The Southern California Wildfire Paradox

A heat wave struck Southern California earlier this month. Soon after, large swaths of the region began to burn. All three fires, the Line Fire, the Bridge Fire, and the Airport Fire, are still going.

So far, they’ve engulfed almost 200 square miles, forcing evacuations in four counties and destroying dozens of homes. Southern Californians should know by now that natural disasters threaten our region more than most places in the United States. But time and again, we seem to forget fire season as soon as it ends, and we’re unready for nature’s fury when it inevitably returns.

In June, Claim Guard, an organization that educates consumers about insurance, published a report on natural-disaster preparedness that analyzed data from all counties in the United States. It sought to measure “community resilience,” which it defined as “the ability of a community to anticipate hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and recover rapidly.” It gave Los Angeles County “an exceedingly low score,” among the worst of all large counties. In terms of overall risk of economic loss due to natural disasters, “Los Angeles County scores 100 out of 100, making it the riskiest locale in the nation,” the report noted. Four of its five most at-risk counties in America are in California. Three are in Southern California.

The Public Policy Institute of California surveyed Golden State residents in July about disaster preparedness. Only 35 percent said that they were prepared for a natural disaster. Some aspired to do better: “23% intend to prepare in the next six months and 22% plan to do so in the next year,” the survey found. “The rest—20%—have no plans to prepare in the next year.” What’s more, “worries about wildfires do not appear to spur disaster preparedness,” the report continued, with “minimal differences in preparation” among Californians who view the threat of wildfires as “a big problem” or “not a problem” in their part of the state. Preparation levels were also similar “no matter how serious a personal or economic threat Californians rate wildfires.”

This is a confounding portrait of a region that is unusually vulnerable to natural disasters and unusually unprepared for them, despite being aware of that lack when reminded of it. I’ve tried to make sense of this since my earliest days as a reporter, when I saw the terrifying power of wildfires, floods, and mudslides up close; spent time in communities that they devastated; and saw how neighboring communities did not seem alarmed or altered even when luck alone kept them safe. I’ve come to understand that life is typically so good in Southern California, a place spared seasonal challenges frequent in other regions, that simply ignoring nature is possible for long stretches, with inattentiveness often going unpunished.

[Read: The line to fire is too close to L.A. for comfort]

Two decades ago, during the 2003 Grand Prix and Old Fires, I was driving around Claremont, Rancho Cucamonga, and Fontanna, watching the San Gabriel Mountains as Santa Ana winds began to blow, stoking an ominous orange glow that appeared to pulse on the far side of the range. What I saw next, while reporting for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, will always shape my attitude. Gusts pushed flames up onto ridges and scattered embers down into foothill housing tracts. Soon the whole mountain was on fire. I watched people flee in pickup trucks towing horse trailers, kids packed into cabs, loose picture frames tossed onto dashboards. I watched as a windrow of eucalyptus trees caught fire, the oil-rich leaves fueling the flames.

That night, I went to bed covered in soot, woke up with burning lungs, and stepped outside to a car covered in ash. Days later, I stood with devastated homeowners on lots reduced to smoldering ruins. I also remember driving a few miles away for lunch and recognizing that, just a bit farther from the mountain, most people were unaffected by the biggest fire in a generation. While the air was thick with smoke, they noticed, but soon the smoke just drifted away. Seeing what I had seen, I was jarred by the speed with which they felt incuriosity and indifference toward the fire. But they hadn’t seen what I had seen, so what had been wrought on their neighbors didn’t penetrate their experience, as if the nice, sunny days that followed rendered it unimaginable. I didn’t need to imagine. And I’ve never again gone to sleep in a house or hotel in a wildfire zone without thinking about how I’d get out if awoken by a surprise blaze.

At the same time, born and raised in Southern California, I can understand the out-of-sight, out-of-mind reaction to the region’s many natural threats. In lots of ways, they are rooted in the experience of life here. On the Pacific Coast, the climate is so temperate and stable for so much of the year, it is easy to go months without checking a forecast, let alone worrying about the weather doing you harm. Friends going skiing would say, “We’re driving to the snow this weekend,” because snow wasn’t something that fell here; it was something you drove to over there in the mountains. Here, April days were T-shirt weather. In drought years, rain was scarce, yet the tap never ran dry. And near the beach, onshore breezes kept us cool all summer.

There were occasional heat waves back then. They tended to arrive in early autumn, when we kids were newly stuck in stifling classrooms, and last a week or so. Teachers would curse the heat, and parents who lived happily all year without air-conditioning would open windows and lie in bed, slick with sweat, promising spouses, “Before next year, we’ll get AC.” Each year, some acted, but many others put it off, as one does when the problem you’re solving is months away, and soon enough forgot, as one does when bad consequences are so infrequent.

