In a case that calls into question plant clearing techniques that have become fundamental to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, the San Diego Superior Court has ordered the agency to amend a program to reduce wildfire risk across the state because it could make things worse.

The years-long legal action filed by the California Chaparral Institute and Endangered Habitats League against the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection within Cal Fire, highlights deep rifts between ecologists’ and firefighters’ approaches to solving California’s wildfire crisis.

Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute, was elated. “Chaparral and sage scrub is more than 10% of the state,” he said.

“Despite all the rhetoric about how we love biodiversity, you’re going to wipe out where most of the biodiversity is in the state,” and in the process make the landscape more flammable, Halsey said of the Cal Fire plan.

Cal Fire’s Vegetation Treatment Program aims to use prescribed fire plus tree and brush cutting to reduce the risk of a wildfire igniting, exploding out of control and jeopardizing lives and property. In doing so, the agency also tries to nurture the biodiversity of native species and protect clean water and soil health.

“The California Vegetation Treatment Program is one critical tool of many to address the state’s catastrophic wildfire crisis,” Tony Andersen, executive officer of the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in a statement. “We appreciate the months of collaborative work spent with the Chaparral Institute, Endangered Habitats League, and others to find interim solutions that address their feedback.”

In California’s conifer forests, this often looks like thinning an unnaturally high density of trees and brush that fuel exceptionally severe fire.

But in Southern California, much of the wildlands are home to chaparral ecosystems of shrubs, oak trees, native grasses and flowers, and the typical approach is to cut fuel breaks: long strips along ridgelines and roadways devoid of all vegetation that can stop creeping ground fires in their tracks and give firefighters safe access to battle wind-driven blazes that can easily jump.

Severe and frequent wildfires are already causing some areas with trees to become chaparral and some areas of chaparral to become just flammable grasses. The legal action claimed that Cal Fire’s chaparral firebreaks can cause this “type conversion.”

When native chaparral is cleared from a landscape, whether by a wildfire or through a vegetation management project, it’s often not native plants that grow back, but instead opportunistic fast-growing invasive grasses.

Cal Fire argued that its program addressed this in its environmental impact review. But the California Chaparral Institute and Endangered Habitats League said the department did not take into account that these invasive grasses are much more flammable than the native species it is cutting down — meaning it could increase fire risk.

The Vegetation TreatmentProgram guides real work on the ground. So far this year it has completed more than 5,400 acres of work on 26 projects. About 13% of the work was in shrublands, like chaparral.

The ecology organizations filed the petition in 2020, and in 2023 the San Diego Superior Court ruled for Cal Fire. The organizations appealed, and, in May 2025, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal reversed the trial court and ordered it to determine how to remedy the problem.

On Nov. 14, the lower court ordered Cal Fire to address the potential for type conversion to worsen wildfire risk and until it does so, barred individual projects in the Vegetation Treatment Program from relying on the program’s blanket environmental review to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.

The order does not apply to new fuel break projects that already have a plan to prevent flammable grasses from growing, nor to maintaining existing fuel breaks. Projects on forestlands and grasslands may also continue unimpeded, as may projects on land that has already lost its trees or chaparral to type conversion.

Ecologists and fire officials ultimately have the same goals: reduce devastating wildfires and protect native biodiversity. After all, fire can wipe out thousands of acres of native ecosystem — and the non-native ecosystems that plague the region can much more easily ignite.

But ecologists tend to favor solutions preserving native ecosystems (such as programs focused on reducing the chance of fire starting in the first place), whereas fire officials tend to gravitate toward solutions that view plants as “fuel” for a potential fire (such as cutting away vegetation to create fuel breaks).

Fire officials argue fuel breaks give crews a much needed strategic advantage when they’re working to protect communities. However, some ecologists question whether breaks even help in ember-driven fires and whether fire departments actually staff fuel breaks during an emergency.

These differences came into full focus as fire departments and land managers in the Santa Monica Mountains began a project to build a network of fuel breaks throughout the region in September, thanks to an expedited approval process created by Gov. Gavin Newsom and funding from the $10-billion climate bond that California voters approved last November.

As the board updates the program, “we’re taking stock of what’s working and boosting progress,” Andersen said. The board is working to find opportunities to “balance environmental and ecological protection with keeping communities and people safe. We can do both and the program is working to show how.”

California could see an early start to the annual flu season, as a combination of low vaccination rates and late mutations to the virus may leave the state particularly exposed to transmission, health experts say.

Already, there are warning signs. Los Angeles County recently reported its first flu death of the season, and other nations are reporting record-breaking or powerful, earlier-than-expected flu seasons.

Typically, flu picks up right after Christmas and into the New Year, but Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional physician chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, said she expects increases in viral activity perhaps over the next two to three weeks.

“We’re expecting an early and likely sharp start to the flu season,” Hudson said.

Last year’s flu season was the worst California had seen in years, and it’s not usual for there to be back-to-back bad flu seasons. But a combination of a decline in flu vaccination rates and a “souped-up mutant” is particularly concerning this year, according to Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at UC San Francisco.

“That may translate into more people getting infected. And as more people get infected, a proportion of them will go to the hospital,” Chin-Hong said.

The timing of this new flu subvariant — called H3N2 subclade K — is particularly problematic. It emerged toward the end of the summer, long after health officials had already determined how to formulate this fall’s flu vaccine, a decision that had to be made in February.

H3N2 subclade K seems to be starting to dominate in Japan and Britain, Hudson said.

“It looks like a bit of a mismatch between the seasonal flu vaccine strains” and the new subvariant, Hudson said.

It remains unclear whether subclade K will reduce the effectiveness of this year’s flu shot.

In California and the rest of the U.S., “things are quiet, but I think it’s just a calm before the storm,” Chin-Hong said. “From what we see in the U.K. and Japan, a lot more people are getting flu earlier.”

Chin-Hong noted that subclade K is not that much different than the strains this year’s flu vaccines were designed against. And he noted data recently released in Britain that showed this season’s vaccines were still effective against hospitalization.

According to the British government, vaccinated children were 70% to 75% less likely to need hospital care, and adults were 30% to 40% less likely. Flu vaccine effectiveness is typically between 30% to 60%, and tends to be more effective in younger people, the British government said.

Even if there is some degree of mismatch between the vaccine and circulating strains, “the flu vaccine still provides protection against severe illness, including hospitalizations,” according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

“Public Health strongly encourages everyone who has not received the flu vaccine yet this year to receive it now, especially before gathering with loved ones during the holidays,” the department said in a statement.

But “while mismatched vaccines may still provide protection, enhanced genetic, antigenic and epidemiological … monitoring are warranted to inform risk assessment and response,” according to scientists writing in the Journal of the Assn. of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Canada.

Because the vaccine is not a perfect match for the latest mutated flu strain, Chin-Hong said getting antiviral medication like Tamiflu to infected patients may be especially important this year, even for those who are vaccinated. That’s especially true for the most vulnerable, which include the very young and very old.

“But that means you need to get diagnosed earlier,” Chin-Hong said. Drugs like Tamiflu work best when started within one to two days after flu symptoms begin, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

There are now at-home flu testing kits that are widely available for sale for people who are showing signs of illness.

Also worrying is how the flu has surged in other countries.

Australia’s flu season came earlier this year and was more severe than usual. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners said that nation saw a record flu season, with more than 410,000 lab-confirmed cases, up from the prior all-time high of 365,000 that were reported last year.

“This is not a record we want to be breaking,” Dr. Michael Wright, president of the physician’s group, said.

Hudson noted Australia’s flu season was “particularly hard on children” this year.

L.A. County health officials cautioned that Australia’s experience isn’t a solid predictor of what happens locally.

