“There is an arsonist here in LA,” Henry Winkler posted on X. It was 10:36 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 8. Almost as soon as the blaze in Pacific Palisades had broken out, the assignment of blame began. The president-elect was blaming the governor. A billionaire mall owner was blaming the mayor. Now, a full day into Los Angeles’s burning, responsibility for the fires had been distilled to its purest form: the arsonist. No actual cause for the fires had been determined, but arson was simple: All we had to do now was find this person and stop them.
Just hours before Winkler’s post, a little before 6 p.m., a new fire, the Sunset Fire, broke out on a steep hillside between Runyon and Nichols Canyons in the Hollywood Hills, a few blocks north of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards — a famous slice of the Santa Monica Mountains that juts right into the thick of Los Angeles. The night before, across town in Altadena, embers from the Eaton Fire were carried by howling winds and ignited buildings as far as three miles away from the fire line. The Sunset Fire could easily have done much worse: It was burning a stone’s throw from a swath of L.A. that is among the county’s most dense, filled with apartment buildings, commercial blocks, major museums and even L.A.’s most famous mall, the Grove, which reputedly has more visitors per year than Disneyland.
But the Sunset Fire did not burn the city down. Instead, less than 24 hours after it started, it was stopped. It had torched 43 acres of brush surrounded by homes, but it was fully contained and suppressed without destroying a single structure. Not even a car. A day after two huge and ultimately cataclysmic burns erupted on opposite ends of the city — after a full 24-hour shift spent trying to firm up defense lines — firefighters not only suppressed the new burn in the Hollywood Hills but were also combating three other major, named fires, as well as smaller brush fires throughout the city.
There is an app called Watch Duty that tracks wildfires and the response to them; it has, over the past few weeks, been installed on the phones of many, many Angelenos. Anyone who had paid for the members’ version would have seen something remarkable that Wednesday. When the Sunset Fire broke out, there were already more than a dozen firefighting craft in the air — by the Pacific Ocean, fighting the Palisades Fire, and to the east, around the San Gabriel Mountains, fighting the Eaton Fire. The sky was quickly darkening, visibility was worsening and the winds were gusting harder and harder. A fixed-wing “air attack” platform flew overhead directing aerial traffic; it most likely spotted the smoke from Sunset almost immediately. The pilot would have known that the window to make effective drops was shrinking fast. Suddenly, Watch Duty displayed many of those aircraft rerouting: They were heading toward Sunset.