Palisades Fire Damage: Structures and Fatalities
CAL FIRE's incident record lists 6,845 structures destroyed, 975 damaged and 12 confirmed civilian fatalities after inspectors assessed the entire fire footprint.
Timeline
- January 7, 2025: The Palisades Fire began in Pacific Palisades and spread through Los Angeles County.
- January 31, 2025: The incident was recorded as fully contained after burning 23,448 acres.
- April 9, 2026: The incident page's latest listed update reported completed inspections across the fire footprint.
CAL FIRE's Palisades Fire incident page lists 6,845 structures destroyed and 975 damaged. It also records 12 confirmed civilian fatalities, three civilian injuries and one firefighter injury. Those are the official incident-page figures after damage inspection teams completed inspections for all structures within the mapped fire footprint. [1]
The fire began on January 7, 2025 in Pacific Palisades and burned 23,448 acres in Los Angeles County. The incident record gives January 31 as the containment date, after 24 active days. Containment means crews established control lines around the fire; it does not mean every burned property was immediately safe, accessible or ready for residents to return. [1]
A structure count is broader than a home count. CAL FIRE groups residential, commercial and other structures in the destroyed and damaged totals. Garages, outbuildings and other mapped structures can therefore be counted separately from primary residences. The 6,845 figure should not be rewritten as 6,845 houses or households without a category-specific assessment. [1]
Destroyed and damaged are also different assessment labels. A destroyed structure suffered loss severe enough to meet the agency's destruction classification, while the damaged count includes affected structures that remained standing to varying degrees. Neither number alone states the dollar value of losses, whether a property was insured or how many people were displaced. [1][2]
The totals changed while inspections continued. A February 10 incident update listed 6,833 destroyed and 973 damaged structures, with 12 civilian fatalities. Later revisions increased the property counts. That history is why a dated preliminary update may disagree slightly with the current incident page without either page having been fabricated. [1][2]
The 12 fatalities belong to the Palisades incident record. They should not be combined casually with deaths from the Eaton Fire or described as the total for every January 2025 Los Angeles wildfire. Similarly, the Palisades acreage and structure figures describe this fire's footprint and do not represent a countywide total for the broader disaster period. [1][2]
For a concise official toll, the current record is 6,845 destroyed structures, 975 damaged structures and 12 confirmed civilian deaths. Those figures measure physical impacts documented by agencies, while recovery also involves debris removal, utilities, housing, businesses and community services. The assessment is therefore a baseline for understanding the disaster, not a complete measure of every loss. [1][2]
Sources
- CAL FIRE — Palisades Fire incident record
- CAL FIRE — Palisades Fire incident update, February 10, 2025