Into the fire. . .

January 9, 2025 • 6:45 am

I am leaving for a week. The bad news is that I am going to Los Angeles, where wildfires are running rampant.

The wildfire that raced across the Hollywood Hills early Thursday, threatening a wealthy area indelibly tied to the American film industry, put additional strain on millions of Los Angeles residents already stressed by catastrophic blazes that have erased entire neighborhoods and streaked the sky with smoke and embers.

The fires have killed at least five people and burned more than 27,000 acres, equivalent to nearly 20,000 football fields. The largest ones, the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed at least 2,000 structures and are already the two most destructive to ever hit Los Angeles.

Tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents were under mandatory evacuation orders or warnings on Thursday. Overnight, there was a palpable sense of anxiety as firefighting helicopters swept across a dark sky where orange embers were floating like lightning bugs.

There were traffic jams after a wildfire broke out in the Hollywood Hills near streets — Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard — whose names evoke the grandeur of Hollywood movies. An evacuation order for that area was mostly lifted just before midnight.

A fire also reared up in the nearby Studio City neighborhood, burning several homes and prompting warnings of a potential evacuation. But it was quickly extinguished and no injuries were reported.

Residents feel vulnerable partly because strong desert winds and dangerously dry conditions — it hasn’t rained much in Los Angeles for months — are making it easier for more fires to start and spread. A shortage of water in local reservoirs makes it harder for crews to put fires out.

More than 16 million people in Southern California, from Malibu down to San Diego County, were under a red flag warning early Thursday morning. Forecasters warned that extreme fire danger would continue for at least another day.

There are three big ones.

From the Free Press newsletter:

Southern California is burning. Thousands have been forced to evacuate as wildfires rip through the area. There are five so far and not enough firefighters to deal with them, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said yesterday, telling reporters his department was “prepared for one or two major fires… This is not a normal red flag alert.”

So far, five people have been killed. Over 130,000 residents have been told to evacuate. Hundreds of schools have been closed, as tens of thousands of acres go up in smoke. Not even the rich and famous have been spared. Actor James Woods lost his home. The Malibu mansion of hotel heiress Paris Hilton went up in flames. Palisades Charter High School, among the most iconic public secondary schools in America and which educated J.J. Abrams, will.i.am, and Katey Sagal, has turned to ash.

Late yesterday morning, on Truth Social, our president-elect railed against California’s “Governor Gavin Newscum,” blaming him for the wildfires currently ravaging the state. According to Donald Trump, Newsom blocked a water restoration project because “he wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” and that’s why California is burning. It’s not entirely clear what Trump’s trying to claim here—and believe me, I spent some time trying to figure it out. But the basic elements seem to be fire=bad, water=good, fish=tangentially related and controversial.

I am told that my conference, at the University of Southern California, is out of the fire zone and will go on. But I am also told that one friend whom I was going to visit has lost his home and everything in the fire. That is ineffably sad; the person was an artist and lost his studio as well. I cannot imagine losing everything you own, all at once.

I will report on the meeting and post when I can (I do my best). I am off to Midway Airport, where I hope to procure a giant coffee and a couple of sinkers at Dunkin Donuts.

 

49 thoughts on “Into the fire. . .”

  2. You couldn’t pay me to fly into that catastrophe. I’m surprised your event is continuing as planned. The air quality alone would keep me away. My condolences to your friend who lost his home.

    1. I wouldn’t go either. The pictures and videos are terrifying.

      All I can do is offer best wishes and stay safe.

  4. I’m in Philadelphia for a few days and connected from Australia through LAX yesterday. When the plane took off we could see the hills to the north covered in smoke. It looked horrific 🙁

  5. The company I retired from is out there. A former colleague just lost his home and entire neighborhood. It is bad out there.

  6. So sad to see such devastation and loss. We Canadians are bristling over certain annexation threats and insults, but we love our American family, friends and neighbours and wish you all well.
    Travel safely Professor.

    1. Just remember that most Americans, and I’m sure that includes people who voted for Trump, are horrified at his blather about taking over Canada as the 51st State. Fortunately, he rarely follows through on such idiotic pronouncements. O Canada!

    2. Canada has been helping directly “In addition to the two Canadian-made CL-415 planes belonging to the Quebec government, helicopters belonging to B.C.-based Coulson Aviation have been “on the front line” of the fight” https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/on-the-front-line-quebec-planes-and-b-c-helicopters-battle-l-a-wildfires-1.7169575

      All while enduring the MAGA crowd saying they will use Canadians to tend to their gardens and pick fruit and the president elect saying how he will crush Canada economically (a very real possibility).

