Water for Fire: Framing Water Governance Debates During the 2025 Los Angeles Fires

In January 2025, several wildfires broke out in Los Angeles County, California. Some fire hydrants failed early on, thus initiating debates about the state’s long-term water challenges. Disasters like this may facilitate important discussions about broader environmental issues, and these are shaped by media coverage. As such, it is important to examine patterns in the media landscape during and after disasters. In this study, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of news media in the four-week period when the fires were most active. Building on scholarship from disaster communication and media framing theories, we studied the frames used in each of 106 articles, newswires, and transcripts. We found conflict and accountability frames to be the most common, followed distantly by scientific and economic ones. In addition, we found a blurring of boundaries between frames, which can help to communicate the multidimensional nature of environmental challenges but also enables the intrusion of politicized narratives into other frames. This study further underlines the need to communicate complexity and context during and following environmental disasters.