Tuesday night, a historic wind event swept through Southern California, spreading horrifying fires that torched a dense urban patchwork of homes, institutions and businesses. The multiple fires in greater Los Angeles have produced only two deaths so far, somewhat mercifully. But the windstorm is expected to continue, and already much of Pacific Palisades has burned to an unrecognizable gray.
A decade ago, this kind of disaster seemed unthinkably rare. In retrospect, Canada’s 2016 Fort McMurray disaster, which formed the basis of John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather,” was the beginning of a frightening new era. Then came Santa Rosa, Paradise, Boulder and Lahaina — the deadliest North American fire in more than a century, if one that now hardly stands out in cultural memory against the other scars of urban firestorms. In neighborhoods like these, often far from the wildland-urban interface, it’s almost impossible to clear enough brush to make homes defensible, as the wildfire expert Zeke Lunder noted on Tuesday. The homes provide the fuel, and the fires jump from house to house.
These years of fire have also initiated a set of arguments about its driving factors — to what extent the new disaster landscape is the result of climate conditions or fuel buildup from decades of fire suppression and to what extent building and population patterns have pushed more people into the path of fire. At times like this, for better or for worse, those arguments and their policy implications feel less urgent than the sheer scale of the wreckage and the simple and obvious lesson: We are not prepared.
“There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this,” Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told me in 2019. “The only thing that will stop this is when the earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.”
Seven of the eight largest wildfires in California history have burned since then.
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