The Icarian

Design For Disaster – The 1961 Bel Air Conflagration
2025 Fires Are A Remake

What we are witnessing in Los Angeles has happened before.

This is a sad example of history repeating itself, lessons unlearned and warnings ignored in the name of commerce and development. In fact, this history has repeated itself at least 10 times since 1955.

“The biggest thing to note about these fires in LA is that none of this is surprising,” Oregon State University professor Erica Fischer, who studies wildfire impacts on buildings and infrastructure, told the news website CalMatters. https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/01/ca-wui-housing-policy/

The Bel Air/Brentwood wildfire started on 5 November 1961 in the Bel Air community of Los Angeles. During three days, the Santa Ana wind-driven fire destroyed 484 homes, damaged 190 others. It burned more than 16,000 acres.

The population of Los Angeles County was 6 million in 1960, having boomed from 2.7 million in 1940 in the 15 years after WWII. Sixty three years later there are 9.6 million people in Los Angeles County.

Like LA’s population growth, the 2025 fires have been many magnitudes larger and more destructive. The fires, like LA county, are obviously much larger than 63 years ago. To think that a fire of the proportions we are witnessing now couldn’t happen would simply be a failure of imagination, perhaps a willful failure. This is an odd situation for a place where a large section of the economy is driven by innovation and storytelling for profit.

“In 1955, the Ventu Park wildfire tore through the canyons above Malibu, burning nearly 14,000 acres and eight homes. The same area saw two large fires burn hillsides and homes over the next three years. There were two in the 1970s, one in the ‘80s and three in the ‘90s,” according to a CalMatters story by Ben Christopher.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/01/ca-wui-housing-policy/

More recently, the 2018 Woolsey Fire started in Los Angeles County and spread north into Ventura County. The fire began 8 November, 2018. It wasn’t contained until 21 November 2018. The Woolsey Fire burned 96,949 acres, destroyed 1,643 structures. Three people died. More than 295,000 people were evacuated. It was one of several California fires to ignite on the same day.

As of 15 January, fires in the Greater Los Angeles area have burned more than 40,000 acres, destroyed more than 12,300 structures, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. As many as 200,000 residents were forced to evacuate.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/before-after/greater-los-angeles-wildfires-january-2025

The largest blaze, the Palisades Fire, burned nearly 24,000 acres in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. The Eaton Fire, located north of Pasadena, has burned more than 14,000 acres. The Eaton and Palisades fires are more than double the area of the 1961 Bel Air/Brentwood fire. These acreage figures do not include two smaller fires that burned along the border between Los Angeles and Ventura counties. These fires are reportedly contained or nearly contained.

As bad as the 1961 Bel Air fire (also known as the Bel Air Conflagration) was at the time, the one stunning feature of the event is no one was killed as a direct result of the blaze. LA wasn’t so lucky this time. As of 16 January there are 27 confirmed deaths.

In the wake of the Bel Air Conflagration, the LAFD commissioned a 30-minute documentary, “Design For Disaster,” narrated by actor, director and producer William Conrad. Conrad, his voice at least, is known to people of a certain age as TV detective of size Cannon and the narrator of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.

“In 1959 experts from the National Fire Protection Association surveyed portions of Los Angeles. They found a mountain range within the city combustible roofed houses closely spaced in brush covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads. They called it A Design for Disaster. They predicted the Bel Air fire, plus others which are sure to come unless citizens and city officials worked together on a definite plan of fire defense,” Conrad warns in the narration.

Even in 1961, NIMBYism was at work, helping to create the conditions for conflagrations.

“The fire defense the prediction was nothing new to firemen. They have their own ideas about people who don’t like water pumping stations or fire stations in their neighborhood because they feel that they’re unsightly. Or homeowners who refuse to cut brush away from homes because it mars the natural beauty of the hill and those groups who maintain to the last glowing ember that combustible roofs are not hazardous in fire areas despite the fact that over 600 cities have outlawed them,” Conrad says in Design For Disaster.

In 1961, Design for Disaster became reality.

Some 3,000 firefighters fought the 1961 Bel Air/Brentwood fires, only managing to knock the fire down when the Santa Ana winds subsided after three days.

Oh, and dry fire hydrants and firefighters running out of water? That also happened in 1961.

Design For Disaster and William Conrad explain the dry hydrants with an informative animation. The clip linked below starts 22:53 into the film, the point where the explanation how water pressure works begins:

The CalMatters story also offers a good overview of why homes and businesses keep getting built in place where they probably shouldn’t.

“Once the smoke clears, rebuilding in the same place, often in the same way, is the historic norm. A study of 28 catastrophic blazes across California between 1970 and 2009 found that nearly 60% of all the destroyed buildings were replaced within six years,” writes ClaMatters’ Chrsitopher. “The study also found “no consistent trend” suggesting that the homes or communities were rebuilt in a way more likely to resist future fire.” https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/01/ca-wui-housing-policy/

Los Angeles is far from the only large city in California prone to wildfire or other weather-related mass destruction events. Such wildfire events are also not unique to California or the United States.

In the 2025 fires, Santa Ana winds and the accompanying extremely low humidly – often well below 20 percent — persisted for more than a week, not three days as in the 1961 Bel Air conflagration. It’s not over yet. As of Friday, 17 January, Santa Ana winds are expected to return early next week.

There is no rain in the forecast for the foreseeable future.