In January, destructive wildfires devastated Los Angeles, killing at least 30 people and displacing hundreds of thousands more. As the city rebuilds, it may face a particularly brutal summer fire season, experts warn.
Thanks to a potentially deadly combination of alarming environmental conditions and sweeping cuts to emergency response agencies, the outlook on California’s 2025 fire season is grim. With critical resources—particularly fire response personnel—drastically depleted, it’s unclear how the state will be able to manage what is shaping up to be an active season.
“I am not confident in our ability to respond to wildfire [or] concurrent disasters this summer,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told Gizmodo. Unusually early mountain snowmelt, a very dry winter, and both current and projected above-average temperatures are the main factors likely to increase the frequency and intensity of California’s fires this year, he said.
“Some aspects of fire season are predictable and some aspects are not. What ultimately happens will be a function of both of those things,” Swain said. “The most likely outcome is a very active fire season both in the lower elevations and also in the higher elevations this year.”
Brian Fennessy, chief of the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA), agrees. “Every predictive service model indicates that Southern California will have an active peak fire year,” he told Gizmodo in an email. “Absent significant tropical influence that brings with it high humidity and potential precipitation, we expect the potential for large fires.”
Fire season sparks early
In a typical year in June, California is still pretty wet, Swain said. At higher elevations, snowpack continues to melt until July, keeping mountain soils moist. Meanwhile, lower elevations remain saturated from the state’s wet season, which generally lasts from winter to spring. But this is not a typical year.
“Although the seasonal mountain snowpack was decently close to the long-term average…it melted much faster than average,” Swain said. When snowpack melts earlier, high-elevation soils dry out earlier, jumpstarting wildfire season in California’s mountain regions. “We’re about a month to a month-and-a-half ahead of schedule in terms of the drying in the mountains,” he explained. Because of this, the higher mountain forest fire risk is probably going to be “a lot higher” than usual by July, August, and September.
In California’s low-lying regions, which include most of the state’s area and population, experts are already seeing an uptick in fire activity. The reasons vary for different parts of the state, Swain said, but in Southern California, it’s due to a very dry winter. “We know this because we had the worst, most destructive fires on record in L.A. in January, which is usually the peak of the rainy season,” he explained.
In low-lying, inland areas of Northern California, it’s been unseasonably hot for the past month. In addition to raising current fire risk, the above-average temperatures suggest the state is in for an incredibly hot summer, according to Swain. “To the extent that we have seasonal predictions, the one for this summer and early fall is screaming, ‘yikes—this looks like a very hot summer,’ potentially across most of the West,” he said. In fact, it could be among the warmest on record.
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