Los Angeles fires hit area chemists

Kitty Cahalan, a chemist turned assistant director for educational outreach at the California Institute of Technology, was cooking dinner for her family in Pasadena, California, when she got a text from a neighbor. They told her they could see flames from the fire burning in the mountains northeast of her, known as the Eaton fire and were getting ready to leave.

Cahalan and her family immediately started to do the same. “We basically turned off dinner—left it on the stove with the stove off—and we packed some things and evacuated,” she says.

Cahalan and her family spent the next two nights in her Caltech office, located safely outside the evacuation zones. While there, she says, she would periodically call her old-fashioned answering machine back at home. “I was like, ‘If it picks up, then our house probably hasn’t burned yet.’ ”

Michael Vicic, a chemical engineering lecturer at Caltech, knew it was time to leave when he saw embers raining down on his backyard. Just an hour after the Eaton fire started, he and his wife grabbed their go bags and three cats and left to stay with family members who live near his work.

Stanna Dorn, a chemistry postdoctoral researcher who also works at Caltech, left her Pasadena home when she noticed that she could see the eerie glow of the fire in the distance. The fire “seemed like it was moving south quickly,” she says in a Bluesky message.

Just a few hours earlier, Dorn was busy setting up experiments at work. At the time, she thought the most she’d have to deal with that day was a power outage caused by the once-in-a-decade windstorm that was forecast to peak that night.

These chemists are among the more than 100,000 people displaced by multiple fires that erupted across Los Angeles County on Jan. 7. The two biggest are the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, which together have burned over 15,000 hectares and damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 structures. As of Jan. 15, the Palisades fire was 19% contained, and the Eaton fire was 45% contained.

The cause of the fires is still under investigation, but what is clear is that they were exacerbated by extreme weather patterns that have become all the more common because of climate change. Dry conditions mixed with wind gusts of up to 160 km/h created the perfect environment for the fires to grow rapidly. The winds also hampered efforts by first responders to get the flames under control as the fire encroached on residential neighborhoods.

The homes of Cahalan, Vicic, and Dorn were all spared, but many of their Caltech colleagues were less fortunate. Around 78 people associated with Caltech have lost their homes, according to a Caltech spokesperson, as have over 200 employees of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages.

At the disaster’s peak, around 970 Caltech community members were under evacuation orders, and 900 were under evacuation warnings. To support affected staff, faculty, and students, Caltech and the JPL have set up a disaster relief fund.

The JPL campus is currently closed, and only a small number of critical personnel are being allowed into the facility. Caltech closed its campus in the days immediately after the fire began but has since reopened it for in-person instruction.

But returning to class as normal is going to be a challenge, especially for undergraduates, Vicic says. On top of lost class time, the devastation from the fires will affect them emotionally and could “disrupt their learning and professional growth.”

Meanwhile, across the county, the fires have also affected the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pepperdine University, both of which have closed their main campuses because of their proximity to the Palisades fire. Although neither university is in an evacuation zone, they are adjacent to areas under evacuation warnings.

“It’s like having an extremely apocalyptic snow day,” says Victoria Barber, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at UCLA. Barber doesn’t live close to any evacuation zones, but at one point she could see smoke plumes from four separate fires—the Palisades and Eaton fires and two others that are now either contained or mostly contained.

The smoke and ash will likely negatively impact the region’s outdoor air quality for some time, Barber says. They will also have a huge impact on indoor air quality, particularly in buildings closest to the fires.

Chemistry labs could be particularly vulnerable. Case in point: on Jan. 10, Caltech sent an indoor air quality advisory to campus members stating that “air quality in the labs, especially buildings with fume hood intensive labs that require outside air, is in an unhealthy range.” Caltech says it is taking steps to improve its indoor air quality.