      3. Let’s hope the fires are out before Inauguration Day and that no more people die. The new Administration might apply tariffs to the aircraft as “imports” and turn back the aircrews and mechanics if they didn’t have H-1B visas.

        Of course Canada and all the northern states should and always will lend all the fire-suppression resources they can spare which, in winter, should be everything we’ve got. (As FDR said, in arguing for Lease-Lend, when your neighbour’s house is on fire, of course you lend him your garden hose.)

        Fire suppression doesn’t work in the boreal wilderness for ordinary forest fires — we just let them burn — but the few water bombers we now have can be useful in defending residential areas. Up to a point. Dangerous work, though.

    3. President-elect Trump is a blowhard who loves to unsettle potential negotiating opponents so please take his musings with a full box of salt. We do. In addition, he does not speak for the majority of Americans when he shoots from the hip as he is doing now. Some of us just laugh and shake our heads at his antics since, so far and knock on wood, the guardrails of our system have kept him in check and he can do some good by undoing the regressive and bigoted direction of some of the policies of the current administration. Power ebbs and flows. His will last for four years at most. Knock on wood again.

      1. I sense that we’re on the cusp of a sea change in the world of Western style democracies, and I think that there is a very real chance that all our countries will end up stronger, smarter and better off both individually and as allies. I feel hopeful. Time will tell.

        1. I watched a really good interview with David Frum. He describes, I think accurately, Trump’s style not as an “isolationist president” as many suggest but as one whose approach is “predatory”. In this sense, he does not see the point of win-win. He is all about zero-sum. This is a very tragic and disheartening change to how the Western democracies viewed the world – most still do but the most powerful among us no longer does – that is dangerous!

          1. We certainly live in perilous times. I think that democratic leaders will have to be very principled and serious about navigating the many threats we face. Short-term vote-getting or self-serving partisan decision-making just won’t cut it. We need a return to statesmanship, all party collaboration and putting the country’s best interests ahead of selfish considerations.
            I always enjoy listening to what David Frum has to say.

  7. Hope you have a good visit to my city. It is not the best time to come, but there are still many places that are safe. Most of the fires are in the “hills” and most of them are north of the famous Sunset Blvd. These are the most expensive areas of Los Angeles making the losses even more dramatic. I am near Culver City, which has been, luckily, quite safe. USC is south of downtown LA and is also safe. Take care!

  8. How has something like this happened?

    Is this an extreme outlier event, unforeseeable by the powers that be?

    Or more like the culmination of misguided leadership by those who should have planned better to mitigate or even prevent these fires?

    1. Neither I think. Predicted by not entirely avoidable. Better building practices would help (don’t build up against the wilderness, and if so build with fire resilience in mind) but at the end of the day climate change is making extreme events more common (cycles of wetter and then dryer conditions making fires more likely and hotter). Plus, this event largely got so bad because the very very strong winds spread the fires and kept firefighting aircraft grounded during critical periods.

    2. The Santa Ana winds that are driving these fires are a regular occurrence in the cooler months: dry warm air from inland blows over the inland hills, compressing and heating as it goes, and then through canyons toward the coast. Winds yesterday reached 100 mph (150 km/h); and this means that embers can travel a long way. So even a small fire can build into a large one very quickly, and be very hard to fight. And this is all exacerbated by the lack of rain in the LA area: downtown LA has had only something like a quarter inch of rain this season (since 1 October) – compare it with the San Francisco area, where Santa Rosa has had over a foot of rain; so everything is ready to burn.
      There were very strong warnings of possible fire events before the fires started, just because of the high winds.
      So in a sense foreseeable, but not predictable, and not easily preventable.

    3. Also, So. Cal. had an unprecedented wet winter and spring and the wild grasses and shrubs grew quickly and exorbitantly. The extremely dry and hot summer and continual dry winter dried out all this new growth and it became potent fuel for the wildfires.

    4. There have also been reports that controlled burns which could have mitigated potential fire risk have been reduced or eliminated, stemming from a successful 2007 lawsuit by the Sierra Club against the US Forest Service https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/claims-about-fires.htm .
      Of course, this doesn’t affect residential zones burning, but in the comments section of the post it’s also noted that brush near residential zones has not been cleared away.
      ProPublica also talked about this: https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen.

