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
Energy

Trump’s Total War on Wind Power

Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.

A wind turbine tied in a knot.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.

Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.

Keep reading...Show less
Sparks

Solar for All May Be on the Chopping Block After All

The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.

The EPA blocking solar power.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.

Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

Electric Cars Are Doomed to Be Fancy

Without the federal tax credit and until battery prices come down, automakers will have to argue that pricey EVs are worth it.

A fancy EV.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Hyundai

America’s federal tax credit for buying an electric car was supposed to be the great equalizer, an incentive meant to solve for the fact that EVs have long been more expensive than the polluting fossil fuel vehicles they must replace.

That tax credit is now dead. Thanks to the Republican budget reconciliation bill pushed through Congress this summer, the incentive will die after September 30 of this year.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue