Los Angeles, CA

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I’m writing on Monday night, so when you read this, you’ll know more than I did about how badly the Los Angeles fires flared back up during Tuesday’s forecasted windstorm.

The coming annihilation of Los Angeles has been a persistently popular topic over the past century, which has once again flared up with the current fires.

The late journalist Mike Davis published a local bestseller in 1998, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, in which he tabulated, “The destruction of Los Angeles has been the central theme or dominating image in more than a hundred and fifty novels, short stories, and films.” Common fictional causes of L.A.’s coming catastrophe include fire, earthquake, flood, nuclear bombardment, comet strike, and invading hordes of creatures, whether human, animal, or alien.

Some of this is a supply-side phenomenon: The movie industry is centered here, so Los Angeles is the most convenient city for them to blow up.

And many famous science fiction writers were attracted to Los Angeles by the military-industrial complex, such as my late neighbor Jerry Pournelle, who cowrote his comet-strike epic Lucifer’s Hammer with his authorial partner Larry Niven. (In contrast, Niven is about as old money as Los Angeles gets: His grandfather Edward L. Doheny was the first to strike oil in Los Angeles in 1892, making him, vaguely, the source for Daniel Day-Lewis’ titanic Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.)

But much of it is demand-driven. Lots of people enjoy thinking about the annihilation of Los Angeles.

For example, one of the earlier L.A. Armageddon books, Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, features a sensitive Ivy League-trained painter who is inspired by encountering a typical Los Angeleno simpleton named Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where Matt Groening got the name) to envision his masterpiece: “The Burning of Los Angeles.” At the end, the overexcited throng at a movie premiere white-riots and carries out his theme by burning down Los Angeles.

West, born Nathan Weinstein, was a classic example of the indignant indigent man of letters lured to Los Angeles to write for the film industry. The crass self-expression of the inhabitants drove West crazy. He wrote of a residential street in the Hollywood Hills:

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.

Well, the Sunset fire that broke out suspiciously last Wednesday near the popular Runyon Canyon hiking trail in Hollywood came close to cleaning up the architectural diversity deplored by West. Almost like in a scene from Day of the Locust, the wind blew it straight toward Hollywood Boulevard.

But a huge turnout of firemen knocked it down quickly.

West went on:

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

But lots of people who aren’t in Los Angeles also enjoy visualizing its demise. After all, if you live in a frigid part of the country, it’s pleasant to imagine the lotus eaters of Los Angeles getting what’s coming to them.

But the prosaic reality is that Los Angeles isn’t likely to be left a ruin anytime soon. It’s alarming to flatlanders like myself that homes have burned not just on winding roads in the sagebrush-covered hills but also in normal street grid suburban neighborhoods. Still, so far, just a small fraction of 1 percent of the homes in Los Angeles County have been destroyed.

Then again…

Although many emphasize the inevitability of Los Angeles’ downfall, the amount of time matters. If the best guess is that your home will be destroyed in 250 years, nobody much cares. On the other hand, 25 years is highly worrisome.

So, what will happen between the time I write this and the time you read this? As I’ve often admitted, I prefer trying to make sense of the recent past than predicting the future. So, I’ll tell you what I’m most worried about.

The good news is that there are a lot more firemen in place this week than on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 7, when only about 10 percent more than normal were deployed despite forecasts of extreme winds, along with the near total lack of rain since spring (after two years of heavy rains grew much now-dry grass on the hills). The New York Times reported:

Those extra firefighters the city of Los Angeles called on made up less than a tenth of the approximately 1,000 on duty on any given day. And the 100 additional people called up by the county added to its daily firefighting force of 900.

Yet, once Los Angeles’ city and county fire departments rounded up enough resources, borrowing heavily from other places, they’ve mostly executed their contingency plans brilliantly.

For example, when the wind from the north reversed on Friday afternoon, on the fourth day of the fire, and started pushing the Palisades fire northward toward the massively populated San Fernando Valley, where I live, they had ten helicopters filling up with water from the Encino reservoir and dropping it every thirty seconds all night long. It was an impressive sight.

The next day they even managed to save all but two homes deep in Mandeville Canyon just west of the 405.

Hopefully, they’ve since laid down enough strategic lines of the pink fire retardant goo to keep the current fires bottled up.

Of course, we also could easily get new fires in new, unprotected places, due to more faulty power lines, arsonists, smokers, tweakers, homeless campers, and all the other stupid reasons that about twenty wildfires break out on the average day in the state of California. (As for natural causes, the Golden State has less lightning than most other places.)

Five of California’s top ten wildfires in acreage ever, since the late 1800s, happened in 2020, which could be due to climate change and/or to the various insanities of the year 2020, delusions I may have mentioned once or twice in this column.

And the bad news is that firefighting aircraft can’t operate when the winds are at their worst, which is exactly when wildfires are most dangerous. The great majority of homes lost last week came while the airplanes and helicopters were grounded during the initial high winds.

I suspect that Southern California needs a huge investment in infrastructure to fight fires on the ground.

What we saw on Friday that worked to keep the Palisades fire out of the San Fernando Valley was that after the flames roared up the south side of the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, they greatly slowed down once they started having to advance downhill. Heat rises, so fires move much faster uphill.

Intelligently though worrisomely, the firemen made their stand on the downslope. Tanker planes, which only operate during daylight to prevent crashes when flying low, had laid down a band of pink Phos-Chek on the north slope, which slopes down. Firemen working on the dirt portion of Mulholland Drive, which runs just north of and thus below the crest west of the 405 freeway, cleared more brush. And the choppers dropped water for hours.

Encino and Tarzana were saved.

The next day, the firemen repeated the process in Mandeville Canyon, going all-out on the counterattack once the fire reached the downslope into the canyon. It’s scary how firefighters wait until the last moment to strike back, rather like how in the crisis at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington kept his best troops hidden by lying down on the reverse slope while Napoleon’s crack Imperial Guards charged upward.

But that tactic depends upon having men and, especially, aircraft close by. Unfortunately, nobody knows where the fire will break out next. Los Angeles County is home to almost 10 million people over 4,000 square miles—roughly a square 64 miles across.

And low-level bombers can’t fly with sustained winds over 40 mph.

A military analogy is the millennia-long debate over the utility of fortifications versus mobility. Since May 10, 1940, when the German tanks blitzkrieged around the end of the Maginot line, fixed lines have been unfashionable.

But technology changes. For example, in the current war, the Russians have been investing much more in hardening their defensive barriers than the Ukrainians. We shall see which strategy proves most prudent.

The next revolution in firefighting might involve increased mobility, such as having a huge number of drones loaded with flame retardants or water being stationed every mile or so to allow them to hit new fires within their vulnerable first five minutes.

Or, the future of fighting wildfires might involve fixed lines of defense.

For instance, Southern California mountains already have countless fire roads: dirt roads running along the top of ridges that provide both a firebreak, at least when winds aren’t blowing embers too far, and access for firemen.

What if both edges of these fire roads were lined with sprinkler pipelines that could spray down the hillsides, either with water or, ideally, low-viscosity retardant? What’s needed is an automatic response before firemen can be mustered.

California was hugely effectual at building infrastructure, such as its vast water projects and college campuses, from about 1885 until 1969. Then, in a remarkably short period, its elites, rather than course-correcting moderately, flipped 180 degrees to devoting their brainpower to blocking the bulldozers. This is famously epitomized by the generation gap between master builder father/governor Pat Brown (first elected in 1958) and “era of limits” son/governor Jerry Brown (first elected in 1974).

During this vibe shift, though, can we just change 90 degrees rather than 0 or 180?