It's terrible and the humanitarian aspect is awful.
Still, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds tells me
> "The strongest Santa Ana winds yet recorded occurred in early December 2011. An atmospheric set-up occurred that allowed the towns of Pasadena and Altadena in the San Gabriel Valley to get whipped by sustained winds at 97 mph (156 km/h), and gusts up to 167 mph."
The 2011 Citation 24 from that Wikipedia article, if one looks it up, includes the line
> "We haven’t had this kind of event in more than 10 years,” said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard, Calif. “This system is particularly special because there was cold air being pushed up, and it makes them even stronger. Some are going to be hurricane force, but all of it will be felt.”
So, roughly every 10 years there are hurricane force wind events in Greater LA out on the tail of the normal weather distribution. And documentation of those stretches over at least 20 years. And everyone interprets it as special at the time.
I quickly tried digging up historical Santa Ana data from peer-reviewed publications. The obvious article I found had data only back to the late 1960's and it was from 2003: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/eint/7/8/1087-356... I can't figure out if right now is a 1- or 2- or 3-sigma event when combined with changes in human living patterns and forest management patterns. That shouldn't change aid or the systemic response to helping the people involved. But it should inform how we collectively speak about these circumstances when they arise.
I grew up in an area that had awful flooding roughly every 30-40 years (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood). It's presently overdue to happen again. That such disaster is infrequent doesn't change the humanitarian scope of the catastrophes when they happen, of course, but it does suggest that humans tend to discount the tails of historical weather patterns.