Urban Wildfires Shouldn’t Surprise Us

Years ago, at a friend’s dinner party in Los Angeles, I met someone who told me how hard it had become for him to watch television news, especially when it came to war and ecological devastation.

“It’s all too much to bear,” he said, as if he had to excuse himself. I nodded; I, too, find it extremely difficult to take in the ongoing and increasingly dire story of how we’ve disturbed the planet and how little we are doing to address climate change. The fact that I am a journalist does not save me from the anxiety, I told him. “But,” he added, “I worry about a disaster knocking on my front door and not knowing anything about it.”

His words echoed in my mind as I watched footage of the fast-moving wildfires engulfing many parts of Los Angeles in January. I hope he and his family are safe. He lived near Altadena, the epicenter of the Eaton Fire, which killed 17 people, destroyed almost 10,000 buildings and forced more than 100,000 residents to evacuate. Altadena is only about 7 miles from where I lived five years ago; now, Eaton Canyon, a popular hiking spot where my family and I went on weekends, is little more than ash. I see the images online and can’t comprehend what I’m seeing: people walking around in masks, hauling their possessions in carts, stumbling past destroyed, still-smoldering homes, the air hazy, thick and orange all around them. The thought of their pain breaks my heart.

In my profession, though, I can’t turn away from bad news the way the man I met at the dinner party had been trying to do. I do try to regulate my intake. I don’t get alerts, for example. I seek analysis rather than breaking news. More than anything, what overwhelms me is a sense of utter helplessness, even, at times, of rage. As a writer, I’m always looking for deeper context and history; I want to focus on solutions, and I try to encourage myself and others to find ways to live in harmony with one another and with the planet. But what happens when the disaster hits home? Angelenos never imagined wildfires galloping wildly into their neighborhoods, so many blazes raging across dozens of miles, all over town — that was something you would only see on the big screen, never in real life.

A steady diet of news couldn’t have kept the strong Santa Ana winds from pushing the flames south and then west through Eaton Canyon, any more than fire crews could have contained the fire’s early spread, even if they had had enough water — which, it turned out, they didn’t.

“Those erratic wind gusts were blowing embers for multiple miles ahead of the fire, and that’s really what caused the rapid spread of this fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin told the Los Angeles Times.

Quite simply, the urban wildfires that hit the region were the offspring of a monster that just keeps growing. And this has been a long time in the making. Like our warmer summers, droughts and floods, wildfires keep gaining in intensity and behaving in ways that surprise even the scientists who have warned us for years about the exponential impacts of climate change.

Could this be the disaster that finally awakens officials and voters to the immense need for climate adaptation? To a major reduction in greenhouse gases? Could the L.A. wildfires help make the case that the fossil fuel industry should be held legally accountable for its climate denial and the devastating ripple effects of its environmental impacts?

We need serious investments in public infrastructure, including emergency response and transportation, as well as recovery funds that don’t depend on the whims of the federal government. Recovering from a fire of this magnitude can be incredibly difficult, plunging families and entire neighborhoods into poverty and disinvestment. We need stronger, better climate education and local leaders who understand what preparedness should look like, based on their particular regional hazards.

We need all of this now, and so we cannot look away, as much as we might want to. It’s a monumental ask during a time of grieving, when we are still recovering from other climate change disasters in recent years. What happened in Los Angeles should radicalize us. The disaster is knocking at our front door right now, and we can no longer pretend to be surprised.