The Los Angeles fires and the city that had rehearsed

The fires that swept through the hills above Los Angeles in mid-January were among the most destructive in the city’s history, and the response that followed was the strange mixture of the heroic and the overwhelmed that large disasters always produce. The wind-driven flames moved faster than the evacuation plans assumed, the water systems were pushed past their design, and the neighbourhoods that the maps had marked as safe were gone by the time the fire crews could arrive. The city had rehearsed for this fire for twenty years; the rehearsal was real, and it was not enough, and the difference between the rehearsal and the event is the story that the weeks ahead will have to tell.

The meteorology of the fire was the part that the forecasters had got right, and the rightness was small comfort. The dry season had been longer than usual, the vegetation had cured to the point where it burned readily, and the Santa Ana winds had arrived with the particular ferocity that the models had warned about for a decade. The conditions were not a surprise; the scale of the destruction was the surprise, and the scale was the product of the conditions interacting with the decisions of the past century, the hillside suburbs, the power lines, the chaparral that had been allowed to accumulate beyond the point that the ecology could sustain. The fire was natural in its origin and architectural in its damage.

The response revealed the strengths and the limits of the system at the same time. The evacuation alerts reached the phones with the speed that the modern systems have earned, the fire crews were rotated with the discipline that the profession has built over decades, and the mutual aid agreements moved engines across the state with a speed that the maps could barely track. The limits were in the infrastructure that the city had let age: the water pressure that the hydrants could not deliver at the scale demanded, the roads that the evacuating cars clogged, the insurance maps that had stopped covering the hills long before the fire. The system was as good as the city had built it, and the fire found the gaps that the city had chosen not to close.

The personal cost of the fire will take years to count, and the counting will be done in a language that the statistics cannot capture. The families who lost their homes, the businesses that burned with their neighbourhoods, the schools that will not reopen, the elderly residents who will not return, the communities that the maps will redraw, all of it will be counted in the insurance claims and the rebuilding permits and the census figures, and the count will never quite reach the thing that was lost, which is the particular shape of a life. The recovery will begin with the fires still smouldering, and the recovery will last longer than the fire, because the rebuilding of a city is slower than the burning of one.

The lessons of the fire are the ones that the city has been taught before, and the teaching is the part that deserves the scepticism. The building codes will be tightened, the vegetation management will be funded, the power lines will be buried, and the next fire will find the new gaps that the tightening leaves open, because the climate that produced this fire is not the climate that the codes were written for. The city that had rehearsed for twenty years discovered that the rehearsal is never finished, and that the only honest preparation for the next fire is the continuous work of making the city less flammable, which is a project without an end date. The fires of January will be remembered for the damage they did; the work they leave behind is the part that will decide what the memory means.