.png)
5 hours ago
1
Over the last seven years, I have covered three of the four deadliest wildfires in modern US history. From the smoldering, forested lots of Paradise to the leveled Lahaina homes overlooking the Pacific, I’ve documented the stories of people who ran for their lives, held the hands of badly burned fire victims and trudged alongside families searching for their missing loved ones.
But nothing prepared me for the overwhelming sense of loss that permeates Altadena in the aftermath of the Eaton fire. It’s not just the figures, though they are shocking – nearly 7,000 homes burned and at least 16 dead. Instead, it is the thought that kept returning to me as I surveyed the blackened remnants of homes and so many lives laid bare: it did not have to be this way.
While this disaster has been described as unprecedented – hurricane-force winds made it impossible for firefighters to stop, let alone contain, the inferno – here in California we have experience with this kind of fire.
Deadly fires raged through communities around California’s wine country as well as in southern California in 2017, destroying 10,000 buildings and killing more than 40 people.
The next year was even more perilous. In November 2018, as powerful winds gusted through far-northern California, a century-old piece of power equipment, decades overdue for replacement, failed and sent sparks into tinder-dry brush. The flames moved faster than scientists knew was possible, consuming the hamlet of Concow before making their way into the suburban settlement Paradise and the nearby community of Magalia. Paradise, in a fire-prone area, had long prepared for fast-moving conflagration and was still caught off-guard.
In the end, the town was essentially wiped away. Nearly 14,000 homes were lost and 85 people died – many of them elderly and disabled. They perished in cars and in basements with their pets, in showers as part of last-ditch efforts to protect themselves from the flames, and in their yards. Ethel Riggs, 96, could not escape because she wasn’t tall enough to reach the manual release to open her garage door to drive away.
It was a horrifying preview of the hellish firestorms that firefighters, experts and government officials knew would only grow in frequency.
Just two years later, California was besieged by wildfires that again wiped away towns. Berry Creek was destroyed, 33 people were killed and the sky turned orange across the west coast. In the midst of the pandemic and two years after such a deadly fire, attention on the affected communities quickly faded.
Reflecting on that year’s record-breaking fire season, the climate scientist Daniel Swain warned that wildfires were worsening at such a rate that human solutions were not keeping up.
“The velocity of real-world change is outpacing the kind of interventions that are emerging. The wildfire crisis is getting ahead of us,” he told me. “We’re just sort of stumbling over ourselves, moving from one crisis to the next.”
What shocked me most about what I’ve seen in Altadena is how many of the stories are the same as those I heard in Paradise and Maui. Frantic evacuations unfolding with almost no official warnings, and older adults and disabled people essentially left to fend for themselves.
The worst-case scenario keeps happening again and again and we are doing so little to adequately prepare for it.
The causes of these disasters are multiple and complex. Entire communities have been built on flammable land that we know will burn. Meanwhile, decades of misguided fire-suppression policies, forest-management practices and a landscape that has grown hotter and drier amid the climate crisis are fueling disasters.
Those familiar with fire know what is needed to prepare and respond to these emergencies. We need more good fire on the land and less dense forests. Communities must get ready for all-out firestorms with massive evacuation plans. But some solutions – like not rebuilding decimated towns or abandoning the most fire-prone areas entirely – are deeply unpopular. And building the infrastructure to sustain the firefighting efforts necessary to respond to megafires would be a massive and unprecedented financial and structural undertaking.
But walking through the ash-covered sidewalks in Altadena, past the donation centers that residents have created to help their neighbors, I kept wondering why we haven’t seen meaningful progress in how we respond to these fires. It seems as if after each blaze, the strategy is instead to simply hope it doesn’t happen again. After the Camp fire destroyed Paradise, I wondered if, had that fire happened closer to the centers of power, there would have been more significant action.
In the days since these raging wildfires ravaged Los Angeles, the preparation and response of authorities has drawn much criticism – though experts have noted that there is no water system in the world that could have extinguished the flames. To me, the death and devastation in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades serve as an indictment – not simply of local officials, but of the collective. We did not heed the lessons of Paradise, Berry Creek or Santa Rosa, and other communities will pay the price.