“It is difficult to predict what will happen in the United States and Los Angeles, as the severity of the flu season depends on multiple factors including circulating strains, pre-existing immunity, vaccine uptake, and the overall health of the population,” the L.A. County Department of Public Health said.

The new strain has also thrown a wrench in things. As Australia’s flu season was ending, “this new mutation came up, which kind of ignited flu in Japan and the U.K., and other parts of Europe and Asia,” Chin-Hong said.

On Friday, Japan reportedly issued a national alert with flu cases surging and hospitalizations increasing, especially among children and the elderly, accompanied by a sharp rise in school and class closures. The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun said children ages 1 through 9 and adults 80 and up were among the hardest-hit groups.

Taiwanese health officials warned of the possibility of a second peak in flu this year, according to the Central News Agency. There was already a peak in late September and early October — a month earlier than normal — and officials are warning about an uptick in flu cases starting in December and then peaking around the Lunar New Year on Feb. 17.

Taiwanese officials said 95% of patients with severe flu symptoms had not been recently vaccinated.

British health officials this month issued a “flu jab SOS,” as an early wave struck the nation. Flu cases are “already triple what they were this time last year,” Public Health Minister Ashley Dalton said in a statement.

In England, outside of pandemic years, this fall marked the earliest start to the flu season since 2003-04, scientists said in the journal Eurosurveillance.

“We have to brace ourselves for another year of more cases of flu,” Chin-Hong said.

One major concern has been declining flu vaccination rates — a trend seen in both Australia and the United States.

In Australia, only 25.7% of children age 6 months to 5 years were vaccinated against flu in 2025, the lowest rate since 2021. Among seniors age 65 and up, 60.5% were vaccinated, the lowest rate since 2020.

Australian health officials are promoting free flu vaccinations for children that don’t require an injection, but are administered by nasal spray.

“We must boost vaccination rates,” Wright said.

In the U.S., officials recommend the annual flu vaccine for everyone age 6 months and up. Those age 65 and up are eligible for a higher-dose version, and kids and adults between age 2 and age 49 are eligible to get vaccinated via the FluMist nasal spray, rather than a needle injection.

Officials this year began allowing people to order FluMist to be mailed to them at home.

Besides getting vaccinated, other ways to protect yourself against the flu include washing your hands frequently, avoiding sick people and wearing a mask in higher-risk indoor settings, such as while in the airport and on a plane.

Healthy high-risk people, such as older individuals, can be prescribed antiviral drugs like Tamiflu if another household member has the flu, Chin-Hong said.

Doctors are especially concerned about babies, toddlers and young children up to age 5.

“Those are the kids that are the most vulnerable if they get any kind of a respiratory illness. It can really go badly for them, and they can end up extraordinarily ill,” Hudson said.

In the United States, just 49.2% of children had gotten a flu shot as of late April, lower than the 53.4% who had done so at the same point the previous season, according to preliminary national survey results. Both figures are well below the final flu vaccination rate for eligible children during the 2019-20 season, which was 63.7%.

Among adults, 46.7% had gotten their flu shot as of late April, slightly down from the 47.4% at the same point last season, according to the preliminary survey results, which are the most recent data available.

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, flu vaccination coverage had been slowly increasing; downturns in coverage occurred during and after the pandemic. Flu vaccination levels have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels,” according to the CDC.

The disparaging of vaccinations by federal health officials, led by the vaccine-skeptic secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has not helped improve immunization rates, health experts say. Kennedy told the New York Times on Thursday that he personally directed the CDC to change its website to abandon its position that vaccines do not cause autism.

Mainstream health experts and former CDC officials denounced the change. “Extensive scientific evidence shows vaccines do not cause autism,” wrote Daniel Jernigan, Demetre Daskalakis and Debra Houry, all former top officials at the CDC, in an op-ed to MS NOW.

“CDC has been updated to cause chaos without scientific basis. Do not trust this agency,” Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, added on social media. “This is a national embarrassment.”

