Good morning. Here’s what you need to know to start your day.
How do you stop a ‘perfect storm’?
It’s been a devastating, draining week for Los Angeles County.
Ten people confirmed dead. More than 9,000 homes and other structures destroyed or damaged. Over 35,000 acres burned.
The Palisades and Eaton fires are likely the worst disaster in California history in terms of economic loss — and among the worst nationwide.
The Palisades fire wiped out entire blocks of homes. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Then came another blaze, the Kenneth fire, which broke out Thursday afternoon on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley north of the 101 Freeway. By evening it had scorched nearly 1,000 acres and prompted evacuation orders and warnings in Hidden Hills, Calabasas and Woodland Hills.
The layers of tragedy reach at the personal, communal and cultural levels. Thousands of people lost their homes and priceless items inside them as flames clawed through neighborhoods, sparked by wind-driven embers. Hundreds more returned to the scorched remains of businesses they worked hard to create.
Tens of thousands of others had their sense of safety rattled as they were forced to take what they could carry and flee, unsure where to go or what they would return to.
Even those not directly affected by the fires mourned as historic buildings, beloved restaurants, houses of worship and familiar corners were reduced to ash.
Altadena Community Church burned down in the Eaton fire. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
As these fires and smaller blazes continue to burn, we’re all trying to understand what failures contributed to this virtually unchecked destruction.
Did the city really cut funding to its Fire Department? Was it the notable absence of Mayor Karen Bass, who was on a trip to Africa as the Palisades began to burn? Or the infrastructure that could not meet the demand for water, leaving fire hydrants running dry? Did the strong winds damage power lines, creating a fateful spark?
There will be plenty of postmortems on how local government leaders and agencies (mis)managed the crisis.
But I keep being reminded: This was a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Climate whiplash, made worse by our actions, created a tinderbox.
Researchers have for years been gathering evidence that climate change is creating conditions that will make wildfires increasingly more destructive.
Times reporter Ian James unpacked new research this week that shows those increasingly dramatic swings between heavy rain and searing drought are becoming more frequent and severe due to human-caused climate change.
“California naturally experiences some of the world’s most dramatic shifts between very wet weather and dry spells,” Ian wrote. “And with more warming, the scientists project the state to see these swings become even more extreme.”
In this latest back-and-forth, the exceptionally wet winters of 2023 and 2024 supercharged the growth of brush and grasses in hillsides and canyons. Then came a summer of record-breaking heat, followed by a notably dry fall. That’s how you make a tinderbox.
We’ve built communities out into those tinderboxes.
The origin points of the blazes are textbook wildland-urban interface, or WUI (woo-ee). Those are the places where human development spreads into wild, undeveloped spaces.
Historically, wildfires are a regular and natural part of the ecosystem in and around the Santa Monica Mountains. Sprawling neighborhoods in fire-prone areas supercharges the risks. And then there’s the human factor; Cal Fire, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, estimates more than 90% of wildfires are caused by humans, whether through carelessness, deliberate ignitions or infrastructure failures.
Add to all that the hurricane-force gusts that howled through the region earlier this week and we get the perfect, horrific recipe for inferno at a level our human countermeasures cannot match.
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain put it this way in a recent livestream:
“The reality is when you have bone-dry, critically dry, vegetation and 50- to- 90-mph winds with highly flammable structures densely intermixed with the vegetation, there is not a lot that can be done to stop the aggressive chemical reaction that is the combustion process of an intense wind-driven fire.”
A helicopter drops water on a fire near Topanga Village along Topanga Canyon Road on Wednesday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
We haven’t adjusted properly to fire given the realities of climate change.
That’s according to Monalisa Chatterjee, a climate scientist and associate professor of environmental studies at USC Dornsife. Her research is centered on how societies are adapting (or not) to climate change and the impacts and vulnerabilities that come with it.
Chatterjee told me the “perfect storm” of risks and the resulting devastation should serve as a reminder that human attempts to control fire — “a natural part of this ecosystem” — may work for a while, but eventually nature hits a breaking point.
“In the past, we’ve been resisting it — let’s not allow any fires to happen, because fires are bad,” she said. “But in reality, that ended up accumulating so much fuel that now, wherever there is any kind of fire events, we are seeing that it is escalating because there’s so much material available to burn.”
It’s vital for communities and government to move from a resistance mindset to a resiliency mindset and learn to coexist with fires, Chatterjee explained. That may include difficult decisions about where we build — or rebuild — homes.
Charred oranges hang from a tree Wednesday at the remnants of a home burned on Radcliffe Avenue in Pacific Palisades. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“We have to consider that we are living in a place where there is a fire risk. We have to culturally accept that,” she said. “We should be talking about fire when there are no fires.”
I don’t write this to give government officials and agencies a pass, or to gloss over the unfathomable loss that thousands of families have suffered this week. But I wanted to think about how we collectively view responsibility during a disaster of this magnitude.
Could there ever be enough money or firefighters or water when we’re staring down the barrel of a climate crisis shotgun that we helped load?
Was this inevitable in spite of us or because of us? Maybe both.
No comments:
Post a Comment