How Wildfires Came for Southern California

For 18 years, Nancy Spiller savored “the magic of living in the canyon” high up in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of L.A., where the sun each morning would cast the craggy brush-covered mountains outside her window in a spectacular orange glow. Ms. Spiller, 71, watched the fog march in from the Pacific Ocean during her daily trail runs.

Ms. Spiller’s town-home complex, known as the Woodies, was consumed last week as fire stretched from oceanside bluffs near Santa Monica up into the hills where Ms. Spiller lived. Little is left of the dozens of two-story town homes beyond piles of rubble, warped metal fences and several mostly unscathed trees.

In recent years, residents had removed some pine trees from the complex grounds for fear they would “be like Roman candles in case of a fire,” Ms. Spiller said. Now it’s clear that they underestimated the flammability of the homes themselves, built in the early 1970s with wood siding and wooden fences.

“It’s the property that went up like Roman candles,” said Ms. Spiller, a writer and artist.

California’s building code for wildfires is among the most stringent in the nation, requiring homes in high risk areas to follow guidelines aimed at limiting fires, including using materials that are less likely to burn, such as stucco, concrete or steel. Windows must be made of tempered glass, which is less likely to shatter and allow embers inside a home.

The state’s codes were developed after a fire in 1991 tore through thousands of homes in the verdant hills above Oakland, a high-profile example of a wildfire that turned houses into kindling. But the new codes, enacted in 2008, apply only to homes constructed after that year. The code did not require residents to retrofit older homes — a prospect that could be extremely costly for longtime homeowners and landlords — and such retrofits are relatively rare, officials say. So, in general, older homes are more likely to burn.