For the first time in my memory, everyone here either knows someone or yes Those who have lost their homes or been displaced by the fires that have left scars on our beloved Los Angeles.
Everyone wants to know: What happens now? Will people rebuild? When will things get back to normal?
Those of us who have been paying attention over the past few decades also wonder: How long until this happens again?
New York Times reporter Seth Meydans once described this tension as our region’s “central paradox.” We were “caught between fire and flood, beauty and destruction, fear and reckless optimism,” he wrote after a major wildfire in 1993.
Many factors contribute to our current natural disaster being one of the largest in U.S. history: a warming planet, extremely wet seasons followed by extremely dry seasons, unusually strong Santa Ana winds, large swaths of fire in areas known to periodically catch fire. Scale development.
But the more you learn about the natural disasters that strike our foothills and mountain communities, the more you wonder what city planners and politicians were thinking when they originally zoned so much land for development.
Despite tendentious accusations, no politician in the world – nor, for that matter, the fire service – can tame the hurricane-like winds that ground firefighting aircraft while bringing devastating Embers are thrown into communities where previously unimaginable fires have gotten out of hand.
In California, things that would have been unimaginable keep happening.
We have a wet fall and winter, followed by a hot, dry summer, and the shrubbery soaks up the moisture and becomes a tinder for fires caused by human activity — sparking power lines, arson, bonfires, vehicles, fireworks — and then triggering the madness that originates in the desert The evil winds pick up speed as they pass through our mountain valleys and into the ocean. It turns out that the weather cycles and terrain where we live are a gift from the god of fire.
Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, once said, “It’s the fuel that causes fires, not the ignition.” “You could send an arsonist to Death Valley and he would never be caught. ”
In 2017, another wind-swept Tubbs Fire improbably tore through a flat residential neighborhood on Highway 101 in Santa Rosa. Twenty-two people died and more than 5,600 buildings were destroyed, including about 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing stock. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history.
The record lasted only 13 months. The following year, the Camp Fire devastated the Northern California town of Paradise, killing 85 people, destroying approximately 14,000 homes, and displacing approximately 50,000 people.
Until last week, the Camp Fire was considered the costliest fire in U.S. history. But its $12.5 billion in losses was a pittance compared with the ultimate cost of the Palisades and Eaton fires. Real estate analytics firm CoreLogic estimates insured property losses at $30 billion so far. AccuWeather experts estimate the cost will be between $250 billion and $275 billion in property damage and economic losses.
Over the past 30 years, it has become a cliché to turn to the late author and social critic Mike Davis’s famous 1995 essay “The Case for Let Malibu Burn” in these moments. Republished in his 1998 book The Ecology of Fear. But for those who think the recent fires were just a fluke, this article is an eye-opening primer. In fact, they are a feature of the landscape, exacerbated by our fire suppression efforts, and reappear reliably as if they have been forever.
Debates over whether to rebuild and who should bear the costs have also raged for decades.
In 1993, the Old Topanga Fire was one of 26 major wildfires that burned from Ventura County to the Mexican border. It burned for 10 days, burned 18,000 acres, destroyed 359 homes, and killed three people. die. Two years later, state Sen. Tom Hayden, then running for mayor of Los Angeles, advocated for stricter zoning in disaster-prone areas and, failing that, forcing local governments to foot the bill.
“Everyone in California thinks that American taxpayers will forever subsidize our way of life and that we can give them a blank check every time there’s a mudslide or a flood?” he asked at the time. “The rest of the country is in trouble, too.”
No wonder he lost his bid for governor of California in 1994 and mayor of Los Angeles in 1997.
I predict that within five years, much of the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena will be rebuilt. Memories fade, insurance rates rise, and life goes on—until the next fire, flood, or earthquake.
“We’ve invented a fool’s paradise,” Hayden once complained.
Maybe so. But we also reinvent it again and again.
blue sky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. theme: @rabcarian