      There’s also been criticism focused on the implementation of actions that should have been taken after California 2014 Prop 1 was passed, which raised $2.7 billion for water storage (https://mavensnotebook.com/2024/10/24/ca-water-commission-update-on-the-water-storage-investment-program-projects-2/ for status of the specific projects, which after 10 years are still not close to completion with some not yet started), especially as concerns the fact that cities ran out of water to suppress the fires. I don’t know whether the implementation of these reservoir areas would have made more water available or not, so I can’t judge the veracity of the claim.

      I personally know people who have lost childhood homes in the area and others who still have evacuated and don’t have a clue as to whether they have a home to return to or not. I understand that the high winds and dry conditions exacerbate the spreading of fires, but I do not hold the leaders blameless (though they will, as all politicians are wont to do, deflect blame onto factors they can’t control).

  9. There’s a separate fire north of Pasadena, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, which is threatening NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    1. Yes. JPL has emergency days both for fires and earthquakes. What makes the area so incredibly beautiful also makes it fairly unstable.

      I have a friend visiting his son in Pasadena where they were safe until the altadena fire started, burning the Pasadena Synagogue and leading to the evacuation of his son’s Pasadena neighborhood. The wife, kids, and dogs hightailed it up to a sister’s home in Berkley while my friend and his son went to a friend’s home in his former Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Then eight hours later, fire started in that canyon and they had to evacuate once more….last heard from heading for Bakersfield or Fresno. I suggested the barren sand of Lancaster in the high desert where I used to billet on visits to Edwards AFB.

    1. Thank you for posting the schedule and Zoom link. I’m horrified by the devestation in the Los Angeles area and can only hope that they get the fired under control quickly!

  11. I clicked on the URL supplied by Jim Batterson. The people involved in the conference Censorship in the Sciences look like a who’s who in rational, reasonable science promotion. No wonder wildfires won’t stop Jerry from attending.
    In todays NYT is a piece by Pamela Paul on ideological capture at the recent annual conference of the American Historical Association. These are historians(?) supposedly voting for charging Israel with “scholasticide”,saying that because Israel bombed schools in the Gaza war they want to destroy Gazan education. Like Paul notes, no mention of Hamas terrorists hiding at the schools. You would think that if anyone would want institutional neutrality on current events it would be historians.

  12. Let’s hope the fires don’t cause the whole area to finally break off into the ocean.
    If you’ve a burning need to go, then go — and best of luck to you. Please stay safe.

  13. I live in Altadena and am still considering attending the conference, which I found out about here. It all depends on the wind situation. Houses two blocks from me have burned down.

    I know it’s inevitable, but all the people with outsider political takes on this devestating disaster are not helping. It doesn’t feel like a political issue when nearly my whole town is gone.

    1. Sorry about those unfeeling distractions, Tommy. My thoughts are certainly with you and hope your home stays safe.

    2. Amen. We lived in Malibu for a number of years, and most people don’t quite comprehend the power of the Santa Anas. They can quickly desiccate vegetation, and if there’s a spark of a fire, it can quickly turn into a hell-scape. Fire mitigation can certainly help as was demonstrated during the Franklin Fire that recently swept right through the Pepperdine campus without any structural losses. There are probably no mitigation efforts that would prevent many of the home and businesses from destruction. Three years ago here in Colorado, the Marshall fire grew from an untended trash fire into a vast urban fire fueled by 100+mph winds. Over 1000 homes destroyed in neighborhoods that seemed most unlikely to burn. There used to be a “fire season” for many places, but now it is a year round concern.

  15. Perhaps you can decode this from our president-elect:

    “these people are crazy. there’s something wrong with them. there’s something wrong with them. they also want to go back, and they have already started that, too, when you buy a faucet, no water comes out. because they want to preserve— even in areas that have so much water you don’t know what to do with it. it’s called rain. it comes down from, it comes down from heaven. and uh, they want to do no water comes out of the shower. it goes drip, drip, drip. so what happens, you’re in the shower ten times as long, you know. no water comes out of the faucet, you want to wash your hands, they want to go back to even stronger than what they have right now. I, as you know, I ended that policy. you can have all the water you want. makes no difference. comes— we’ve— especially in certain areas we have so much water we don’t know what to do with it.”

    All I can find there is a sign of dementia.

      1. I have known some stupid people, but at least they were able to construct a coherent sentence.

    2. “these people are crazy. there’s something wrong with them. there’s something wrong with them…”

      Sure there is dementia and stupidity, but there is always a large dose of projection.

    4. This was an old rant about flow-limited showerheads intended to conserve water even in areas without water shortages, wasn’t it? Trump was going to ban them and bring back regular showerheads and faucets that gave stronger more satisfying flow. Nothing to do with the LA fires.

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