Southern California’s top fire officials met behind closed doors in East Los Angeles Friday to discuss the outlook for this year’s peak fire season and how to coordinate the region’s world-class firefighters to keep communities safe.

At a press conference afterward, officials stressed that even though coastal Southern California is not expected to have an exceptionally dangerous fire season, they are doing everything they can to protect Californians. They urged residents to do the same.

“It is clear that wildfires are no longer solely a fire-service problem. They are an all-of-us problem,” said Orange County Fire Authority Interim Chief T.J. McGovern, standing in front of a suite of emergency response vehicles at L.A. County Fire Department’s headquarters. “They can only be mitigated by all of us working together.”

Coastal Southern California, which had the third-wettest season in record within the last 15 years, can expect a typical wildfire season, fire weather analysts predict. That’s in sharp contrast to Northern California, which saw a record-breaking March heat wave melt mountain snowpack early. Fire officials typically rely on the snowpack to keep vegetation green and moist into summer.

“The interesting thing about last year is that it was the southern half of the state that was significantly drier,” said Cal Fire Director Joe Tyler at a wildfire season outlook briefing last month. This year, he said, “we’re seeing that critical condition really spreading across Northern California.”

Coastal Southern California must still endure a particularly dry June before reaching typical conditions July through September — and even “typical” conditions remain dangerous, which is why officials urged Southern Californians Friday to remain vigilant.

A series of fires mid-May served as a warning shot for the region. The Sandy fire in Ventura County destroyed one home and damaged two more structures. The Santa Rosa Island fire burned through a third of the second-largest Channel island.

Officials at Friday’s Southern California meeting urged homeowners to do what they can to harden their homes against wildfire — including covering vents with mesh to prevent embers from entering the home and using multi-paned tempered windows that are less likely to shatter in extreme heat.

They also asked homeowners to maintain defensible space around homes by clearing dead vegetation in their yards, making sure there is space between shrubs and trees and creating a 5-foot buffer around homes with nothing combustible, including plants.

Homeowners should also make sure they’re signed up for evacuation alerts from their local fire department, the chiefs added, and should not hesitate to evacuate at the sight or smell of smoke — regardless of whether an official evacuation has been ordered.

As for their part, Southern California fire departments have been working to thin out hazardous vegetation surrounding communities and remain at the ready to respond to fires.

“We will show up. We show up every time, across every jurisdiction … That’s not a question,” said Los Angeles City Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore. However, without defensible space at individual homes, it is “very difficult for us to be able to combat those fires.”

The Los Angeles and Ventura county fire departments have been working to remove flammable vegetation surrounding communities in the Santa Monica Mountains with fire department crews, goats and prescribed fire. The U.S. Forest Service has been doing similar work in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The crews are working to create a network of vegetation-free pathways, called fuel breaks, that can slow fires and give firefighters strategic access to wildlands to combat blazes. They are also working to remove particularly flammable invasive grasses.

“As we share our preparation to defend communities and build wildfire resilience, it’s a call to action,” Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia said. “It’s now a shift to individual homeowners and communities to start leveraging some of that work that your agencies are doing.”

While this kind of landscape-wide work has significantly increased in the state over the past five years, California is running out of money to complete such projects.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service saw a decrease in how much work it could complete after the Trump administration significantly reduced the size of the service’s workforce.

Neither the state’s funding woes nor the shrinking of the federal workforce are expected to impact firefighting ability.

“It is absolutely as strong as ever,” Tyler said last month of the federal and state government’s ability to respond to fires.

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has joined a chorus of California hospitals and health systems lobbying the state for a $500-million emergency payment to public hospitals bracing for massive financial losses.

The California Assn. of Public Hospitals and Health Systems is requesting a one-time general fund payment in the 2026-27 budget to help cover inpatient care for fee-for-service Medi-Cal patients at the state’s 17 public hospitals.

While the exact percentage of the $500 million allocated to each hospital will depend on inpatient claims, the county expects that roughly 25%, or $125 million, will end up at Los Angeles County hospitals, said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of LA Health Services.

“That’s the money that is really necessary to serve as a stopgap and continue that lifeline that the public hospitals desperately need, particularly with the state’s proposed shift of undocumented individuals from managed care into fee-for-service,” Ghaly said.

Ghaly praised county voters for passing Measure ER, which will provide an estimated $220 million annually for the next five years to the county health system through a new half-cent sales tax, Ghaly said.

But it’s not enough to stanch what the county estimates will be a $700-million annual loss by the 2028-29 fiscal year.

LA Health Services is the largest public health system in the state and second-largest in the nation. It serves as a safety net for the county’s 10 million residents, providing healthcare regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.

More than 80% of the system’s patients rely on Medi-Cal, Los Angeles General Medical Center Chief Executive Jorge Orozco told a state Senate committee in March.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law last summer, alters Medicaid eligibility requirements and includes about $1 trillion in federal Medicaid reductions over 10 years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. As a result, California is expected to lose tens of billions in total funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

About 660,000 people in Los Angeles County are expected to lose Medi-Cal coverage, “but they will not stop needing healthcare,” Orozco said in March. “They will still come to our emergency rooms for everything from routine illness to life threatening conditions. And safety net hospital systems like ours will be forced to absorb those costs.”

County health officials have enacted hiring freezes, consolidated services, reduced overtime and taken other cost-cutting measures in anticipation of the losses, resulting in about $230 million in savings.

“But we need to be clear: we cannot cut our way out of a funding loss of this magnitude,” the department said in a statement released this week. “Without help from the State, we will be forced to consider options no one wants, reduced patient services, staff layoffs, and potential facility closures.”

The county has not yet identified specific services for closure, Ghaly said.

“Our focus is entirely on preventing the harm that would come before we have to make those tough choices,” she added.

A memo on the department’s fiscal outlook prepared for the Board of Supervisors sounded the alarm in April.

“For the patients we serve, losing Medi-Cal doesn’t mean they stop getting sick — it means losing access to care. Health Services will still be here, but with over 600,000 more uninsured patients in LA County alone, the strain will be felt across our health system and across every emergency room in Los Angeles County,” the memo read.

“Without substantial new revenue sources, Health Services will have no alternative but to consider planning for service curtailments — including possible facility closures and staff layoffs — beginning in early 2027.”