A Year of Fires and Floods in Southern California

In a place known for courting dreams, 2025 was a year of nightmares.

The first weeks brought devastating fires to Southern California, and the last delivered terrible floods.

The storm that struck the Los Angeles region over Christmas caused rocky mudslides and flooded roads, though nowhere near the scale of destruction left by some of the worst wildfires in California’s history in January. But the timing of the two disasters, with the flooding unfolding near the first anniversary of the fires, shows how extreme weather is defining life in Southern California and reshaping its public image as a kind of paradise.

“We have chosen to dream the city we want to live in, not actually live in the city we have,” said D.J. Waldie, a cultural historian in Southern California. “The weather is very good, the sun is shining most of the time, but the reality is also Los Angeles burns, Los Angeles floods.”

Paige Fillion, who moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 2007, had to evacuate her home during the January fires in Sierra Madre, a city in the foothills at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. She was issued another evacuation warning last week during torrential storms.

“I’m like, ‘What are we doing here? What are we doing here?’ But it’s so beautiful,” said Ms. Fillion, 63. “You have to live with the fact that it’s a dangerous place.”

Los Angeles has always been subject to unnerving weather extremes. In February 1938, heavy rains flooded the Los Angeles River and killed 87 people. On Thanksgiving Day that same year, dry conditions fueled a fire in Topanga Canyon that destroyed 350 buildings.

In an essay first published in 1965, Joan Didion wrote: “Easterners commonly complain that there is no ‘weather’ at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes.”

She continued: “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”

Climate change is increasing the severity of those extremes, testing the region’s resources and response, climate experts and California officials said.

The state’s geography makes it prone to big swings between wet and dry conditions, and climate change only exacerbates that, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. Warmer air holds more moisture, making storms bigger and more violent when they hit, he added. And when the weather is dry, the hotter atmosphere sucks up moisture from the land, worsening droughts and fires.

The fires in January in Pacific Palisades and Altadena were so devastating in part because very wet weather between 2022 and early 2024 fueled vegetation growth. Then, near-record-low precipitation in late 2024 dried out much of the grasses and shrubs, priming them to burn, Mr. Swain said.

He added, “2025 exhibited almost every variant of that very kind of extreme weather that Southern California can see — it’s part of the geographic reality of living in this place.”

The weather extremes at the beginning and end of the year came amid other turmoil in Southern California. The region was hit hard by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which continues to cause widespread fear and outrage in Hispanic communities. Chaos in various forms seemed to define 2025.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda, 51, whose house in West Altadena was on the edge of the Eaton fire’s burn zone in January, was lining it with sandbags last week to prepare for floods. She and her wife are still remediating their yard, which has lead in it, so their young child cannot play outside. And the workers who have helped her home recover in the past year — gardeners and day laborers — have regularly felt under threat because of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, she said.

“It feels like attacks coming from multiple locations,” said Ms. Portillo Villeda, a professor at Pitzer College. “It’s been hard to catch a breath.”

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said the year had tested the city in many ways. Last week, she was in the Boyle Heights neighborhood with the National Weather Service, assessing the damage caused by a tornado.

“There is no question that we are seeing more extreme weather events becoming the new normal in L.A. and across the country,” the mayor said in a statement, adding, “Times are changing, and we will continue to prepare for whatever may come our way in the new year.”

The floods last week devastated Wrightwood, a mountain community of about 5,000 people in San Bernardino County, pushing five-foot walls of mud into people’s homes.

Debra Gonzales, who lives in Wrightwood, said the floods represented the third consecutive year of intense weather. In 2023, a blizzard trapped people in Wrightwood for days. In 2024, an enormous fire destroyed homes in the town. And last week, rain falling on the burn scar from that fire washed out roads and bridges and buried houses and cars in mud and gravel.

Still, Ms. Gonzales, 51, said she had no plans to move.

“The good outweighs the bad — you can go to the beach one day and skiing the next,” she said, adding, “I just pray there isn’t an earthquake.”

Rachel Parsons contributed reporting.

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