Dave Gomberg had been watching the wind, his concern mounting. A veteran fire weather specialist at the National Weather Service, he understood the high and low pressure systems that ginned up the infamous Santa Anas that blew periodically through Southern California.

This wasn’t that. High in the upper atmosphere, powerful currents were forecast to align with the fast-moving air off the desert, threatening a rare supercharged windstorm — all this in a region that had seen less than a quarter-inch of rain over the last eight months.

The National Weather Service held a conference call with Southern California fire and emergency management officials on Jan. 3, warning that a “truly historic event” was due in four days, with the possibility of fires that would spread with extraordinary speed. Even an amateur weather watcher was worried about the conditions: “Altadena, we have a problem,” he warned his followers.

Yet neither days of lead time nor highly specific warnings from weather experts were enough to save Los Angeles from an inferno. The firestorms that would ravage the area would expose multiple weaknesses in the region’s ability to respond to an extreme weather event — even one whose timing was widely predicted — that was far more serious than the seasonal fire threats California had long endured.

There was no all-hands news conference by public officials before the winds arrived, as happens in Florida before a major hurricane. There was no single local leader in the politically fragmented region taking to local television to warn residents of the extraordinary danger. County supervisors issued warnings, but mainly on their social media accounts. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who runs the biggest of 88 cities in the county, was out of the country when the fires ignited. Gov. Gavin Newsom had driven down from Sacramento, not for the fires but for an unrelated news conference, and he was more than two hours away in the Palm Springs area when the first fire broke out.

Los Angeles had spent decades preparing for a major earthquake disaster — the “Big One,” they call it — and the Big One was here. But it was a fire, and no one had a playbook for one this big.