A Wildfire for the Ages

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A Wildfire for the Ages

Millions of us watched a tragedy of unimaginable proportion unfold in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. Drought, Santa Ana winds, fire and embers that hopscotched for miles through tree-lined neighborhoods came together in Pacific Palisades in A Wildfire for the Ages.

Most of opulent Pacific Palisades is gone. So are the homes of some of Hollywood’s most notable actors: James Woods, John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Affleck, Jeff Bridges, Paris Hilton and Anthony Hopkins.

Moonshadows in nearby Santa Monica is gone, too.

Years ago, it was my favorite beachfront haunt. The food, drinks and platinum blonde were fabulous. Now only the pilings remain.

The long knives are already out blaming everyone but themselves for this tragedy.

It won’t happen here. There is plenty of blame for everyone to share.

What we have here is a very timely teaching moment – an opportunity to figure out how to minimize the flammable risks that left most of Pacific Palisades in ashen ruin.

The Palisades fires are not the result of “bad forest management.” There are no forests there unless you count a couple of nearby state parks. The closest National Forest – the Angeles – is 62 miles from Pacific Palisades.

However, there are many tree-lined streets in Palisades and the terrain leading to the ocean is very steep in places. The fires – one at first and eventually five – were too much for outmanned fire crews whose hoses ran dry working in dark streets filled with motorists fleeing flames.

Greenville, a small northern California town leveled in less than 30 minutes in the 2021 Dixie Fire, came immediately to my mind while watching news channels that were all over Facebook. Nearly one million acres of dense forest around Greenville were destroyed.

Paradise, California also comes to mind. Eight-five people were killed in the 2018 conflagration. About 18,000 structures were lost and between 30,000 and 40,000 were left homeless. Most of the bucolic towns trees were killed by searing heat and flames.

We have featured both fires on our website, so we think it important to explain the main differences between what happened in Pacific Palisades and what happened in Greenville and Paradise, California.

First, Greenville was surrounded by federal forests that were much too dense for the carrying capacity of the land. But people loves trees and resist thinning that would reduce risk.

The Camp Fire was different. Sparks from a downed PG&E transmission line and subsequent winds drove the fire into Paradise. At its peak, the fire was moving through dry grass at a rate of 80 football fields per minute. When the courtroom dust settled the utility – one of the nation’s largest - filed for bankruptcy. It paid about $13.5 billion in claims to victims and their families.

No doubt the Pacific Palisades fires will become a feeding ground for lawyers. All the more reason to understand that these fires burned in chaparral, not federally owned forests in the Oregon Cascades, where lightning-caused fires are common and not – as our colleague Bob Zybach has frequently reminded our readers – in Oregon’s coastal forests where Chinook winds have a history similar to Santa Ana winds.

“The problem here isn’t ground fuels,” Zybach wrote in a Thursday email exchange with a senior scientist stationed at the U.S. Geological Survey Sequoia-Kings Canyon Field Station in Sequoia National Park. “Our problem is crown fire and anomalous accumulations of understory fuels.”

In a phrase, lousy forest management in diseased and dying National Forests that that we hope will be vastly improved by the incoming Trump Administration.

The outpouring of sympathy for Pacific Palisades residents has come from across our nation. Likewise, the offers of help from rural western communities that have occasionally been targets of ridicule by some in Hollywood. They will soon see 30 of our fire engines and six strike team leaders on their streets.

Their crews include friends from Kootenai County, where Julia and I live, and neighboring Shoshone County, where I grew up. They left here at 6 a.m. Thursday and will begin their 14-day deployments tomorrow morning. We wish them godspeed.

This is as it should be in our deeply divided nation. It is time for introspection and change. The rural-urban-metropolitan cultural chasm must be bridged as quickly as possible.