The L.A. Apocalypse Was Entirely Predictable

It is a truth almost universally denied that the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles—my hometown—are merely a magnified version of the normal.

Donald Trump blames Gavin Newsom, because that’s Trump’s knee-jerk (or just plain jerk) response to any California misfortune. In a similar display of politically targeted bile, Rick Caruso, the Bloomberg-esque Republican turned Democrat who lost the most recent L.A. mayoral election to mainstream Democrat Karen Bass, blames Bass. Any day now, Wall Street Journal editorialists will blame the New Deal and some Latin Mass Catholics will blame Pope Francis.

If there’s one person whose analysis we should take seriously, it’s the late Mike Davis. In 1998, Davis followed up City of Quartz—his critically successful dissection of Los Angeles—with Ecology of Fear, which looked more specifically at the apocalypses that were and are a constant feature of L.A. life. (I edited a number of such Davis articles at the L.A. Weekly during the ’90s.) In the decade since he’d written City of Quartz, Los Angeles had experienced the Rodney King riots, the Northridge earthquake, recurrent fires and floods in the hills surrounding the city, and the decimation of the area’s middle class with the huge post–Cold War downsizing of the region’s largest employers, the Pentagon-funded aerospace companies. Plunging himself into obscure archives, traversing L.A.’s tinder-dry hills and firetrap tenements, Davis chronicled and explained Los Angeles’s unending physical and social combustibility with the zeal and scholarship of a peer-reviewed Cassandra.

Chapter Three of Ecology of Fear is entitled "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn." It begins by noting that L.A.’s pre-European residents, the Chumash and Tongva Indians, annually set small fires in the hills of Pacific Palisades and Malibu to clear out the brush that would explode if left in place. Mike notes that Richard Henry Dana wrote in his seafaring classic Two Years Before the Mast that when he first sailed up the California coast in 1826, he saw a fire engulfing Topanga Canyon. Mike then documents the 13 fires that had burned at least 10,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains just west of the Palisades between 1930 and 1996. Mike makes a compelling case that the dry hills surrounding Los Angeles, running from Pasadena in the east to Malibu in the west, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow, and that building houses in those hills all but guarantees that many of those houses will burn, particularly when those winds soar above 50 miles per hour.

I can personally attest to what happens in those hills when the Santa Anas descend. In 1961, when I was in fifth grade at Kenter Canyon School, we—all the students, teachers, and staff—were abruptly evacuated when a fire that had been burning in Bel Air leaped the still-under-construction 405 and began racing across the hills of Brentwood. Classmates lost their homes, and the fire came within 300 yards of my family’s. We returned to our home the following day, and my memory of the next two weeks is that we were living in an ashtray. Nearly 500 homes were destroyed in that fire, which held the L.A. home destruction record—until this week.

Two days ago, Kenter Canyon School was evacuated yet again, as was the junior high (that’s what they used to call middle schools) I attended (Paul Revere). My high school, Palisades, was partly consumed by the blaze, as were the shops and homes where my buddies and I had hung out in the mid-1960s. The Safeway market is gone, as, I presume, is its marquee-style sign that we climbed onto in the midnight hours preceding the next day’s 1968 July 4th parade to solder the letters usually displayed on the sign to highlight the items on sale into an anti–Vietnam War slogan. (As the sign towered over the Palisades American Legion post, one of our slogans was "The American Legion is a hotbed of senility.")

In the more than half-century since the ’60s, that Safeway had been somewhat eclipsed by the very high-end Gelson’s Market, whose post-’60s arrival signaled the increasingly upscale character of the Palisades. None of the houses that first caught fire there this week were around in the ’60s; they were part of some very posh developments that extended far deeper into the Palisades hills than any developments had previously. A place so glorious—with sea breezes that mitigated the summer heat and views that stretched to downtown L.A. on one side and distant islands on the other—became an abode disproportionately for the truly wealthy, and the incentives for developers to put mansions on those hills rose accordingly.

Mike Davis told us what would happen to those homes and, when the winds reached their apogee, as predictably they would, to the shops and homes and apartments on the flatlands, too. The Chumash and early-19th-century seagoers knew what would happen. Only we denied it.