A gray Los Angeles morning is nothing unusual in what passes for winter out here. But on Wednesday, barely a week into the new year, it was a dense glut of smoke that darkened the sky, choking the air with ash. Where the sun broke through, it was the hazy and hellish shade of orange that millions of us on the West Coast recognize as the eerie light of a massive wildfire event.
Angelenos had braced for as much early in the week, aware that a powerful storm of Santa Ana winds blowing down from the mountains toward the ocean had the potential to whip up fires. After eight months with virtually no rainfall, what should be a wetter season for the region was instead perilously dry — that long stretch is now the second driest on record, in fact — but heavier rains the past two years had also fed an abundance of vegetation, fuel for an inferno. A red-flag fire warning blanketed L.A. County and parts beyond.
Yet even lifelong residents were shocked at the speed and scale of the blazes that erupted on Tuesday, first in the tony coastal enclave of Pacific Palisades; then in Eaton Canyon, near Altadena; and to the north, around the area of Sylmar. With hurricane-force gusts of up to 100 mph carrying embers as far as a mile from these sites, it was anyone’s guess where the next conflagration might begin. We watched as celebrities fled their mansions on the west side, where actor Steve Guttenberg helped move abandoned cars blocking emergency vehicles, and in Malibu, where beloved seafood restaurants and landmarks on the Pacific Coast Highway burned along with houses. We saw brave volunteers moving seniors in wheelchairs out of their assisted living home in Pasadena. Tens of thousands of people were displaced, with at least five killed and many more injured, casualty numbers that are sure to increase. As of Wednesday morning, some 1,000 structures have burned, including a high school that has often served as a shooting location for Hollywood. Brush fire also lapped at the trees of the iconic Getty Villa, which houses a collection of priceless antiquities, but a museum official has since confirmed that the buildings remain safe.
A certain helplessness attends these unfolding disasters, even as you make sure you have the emergency supply kit, pet carrier, face masks, and other necessities ready to go should the worst come any closer. And what if it does? Time will rapidly accelerate, short-circuiting any rational response — it feels impossible to say what instincts might kick in. Late on Tuesday, when not fielding an avalanche of concerned texts from those far away and unsure of California geography, I was offering my guest room to friends who had already been evacuated, my outlets to the ones who had lost electricity, streaming news coverage on KTLA, refreshing the Los Angeles Times and social media.
We also stood staring out of our west-facing windows, because in the dark, even from Silver Lake, you could clearly make out the glowing edge of the scorched wildland some 20 miles away. The strengthening winds tore heavy fronds off the tall, creaking palm tree in our front yard, and grounded firefighting aircraft, because any water or retardant they dropped would be dispersed before it reached the ground.
Suddenly, everyone in town was recommending the app Watch Duty, which offers the latest updates on the fires and neighborhoods directly threatened. It buzzed my phone with notifications deep into the night, until I woke up at 5 a.m. and turned it off. After that, I lapsed into a terrible dream that flowed from my most immediate fear: Waking up, I get dressed and go outside, breathing in the acrid fumes, and follow my street to the end of the block. When I turn the corner, I am confronted with a house in flames that’s about to set another alight. The chain of ignition will lead right to my doorstep. I run back there, shouting for my partner, knowing we have just minutes, seconds to act.
Then I really woke up — safe, relieved, the air purifier still running — but hemmed in by fires that had burned out of control as we slept. The Eaton blaze had exploded, consuming more than 10,000 acres and casting the pall of smoke overhead. From a distance, the smoldering hills of the Palisades, where 15,000 acres have now been torched, looked like a volcanic crater. There were another hundred text messages to answer. We fed the couple of stray cats that visit us daily, glad they were surviving. Apart from the occasional siren and the rustling of the Santa Anas, our surroundings were distinctly quiet. Despite remaining inside, I found my throat and sinuses irritated, my eyes slightly watery. The first twinge of a headache wasn’t far behind.
With strong winds forecast through the end of the week, millions across L.A. can do little besides wait and wonder what lies in store. The apocalyptic sense of dread has only been heightened by reports of hydrants running dry and a critical shortage of firefighters, blamed by some on a $17 million budget cut for the Los Angeles Fire Department (the city meanwhile committed to $1 billion in raises and bonuses for the police department over four years). California prisoners continue to do dangerous work on fire crews for extremely low pay. Climate science deniers up to and including President-elect Donald Trump — who keeps vowing to withhold federal aid from the state during wildfires once he’s back in the White House — have baselessly claimed that the devastation is due to environmental safeguards. Equally infuriating: Alex Jones and Elon Musk pushing conspiracist gibberish on X, formerly Twitter, that chalks the fires up to a “Globalist Plot To Wage Economic Warfare.”
If residents of the Southland can affect a certain nonchalance about catastrophes, bragging that they hardly notice small earthquakes and so on, they are nevertheless attuned to the precarity of life in this would-be paradise. The question on everyone’s mind, witnessing “unprecedented” fires spread from the rugged canyons into the urban matrix, outstripping every human effort at containment, is whether this novel and frightening precedent will soon be normalized. It’s a reminder of how many around the world exist on the brink of oblivion, imperiled by the violence and ecological folly of our species. Community is how we endure these crises, but when they ravage all we hold dear, it seems that in meeting the broader challenge, our institutions can be as indifferent as nature itself.
