The Bel Air Fire of 1961

The Bel Air Fire was a disaster that began as a brush fire on November 5, 1961 in the Bel Air community of Los Angeles. 484 homes were destroyed and 16,900 acres (68 km²) were burned. The fire was fueled by strong Santa Ana winds.

There were multiple celebrities affected by the fire. Actors Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, comedian Joe E. Brown, Nobel laureate chemist Willard Libby and composer Lukas Foss lost homes in the fire. Others that fought flames before they evacuated were former Vice President Richard Nixon, actor Robert Taylor, film producer Keith Daniels and singer Billy Vaughn.

Aftermath

As a result of the Bel Air Fire, Los Angeles initiated a series of laws and fire safety policies. These included the banning of wood shingle roofs in new construction and one of the most stringent brush clearance policies in the US.

The Los Angeles City Fire Department produced a documentary, "Design For Disaster", about the wildfire, narrated by William Conrad.

. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Air_Fire

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The “Design for Disaster” 26 minute documentary is available on-line at 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj0rfeF5GbA .

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There was a subsequent Bel Air fire in 2017, the Skirball Fire (See 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirball_Fire ).

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Chaparral, the ground cover in Bel Air, is a shrub with oily sap that renews itself every fifteen to fifty years by fire.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral .

The Basics on Fire in the Chaparral

1.      The natural fire return interval for chaparral is 30 to 150 years or more. Today, there are more fires than the chaparral ecosystem can tolerate - see #2 below).

2. Fires more than once every 20 years, or during the cool season by prescribed fire, can eliminate chaparral by first reducing its biodiversity through the loss of fire-sensitive species, then by converting it to non-native weedlands (called type-conversion).

3. Being dense, impenetrable, and prone to infrequent, large, high-intensity wildfires is the natural condition of chaparral. It's not the fault of past fire suppression, poor land management, "unnatural" amounts of vegetation, or environmental laws as some claim.

4. The age and density of chaparral has little to do with the occurrence of such large fires. Large fires in California shrublands are driven primarily by weather, such as Santa Ana winds, sundowner winds, and multi-year droughts.

5. Chaparral has a high-intensity, crown fire regime, meaning when a fire burns, it burns everything, frequently leaving behind an ashen landscape. This is in contrast to a "surface fire regime" found in dry Ponderosa pine forests in the American Southwest where fires mostly burn the understory and only char the tree trunks rather than getting into the tree tops (crowns).

6. Native Americans did burn the landscape for various purposes in the past. In fact, some of their burning practices likely eliminated native shrublands in some areas (like the Central Coast) through type-conversion (see #2 above). However, their burning activity did not prevent the occurrence of large, infrequent, high-intensity chaparral fires. Such fires have always been a natural and inevitable part of the landscape.

                 http://www.californiachaparral.com/fire/firenature.html

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There is another similar fire in northern Los Angeles today, October 11, 2019.  See 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-latest-fire-rages-along-northern-border-of-los-angeles/2019/10/11/f4048b40-ec31-11e9-a329-7378fbfa1b63_story.html