The Best Time to Fireproof Los Angeles Was Yesterday

Opinion|The Best Time to Fireproof Los Angeles Was Yesterday

From the sky, it looked like a firebombing — nearly every structure in parts of Altadena burning at once and much of Pacific Palisades aflame overnight, a neighborhood of more than 20,000 leveled to its foundations and dusted with the ash of all that had stood before. Ash from homes and schools and churches, palm trees and chaparral, stuffed animals and onesies. More residue was suspended in the sky, where the sun rose Wednesday a spectacular blood orange, and through the alveoli of lungs throughout Los Angeles, where schools were closed by fear of toxic air. On the ground, what remained resembled ruins; the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben compared the devastation to the catacombs of Pompeii.

Three-quarters of a century ago, the poet Czeslaw Milosz famously described a man laying flat below machine-gun fire in the streets of a city ravaged by World War II and marveling over the surreal fact that, pummeled by bombs, “the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine.” The whole of civilization, he felt, was humbled by the incongruity. The closest America has gotten may be these fires — with the Palisades, that postcard fantasy of an eternal affluent Pleasantville, now a pulverized expanse of lifeless gray. Much of Malibu burned again, too, blown through by winds as high as 100 miles per hour as decisively as a house of sand.

Can a city lose an entire neighborhood now and simply shuffle on, dragging the local memory like a ghost limb? This urban firestorm burned larger than Central Park, and the neighborhood it destroyed was home to so many endowed with social media reach that the disaster looked, on certain feeds, like a ghastly Map of the Stars’ Homes. The rampage of flames was, though incomprehensible to those watching from afar, also predictable enough that nearly everyone got out alive. But nearly everything left behind looks lost.

And who was to blame? No one says “act of God,” anymore — to indulge in talk of forces so large would insult our collective need to believe in human responsibility, which is to say control, even over disasters of incomprehensible scale. On social media these days, the need to find fault is so strong that if there isn’t a villain the event might as well have never taken place.

“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote way back in the 1960s. And on X and Truth Social and, indeed, Fox News, they were playing the hits, too — the fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought but the responsibility of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city’s fire chief, until this point anonymous nationally, who had the audacity to be a woman.

It was a remarkable reversal, conservatives demagoguing California fire disaster, but after the conspiratorial deluge of Hurricane Helene, it need not have been surprising. Had the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget really been cut? The fire hydrants were dry primarily because of the demand from the fires themselves, it turned out. There had been no political showdown about a fish called a smelt, and the California supply of water did not hang on its fate. The chaparral was not dry because of water policy choices. The controlled burns that took place last year and the order to suspend them — yes, perhaps shortsighted — had been given to ensure that firefighters were available to work the line on uncontrolled blazes elsewhere.