“There is an arsonist here in LA,” ?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Henry Winkler posted on X. It was 10:36 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 8. Almost as soon as the blaze in Pacific Palisades had broken out, the assignment of blame began. The president-elect was blaming the governor. A billionaire mall owner was blaming the mayor. Now, a full day into Los Angeles’s burning, responsibility for the fires had been distilled to its purest form: the arsonist. No actual cause for the fires had been determined, but arson was simple: All we had to do now was find this person and stop them.
Just hours before Winkler’s post, a little before 6 p.m., a new fire, the Sunset Fire, broke out on a steep hillside between Runyon and Nichols Canyons in the Hollywood Hills, a few blocks north of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards — a famous slice of the Santa Monica Mountains that juts right into the thick of Los Angeles. The night before, across town in Altadena, embers from the Eaton Fire were carried by howling winds and ignited buildings as far as three miles away from the fire line. The Sunset Fire could easily have done much worse: It was burning a stone’s throw from a swath of L.A. that is among the county’s most dense, filled with apartment buildings, commercial blocks, major museums and even L.A.’s most famous mall, the Grove, which reputedly has more visitors per year than Disneyland.
But the Sunset Fire did not burn the city down. Instead, less than 24 hours after it started, it was stopped. It had torched 43 acres of brush surrounded by homes, but it was fully contained and suppressed without destroying a single structure. Not even a car. A day after two huge and ultimately cataclysmic burns erupted on opposite ends of the city — after a full 24-hour shift spent trying to firm up defense lines — firefighters not only suppressed the new burn in the Hollywood Hills but were also combating three other major, named fires, as well as smaller brush fires throughout the city.
There is an app called Watch Duty that tracks wildfires and the response to them; it has, over the past few weeks, been installed on the phones of many, many Angelenos. Anyone who had paid for the members’ version would have seen something remarkable that Wednesday. When the Sunset Fire broke out, there were already more than a dozen firefighting craft in the air — by the Pacific Ocean, fighting the Palisades Fire, and to the east, around the San Gabriel Mountains, fighting the Eaton Fire. The sky was quickly darkening, visibility was worsening and the winds were gusting harder and harder. A fixed-wing “air attack” platform flew overhead directing aerial traffic; it most likely spotted the smoke from Sunset almost immediately. The pilot would have known that the window to make effective drops was shrinking fast. Suddenly, Watch Duty displayed many of those aircraft rerouting: They were heading toward Sunset.
Because it was put out quickly, it could be forgotten quickly.
These were aircraft from all over Southern California and beyond, piloted by crews that rushed in from across the Western United States. There were trucks and crews from the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service; from Nevada, Utah and Oregon; from well over 20 California cities and seven counties. Orchestrating this kind of ad hoc, real-time response is a devilishly complex task, and pulling off such a quick pivot to suppress another new fire is a true feat of modern management. The system behind it is called NIMS, the National Incident Management System. It is what allowed so many different fire crews to make that quick adjustment and save a significant swath of Los Angeles.
The system that led to NIMS was invented here in Southern California. In 1970, a series of fires raged throughout the area. This “fire siege,” as it came to be known, required agencies to fight a series of fires — a complex fire — across the region’s unique blend of wild and urban environments. But the agencies were unable to communicate well; they couldn’t coordinate an effective response. The fires burned for 13 days, torching more than 500,000 acres, destroying at least 700 homes and killing 16 people. Two years later, Congress agreed to fund the Firefighting Resources of Southern California Organized for Potential Emergencies project, known as FIRESCOPE, and the Forest Service began working with Southern California fire agencies to fix the fire problem. FIRESCOPE would grow into NIMS, carrying with it one of the fundamental findings of the whole project: In a fire-siege situation, departments needed to pool resources, and quickly. And to do that, they needed to set up mutual-aid agreements.
Yes, at the heart of a federal management system is “mutual aid,” a concept developed by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Mutual-aid agreements are common, and not only among firefighters — they crop up across almost every agency and at every level of government. They are so common that FEMA publishes an entire guide for mutual aid. The essential nature of these contracts isn’t all that different from what Kropotkin identified: Groups that work together, that share and shift their resources toward those most in need, are more successful than groups that do not. Sharing like this is particularly vital in emergency situations, because almost no one — and no one department — is fully prepared for an enormous crisis. As FEMA dryly puts it: “Most jurisdictions do not maintain sufficient resource levels to handle extreme events independently.”
The rapid shift of resources required to suppress the Sunset Fire is a perfect example of the sort of sharing Kropotkin envisioned. But its success creates an absence; it is seen mostly in things that didn’t happen. We can’t know how many homes or lives it saved. The Sunset Fire was put out quickly, and because it was put out quickly, it could be forgotten quickly. And yet the mutual-aid agreements that rendered the Sunset Fire forgettable tell us infinitely more about how we are going to go on living here, alongside fire and in its aftermath, than any assignment of blame, arson or otherwise.
Whom did we envision as the arsonist? Some leaped to report on the homeless and previous fires that started in their encampments. Others were tempted by theories involving energy weapons, D.E.I. practices or Diddy. Those disgusted by tech posted infographics about the amount of water necessary to run A.I. servers. In our need for the fire to be personal, to be someone’s fault, to be a thing someone did to us, we revealed any number of our own hypocrisies. Rick Caruso — the billionaire mall owner who quickly went on TV to blame Mayor Karen Bass — hired a private fire crew to protect his Brentwood home and other properties. But in hiring firefighters away from their own departments, he broke the very chain of mutual aid that ended up beating back the Sunset Fire — a fire that was prevented from ever threatening the Grove, one of Caruso’s own malls.
Blame is an easier, more visceral and seemingly actionable emotion than grappling with the fact that monumental fire is a thing that happens, and has been happening for millions of years, throughout Southern California. I never really understood what it is to live in a place that is predestined to burn until recently, when I became a gardener and got into propagating native seeds. To germinate the seeds of certain lupines, it helps to put them “to fire” — that is, to heat them up, even under a flame. This is because the plants have evolved to follow fire. Lupines have lived in California some 4.6 million years; humans, as little as 15,000. They have figured out how to use fire’s heat as a signal, sprouting aggressively in its wake. For us, the fire is similarly revealing. The fire is a mirror: It lays bare our best and our worst, our need for one another.
Ryan Francis Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles. He has previously written for the magazine about the director Ti West and the band Khruangbin.
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