State health officials from California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii on Friday called the new claims on the CDC website inaccurate and said there are decades of “high quality evidence that vaccines are not linked to autism.”

“Over 40 high-quality studies involving more than 5.6 million children have found no link between any routine childhood vaccine and autism,” the L.A. County Department of Public Health said Friday. “The increase in autism diagnoses reflects improved screening, broader diagnostic criteria, and greater awareness, not a link to vaccines.”

Hudson said it’s important to get evidence-based information on the flu vaccines.

“Vaccines save lives. The flu vaccine in particular saves lives,” Hudson said.

Dozens of Topanga residents gathered in the town’s Community House to hear Assistant Fire Chief Drew Smith discuss how the Los Angeles County Fire Department plans to keep Topangans alive in a fierce firestorm.

In the red-brick atrium, adorned with exposed wood and a gothic chandelier, Smith explained that if a fire explodes next to the town and flames will reach homes within minutes, orchestrating a multi-hour evacuation through winding mountain roads for Topanga’s more than 8,000 residents will just not be a viable option. In such cases, Smith told attendees at the town’s Oct. 4 ReadyFest wildfire preparedness event, the department now plans to order residents to shelter in their homes.

“Your structure may catch on fire,” Smith said. “You’re going to have religious moments, I guarantee it. But that’s your safest option.”

Wildfire emergency response leaders and experts have described such an approach as concerning and point to Australia as an example: After the nation adopted a similar policy, a series of brush fires in 2009 now known as Black Saturday killed 173 people, many sheltering in their homes.

Some in the bohemian community of nature lovers, creatives and free spirits — who often pride themselves on their rugged, risky lifestyle navigating floods, mudslides, wildfires and the road closures and power outages they entail — are left with the sinking realization that the wildfire risk in Topanga may be too big to bear.

Water tanks called “pumpkins” are available to helicopters to be used during a fire at 69 Bravo, an LAFD Command Center along Saddle Peak Road in Topanga.

They see the shelter-in-place plan as a perilous wager, with no comprehensive plan to help residents harden their homes against fire and no clear, fire-tested guidance on what residents should do if they’re stuck in a burning home.

“Do we need to have some way of communicating with first responders while we are sheltering in place? Would the fire front be approaching us and we’re just on our own?” asked Connie Najah, a Topanga resident who attended ReadyFest and was unsettled by the proposal. “What are the plans for helping people through this season and the next season while we’re waiting to have widespread defensible space implementation?”

No fire chief wants to face the scenario of a vulnerable town with no time to evacuate. But it is a real possibility for Topanga. Smith, speaking to The Times, stressed that the new guidelines only apply to situations where the Fire Department has deemed evacuations infeasible.

“If we have time to evacuate, we will evacuate you,” Smith said.

Emergency operations experts say not enough has been done in their field to address the very grim possibility that evacuating may not always be possible — in part because it’s a hard reality to confront. It’s not a small problem, either: Cal Fire has identified more than 2,400 developments around the state with at least 30 residences that have significant fire risk and only a single evacuation route. Topanga is home to nine of them.

Recent fires, including the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise and Woolsey fire in Malibu, have made the issue too hard to ignore.

In Topanga, Najah has a ham radio license so she can stay informed when power and cell service inevitably go down. The elementary school relocates out of town during red-flag days. A task force including the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness, the Fire Department and other emergency operations agencies publishes a Disaster Survival Guide and distributes it to every household.

“The survival guide was born out of necessity,” said James Grasso, president of TCEP, who also serves as a call firefighter for the county Fire Department. “We’re pretty isolated. We’re densely populated. Fuel and homes are intermixed. It’s an extremely dangerous area, particularly during Santa Ana wind conditions.”

The guide had instructed residents to flock to predetermined “public safe refuges” in town, such as the baseball field at the Community House or the large parking lot at the state park, to wait out fires. If residents couldn’t make it to these, there were predetermined “public temporary refuge areas” within each neighborhood, such as street intersections and homes with large cleared backyards, that provide some increased chance of survival.

