It didn’t just seem like there were more brush fires than usual in January, there actually were.
And by a lot.
Cal Fire crews responded to 28 brush fires of 10 or more acres statewide in January — almost one a day — ranging from small Santa Ana River bottom fires to the massive, deadly Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County.
That pace was dizzying compared to the previous three Januarys, when firefighters could almost have hibernated. Cal Fire rolled on zero brush fires of 10 or more acres in 2024 and 2023, and just one in 2022.
Overall, Cal Fire went to 331 brush fires of all sizes in January 2025, a 134.8% increase in such fires and an astounding 75,711.8% increase in acres burned over January 2024.
The Orange County Fire Authority also saw a significant increase. After responding to four brush fires in January 2024 and nine in January 2023, the agency’s engines went to 24 in January 2025.
So why all the fires this January, in the dead of winter?
Officials point to above-normal rainfall the previous two years followed by a historic, near-record-breaking dry spell. Then came the Santa Ana winds, which howled without stopping for days, further drying out vegetation and casting embers for miles that caused what might normally be small fires to grow.
So in some cases, what might typically have been an innocent spark quickly became a conflagration.
“There was a 5-inch deficit of rain in Southern California at the time of these fires,” said Battalion Chief Jesse Torres, a Cal Fire spokesman in Sacramento. “With human-caused fires and high winds, the possibility of unwanted fires is extremely high.
“The fuel and vegetation in Southern California were receptive to burn and the conditions for wildfire were high as the high winds dropped relative humidities into the teens.”
Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles/Oxnard office, said that the dryness of the vegetation in January was “pretty rare.”
How rare?
The water year is measured from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. Through Jan. 15, downtown Los Angeles, which normally records 5.56 inches of rain in a year, had received 0.16 inches of rain — the second-driest start to the water year since 1878. The record was set in 1904, Kittell said.
The Inland Empire and Orange County had received less than a half-inch of rain through mid-January, and that total was boosted by one-third of an inch from a brief storm, said Adam Roser, a meteorologist in the weather service’s San Diego office.
It was the third-driest start to the water year in the Riverside area since 1893, Roser said. High-pressure systems have blocked the storms that would normally drench the region, he said.
“What makes this year unique in precipitation is that the last two years have been extremely wet, so you can imagine a lot of the plants have been pretty abundant, and then they’ve been drying since May, and then they have an extra couple of months to dry on top of that,” Kittell said.
Cal Fire has not announced the cause of most of the January fires and declined to speculate on whether an arsonist set any of them or address any other possible cause. But an overwhelming number of brush fires are caused by humans in some manner.
Cal Fire said there were 6,090 brush fires statewide in 2024. Only 171 were attributable to natural causes such as lightning. Among the identified causes, arson led the way with 938, followed by open debris burning with 734, equipment with 688 and vehicles with 598.
Fire investigators will sometimes announce that a blaze was human-caused not because they have evidence of a specific action but because natural causes have been ruled out.
Adrienne Freeman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, said many fires her agency responded to in January started near a roadside. She cited sparks from exhausts and dragging chains or other car parts, hot engines and discarded cigarettes as frequent causes over the years
But the weather this year has been different, she said.
“If the fuel vegetation had been wet or not carrying (embers by the wind), the fire would have gone out,” Freeman said. “Maybe they were less consequential in previous years.”
Eric Sherwin, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Fire Department, said it is important to maintain vehicles and not park on dry grass. Brush fires can also start from unattended campfires and sparks produced by mowing a rocky field, he said.
January’s spree of fires is a reminder of what officials have been saying for several years: That the so-called brush fire season, when conditions are optimal for ignition and rapid spread of flames, is year-round now.
“We used to put our wildland gear on (the engine) during the summer months, then take it off in the winter,” said Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Thanh Nguyen, a firefighter for 29 years. “That gear became permanent because it could happen any time.”