It has been warned of fatal forest fires. Has it done enough to prepare?

Dave Gomberg had watched the wind, his mounting of worry. Fire veteran specialist at the National Weather Service, he understood the high pressure and low pressure systems that erected the sadly famous Santa Anas who periodically blown in southern California.

It wasn’t that. In the upper atmosphere, powerful currents had to line up with the rapid air of the desert, threatening a rare supercharged wind storm – all this in a region that had seen less than a quarter of rain in the last eight month.

The National Weather Service held a conference call with the managers of the management of fire and emergencies in southern California on January 3, warning that a “truly historic event” was due in four days, with the possibility of fires which would propagate at an extraordinary speed. Even an amateur meteorological observer was worried about the conditions: “Altadena, we have a problem,” he warned his disciples.

However, neither the days of delay nor the very specific warnings of meteorological experts were sufficient to save Los Angeles from a hell. Fire storms that would ravage the region would exhibit multiple weaknesses in the region’s ability to respond to an extreme meteorological event – even the one whose timing was largely predicted – which was much more serious than seasonal fire threats than California had long endured.

There was no press conference in all hands of civil servants before the arrival of the winds, as happened in Florida before a major hurricane. There was no unique local leader in the politically fragmented region who went to local television to warn residents of the extraordinary danger. Comté supervisors have issued warnings, but mainly on their social media accounts. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who heads the largest of the 88 cities in the county, was outside the country when the fires ignited. Governor Gavin Newsom had descended from Sacramento, not for fires but for an independent press conference, and he was more than two hours in the Palm Springs region when the first fire broke out.

Los Angeles had spent decades preparing for a major earthquake disaster – the “big”, they call it – and the big one was here. But it was a fire, and no one had a game book for such a big one.