After a Los Angeles freeway caught fire near a homeless encampment last month, California advocates are calling on officials to provide the state’s homeless with fire safety training.
When flames engulfed the Los Angeles Interstate 10 freeway, mayor Karen Bass rejected community speculation that the nearby homeless population started the fire — even though L.A. residents had reportedly notified police of illegal fires in the encampment before. Investigators have since been able to “confidently determine” that November’s freeway fire was an act of arson.
“We need to make sure that as Angelenos, we never ever turn on each other,” Bass said last month. “We know that the origin of this is arson. We do not know other information. There is no reason to assume that the origin of this fire or the reason this fire happened was because there were unhoused individuals nearby.”
The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) spends half of its budget responding to homelessness-related fires, and the city is well-versed in disastrous homelessness-related fires; L.A.’s 2017 Skirball blaze erupted from an illegal cooking fire at a brush area near the 405 freeway. LAFD reported that 80 percent of the fires in downtown L.A. were caused by homeless individuals in 2021. Sacramento’s Metro Fire Department reported a 111 percent increase in arson investigations in 2021 and told KCRA 3 that most of the fires originated in homeless encampments.
While California politicians urge residents not to point fingers at homeless people for starting fires in or near encampments, California advocacy groups say that homeless communities start fires out of necessity and that the state should provide the homeless with better fire safety training in order to mitigate the danger.
“I think that would be part of the fire department’s responsibility to do outreach and do as much education around all those different kinds of issues as possible,” Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, said. “It’s just common sense to try and prevent fires made because people are trying to cook or stay warm.”
Erlenbusch blamed cases of runaway fires on the state’s lack of housing, and added that if “you’ve got 7,000 people outside who are just trying to survive, you’re going to have, unfortunately, these kinds of incidents happen.” Given the supposed lack of resources for affordable housing, the state should provide homeless encampments with better fire safety resources “to help overcome the consequences of structural and systemic inequalities” said Mel Tillekeratne, founder of nonprofit Shower Of Hope.
California allocated $7.2 billion to address the state’s homelessness crisis in 2021, which amounted to about $42,000 per homeless person, CalMatters reported. Government subsidies to combat homelessness increased to almost $10 billion in 2023, over half of which was spent on housing initiatives.
Fire officials, meanwhile, are stretched thin by the state’s rise in homeless-related fires. Anthony Price, an organizer for the Sacramento Homeless Union, said the state could alleviate pressure on firefighters by simply giving the homeless fire extinguishers and training.
“At various encampments [there should] be firefighting training,” Prince said. “[There should] be connections to available water to run hoses, just like there are fire hydrants all over the city.”
California officials have not announced further plans to curb fires.