After visiting Palisades Fire site, Kamala Harris calls on leaders to "understand how we must do better"

After touring destruction left by the Palisades Fire, former Vice President Kamala Harris called on leaders to "understand how we must to do better" in bracing for increasingly frequent wildfires in California and other natural disasters in the country.

"These extreme weather conditions have become far more frequent than we have historically been used to," Harris told reporters, referring to fires in the state as well as other devastating disasters such as Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people last year. On Thursday, she visited an area of Pacific Palisades where homes were burned to the ground, among the thousands of structures destroyed including schools, businesses and beloved landmarks along the Pacific Coast Highway.

On Jan. 7, the fire sparked in the Palisades and burned thousands of acres before moving toward areas of Los Angeles a few miles inland, including Brentwood, the west LA neighborhood where Harris lives. Residents there were among the tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate their homes last month. Twelve people died in the blaze, now considered one of the most destructive wildfires recorded in state history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

"We as a nation, as we think about where we are headed, we must see the opportunities that these crises are presenting to understand how we must do better," Harris said as she spoke outside an evacuation shelter in Westwood. "And we can do better around the reality of what we can expect going forward."

She was still in office when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out just hours apart on opposite sides of the county last month. A day after they started, former President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration which made survivors and others affected eligible for FEMA aid. The following day, Biden said the federal government would cover 100% of disaster response costs for the fires, saying he would request more funding from Congress to do so.

With full containment taking weeks, firefighters were still on the ground when Harris's term ended in late January. Upon leaving the White House, she met with firefighters and volunteers in LA on Jan. 20, the same day as President Trump's inauguration. 

On Thursday, Harris visited neighborhoods along the coast left in ruins by the wildfire which had threatened her own LA community. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who was with Harris during her visit, said the former vice president's home was under an evacuation warning at one point. 

Surveying the damage, Harris walked through streets in the Palisades lined with wreckage and debris where houses stood just weeks earlier.

"When you see it in person, as opposed to seeing it in pictures or on TV, it changes you," Horvath said. "And I watched that in her today. I know that she's personally affected."

Outside the evacuation shelter at the Westwood Recreation Center, Harris spoke to reporters, discussing policymaking surrounding the state's fires and other natural disasters. 

"Here in California, for example, we no longer talk about wildfire season. Any month of the year we are likely to see these wildfires occur and the damage that they cause, which means we must also look forward in a way," Harris said. "That we are building up resources and priorities around not only responding after an extreme weather occurrence, but what we can do to build up resilience and adaptation to these extreme weather events?"

The reality of California facing an increasingly long wildfire season is a widely recognized consensus among researchers and public agencies overseeing weather and environmental conditions. As the U.S. Department of Agriculture says of fires in the western region of the country, including California, "What was once a four-month fire season now lasts six to eight months."

Another major conclusion among experts is what the driving force is behind these increasingly frequent disasters.

"Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports. 

Southern California's peak fire season typically runs from late spring, around May and June, until October, according to the Western Fire Chiefs Association. But that's changing as wildfires continue to break out later into fall and winter, and in recent years, these blazes during the colder months have become some of the most destructive seen in state history.

Researchers say fall and winter fires can prove even worse than those during the warmer seasons since they have the potential to grow faster due to a combination of dry, gusty Santa Ana winds — which can fan the flames and spread them further — and a terrain that's particularly flammable after being dried out during the summer.

Last month's wildfires in LA County, sparking two weeks into winter, left 29 people dead and destroyed more than 15,000 structures.