For the first time in memory, everyone around here knows someone or has Someone who lost a home or was displaced by the fires that ravaged much of our beloved Los Angeles.
Everyone is wondering: What is happening now? Will people rebuild? When will it be back to normal?
Those who have been paying attention for the past few decades also wonder: How long ago was this again?
New York Times journalist Seth Mydans once described this tension as our region's “central paradox.” After a major wildfire in 1993, he wrote, “We are caught between fire and flood, beauty and disaster, fear and reckless hope.”
Many factors contributed to making our current natural disaster the largest in American history: a warming planet, an extremely wet and extremely dry period, unusually brutal Santa Ana winds, and extensive development in cyclical fire areas.
But the more you learn about the natural disasters that plague our foothills and mountain communities, the more you wonder what city planners and politicians were thinking when they first zoned it for development.
Although pointed fingerNo politician in the world — or fire department, for that matter — can control the hurricane-force winds that land firefighting aircraft, while uncontrolled fires spew devastating lava into previously unthinkable neighborhoods.
In California, the unthinkable is happening.
We have wet falls and winters, followed by hot, dry summers that suck moisture from the chaparral, which ignites fires ignited by human activity—power lines, arson, campfires, vehicles, fireworks—and then rages. The demonic winds that form in the deserts accelerate as they move through our mountain valleys to the ocean. As it turns out, we live in a place whose weather cycles and landscape are a true gift to the fire gods.
“Fuel, not ignition, causes fire” UC Riverside fire ecologist Richard Minnich once said. “You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be caught.”
In 2017, another windswept inferno, Dubs fireThe 101 Freeway in Santa Rosa swept through flat residential areas in an unimaginable way. Twenty-two people died, and more than 5,600 structures were destroyed, including 5% of Santa Rosa's housing stock. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history.
That feat lasted just 13 months. next year, camp fire It devastated the northern California town of Paradise, killing 85 people, destroying about 14,000 homes and displacing about 50,000.
Until last week, the Camp Fire was believed to be the costliest fire in U.S. history. But its $12.5 billion in damages will be pocket change compared to the final tolls of the Palisades and Eaton fires. Real estate analytics firm CoreLogic estimates Damage to insured property $30 billion so far. AccuWeather Experts Between property damage and economic losses, the tab is estimated to be between $250 billion and $275 billion.
Over the past 30 years, it has become a cliché at these moments to return to the late author and social critic Mike Davis' famous 1995 essay.The case for letting Malibu burnRepublished in his book “The Ecology of Fear” in 1998. But the article is an eye-opening primer for anyone who thinks the recent fires are a fluke. In fact, they are a feature of the landscape that we enhance Fire suppression proceduresAnd they repeat as reliably as they always do.
Debates over whether to rebuild and who should bear the costs have been going on for decades.
In 1993, the Old Topanga Fire — one of 26 large wildfires that year that burned from Ventura County to the Mexican border — burned for 10 days, burned 18,000 acres, destroyed 359 homes and killed three people. Two years later, then-state Sen. Tom Hayden, running for mayor of Los Angeles, argued that disaster-prone areas should impose more containment zones or, failing that, force local governments to cover the costs.
“Does everyone in California think that the American taxpayers are going to subsidize our way of life forever and give them a blank check every time there's a landslide or flood?” He asked then. “The rest of the U.S. has problems, too.”
No wonder he lost his bids for governor of California in 1994 and mayor of Los Angeles in 1997.
I predict that within five years, most of the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena will be rebuilt. Memories fade, insurance premiums rise, and life goes on — until the next fire, flood or earthquake.
“We have found a fool's paradise,” Hayden once complained.
Maybe so. But over time, we recreate that too.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Texts: @rabgarian