Fire! Fire! Fire!

January 9, 2025 • 4:20 pm

Those were the words with which Christopher Hitchens began his best speech on video, but it also applies to the three fires raging around Los Angeles. They aren’t bad enough to endanger USC or our conference, but people are cancelling anyway. The sky is hazy and there’s a slight whiff of burning wood at USC, but no sign of smoke.

However, Luana flew into Burbank yesterday, which is closer to the conflagrations, and she took this photo, which she let me put up.

It’s very sad: 100,000 people have evacuated, and many people have lost their homes and everything in them.  My heart goes out to them.

23 thoughts on “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  1. It’s terrifying.

    I was just checking the air quality map on my weather app because was wondering if the soot is traveling across the country yet. What’s going on near Baja California? Seems more intense than in Los Angeles by their map metric. LA is yellow, Baja is purple.

    Not that I mean anything by that, just a potentially similar problem there nearby.

    1. FWIW, the graphics I’ve seen have the winds blowing to the west-southwest. So the smoke is being blown out to the Pacific rather than across the continent.

      1. Some tiny bit of good news…
        I’m an LA natuve who has lived in Canada for many years. My brother in El Segundo, near LAX, is OK so far.
        Pasadena and La Cañada, where cousins and friends grew up, are not looking so good.

  2. I’m planning on attending the conference. I learned about it on this site. I’m local and live in Altadena. It’d be nice to meet you, Jerry.

    1. Hope your Altadena house survived. My friend in Pasadena, a couple of miles from you had to evacuate and went to a friend’s in his former neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills. He was only there for about eight hours when the canyon started to burn and he had to evacuate again…second time in 24 hours. Ended up heading up the I-5 and found fresh, clean air north of Fresno.

      Hope you can get to the conference and sample some of these great sessions over the weekend.

    2. Oh, dear. If you managed to survive this with your home in tact, you are one lucky man. The devastation is heartbreaking.

    1. I doubt that. Already, we’re learning that one reservoir was emptied to repair the cover right at the height of fire season. But for the sake of argument, even assuming it’s true, then the powers that be allowed excessive development on the edge of fire areas.

      There’s no way around it, it’s incompetence and mismanagement all the way down.

      1. Was sarcasm.

        And no regular burn offs as well to get rid of dead plant matter. But yeah, one reservoir was being serviced and development in areas like that.

        Hurricane Katrina all over again.

  4. Seems like a good chance that there’s a firebug setting these given that they are starting in locations with road access and canyon / vegetation down to homes.

  6. My daughter evacuated for the Sunset fire that threatened her neighborhood in Hollywood. Fortunately that one’s been contained at only 45 acres. We think she can go home tomorrow. Could have been much much worse. As are the Palisades and Eaton fires. My wife is from Pasadena. It’s very bad.
    We have not had a drop of rain in Southern California this winter. It’s going to get grim in the Desert this Spring. ugh.

    1. Suggested cause I read somewhere: several years of above average rainfall that encouraged brush growth followed by a long drought. Then add Santa Ana winds.

      Not the immediate cause but could explain how it got so bad.

      1. I wonder how much effort went into basic fire safety precautions like firebreaks, encouraging people in areas close to bushland to keep their trees/shrubs well trimmed, clear gutters of leaves, develop fire safety plans, etc. Took place in L.A. over the last few years verses ‘DEI’ related efforts.

        1. Nellie Bowles has a crack at that in TGIF today. Perhaps the host will excerpt a few bits tomorrow.

          1. If it’s anything like this piece of disingenuous crap then the host ought to choose something else.
            It’s nothing but opportunistic shit-slinging and weirdly off-target political blame-gaming.

            Just the mention of California’s “vast forests” alone proves these ‘Editors’ have no clue.

        2. This comes uncomfortably close to victim-blaming for me. These areas have always been fire-prone. It’s the natural ecology of coastal So Cal to burn periodically. ‘Basic precautions’ are well known and enforced.
          There are no precautions possible against an 8+- month drought and 100-mph winds.
          And ffs it has nothing whatsoever to do with DEI.

      2. I lived in the LA area for 60 years. The average annual rainfall is 14 ins. What that obscures is that, in any given year, the rainfall is close to either 7 ins. or 21 ins. And it will stay at either 7 ins. or 21 ins. for years, until the switch flips.

  7. I have dear friends who live in Altadena. I have not been able to get hold of them, so am pretty worried. From what I can see online, their street, E. Calaveras St. is right in the thick of things. It’s horrifying.

  8. @PCC(E) re “Fire, Fire, Fire” Wow! ~19:41: “Make the best of the time you’ve got left. This is very serious”.

    Thanks! Hitchens’s comments are central to your post re so-called Free Speech on what passes for social media. Maybe you paired it. This gives me pause, reason to examine my thinking.

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