But when the Fire Department determined the spaces were not capable of protecting the town’s entire population from the extreme radiant heat, it pivoted to sheltering in place — the last and most dangerous option listed in the old guide.

Connie Najah, a 16-year resident of Topanga, points out photographs from the Topanga Disaster Survival Guide of places that were once considered “public safe refuges” to be used during a fire.

The survival guide’s old plan was consistent with what emergency response experts and officials have argued across the globe, but it failed to meet typical safety standards for such an approach.

In a March report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, researchers who spent years investigating the response to the Camp fire recommended a network of safety zones and temporary fire refuge areas as a strategy to keep residents alive.

The report argued that, due to tightly packed combustible structures amid an accumulation of flammable vegetation, “nearly all” communities are “unsuitable” for sheltering in place.

David Shew, a trained architect and firefighter who spent more than 30 years at Cal Fire, said that for a shelter-in-place policy to be viable, a community would need to undertake significant work to harden their homes and create defensible space — work that has not been done in most California communities.

It’s “not really safe for people to just think, ‘OK, I’ve done nothing but they told me to just jump in my house,’” he said.

And once a house ignites, suggestions that Smith offered up at ReadyFest like sheltering in a bathroom are of little use, said Mark Ghilarducci, a former director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

“Under certain circumstances, your home could potentially provide a buffer,” he said. But if a house is burning and surrounded by fire in the wildlands, “you’re in a position where you are essentially trapped, and your bathroom’s not going to save you.”

Smith said, however, that the Fire Department had done its own analysis of the Topanga area and determined that the fire dynamics in the area are too extreme for Topanga’s proposed public shelter spaces to be effective.

During hot, aggressive fires like the Woolsey, Franklin and Palisades fires, Smith said, “for 30 to 100 people, you need a minimum of clear land that’s 14 acres, which is 14 football fields.” Many of the safety areas in the survival guide, such as an L.A. County Public Works water tank facility, are barely larger than 1 acre.

The department argues sheltering in place, although far from guaranteeing survival, eliminates the risk of residents getting trapped on roadways, unable to see, with almost no protection.

“There is no way that we can 100% eliminate the fire risk and death potential if you live in a fire-prone area,” Smith said.

Regardless of what residents (or emergency response experts) think of the department’s approach, the safest thing residents can do, experts say, is to always, always, always follow the department’s orders, whether that’s to evacuate, find a safety zone or shelter in their homes. The department’s plan to keep residents alive depends on it.

Still, the history of shelter-in-place policies — and their more aggressive companion, “stay and defend,” which involves attempting to actively combat the blaze at home — looms heavy.

After more than 100 bush fires swept through southeast Australia in 1983, killing 75 people in what became known as Ash Wednesday, Australian fire officials adopted a “stay or go” policy: Either leave well before a fire reaches you, or prepare to stay and fend for yourself. If you’re living in a high fire hazard area, the philosophy goes, it is your responsibility to defend your property and keep yourself alive amid strained fire resources.

Around the same time, California considered the policy for itself after dangerous fires ripped through the Santa Monica Mountains, Ghilarducci said. State officials ultimately decided against it, choosing instead to prioritize early evacuations. Cal Fire’s “Ready, Set, Go!” public awareness campaign became the face of those efforts.

In 2009, an explosive suite of brush fires broke out, yet again, in southeast Australia and seemed to confirm California’s worst nightmare: 173 people lost their lives in the Black Saturday tragedy. Of those, 40% died during or after an attempt to defend their property, and nearly 30% died sheltering in their homes without attempting to defend them. About 20% died while attempting to evacuate.

Afterward, Australia significantly overhauled the policy, placing a much greater emphasis on evacuating early and developing fire shelter building standards.

