reality, we risk creating a false promise that if we simply adapt, we can rebuild and move on. You know, we still are building in fire-prone areas. What would you say to residents who are building in these areas, accepting the risk and the people that have not yet experienced a tragedy, like what happened here in the Palisades? What lessons would you impart to them? Harden your homes now. There is no reason knowing how real these threats are to allow those risks to go unmitigated. You know, I think in many ways we've pushed as far into the urban wild interfaces we can go. Certainly the insurance companies are not having it. I have agonized in the middle of the night about what to do next and how to help. And the weight of responsibility that I feel to see this through, to make sure that we are being thoughtful in not only how we rebuild the Palisades, but in how we are planning for our future in Los Angeles is something that I take very, very seriously. As I got ready to leave LA, India took me to see her house. It's an idyllic spot on Sunset Boulevard with views of the Pacific Ocean. Right down the road from the hiking trail that Jonathan Rindernick walked on New Year's Eve. We walked around back. The fence was melted, leaving a clear view of the neighbor's house, which had burned down to the foundation. These are pieces of our roof melting on the wall, and you can see those bubbles. It's all heat exposure. To this day, to go inside, you need to be in head-to-toe PPE, masked the whole deal. But we peeked inside through the sliding glass door and saw remnants of India's life from a year ago, just after the holidays. We've got, like, all the kids' toys are still, like, it's a big mess. Look, we've still got the, that little train there. It's like a Christmas train. In some places around the Palisades, there are diggers and construction signage. And elsewhere, like here at India's house, it feels like time just stopped. India's family is relocated, and the future of the house is uncertain. Like a lot of people in the Palisades, they are still deciding whether to move back or to move on. Kind of thinking about how hard it was for us to get to the kids that day, I think that's always going to be in the back of my mind. And until they're a little bit bigger, I don't, I don't know how comfortable I'll be not being able to be close to them at school. And it's probably a little crazy, but once you've gone through it, you're like, it could definitely happen again. On the other side of town, Nick Arnzen walked me through an old warehouse that's been transformed into a hub for rebuilding efforts. So you're walking into this big open space. It's 37,000 square feet. So it's, you know, a commune of sorts. There's a free shop where survivors can get everything from diapers to clothes. And there's even a whole section with construction supplies that looks like a mini home depot. And people volunteer their time to help with the challenges that come with such a project. But perhaps the most striking thing in the warehouse is a huge map. It's the first thing you see when you walk in and on it, every single house that's standing, damaged and lost in Altadena. If it's standing, there's a blue dot. If it's damaged, a black one. If it's lost, red. And on that map, it's almost the same as the one that's almost all red dots. Those red dots all represent buildings that were destroyed. So in theory, I like to point out that we're looking for a blue wave over the next few years. Can you show me where your house was? Yeah, it was right up here at the park. There aren't many blue dots, but Nick hopes that will soon start to change. Some people are like, why, why would you put a map that shows so much pain and devastation? And I remind them, we survivors know what we went through. For us, we walk up to it and we go, this is where my house was. And then you go, oh, that mine, mine was over here. We were practically neighbors. Are you building back? And again, where there'll be hope is the blue houses replace the red houses. And I get to go, let's go get one. And you get to through your joy and your tears, put that blue house on there and go, I'm back. So follow Lawless Planet on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free by joining Audible. On the next episode of Lawless Planet, the story of the largest nuclear disaster in U.S. history that you've never heard of. People were confused. Community people, ranchers, livestock owners were not told that it's not safe to water your livestock. For today's episode, we relied heavily on the reporting of the LA Times. Lawless Planet is produced by Audible. This episode was written, produced and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum. Our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Audible is Andy Herman. Our senior managing producer is Latapanya. Our managing producer is Jake Kleinberg. Our producer is Lexie Peary. Sound design and music by Kenny Kuziak. Dialogue edit by George Draving Hicks. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frison Sink. Fact checking by Brian Pugnant. Our legal counsel is Shepard Mullen, executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Naven. Head of Audible Originals, North America, Marsha Louie. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Kiatza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.