Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

In Terror of Embers in Los Angeles

Fire will happen in California. It’s just a question of when and where.

Embers swirl around a house in Los Angeles.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Q&A

You, Too, Can Protect Solar Panels Against Hail

A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.

This week's interview subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Hotspots

The Pro-Renewables Crowd Gets Riled Up

And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.

  • Activists came together on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s decision to issue a stop work order on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. It’s the most notable rally for offshore wind I’ve seen since September, when wind advocates protested offshore opponents at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
  • Esther Rosario, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, told me the rally was intended to focus on the jobs that will be impacted by halting construction and that about a hundred people were at the rally – “a good half of them” union members or representing their unions.
  • “I think it’s important that the elected officials that are in both the area and at the federal level understand the humans behind what it means to issue a stop-work order,” she said.

2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Spotlight

How a Carbon Pipeline Is Turning Iowa Against Wind

Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.

Iowa.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.

Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow