From the sky, it looked like a firebombing — nearly every structure in parts of Altadena burning at once and much of Pacific Palisades aflame overnight, a neighborhood of more than 20,000 leveled to its foundations and dusted with the ash of all that had stood before. Ash from homes and schools and churches, palm trees and chaparral, stuffed animals and onesies. More residue was suspended in the sky, where the sun rose Wednesday a spectacular blood orange, and through the alveoli of lungs throughout Los Angeles, where schools were closed by fear of toxic air. On the ground, what remained resembled ruins; the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben compared the devastation to the catacombs of Pompeii.
Three-quarters of a century ago, the poet Czeslaw Milosz famously described a man laying flat below machine-gun fire in the streets of a city ravaged by World War II and marveling over the surreal fact that, pummeled by bombs, “the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine.” The whole of civilization, he felt, was humbled by the incongruity. The closest America has gotten may be these fires — with the Palisades, that postcard fantasy of an eternal affluent Pleasantville, now a pulverized expanse of lifeless gray. Much of Malibu burned again, too, blown through by winds as high as 100 miles per hour as decisively as a house of sand.
Can a city lose an entire neighborhood now and simply shuffle on, dragging the local memory like a ghost limb? This urban firestorm burned larger than Central Park, and the neighborhood it destroyed was home to so many endowed with social media reach that the disaster looked, on certain feeds, like a ghastly Map of the Stars’ Homes. The rampage of flames was, though incomprehensible to those watching from afar, also predictable enough that nearly everyone got out alive. But nearly everything left behind looks lost.
And who was to blame? No one says “act of God,” anymore — to indulge in talk of forces so large would insult our collective need to believe in human responsibility, which is to say control, even over disasters of incomprehensible scale. On social media these days, the need to find fault is so strong that if there isn’t a villain the event might as well have never taken place.
“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote way back in the 1960s. And on X and Truth Social and, indeed, Fox News, they were playing the hits, too — the fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought but the responsibility of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city’s fire chief, until this point anonymous nationally, who had the audacity to be a woman.
It was a remarkable reversal, conservatives demagoguing California fire disaster, but after the conspiratorial deluge of Hurricane Helene, it need not have been surprising. Had the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget really been cut? The fire hydrants were dry primarily because of the demand from the fires themselves, it turned out. There had been no political showdown about a fish called a smelt, and the California supply of water did not hang on its fate. The chaparral was not dry because of water policy choices. The controlled burns that took place last year and the order to suspend them — yes, perhaps shortsighted — had been given to ensure that firefighters were available to work the line on uncontrolled blazes elsewhere.
But you don’t get disasters of this scale without human failure, too. For years now, watching record-setting fire after record-setting fire, doomscrolling through phone footage of panicked fire-encircled evacuations and clocking the number of new cities visited by eerie and unbreathable clouds of wildfire smoke, it has been easy to mark each new disaster, many unprecedented in our lifetimes, with the scream, “Climate change!” It is also not enough. Decarbonization hasn’t yet solved the risk of catastrophic fire, and more rapid emissions reductions won’t dramatically reduce that risk for decades, either. In the meantime, it cannot be the case — must not be — that there was or is nothing more to do.
Global warming has already remodeled the risk landscape in California and indeed well beyond, making gigafire burns and urban firestorms like this one so much more likely. But so has housing policy, which has directed much more development into the path of fire across the vast tinderbox of the American West. The problem of forest management looms larger in Northern California, with decades of fire suppression producing much denser and more flammable forests there, but the job of brush clearing and fuel thinning has been neglected around Los Angeles, too. In a place like Palisades, where the homes became the fuel, a whole program of home hardening is now harrowingly necessary, to make existing homes much less vulnerable even when the embers descend in blankets from miles away.
What would that hardening look like, enacted at the scale of not just a community but a megalopolis, perhaps a whole state or even a continent? The job is in ways both forbidding and banal. Those forests, now intimidating heaps of fuel, must be thinned — in California perhaps almost four million acres annually, nearly equivalent to the state’s worst fire season in modern history. Brushland and scrubland, while trickier, must be managed better too: when possible, with controlled and traditional burning, and, when not, through mechanical thinning and more aggressive use of strategic fire breaks, particularly along ridge lines, and debris clearance especially in those canyons, like firepits, sometimes called jackpots. On the urban side of the what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, we probably need a program of systematically reducing risk to property by property — retrofitting homes and roofs, eliminating flammable flora, ensuring homes sit clear of anything flammable. Beyond that, some way of overcoming longstanding NIMBYish resistance, explained less by partisanship or climate denial than a more quotidian mix of lack of urgency, homeowner libertarianism and simple wishful thinking.
The social media blame game was in bad faith, but was it possible to see it as progress, for the cause of adaptation and resilience, that those who’d spent a generation conspiring to drown the government in a bathtub were now howling that it must be doing more? Or was it simply the turn of climate skepticism toward the hardened lifeboat ethics of what is sometimes called eco-fascism? By dollars in damage, the Palisades fire was judged within days to be, unequivocally, the worst in American history. But it was hard to know — in the immediate aftermath, with parts of greater Los Angeles still burning and nominal national leadership ambiguous at best — exactly what kind of wormholes it had opened up, in the country’s secondhand perception of ecological reality.
In Los Angeles itself, the mood was more predictably funereal, perhaps in part because so many were choosing to follow the news on local television rather than social media (catching the tragedy but avoiding the scapegoating). “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I heard again and again. “I haven’t felt this way since Sept. 11.”
Six years ago, in the aftermath of Malibu’s Woolsey fire, which burned through 96,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,500 structures, I reported from Los Angeles on the city’s future with fire, encountering again and again residents who hadn’t yet come to terms with how much larger and more frequent the burns had gotten. Back then, you could look at the devastation in Malibu and see discrete tragedies — a house destroyed here, a house destroyed there, set amid a large burn scar that might, in time and with sufficient rain, recover. There were those who talked immediately about building back better — about erecting new dream homes with the insurance payouts.
But just last year, State Farm dropped nearly 70 percent of its customers in Pacific Palisades, where houses are not separated by brush but stacked, almost cheek to jowl. By 2024, the state’s insurer-of-last-resort program had reached $3 billion in exposure, seven times as much as in 2020. Its most recent report counted less than a billion dollars in cash on hand, and though there is reinsurance to draw on, the Palisades fire alone is likely to generate many billions of dollars in claims and perhaps even more in damage. Unimaginability is no firebreak against the future. Refusing to imagine it is no excuse, either.
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