Southern California Fires Incident Analysis Report Released
UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute has released the “Southern California Fires Incident Analysis Report,” the second of two reports conducted at the request of the Office of the Governor of California after the devastating Southern California fires of January 2025.
The fires, including the Palisades and Eaton Fires, occurred under extreme wildfire conditions characterized by powerful Santa Ana winds, critically dry vegetation, and rapid fire spread from vegetation into the built environment, becoming among the most deadly, destructive, and costly wildfire disasters in California history. ULRI conducted an extensive data collection effort, building on a similar approach used in its analysis of the 2023 Lahaina Fire, to establish a timeline and fact base around these fires. This work resulted in the publication of the first report, the Southern California Fires Timeline Report.
This new report builds upon the timeline report and thoroughly examines the conditions, decisions, actions, and systems that influenced the wildfires and resulting community conflagrations before and during the fires. The analysis considerations include emergency preparedness and management; water and electric utilities; weather and vegetation; evacuation warnings and orders; transportation; fire and law enforcement actions, tactics, and policies; fatalities; and built environment factors. Throughout the report, 175 findings and 266 recommendations are identified, presenting lessons learned to support continuous improvement in resilience, preparedness, and response.
The report is informed by data collected from varied sources, including technical discussions with emergency responders and subject matter experts, resident interviews and surveys, site assessments, geospatial analysis, policy reviews, radio communications, dispatch records, automatic vehicle location information, and other available operational data.
The following timelapse animations of the Palisades and Eaton Fires layer each fire’s progression and evacuation activity. Although they represent only a couple of the many interconnected systems examined in the report, they provide a glimpse into the speed, scale, and complexity of the incident and the extraordinary challenges faced by responders, officials, and affected communities.
Key Findings and Recommendations
The analysis found that wildfire and community conflagration outcomes were influenced by the combined performance of numerous interconnected systems rather than a single point of failure. Prior to the fires, California and local agencies had implemented a wide range of wildland urban interface fire risk reduction, preparedness, and response measures, including defensible space programs, vegetation management initiatives, public preparedness efforts, evacuation planning and notification systems, mutual aid frameworks, and substantial firefighting resources.
Despite these investments, the intensity, magnitude, and complexity of the Palisades and Eaton Fires challenged many of the assumptions on which existing programs and response strategies were based. The analysis identified considerable challenges in the implementation and performance of community-wide risk reduction measures, incident management processes, evacuation coordination, situational awareness, infrastructure resilience, fire suppression effectiveness, and resource accountability. Findings also indicate that wildfire exposure and structure loss are increasingly shaped by factors at the neighborhood and community scale, extending beyond individual properties and conventional mitigation practices.
“The fires in Southern California and in communities across the U.S. demonstrate that we are entering a new era of modern conflagration. This report underscores how prevention, preparedness, infrastructure, evacuation, emergency response, incident management, and the built environment collectively shaped wildfire outcomes during the 2025 fires. The findings and recommendations identified in this report extend well beyond California and demonstrate that meaningful wildfire resilience depends on strengthening the entire system, not any single program, policy, or organization.”
—Steve Kerber
Vice President and Executive Director
UL Research Institutes | Fire Safety Research Institute
Key recommendations focus on:
- advancing community-scale wildfire mitigation;
- increasing readiness for large wind-driven community conflagrations;
- strengthening situational awareness and operational intelligence;
- advancing fire suppression capabilities for community conflagrations;
- expanding wildfire-resistant building practices and community preparedness;
- improving evacuation and communications interoperability;
- enhancing infrastructure performance under extreme conditions; and
- developing standardized post-suppression procedures.
