The Southern California fires have us on the edge of our seat. When can we finally relax?

When our city went up in flames last week, everyone I know in Los Angeles was in emergency mode. Now, as a new week begins, it’s hard to know how to feel.

For those of us living in neighborhoods not decimated by fire, the acute threat seems to have passed, at least for the moment. The skies are blueish and a light breeze is blowing as I write this. There’s ash on the ground, but less of it in the air. Most LAUSD schools have thankfully reopened. Friends and neighbors who left town are trickling back home.

And yet the National Weather Service warned of a “particularly dangerous situation” with wind gusts up to 45 to 70 mph from 4 a.m. Tuesday through 12 p.m. Wednesday for swaths of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Additional powerful wind events are also expected throughout the week.

“We are not in the clear yet and we must not let our guard down,” Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at a news conference Monday.

And so, in my house at least, the evacuation bags are still packed and waiting by the door and my phone remains in easy reach at all times. But how much longer do we have to live like this, allowing Watch Duty alerts to interrupt our sleep, poised for flight? When will we stop feeling the threat of fire hanging over our heads? Or has the threat always been there and we’re only now just seeing it?

“The reality check is there will always be events that nature throws at us that, no matter how great our technology, we can’t fight,” said Costas Synolakis, professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC. “We don’t have to live in fear, but this should give us pause about how vulnerable we are.”

A season of high risk

Fire experts say it was the deadly combination of extremely high Santa Ana winds of up to 99 mph and a city that hadn’t seen significant rain in eight months that set the stage for the two most destructive fires in L.A. history: the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire. Collectively they have burned more than 37,000 acres and killed at least 24 people.

“How a fire starts, grows and spreads has a lot to do with wind and rainfall,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, assistant professor of fire policy and management at the University of Oregon. “We had this duality of high risk from drought making things very pro-fire growth and pro-fire proliferation plus fast-moving winds that are going to carry it quickly, make it harder to suppress and challenge firefighter safety.”

The winds may have died down for now, but the dry conditions remain unchanged, making it easy for new fires to break out from a long list of sources. If the underbelly of an overheated car comes in contact with bone-dry vegetation, that can start a fire. If someone accidentally drags a chain behind their truck, unknowingly sending sparks into the air, that too can set our hills ablaze.

“As long as these drought conditions endure, having that go bag packed is not a bad idea,” Stasiewicz said. “If you have a wind event, the opportunity is there to have a fire get bigger, quicker — and larger fires are harder to contain.”

Her advice? Keep an eye on the weather forecast, paying special attention to wind advisories. “It’s a bit of keeping yourself on your toes,” she said.

This ends with rain

Despite the terrifying imagery and intense warnings, keep in mind that the high wind gusts predicted for the coming week are still significantly lower than the howling “Wizard of Oz”-like winds that blew through the city the night our two deadly fires began.

“To be clear, it looks very unlikely that we’ll see strong north winds of anywhere near the magnitude that we did in the beginning of [last] week,” said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist on a YouTube livestream on Friday.

However, he does not think L.A. is out of the woods yet when it comes to fire risk.

“Relatively strong Santa Ana winds have a cumulative effect on intense drying,” he said. “I call them atmospheric blow-dryer-like winds. The longer they blow, the dryer and more flammable the vegetation becomes.”

According to Swain, the city of L.A. will not truly be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief until we see rain.

“What we really need is an inch or two of rain to truly and finally end fire season in L.A.,” he said. “Until then, any time there are dry windy conditions, we are going to see an additional risk.”

Unfortunately, there is only a slim chance of scattered showers in the forecast for the next two weeks.

“There is a chance we may continue to see fire risk into February or even March,” Swain said.

Facing a new reality

Even with no rain in the forecast, Synolakis, who has studied people’s response to natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes and fires across the world, thinks it’s likely that most of us will relax our hyper-vigilant state fairly soon.

“Last week the feeling in my community in Venice was eerily similar to the first few days after 9/11 when people didn’t know if there were going to be more attacks elsewhere in the United States,” he told me. “Hearing helicopters, and seeing these giant plumes of fire increased our uncertainty. People didn’t know if the fire was going to spread all the way down here.”

But as long as the fire plumes continue to clear and evacuation orders continue to be downgraded to warnings or less, he expects people who have not been directly affected by the fires to return to a semblance of normalcy.

“If there is no new flare-up, I think by the weekend people in surrounding communities will take a deep sigh of relief,” he said.

Whether that relief is warranted, however, is worth considering. The feeling of acute threat may have passed, but climate scientists have been warning us for decades that a warming world will be accompanied by more intense weather and more intense fire.

“These fires are entirely unexpected, but this is what I keep telling people about climate change,” Synolakis said. “You are going to have more events that are unexpected, and you are not going to be able to deal with them.”