A brush fire broke out just before 3 a.m. Wednesday near the Department of Veterans Affairs' West Los Angeles campus in Brentwood, but firefighters stopped its forward progress within about an hour, keeping it to roughly two acres with no structures damaged and no injuries reported.
Crews protected nearby homes and apartments from the flames as they worked the hillside blaze, according to NBC Los Angeles. The fire department credited an LAFD helicopter with helping ground crews stop the fire's spread.
Fire crews were expected to remain on scene for mop-up and containment work, and drivers were encouraged to seek alternative routes while the operation continued, per the same NBC Los Angeles account. The blaze ignited adjacent to a federal site with deep roots in the neighborhood: the VA's West Los Angeles campus spans 388 acres and was gifted to the federal government in 1888 to house and care for disabled military veterans, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Red Flag Warning Follows Wednesday Fire
The fire broke out Wednesday, before the National Weather Service's Red Flag Warning for the Santa Monica Mountains and the broader Los Angeles area took effect Thursday morning and remained in effect through Friday night. The warning cited critical fire weather driven by Santa Ana wind gusts up to 70 mph and single-digit humidity, as reported by the Santa Monica Mirror. Those conditions significantly raise the risk of brush ignitions spreading quickly across hillsides like the ones surrounding the VA campus.
The timing underscores how little margin firefighters had to work with. The VA campus grounds themselves have seen fire trouble before: in September 2022, an early morning fire destroyed 11 tiny shelter homes and damaged four others housing homeless veterans on the property, causing an estimated $160,000 in damage, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Part of a Pattern Along the Brentwood Hillsides
Wednesday's fire is the latest in a string of brush ignitions in the immediate Brentwood and Sepulveda Pass area. Just five weeks earlier, a 25-acre brush fire near 1200 Getty Center Drive triggered evacuation warnings for nearby homes and Mount Saint Mary's University before crews stopped its forward progress and made progress containing it, as Hoodline reported at the time. The area's worst recent disaster remains the October 2019 Getty Fire, which burned 745 acres and destroyed 10 homes after a broken tree branch struck power lines, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
That history is part of why the city treats the hillsides here with heightened scrutiny. A Brentwood project site sits within the city's Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. City rules require 200 feet of brush clearance around structures and bar powered brush trimming on Red Flag days. The 1961 Bel-Air/Brentwood Fire burned 6,090 acres and destroyed 484 homes.
Statewide Fire Season Still Burning
Wednesday's two-acre fire is small by comparison to the scale of this year's fire season statewide. By early October, California had recorded more than 5,700 wildfires that had burned over 328,000 acres across the state, Hoodline previously reported.
