By I WANTED TO WRITE something lighthearted about the New Year in my first post of 2025, but it’s hard to be lighthearted if you live in Southern California, as I do.
So much for a Happy New Year.
You’ve surely seen or heard about the fires that have decimated several SoCal communities, and the hardest hit have been Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and a long strip of beachfront homes in Malibu along PCH — the Pacific Coast Highway.
Fires are threatening other communities as well, and a former FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) director told the Los Angeles Times that, “This is your Hurricane Katrina.”
Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA Director during the Obama Administration, added this:
“(This) will forever change the community. It will be a touch point that everybody will remember, before and after. And for Los Angeles, this will become one of the defining moments of the community, the city and the county’s history.”
Craig Fugate is right, because just about anyone living here is hearing similar comments from people all over Southern California even if you aren’t in one of the fire zones.
One of California’s worst disasters ever
THINGS MAY GET WORSE. As a headline in Sunday’s New York Post tells us, LA fires close in on posh Brentwood neighborhood — where Kamala Harris and Lebron James have homes.
The NY Post story describes Brentwood like this:
“The posh ‘burb — also home to scores of Hollywood celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford and Dr. Dre — is the latest affluent community in the crosshairs of one of the worst disasters in California’s history.
The fire — one of several now in their sixth day — has so far incinerated nearly 24,000 acres, heavily contributed to the total death toll of 16 and destroyed more than 5,000 structures, many of them homes, causing untold billions of dollars in damage as it rips its way along the hilly coastline.”
We’ve had bad fires before, and they frequently are driven by the infamous Santa Ana winds, but we generally don’t have Santa Anas with this kind of intensity in January, and we usually don’t have them driving the kind of destruction we have seen this past week.
I don’t live near the current fire areas, and I’m a good 40 miles south of Pacific Palisades. We are all okay … for now, but I’ve had a steady stream of questions from friends and family in other parts of the country wondering if the fires are threatening me and mine who live in other parts of the Los Angeles Basin.
An entirely human failure
WE’RE ALL FINE SO FAR, although one son was on the fringe of a voluntary evacuation area near the Hurst fire and had his children at home all last week because their school was shut down.
But even if you don’t live near a fire zone, the threat of a Santa Ana wind-fueled fire is the No. 1 thought for everyone in Southern California right now.
Thought No. 2 is why we didn’t seem very prepared for the fires despite the fact that we get them nearly every year.
Two stories on The Free Press capture the two sides of the fire issue here in California. One of them is simply titled Paradise Lost, and the subhead cuts to the heart of the matter — The burning of L.A. is not just a natural disaster. It’s a man-made catastrophe.
It’s pretty thought-provoking, but here is the gist of it:
“What explains how one of America’s great cities — the biggest in the fifth-largest economy in the world — is burning to the ground? The failure here, at heart, is an entirely human one.
California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad. Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent some $22 billion to combat homelessness since he took office and yet, there has been a 3 percent increase in homelessness in the last year. Newsom also made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants. This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.
Los Angeles has the same problem with non-essential spending, albeit at a smaller scale. The city allocated $1.3 billion to combat homelessness last year, although the city comptroller found that half of that money has gone unspent. The Los Angeles Fire Department got a good deal less than that — $837 million — a budget that has since been cut by $17 million.
Would that $17 million have made a difference? Who knows? Answers are increasingly hard to come by in California. When asked by Anderson Cooper (CNN host) why the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry, Newsom responded that ‘the local folks are trying to figure that out.’ The buck always stops somewhere else in the Golden State.”
Fire is a part of the natural cycle
IT’S A SOBERING STORY, but so is another one on The Free Press by Leighton Woodhouse that was originally published in Newsweek, and it’s headline is equally sobering — Stop Blaming Politicians. L.A. Was Built to Burn.
Like Paradise Lost, it’s worth reading if you want some insight into just why California has so many destructive wildfires. Here’s a section that jumped out at me:
“There’s a common misconception that beneath the asphalt, Los Angeles is a desert. It isn’t. It’s grassland. And part of the natural cycle of the grassland ecosystem is fire. ...
Anyone who has lived in L.A. for more than a year has experienced either a season of active wildfires or a season of worrying about whether they would come. Joan Didion has written about it. The area around Pacific Palisades, in particular, has been on fire countless times before. There was a huge conflagration in Malibu in 1929. Then 1930 and 1935. Then 1938 and 1943, and so on, averaging two per decade up to the current day. …
There’s a reason this happens so much in Los Angeles: It is unique among American cities for the degree to which it directly abuts wild nature. Older cities grew more gradually. Around the urban core of cities like Boston, Atlanta, or St. Louis emerged suburbs, around them exurbs, and around them rural agricultural zones. Only then do you reach wild forests, mountains, or prairies.
Where New York has its meticulously designed Central Park, Los Angeles has Griffith Park, a sprawling expanse of wild mountain terrain right in the middle of the city.
These abrupt borders between nature and city are called ‘wildland-urban interfaces,’ and they’re inherently volatile. Man-made sparks from homeless encampments, discarded cigarettes, and downed power lines easily ignite wildfires, while brush fires that start from natural causes like lightning easily make the leap into residential areas and become urban conflagrations. …
People should be held accountable for the mistakes they make in forest management, climate emissions, or reckless behavior with flammable objects. But the hazards of California’s built environment are nobody’s fault, or at least no one who is still alive.”
A question to remember: “Did you save it?”
HERE’S MY TAKE: As a native Southern Californian, I can remember fires ravaging this region since I was a kid.
Back when I was in middle school, there was a huge fire in one of the canyon areas of Orange County not terribly far from my school, and I was sitting in class as students who had been at home due to the fire suddenly showed up.
“Did you save it?” the teacher asked as they straggled in.
Nobody had to ask what they were trying to save, because every student in that 7th grade classroom knew their late arriving classmates had been at home doing whatever they could to wet down their house, clear brush, and help their family save their home in some small way.
Over the years, as I have seen so many other California fires, that question from my teacher pops into my head again and again.
“Did you save it?”
Sadly, far too many Southern Californians have not been able to “save it” over the years.
This latest batch of SoCal fires is just the latest reminder of that, and of so many more terrible wildfires still to come.
