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As I recall, everyone here either knows someone or has been displaced or lost their home in the fires that left so many scars on our beloved Los Angeles.
And everyone wonders: what is happening now? Will people rebuild? When will things return to normal?
Even those of us who have been paying attention over the past few decades are wondering how long it will be before the same thing happens again.
New York Times journalist Seth Mydans once described this tension as our region’s “central paradox.” After the devastating wildfires of 1993, he wrote, we are “caught between fire and flood, beauty and devastation, fear and reckless optimism.”
Numerous factors make the current natural disaster one of the greatest natural disasters in American history. It’s massive development in a place known for a warming planet, extreme dry seasons followed by extreme rain, unusually harsh Santa Ana winds, and periodic fires.
But the more we learn about the natural disasters that hit our hilly and mountain communities, the more we wonder what city planners and politicians were thinking when they zoned so much of it for development in the first place. I find myself wondering more and more.
Despite cautious condemnation, the world’s politicians, and by extension fire departments, have been forced to ignore hurricane-force winds that grounded fire planes while uncontrollable fires dumped destructive embers into areas previously unthinkable. could not be controlled.
The unthinkable is happening in California.
Wet autumns and winters, followed by hot, dry summers, draw moisture from the chaparral, which becomes the ignition for fires ignited by human activity, such as sparks from power lines, arson, campfires, vehicles, Fireworks and other frenzy is triggered. By devilish winds that arise from the desert and rush through mountain canyons to the sea. After all, we live in a place where weather cycles and terrain are truly gifts from the God of Fire.
“It’s the fuel, not the ignition, that causes fire,” Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, once said. “You could send an arsonist to Death Valley and they’d never catch him.”
In 2017, another wind-driven inferno, the Tubbs Fire, ravaged the flat residential area straddling the 101 freeway in Santa Rosa. 22 people were killed and more than 5,600 structures, including about 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing stock, were destroyed. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history.
This record stood for just 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 believed to be the costliest fire in U.S. history. But that $12.5 billion in damage would be pennies compared to the final total of the Palisades and Eaton fires. Real estate analysis firm CoreLogic has so far estimated losses to insured properties at $30 billion. AccuWeather experts estimate the combined cost of property damage and economic losses to be between $250 billion and $275 billion.
For the past 30 years, moments like these have been echoed by the late author and social commentator Mike Davis’ famous 1995 essay “What We Burned Malibu” (from his 1998 book The Ecology of Fear). It has become a common practice to look at republished essays. But this essay is an eye-opening primer for anyone who thinks the recent fires are a fluke. In fact, they are a feature of the landscape, exacerbated by our firefighting efforts, and will surely return, as they have forever.
Debate over whether it should be rebuilt and who should pay for it has also been going on for decades.
In 1993, the Old Topanga Fire (one of 26 major wildfires that occurred from Ventura County to the Mexican border that year) burned for 10 days, burning 18,000 acres and destroying 359 homes. and three people died. Two years later, then-state Sen. Tom Hayden, running for mayor of Los Angeles, called for more restrictive zoning in disaster-prone areas, or else forcing local governments to pay for it. argued that it should be done.
“Do all Californians expect American taxpayers to subsidize our lives forever, that we can just hand them a blank check every time there is a landslide or flood? ” he asked then. “Other parts of America have problems, too.”
No wonder he lost the 1994 California gubernatorial race and the 1997 Los Angeles mayoral race.
I predict that within five years, much 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’ve invented a fool’s paradise,” Hayden once complained.
Maybe so. But we reinvent it again and again.
Blue Sky: @rabcarian.bsky.social.Thread: @rabcarian
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