Hollywood in Flames
"The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself."
- Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
It's not enough that Los Angeles sits in the shadow of the greatest geologic fault in North America, that its Mediterranean climate renders drought common and climatic averages meaningless, that its surrounding mountains slough off debris flows, channel foehn winds, hold in polluted air, and echo in reply every environmental insult residents shout at it.
Los Angeles also holds Hollywood, which means a disproportionate fraction of disaster movies are staged in Hollywood's backlots. Los Angeles is, as its most celebrated critic, Mike Davis, notes "the city we love to destroy."
All in all, it's a metastable mix of an extraordinary landscape and an apocalyptic imagination for which combustibility is no mere metaphor. LA's famous noir is black with char.
All the prominent features of Los Angeles contribute to fire or the collateral damages that follow flame. The Mediterranean climate is ideal for creating combustibles. The wet winters grow plants, the long dry summers ready them to burn, and on top of that annual cycle, there are recurring droughts. The resulting chaparral shrublands, toughened by sun and aridity, grow in ways that actually encourage fire, and many plants in the mix rely on fire to provide competitive advantage against less fire-hardy species. The steep mountains accelerate flames up slopes and make possible the eruptive outbreaks of foehn winds in the autumn that drive flames sharply down slope. And since sparks follow people (much as fruit flies do), there are plenty of ignition sources.
The fires are only a beginning. Winter rains can scour the burned slopes into a sludge of mud, ash, and boulders that tumbles like white water rapids through ravines. Fires elsewhere in California have driven utility companies into bankruptcy, led to criminal charges for executives, and ended with powerlines shut down during high winds. Though wind and water are many times more damaging than wind and fire, some insurance companies are refusing to issue new policies or renew existing ones; the fires seem one hazard too many.
The astonishing thing is not that Los Angeles burns but that so much of its development has enhanced rather than blunted the threat from fire. For decades a preference for exposed-wood structures, including shake-shingle roofing, ensured that houses were maximally primed to burn. Public forests and parks meant quasi-natural landscapes would not pave over the fire threat by converting brushlands to brick and concrete; rather, new development carried the problem into fresh lands. Suburbs pushed up slopes, over alluvial fans, and against regrowing fuels. It was as though the city's fringe had taken on the properties of its celebrated chaparral. It promoted fire, it burned, it regrew.
The unholy mingling of built and natural landscapes guaranteed that fire protection was compromised in its very constitution. Cities want no fire; many countrysides need fire, and if mild fires are suppressed, the unburned fuel encourages monsters. If every urban fire that is put out is a problem solved, many wildland fires put out are problems put off. Urban fire services are ineffective in wildlands, and wildland fire brigades are helpless within the city; the two fire services have almost nothing in common except that both have been asked to stand between the hammer of flaming winds and the anvil of urban life and counter the blows.
Southern California has the mightiest firefighting force in the world, yet under the worst conditions – and global warming ensures even these will get worse and multiply – it is helpless against the flames. The same day that the 2018 Camp Fire incinerated the town of Paradise in northern California, the Woolsey Fire blasted through southern California across 39,234 ha, destroyed 1,643 structures, killed three people, and forced 295,000 residents to evacuate. More engines, more planes, more crews – none could have stopped the progression of either fire. What was once unthinkable, urban conflagration, has revived. It's like watching polio or plague return.
The emerging narrative can read like the script for a bad Hollywood slasher film. Yet reforms have stubbornly advanced. Fire risk areas have been mapped. Building codes for hardening structures against ember and flame have been devised. Newer communities tend to be less susceptible to fires than older ones. Fire agencies have created institutions to better cooperate against bad fires and are finding ways to reintroduce good fires. Landscape architects are exploring designs for the adjacent countryside. Practices that had stopped urban conflagrations early in the 20th century are returning in more contemporary forms. The core question is one of rate and scale: the risks are widening and quickening faster than society's responses.
It has been said that California is like the rest of America, only more so. Increasingly, California is like the rest of the modern world, only more so. Megafires have become a pathology of developed countries. In America the problem is usually defined as one of people moving into fire-prone landscapes; in Europe, of people moving out of fire-prone places. The shared fundamental lies in the curious ways modernity, especially underpinned by fossil fuels, has shaped how people live today. Fire synthesizes its surroundings. Modernity powers megafires the way warming oceans do hurricanes.
Thanks to humanity's fire practices – both the burning of living landscapes and the burning of fossil fuels (lithic landscapes) - Earth is undergoing the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. For many decades critics insisted that LA had to learn to live with fire. That's no longer enough: we have to live with a fire age. Some places, some cities – Los Angeles prominent among them – are getting there faster than others. They define the frontier of our fire future. They are portals to a Pyrocene.