As I remember, all present either knows someone affected or has been uprooted or lost their residence in the blazes that left numerous marks on our cherished Los Angeles.
And everyone is curious: what is unfolding now? Will individuals reconstruct? When will life revert to its usual state?
Even those of us who have been observant over the last several decades are pondering how long it will be before the same situation arises once more.
New York Times journalist Seth Mydans once characterized this tension as our region’s “central paradox.” Following the catastrophic wildfires of 1993, he penned that we are “stuck between fire and flood, beauty and ruin, apprehension and unrestrained hope.”
Several elements render the current calamity one of the most significant natural catastrophes in American history. It involves substantial development in an area recognized for a warming planet, intense drought periods followed by torrential rains, unusually fierce Santa Ana winds, and recurrent fires.
However, the more we uncover about the natural disasters afflicting our hilly and mountainous regions, the more we question what urban planners and politicians were contemplating when they designated so much land for development initially. I find myself questioning this increasingly.
In spite of clear warnings, politicians globally, and even fire departments for that matter, are observing the hurricane-grounded fire aircraft as uncontrollable flames release destructive embers into areas previously unimaginable. The powerful winds remained unmanageable.
The unimaginable is occurring in California.
Moist autumns and winters, succeeded by scorching, arid summers, extract moisture from the chaparral, which becomes the catalyst for fires sparked by human actions, such as sparks from power lines, arson, campfires, vehicles, fireworks, and other chaos. These are incited by wicked winds that emerge from the desert and race through mountain canyons towards the ocean. After all, we inhabit a location where weather patterns and terrain are indeed gifts from the God of Fire.
“It’s the fuel, not the spark, that ignites fire,” stated Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Riverside. “You could dispatch an arsonist to Death Valley and they’d never manage to ignite fire.”
In 2017, another wind-driven blaze, the Tubbs Fire, strikingly devastated the flat residential region straddling the 101 Freeway in Santa Rosa. 22 lives were lost, and over 5,600 structures, including about 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing inventory, were obliterated. It was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.
This record endured for only 13 months. The subsequent year, the Camp Fire ravaged the Northern California town of Paradise, claiming 85 lives, demolishing approximately 14,000 homes, and displacing around 50,000 individuals.
Until last week, the Camp Fire was considered the most expensive fire in U.S. history. Yet that $12.5 billion in damages would be trivial compared to the ultimate total of the Palisades and Eaton fires. Real estate analytics firm CoreLogic has thus far estimated damages to insured properties at $30 billion. AccuWeather specialists project the combined cost of property destruction and economic losses to range between $250 billion and $275 billion.
For the past three decades, such instances have echoed the notable author’s and social analyst Mike Davis’ renowned 1995 essay “What We Burned Malibu” (from his 1998 book The Ecology of Fear). It has become routine to revisit republished essays. However, this essay serves as an enlightening introduction for anyone who believes the recent fires are a mere coincidence. In reality, they are a characteristic of the environment, aggravated by our firefighting endeavors, and will undoubtedly return, as they have eternally.
Discussions regarding whether it should be reconstructed and who should bear the costs have persisted for decades.
In 1993, the Old Topanga Fire (one of 26 significant wildfires from Ventura County to the Mexican border that year) blazed for 10 days, consuming 18,000 acres and destroying 359 residences, resulting in three fatalities. Two years later, then-state Senator Tom Hayden, vying for the mayoral position in Los Angeles, advocated for stricter zoning in disaster-prone regions or compelling local authorities to finance the failures. He argued that it should be enforced.
“Do we all in California believe that American taxpayers will subsidize our existence indefinitely, or that we can simply hand them a blank check every time there’s a landslide or a flood?” he posed back then. “Other regions of America face issues as well.”
No wonder he lost the 1994 California gubernatorial race and the 1997 Los Angeles mayoral election.
I suspect that within five years, substantial portions of the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena will be reconstructed. Memories fade, insurance rates inflate, and life continues until the next blaze, deluge, or earthquake.
“We’ve created a fool’s paradise,” Hayden once lamented.
Perhaps so. But we recreate it time and again.
Blue Sky: @rabcarian.bsky.social.Thread: @rabcarian