By Cindy Von Quednow, CNN
Los Angeles (CNN) — The smell of wet grass from the recent atmospheric river rains, mud and gasoline wafts through the warm Southern California air as Alec Derpetrossian works the chainsaw with a foreman, Randy Magaña, who helps him guide where to put the blade. Derpetrossian is still learning how to adequately use the large tool.
Magaña shows him how to maneuver the blade around a thick trunk, as the foreman kicks it loose.
It takes several times to cut down a branch and even longer to conquer a three-pronged tree trunk, as the men struggle to cut the thick tree down.
“Timber!” yells Derpetrossian as a tree comes down.
Derpetrossian and Magaña are working in the Sepulveda Basin, near the Los Angeles River, under shaded trees that they are working to take down. The area is prone to brush fires, thanks to thick vegetation and the presence of homeless encampments.
The men are part of Crew 4, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first full-time paid wildland hand crew aiming to protect the City of Angels from another Palisades Fire, the historic firestorm disaster that decimated the Pacific Palisades area in January 2025.
The blaze was part of 12 fires that broke out in the Los Angeles area, killing 31 people in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades communities and destroying thousands of homes and structures. The Eaton and Palisades fires have left permanent marks in history by joining the top 10 deadliest wildfires in California.
The crew’s purpose is to beef up the city’s emergency response as well as vegetation management throughout Los Angeles to prevent brush fires from spreading out of control, the team’s superintendent Capt. Travis Humpherys said. A large portion of the city lies in a what is known as a “very high fire hazard zone.”
During active fires, the crew digs lines and removes brush out ahead of the fire or along the fire’s edge to help extinguish the blaze.
But before a fire even starts, their goal is to remove invasive trees and brush, so when a blaze ignites and the infamous Santa Ana winds are blowing, embers don’t fly into tree canopies or dry vegetation and spread the fire more rapidly.
While Derpetrossian and Magaña are conquering the tough tree, it takes several crew members to cut, pull, drag and carry heavy branches to a woodchipper, which shreds branches and trunks and spits out chips in a matter of seconds.
When Derpetrossian finally sees sunlight through the trees’ canopy, he thinks “I just did that, I didn’t know I could do that,” he says, his face covered in woodchips and dripping with sweat.
‘There’s no such thing as fire season’
The addition of Crew 4 to the LAFD’s firefighting toolbox comes as wildfire disasters in California are becoming significantly larger, more destructive and deadlier.
The area burned by wildfires and the number of large wildfires in California have increased over the past decades, largely influenced by “changes in land use, fire management practices, and the impact of climate change,” according to the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
Additionally, the annual average area burned in the state between 2020 and 2024 was about three times higher compared to the 2010s, the agency reported.
The crew is preparing for fire season, which in Southern California typically runs from late spring to October, except fires can now happen any time in the region thanks to changes in climate conditions, dry veg