In Terror of Embers in Los Angeles

Ask me one thing I love about living in Los Angeles and there’s a good chance I’d say, Because it’s wild. The giant city park near us is no flat, grassy plane for picnicking and Frisbee, but a rugged expanse of coyotes and the occasional mountain lion, God rest his soul. Outside my window loom the San Gabriel Mountains, loaded with hiking trails.

This is a place integrated with nature. People hike after brunch. But, as we must say at times like this, there is a cost to that.

The skies are dark today after two enormous wildfires sprang up overnight, sparked and fueled by ferocious Santa Anas. The winds, which blow hot air from the inland Great Basin toward the ocean, typically bring unseasonably warm days and fire danger in autumn. This January incident brought gusts as high as 100 miles per hour that rattled our windows and downed trees across town.

First came the fire in the Pacific Palisades, the area between the city’s ritzy western beach towns and the oft-burning hills of Malibu. The Palisades fire turned into a beast in a hurry as tens of thousands of people abandoned their homes and parts of Santa Monica went on high alert. Bulldozers bulldozed abandoned cars to make way for fire trucks.

Later in the evening, a second blaze began in Eaton Canyon, whose waterfall makes it one of the busiest hiking destinations in town. Eaton spread quickly in the dry mountains above Pasadena, forcing evacuations and alerts in the cities like Altadena and La Cañada Flintridge and creating a dark cloud of smoke over the San Gabriel Valley. At Caltech, where I work, the campus is wind-beaten and classes are canceled, as they are at plenty of area school districts.

L.A. woke up Wednesday morning to find itself between two fires. And those two enormous events, each of which has consumed thousands of acres by now, aren’t the end of it. Another major wildfire broke out north of the city near Santa Clarita. Smaller blazes have popped up all around town like a cruel game of Whack-a-Mole — in Pasadena, in Culver City, and close to here, by Dodger Stadium. Mercifully, most of these flare-ups were extinguished before they could spread.

In social media posts, residents are recommending to each other the excellent Watch Duty app that tracks fires as they develop. To have that on your phone this week is to be barraged by messages about new evacuation orders and new fires blazing up. With the whole region bone-dry and the gusts unrelenting, the city suddenly feels like a minefield. Any expanse of tree or scrub could be the next one to catch fire. As I watched out my window last night to see the mountain flames dance in the distance, a power line explosion in the foreground darkened part of a neighborhood across the river.

Such gloom was already a signature part of late summer and autumn in California, when the months of near-zero precipitation create a tinderbox in the hills and the mountains. Now, wildfires are seasonally unbounded. No significant rain has fallen in November or December. That, plus, an extremely hot and dry summer, led to the parched conditions that combined with freak winds to set the city ablaze during what used to be a wet month.

This is the way of things now. During the past two winters, El Niño conditions dropped heavy rainfall around Los Angeles that added snowpack to the mountains and eased drought conditions in the area. This winter we haven’t been so fortunate. In a climate-changed L.A. with less rain during its rainy season, the delicate balance of the city starts to tilt out of balance. It’s harder and harder to have neighborhoods in and up against the mountains, when wildfires seem to come so much more often.

These events inevitably trigger a wave of “How could you live in such a place?” Of course, you could ask the same thing of the tornadoes that sweep through where I’m originally from, or the hurricanes of the Gulf Coast. Every place has its disasters, and major wildfires are growing more common everywhere, not just in California. Retreat is an illusion.

What matters, here and elsewhere, is resilience. Not just the psychological kind that means we recover and come back, but the practical, logistical kind, like decentralized electrical grids that are less vulnerable to natural disasters and help people keep the lights on when the worst happens. We must build for the unexpected now that the freak cataclysm isn’t a freak event anymore.