For the first time in my memory, everyone around here knew someone or something. teeth These are people who lost their homes or were relocated due to the fires that left 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.
in spite of careful pointingPoliticians around the world, and fire departments for that matter, have no control over the hurricane-force winds that grounded fire planes while uncontrollable fires dumped destructive embers into previously unthinkable areas. It would have been.
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 the fire.” University of California Riverside fire ecologist Richard Minnich Said once. “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 analytics company CoreLogic Damage to insured property 30 billion so far. AccuWeather Experts Combined property damage and economic losses are estimated to be between $250 billion and $275 billion.
Over the past three decades, it has become commonplace in moments like these to turn to the late author and social commentator Mike Davis’ famous 1995 essay.Cases that should set Malibu on fire” was republished in his 1998 book, The Ecology of Fear. 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 and are further exacerbated by our environment. firefightingAnd like forever, it will definitely happen again.
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
