Contextualizing Glendale’s fire vulnerability using historical drought and wildfire trends.
Glendale is located at the intersection of several high-risk wildfire environments: the Verdugo Mountains, Angeles National Forest, and the northern Los Angeles foothills. This region experiences prolonged drought cycles, Santa Ana wind events, and some of the highest wildfire activity in Southern California.
The graphs below summarize key regional factors that contribute to Glendale’s structural wildfire risk. These provide context for the building-level 2D and 3D tools available on the other pages.
Southern California’s multi-decadal drought pattern is one of the primary drivers of vegetation dryness, increasing ignition potential and spread probability. The following figure visualizes drought risk in Los Angeles County and the surrounding region.
The Glendale area is surrounded by three of California’s most fire-prone landscapes: Los Angeles County wildlands, Ventura County fire corridors, and Angeles National Forest. These regions regularly experience large fires that impact Glendale's air quality, evacuation planning, and building resilience needs. LAC refers to LA county, VNC to Ventura county, and ANF to Angeles National Forest.
To understand how the intensity of fires in Glendale has evolved, we aggregated total acres burned per decade across the three major fire protection units surrounding Glendale: Los Angeles County (LAC), Ventura County (VNC), and Angeles National Forest (ANF). This visualization highlights how certain decades—especially the 1970s, 2000s, and 2010s—experienced exceptionally large burns. These long-term patterns help contextualize Glendale’s modern wildfire exposure, showing that the region has repeatedly faced large, high-intensity fire events that shape today’s risk landscape.
These regional trends provide important context, but Glendale’s building-level risk varies sharply based on slope, aspect, vegetation, and elevation. Visit the 3D map or dashboard to explore how terrain and structure attributes shape localized fire vulnerability.