The Fire Next Time

And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.

So we lived in the hills as soon as Mom and Dad could afford a mortgage rather than rent, kept the brush around the various houses trimmed, the garden well-watered, had a mental list of the precious and irreplaceable items to be grabbed and taken with us in case of a sudden fire evacuation. (In the end, in spite of all care and precautions taken, Mom and Dad’s retirement house in northern San Diego County burned in the 2003 fires, destroying any number of inherited family relics.)I have never forgotten the peculiar odor of smoke from a big burn hanging in the air, the odd beige-orange color of the sky, how the smoke from a distant brushfire piles up in sullen beige clouds, and the peculiar deep roaring sound of a fire well under way. One night in the week of Thanksgiving 1975, we watched the Mill fire burning downhill towards Sunland, Tujunga and La Crescenta. Through Dad’s binoculars, we saw a fire tornado sucking flying debris into itself, while a line of advancing flames stretched as far to the east and west as we could see. Fire engine sirens wailed almost constantly, near and far that night, along the streets below us.

The LAFD were able to beat out that massive fire in the Angeles National Forest within three days or so. But that was then … this is now, and half a century later. Managerial competence in governance and administration appears to have departed California, right along with that portion of a middle and working class who despair of ever getting ahead of the game. So many essential blocks have been pulled out of the jenga tower that was California, through political expediency and mismanagement. The infrastructure of lines and hydrants neglected. Reservoirs and dams were not filled with a particularly generous snow-melt and routed where it would be needed when the fires came; instead, precious water was allowed to pour unhindered into the ocean. Fire breaks and roads were not maintained, preventive burns not done, because environmental activists within and outside the state government have made it nearly impossible. Insurance companies, upon seeing the writing on the wall and knowing that catastrophic fires were inevitable, flatly declined to provide coverage to homeowners. The LAFD fired essential personnel for refusing the Covid shot, deferred equipment maintenance, appeared to prioritize celebrating gay and transgender rather than focusing on fire prevention. In the final insult, the LA FD had their budget cut by the mayor’s office. The mayor herself seems to be one of those who revels in the rewards of the office and those ceremonial honors attached but has little appetite or ability for attending to essentials of civic management.

So all those jenga blocks had been pulled out, when the fires started burning after the Santa Ana winds began to blow. It matters very little if those fires were started by any deliberate or random accident, as they always will in California. Anything and everything will spark off a fire: a discarded cigarette butt, a short in a power line or a string of Christmas lights, a steel bulldozer striking a flint rock, sunlight focusing through a piece of broken glass, a campfire not entirely extinguished, a hot catalytic converter on a car parking in long dry grass … accident or arson.
The hills will burn.
This time, they have burned out the wealthy and well-situated. (Again – like the 1961 Bel-Air fire did.) To a large degree, those in Malibu, along the coast, and in the Pacific Palisades generally appear to be people who were perfectly OK with the initial extraction of the jenga blocks which permitted their secure and privileged lives. Until the fires came over the hillside. (The Eaton fire simultaneously burned out whole neighborhoods in Altadena. This didn’t seem to get half the breathless coverage in the mainstream establish media, mostly because it’s a middle-class to working class neighborhood, with many residents who have lived there for generations, and whose small urban single-family cottages will not be as readily replaced.)

Some commenters speculate that the fires this time will lead to a conservative reawakening in California. A nice thought, but I rather doubt it. Even with the various mismanagement of things in California … it’s still very pleasant for those who have a comfortable income, have lived there all their lives and distain the thought of living anywhere else. The climate is mild year-round, compared to most other places, the range of scenery is glorious, and there still are some cultural advantages. A handful of counties back of the coastal zone and outside of the big cities are still well-managed and sane.
I think it more likely that what will happen as a result of the fires will be a west-coast Curley effect. The electorate will be shaped as the long-time mayor of Boston did, driving out those most inclined to vote against progressive policies. Those who can see the writing on the wall are leaving and will leave with all speed, and perhaps the speed will increase after this disaster. The Californians left behind probably won’t vote for Karen “The Commie” Bass, Governor Brylcreem or their ilk. It’s even more likely that they’ll pull the lever for another even worse Dem next time around and probably one even more incompetent. Whoever the next generation of California politicians and managers will be – it’s a guarantee that their progressive credentials and their chosen pronouns will be perfect. Comment as you wish.