The scene in the Los Angeles area over the last week has become heartbreakingly familiar — people on the run and watching helplessly as unrelenting flames destroy the suburban sprawl of homes and whole neighborhoods.

Crystal Scott grew up playing in the picturesque San Gabriel Mountains, but her home at the base of the mountains was one of thousands destroyed in the Eaton Fire.

"I'm very devastated. Our families worked hard to put us here and to establish us," Scott told CBS News, regarding the destruction of their home in the suburban sprawl.

While their family home was the realization of a dream, it and many others like it are also part of a trend in which urban and suburban sprawl has crept into previously wild areas.

Climate change is also playing a role in increasing risk in addition to suburban sprawl.

Suburban sprawl tucked into the foothills of Los Angeles are now more vulnerable as rainy seasons become more intense and dry seasons last longer — a cycle that leads to more vegetation fueling fires. The last time Los Angeles saw more than an inch of rain was around Easter of last year, and long-term weather models don't see any rainfall coming to the area any time soon.

Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, says the destruction, while "awful," is "not terribly surprising," pointing to a history of intense fires in the West before and during suburban sprawl.

There was the Marshall Fire near Denver, which three years ago snaked down a hill, growing from a grass fire into the most destructive blaze in Colorado's history, incinerating more than 1,000 suburban sprawl homes.

In 2013, the Yarnell Fire in Arizona killed 19 firefighters who were trying to protect suburban sprawl homes just down the mountain.

"We're still thinking that as humans, we can overpower nature. We're not that powerful," Pincetl said.

All these fires share one thing in common: They take place at the wildland-urban interface, a technical term for where humans have overstepped into nature. One-third of all American homes exist in this type of space.

Read the full article about suburban sprawl and climate change by Tom Hanson, Alicia Hastey, and Simon Bouie at CBS News.