5 miles from the most destructive fire in LA history | Jan 8, 2025
I don't really know how to write about this
It’s been a wild past 48 hours.
Yesterday (Tuesday) while on my daily walk around noon I noticed clouds that were way too big and way too close. I stupidly asked a stranger walking his dog if he knew why the sky was red. Within an hour I could see the flames with my naked eye.
It’s the most destructive fire in the history of LA and it’s happening in Pacific Palisades less than five miles from where I’m currently living in Santa Monica. I could do a lot of fancy writing about watching the flames dance or the black and red clouds unfurling, but I’m tapped out and it feels kind of disrespectful and attention-getting anyways. It’s a really sad and really scary situation.
Last night when the evacuation warning zone got too close for comfort (a few streets away) I drove 40 minutes to Glendale to stay with some friends. This turned out to be a classic out of the frying pan, into the fire sort of situation because they lost power and we ended up getting an evacuation warning there at 6 AM due to the Eaton fire which had gotten completely out of control during the night. It looked like the apocalypse outside, with ash falling from the sky the way I’ve only ever seen in movies.
I drove back under a carpet of black clouds to Santa Monica to get to cleaner air, but by the evening there were new evacuation orders. Now I’m in Long Beach at another friend’s place, writing this post from the couch. I’m hoping tomorrow it will be safe to return to Santa Monica.
Nature is really, really scary.
Nature is scary.
Unfortunately, nature's also likely not the cause of this situation. I'm a Californian myself, just a couple hours southeast of you. I've lived through multiple moderate to large fires. I've had the experience of watching the flames creep up the hills and through the valleys, drawing closer to your home during the night. I've stared at the silhouettes of mountains backed by orange and black, as if I were staring into Mordor. I've smelled that acrid smoke, watched the ashes fall, saw everything get blanketed and stuck with them and noticed how those smells lingered for weeks after the fact. In 2003, I drove through the communities destroyed by the Cedar fire. In 2007, I saw the destruction of the Witch Creek fire. In both cases, I had friends or friends of friends who lost their homes. I knew people from Harbison Canyon who had to leave because the homes in that community were burned to their foundations. I saw how the village of Crest was 90% wiped out, the majority of houses reduced to char and ash. Time and time again, I've seen both the human and economic impact of these disasters firsthand.
The common truth of these major firestorms is that nature rarely started them. A reckless individual did. Poor or thoughtless human decision making is almost always the root cause of these firestorms, while poor or thoughtless regulations result in them growing to the scope they reach.
Nature isn't to blame here, that's the hard truth people need to swallow. Callous though it might sound, we need to face up to the fact that these firestorms are the results of our own doing, the results of human error and human incompetence. It's a steep cost to pay for our poor decisions, and it's a cost we'll pay again if we don't put in the time and effort to learn from this disaster and make better choices in how we manage our lives, our communities, and our state.
Would that I could say I was confident we Californians would, but we've been through this lesson before. Like I said, time and time again, I've seen both the human and economic impact of these disasters firsthand. We failed to learn back then, so I have very little reason to believe we'll learn now.
I feel your angst. I live in the Sierra Nevada foothills in Northern CA and we're had our share of regional wildfires and the occasional evac advisory/warning/order. Summertime is the high risk time here, so pretty much from late June until the rains come in the fall we're on alert and looking at Watch Duty all the time. We expect smoky days on occasion and sometimes get ashfall; in 2020 the air was so foul for a few days that I blocked up every seepage point I could find in the house.
Anyway, stay safe.