Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kyle Resdahl, Tuesday, 14 January, back at work, thankfully.

Back in my house, that whole deal.

Yeah, it was a little hairy.

It was a little hairy. Anyway, so we're going to talk about the LA fires and more importantly, the LA fires and all the rest of us because maybe it's

not coming quite the way it did here, but it's all coming for all of us. Right. The it coming for all of us

is climate change. I mean, these fires obviously have taken lives, homes, businesses, whole communities.

This is going to likely be one of the costliest disasters ever in the United States.

So we want to know more about the role that climate change is playing in these disasters, how communities can adapt to increasing wildfire risk, and also how we can

make the recovery process work better for more people. So for that, Crystal Colden is here to make

a smart. She's a director of the Fire Resilience Center at the University of California, Merced,

and a former wildland firefighter. Welcome to the show, Crystal.

Thanks for having me. So as somebody who has fought wildfires, what stands out to you about

some of the conditions that these firefighters in L.A. are up against? So what's really challenging

for firefighters in these particular fires is that, first of all, it's January.

And while it's not unheard of to have wildfires in January in Southern California, we normally don't see them of this magnitude.

And specifically, the types of really strong, hot, dry Santa Ana winds that fueled these fires this last week and the extremely dry

condition of the fuel that produced just the incredible fire behavior that challenged firefighters. And what we saw,

of course, was that you just can't control the fire when it is burning this intensely and with the

types of flames we saw and the extreme ember showers that just blew everywhere.

Also, the speed of this whole thing, right, Crystal? I mean, it happened so fast.

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