Today, Southern California weather, like weather worldwide, is a bit hotter than it once was. Yet heat waves here are easier to bear. More houses, businesses, and classrooms got air-conditioning as the actors accumulated over time, and new construction came with more amenities. Cars have improved too. Gone are the days when many of us drove 1980s sedans that overheated going up hills unless you blasted the heat to move hot air away from the engine. And like everywhere else––perhaps even more so––Californians have adopted the digital technologies that mediate more of life through screens.

When this autumn’s heat wave began, lots of Californians simply spent more time in climate-controlled spaces. Amid sprawl, where cities merge in uninterrupted stretches of pavement, dry riverbeds are hidden away in concrete channels, and one struggles to remember the last rainy day, it is easy to set the thermostat to 70, order UberEats, log on to Netflix, and forget about nature, even during a heat wave … unless your own community catches fire.

That tends to get even our attention.

The Airport Fire came to my attention late one night as I put on headphones, cued up a podcast, and stepped outside for a walk. I couldn’t see much in the dark or hear anything of the outside world, but I hadn’t walked far when a slight breeze brought a hint of smoke to my nose. I thought, Where is the wildfire?––I’ve lived in California long enough to get reasonably skilled at distinguishing smoke from a joint versus a chimney versus a beach bonfire versus a wildfire. I rerouted my walk to the top of a nearby hill to see whether I was in sight of any flames.

[Annie Lowrey: What the camp fired reveal]

I saw only darkness. But online, I determined that I was smelling the Airport Fire, 25 miles away. It had started just east of Rancho Santa Margarita, where I’d attended high school. The next day, as the Airport Fire spread, I watched on TV as it consumed a house near Lake Elsinore. I’d always thought of my high school as far away from Lake Elsinore—to get from one to the other, you take the 241 toll road to the 91 freeway to the 15 freeway, which takes about an hour if you avoid rush hour.

But large as they loom in day-to-day life here, wildfires don’t travel by freeway routes. An eagle in Rancho Santa Margarita would reach Lake Elsinore by flying over the Santa Ana Mountains. Upon hearing about a fire in Rancho Santa Margarita, Lake Elsinore residents must start worrying immediately, because flames can climb rugged ridges, summit peaks, and drop into valleys at astonishing speeds, depending on the wind. Tracking the wildfire reminded me to stop mistaking the MapQuest route for the territory. It was reorienting me to reality.

Days later, I was back in Claremont, wondering whether the smoke I saw rising ominously above Mount Baldy portended a dramatic night for the Inland Empire. But many of the communities that were hit hardest during the wildfires of 2003 were spared any damage at all this year. This month’s wildfires have destroyed a small number of houses and forced many thousands of residents to temporarily evacuate. Yet on the whole, locals feel lucky, knowing that the wind has been mild and that, given different weather, such as the gusty Santa Anas that occasionally sweep across the L.A. basin, fires that caused local tragedies could have been regionally catastrophic.

If the weather holds until this year’s fires are fully contained, fewer evacuees will confront the nightmare of returning home to a void. But even fleeing and returning to an intact house renews a person’s understanding of the scale of wildfires and the limits of the tools we use to fight them. Certain communities accustomed to the comforts of modernity now realize that their fate, or at least the fate of their homes, turn on the interplay of fire, air, water, and earth, elements so basic that the ancients thought they composed the whole universe.

The terrible coda of Southern California wildfires is that the worst may be yet to come, because mountains and hillsides denuded of brush are less able than they were to hold rocks and soil in place. Fall wildfires often portend winter or spring mudslides and debris flows––think boulders the size of cars dislodging from the mountains and ending up in the foothills, perhaps in a living room. Now, while hillsides still smolder, is the time to clear brush, trim trees, replace old shingled roofs, retrofit attic vents, fill sandbags, order supplies, plan for how you’d evacuate your family and pets if forced to flee home, and learn about your local government’s disaster plans. But it is hard to think of errant boulders as autumn fires are extinguished, smoke fades from the air, and deadlines to find a Halloween costume assert themselves. Amid Thanksgiving obligations, few people find time to prepare for tons of mud that won’t arrive for weeks or months or years––and that won’t ever threaten most streets. Soon, all but those hardest hit by these fires will cease to think about them. The region’s pleasantness will lull most of us who haven’t yet been burned into forgetting the several imminent perils that confront our region. I nearly forgot to note that among them are earthquakes.