Similar fire in Chongqing, China back in 2022. The fire was pretty close to the city. The total acre burnt was less than 1000 acres in total.
High winds don't help:
> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.
> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.
[…]
> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.
> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
If you don't stop it within the first 5 min, it quickly gets out of control. There's so much stuff to burn.
The fires in LA were a failure and more redundancy will soon follow like improved building codes, better forest management, etc.
But it's an ecosystem that has evolved for fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral#Fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia#Before_...
The winds prevented the use of aircraft, either for direct attack or to insert handcrews.
That means firefighters need to drive/hike in, which can take hours. By that point, it's grown to the point where the wind is blowing embers over your head and causing spotfires miles away.
With the winds again, your containment options are limited. It's already too large for a direct attack. It'll jump your mineral earth containment lines, and you can't light a backburn.
The only real option then becomes property protection, and with a water shortage and finite resources that becomes a challenge.
Fire crews were ready to fight fires in Los Angeles, and quite a lot of fire crews from outside the area were brought in before the fires even started - they knew how dangerous the situation was, and they were trying to do what they could by staffing up. Once the winds died down, fire-fighting aircraft could fly and started containing the fires on the mountains, but much of the residential areas had already been lost, there was just too much fire and too few resources to keep it under control.