Los Angeles is a topographical wonderland. Mountains loom in the distance. Hillsides and canyons are the refuge of hikers and dog-walkers. Beaches and bluffs above the coastline beckon. Into this wilderness we have threaded our neighborhoods and streets, not to mention freeways, making it a mix of the wild and the urban. We are the only megacity in the world that has mountain lions roaming the streets; only Mumbai and its leopards even compare. Here, mountain lions mostly hide during the day but come out at night, caught on doorbell cameras’ video slinking into backyards and hopping fences.
We have plumbed and electrified the wilderness of Los Angeles. But we haven’t tamed it. How could we? To live here, we don’t make a pact with nature as much as we reach an uneasy standoff with it. We know there will be earthquakes — the ground is riddled with fault lines — but we retrofit and tell ourselves they are high-risk, low-probability events. That allows us to sleep at night, perhaps with a false sense of security in the roofs over our heads.
And we know there will be wildfires, but we think they will be relatively quickly contained and occur in foothills and areas with ill-managed underbrush — the places that homeowners didn’t clear or voracious goats weren’t dispatched to munch away.
We were wrong.
A confluence of extraordinarily bad events — no significant rainfall since May (that drizzle on your car window on Christmas Eve didn’t count) and a merciless hurricane-like windstorm — whipped a fire that may have started in a backyard in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday morning into an inconceivable inferno that mowed down stretches of the coastal community in a matter of minutes. Then a fire exploded in Altadena, wiping out neighborhoods. A day later, the Palisades fire had destroyed thousands of acres, with 0% containment.
By the end of the week, six fires had burned across Los Angeles County, destroying not just the Palisades and much of Altadena but areas in Malibu, the San Fernando Valley, L.A. near the Ventura County border, and the Hollywood Hills. People lost homes, and all of us lost Will Rogers’ historic ranch home, part of Will Rogers State Historic Park in the Palisades. Fire went for everything. Black smoke billowed up toward the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory to the east and flames made it to the grounds of the fabled Getty Villa, which houses priceless antiquities. Both have survived so far, with the Getty Villa no doubt helped by brush clearance 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 when we figured that our infrastructure was sufficient to save us from this inferno.
I have lived here more than 30 years and have been spared fire. But like other Angelenos, I knew all along that it could come. There’s been so much fire in the time I’ve been here that I sometimes think Los Angeles will sooner be destroyed by fire than by the big earthquake we’re supposed to prepare for.
I live next to a grove of 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 dubbed it. Whenever the trees sway vigorously in a dry wind, I desperately worry and scan them for any sign of fire.
The wildfires that have scorched the hillsides above where I live have never come down to my neighborhood. But I have heard the police driving through those streets at 3 a.m. calling for people to evacuate.
I was writing this piece Thursday afternoon when I got an emergency alert for an evacuation warning in my area. Freaked out, I started packing. How do you choose the most precious of your precious things to pack in a couple of overnight 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 relief was a return to the denial that makes it possible to get through our daily lives in this perilous place.
Angelenos are upset about the glitchy emergency alert system, but that is the least of the issues this conflagration has revealed. Overwhelmed by the massive demand — especially with water-dropping aircraft grounded at some points by strong winds — fire hydrants in the hillier elevations of the Palisades ran dry. Lack of pressure to move the water was the culprit, said city officials. Should the city revamp the hydrant system, which seems to work fine when there are just a few structures on fire? Or was this just a once-in-a-generation fire that out-drank the city’s water system?
There are other questions. People have criticized Mayor Karen Bass for being out of the country when the fire started on Tuesday and for cutting the Fire Department budget, though the city administrative officer says the budget ultimately went up overall and nothing impacted firefighting ability.
Bass obviously could not have stopped the fire. (She’s not Moses.) But what she must do now is follow through on her promise to help people rebuild aggressively. “Red tape, bureaucracy — all of it must go,” she said Friday. That is something that will help us all. To make a life in this wilderness, we need all the help we can get.
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