For the first time in memory, everyone around here knows someone is something someone who has lost a home or been displaced by the fire that has devastated our beloved Los Angeles.
And everyone is wondering: What happens now? Will people rebuild? When will things return to normal?
Those of us who have been paying attention for the past few decades are also wondering: How long before it happens again?
New York Times reporter Seth Mydans once described this tension as the “central paradox” of our region. He wrote after the great wildfire of 1993, “we are caught between fire and flood, beauty and destruction, fear and hopelessness.”
There are so many factors that have helped make our current natural disaster the worst in American history: a warming planet, an extremely dry season that followed an extraordinary rainfall, unusually ferocious Santa Ana winds, extensive development in areas known to catch fire on a rotating basis.
But the more you read about the natural disasters that befall our hill and mountain communities, the more you wonder what hell’s city planners and politicians were thinking when they designed such a large area for development in the first place.
Despite the finger-pointing, none of the politicians in the world – or the fire department, for that matter – could control the hurricane winds that grounded firefighting planes while dropping destructive embers in places where uncontrollable fires were previously unthinkable.
In California, the supposedly unthinkable continues to happen.
We have waterfalls and wet winters, followed by hot, dry summers that absorb moisture from the chaparral, burning fires fueled by human activity – burning power lines, burning, fires, cars, fireworks – then they are blown by devilish winds that come from the deserts and rush as they pass through the mountain gorges to the sea. As it happens, we live in an area where weather and climate cycles are a real gift to the fire gods.
“Fuels, not ignition, cause fires,” said UC Riverside fire expert Richard Minnich. “You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he will never be arrested.”
In 2017, another wind-driven inferno, the Tubbs fire, swept unimaginably through the residential flatlands across the 101 freeway in Santa Rosa. Twenty-two people died, and more than 5,600 buildings were destroyed, including about 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing stock. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history.
That record only lasted 13 months. The following year, the Camp Fire devastated the Northern California town of Paradise, killing 85 people, destroying about 14,000 homes and displacing about 50,000.
Until last week, the Camp fire was believed to be the costliest fire in American history. But its $12.5 billion in damages will be pocket change compared to recent figures from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Real estate analytics firm CoreLogic has estimated damage to insured properties at $30 billion so far. AccuWeather experts estimate that between property damage and economic losses, the tab will be $250 billion to $275 billion.
Over the past 30 years, it has become a reference in these times to turn to the late author and social critic Mike Davis’s famous 1995 book “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” which was republished in his 1998 book, “The Ecology of Fear.” But the story is an eye-opening start for anyone who thinks the recent fires are a fluke. In fact, they are a feature of the world, nurtured by our fire habits, and will faithfully reappear, as they have forever.
Arguments over whether to rebuild, and who should bear the cost of doing so, have also been going on for decades.
In 1993, the Old Topanga fire — one of 26 wildfires that burned from Ventura County to the Mexican border that year — burned for 10 days, burning 18,000 acres, destroying 359 homes and killing people. three. Two years later, then-state Sen. Tom Hayden, who was running for mayor of Los Angeles, argued against imposing stricter restrictions on disaster-prone areas or, failing that, forcing local governments to pay the costs.
“Does everyone in California think that the American taxpayers are going to subsidize our lifestyle forever, that we can just hand them a blank check every time we have a mudslide or a flood?” he asked then. “All of America has problems.”
No wonder he lost his bids for governor of California in 1994 and mayor of Los Angeles in 1997.
Within five years, I predict, most of the Palisades, Malibu and Altadena will be rebuilt. Memories will fade, insurance rates will rise, life will go on – until the next fire, flood or earthquake.
“We’ve made a fool’s paradise,” complained Hayden.
Maybe so. But later on, we do it again.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
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