Nearly a decade later, California confronted its own stress test. The Camp fire ripped through Paradise in the early morning on Nov. 8, 2018. The time between the first sighting of the fire and it reaching the edge of town: one hourand 39 minutes. The time it took to evacuate: seven hours.

Among the miraculous stories of survival in Paradise were the many individuals who found refuge areas in town: a predetermined safety zone in a large, open meadow; the parking lots of stores, churches and schools; a local fire station; roadways and intersections with a little buffer from the burning trees.

But the same day, the intensity of the Woolsey fire in the Santa Monica Mountains — similarly plagued with evacuation challenges — unsettled fire officials. It’s in these conditions that Smith doubted Topanga’s refuge sites could protect residents.

Stuck without many options, the Fire Department began slowly thinking about refining the policies that proved disastrous for Australia. The Palisades fire brought a renewed urgency.

Just a month before ReadyFest, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone stirred anxiety among emergency response officials when he appeared to endorse a stay-and-defend policy, telling KCAL-TV, “We’ve always told people that when the evacuation order comes, you must leave. We’ve departed from that narrative. With the proper training, with the proper equipment and with the proper home hardening and defensible space, you can stay behind and prevent your house from burning down.”

The department later clarified the statement, saying the change only applies to individuals in the Santa Monica Mountains’ community brigade who have received significant training from the department and operate under the department’s command. (The brigade is not intended as a means for members to protect their own homes but instead serve the larger community.)

Now, residents worry the policy to shelter in place is coming without enough preparation.

A worker stops traffic that has been reduced to one lane on a portion of Topanga Canyon Boulevard for underground cable installation Nov. 19.

A Times analysis of L.A. County property records found that roughly 98% of residential properties in Topanga were built before the state adopted home-hardening building codes in 2008 to protect homes against wildfires.

However, a significant number of Topangans have opted to complete the requirements regardless. Various fire safety organizations in the Santa Monica Mountains have visited more than 470 of Topanga’s roughly 3,000 residential properties to help residents learn how to harden their homes. These efforts are, in part, why the National Fire Protection Assn. designated the mountain town as a Firewise Community in 2022.

There are some relatively simple steps homeowners can take, such as covering vents with mesh, that can slightly reduce the chance of a home burning. But undertaking a comprehensive renovation — to remove wood decks, install noncombustible siding and roofing, replace windows with multipaned tempered glass, hardscape the land near the house and trim down trees — is expensive.

A report from the community development research nonprofit Headwaters Economics found a complete home retrofit using affordable materials costs between $23,000 and $40,000. With high-end materials that provide the best protection, it can cost upward of $100,000.

Many Topangans have taken up the challenge, anyway. Grasso, who lost his home in the 1993 Old Topanga fire, has slowly been hardening his property since the rebuild. He’s even built a concrete fire shelter against a hillside with two steel escape doors and porthole windows.

Researchers have found comprehensive home hardening and defensible space can reduce the risk of a home burning by about a third, but not bring it down to zero. (Albeit, none have tested Grasso’s elaborate setup.)

Wildfire safety experts hope the state someday adopts building standards for truly fire-proof structures that could withstand even the most extreme conditions and come equipped with life-support systems. But any such standards are years away, and the L.A. County Fire Department has to have a plan if a fire breaks out tomorrow.

For Grasso, fire risk is a risk like any other, like the choice to drive a car every day. In exchange for the beauty of living life in Topanga, some folks will learn to accept the risk and do what they can to mitigate it: Harden a home, fasten a seat belt. Others — especially those unable to take the drastic steps Grasso has been able to — will deem the beauty of life in Topanga not worth the risk of getting trapped by flames.

“The amount of money it takes to get to this point is too cost-prohibitive for us at this moment,” Najah said. “It’s really a tough place to be in. … It’s not going to be easy, and we’re not the only rural community. All over the state, people are having to deal with this.”

Times assistant data and graphics editor Sean Greene contributed to this report.