Los Angeles is a topographical wonderland. Mountains loom in the distance. Hills and canyons are the haven of hikers and dog walkers. Beaches and cliffs above the coastline beckon. In this wilderness we have merged our neighborhoods and streets, not to mention the highways, making it a mix of the wild and the urban. We are the only megacity in the world where mountain lions roam the streets; only Mumbai and its leopards even compare. Here, mountain lions usually hide during the day but come out at night, caught on video from doorbell cameras sneaking into backyards and jumping fences.
We surveyed and electrified the wilds of Los Angeles. But we haven’t tamed it. How could we? To live here, we don’t so much make a pact with nature as an uneasy standoff with it. We know earthquakes will happen – the ground is littered with fault lines – but we adjust for them and tell ourselves they are high-risk, low-probability events. This allows us to sleep at night, perhaps with a false sense of security in the roofs above our heads.
And we know there will be wildfires, but we think they will be contained relatively quickly and will occur in foothills and areas of poorly managed undergrowth – the places that homeowners haven’t cleaned up or where voracious goats haven’t been sent to nibble.
We were wrong.
A combination of extremely bad events – no significant rainfall since then Be able to (that drizzle on your car window on Christmas Eve didn’t count) and a brutal hurricane-like storm — a fire that may have started in a backyard in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday morning grew into an unimaginable inferno that mowed away parts of the coastal community within minutes. Then a fire exploded in Altadena, wiping out neighborhoods. A day later, the Palisades Fire had burned thousands of acres without containment.
By the end of the week, six fires had burned throughout Los Angeles County, destroying not only the Palisades and much of Altadena, but also areas in Malibu, the San Fernando Valley, LA, near the Ventura County border , and the Hollywood Hills. People lost homes, and all of us lost Will Rogers’ historic farm, part of the Will Rogers State Historic Park in the Palisades. Fire came before everything. Black smoke billowed toward historic Mt. Wilson Observatory to the east and the flames reached the grounds of the legendary Getty Villa, which houses priceless antiquities. Both have survived so far, with the Getty Villa no doubt helped by clearing the bushes and fire-resistant construction.
What happened this past week has upended all our assumptions about our truce with the wildness of Los Angeles. We were wrong to think that our infrastructure was enough to get us out of this inferno.
I have lived here for over thirty years and I have been spared the fire. But like other Angelenos, I knew all along that it could come. There have been so many fires in the time I’ve been here that I sometimes think Los Angeles is more likely to be destroyed by fire than by the great earthquake we have to prepare for.
I live next to a forest with tall eucalyptus trees, which are highly flammable. Their beauty outside my windows is a big part of why I chose to live here – my “treehouse,” a friend called it. Whenever the trees sway vigorously in a dry wind, I worry desperately and scan them for any sign of fire.
The wildfires that scorched the hills above where I live never reached my neighborhood. But I’ve heard police driving through the streets at three in the morning calling for people to evacuate.
I was writing this piece Thursday afternoon when I received an emergency evacuation warning in my area. In a panic I started packing. How do you choose the most valuable items to put in a few weekend bags? Before I could throw more than a few things in, my phone buzzed again. The evacuation warning was a false alarm. I was relieved – but perhaps my panic was more appropriate, and the relief was a return to the denial that makes it possible to endure our daily lives in this dangerous place.
Angelenos are angry about the glitchy emergency alert system, but that’s the least of the problems this fire has exposed. Overwhelmed by the enormous demand — especially as water-dropping planes were grounded at some points by high winds — hydrants on the hillier heights of the Palisades ran dry. Lack of pressure to move the water was the culprit, city officials said. Should the city update the fire hydrant system, which seems to work fine when only a few structures are on fire? Or was this just a one-time fire that overwhelmed the city’s water system?
There are other questions. People have criticized Mayor Karen Bass for being out of the country when the fire broke out Tuesday and for cutting the fire department’s budget, though the city manager says the budget ultimately increased overall and nothing affected firefighting capacity.
Bass clearly couldn’t have stopped the fire. (She’s not Moses.) But what she needs to do now is fulfill her promise to help people rebuild aggressively. “Administration, bureaucracy – everything has to go,” she said on Friday. That’s something that will help us all. To build a life in this wilderness we need all the help we can get.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
