Ethan Swope/AP Photo
Trees sway in high winds as the Eaton Fire consumes homes in Altadena, California, January 8, 2025.
Normally, I would be writing this from the Westside of Los Angeles, where I live most of the year. I happen to be about two hours east right now, away from what has engulfed the region. But I have friends who have been forced to evacuate. The fish restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway where I brought my then-girlfriend (now wife) to meet my parents has been destroyed. I’m texting friends and family and hearing updates on a running basis. I’m hearing about people I know evacuating from the site of one fire, only to reach a destination that happens to be the site of a different fire. I feel like I’m there without being there.
The biggest problems, aside from the thousand-plus structures already burned and an expected shift in the winds that will bring toxic smoke to much more inhabited areas of the L.A. Basin, seem to be infrastructural. There isn’t enough water to deal with the blazes in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Sylmar. Hydrants are dry, and other water resources are being conserved. Power is now out to 400,000 people in the region, some intentionally to remove the threat of sparks and more fires. If the smoke conditions worsen, the health system could come under some strain, as people with respiratory illnesses seek relief.
The heavy winds are starting to soften, but they’re still powerful enough to cancel and delay flights, and disrupt firefighting efforts. Even hours away in Palm Springs, the wind was whipping last night. I’ve heard about numerous semitrucks capsizing on the freeways between the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. That won’t completely cut off the city from a major source of supplies (warehouses dot the landscape in the outlying areas of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties), but it will make things more difficult.
We’re supposed to hold off talk of anything that even smells political in these moments, and focus on the devastation and rescue efforts. But the bottom line is that we have created a ticking bomb in the atmosphere. It has not rained in Los Angeles for close to 300 days, a stat that astonished me when I heard it—and I live here. Wildfires in our current environment in California spread more quickly and haphazardly, and while they may start in uninhabited forests, they can hit heavily populated areas pretty quickly. So far, the evacuation warnings have stalled out at Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, but that’s dangerously close to some very populated areas; my house is about five miles south. That’s never a calculation you want to make.
The idea that you can bolster your infrastructure to handle unpredictable, out-of-control wildfires is very wishful thinking. The L.A. County Fire Department has admitted they were “not prepared for this type of widespread disaster,” and how could they be? We simply don’t have the infrastructure in place to deal with living in places that climate and drought and extreme weather have rendered unlivable, at least in part.
This is the ongoing culmination of a decades-long project of simply ignoring reality. Just in my 20 years of living in L.A., the changes in the climate are noticeable and stark. It’s a different place, and humans molded it that way. We have a ton of hard choices to make and a political and social culture that refrains from making them. It’s difficult not to feel something like despair at all of this. I’m a rational person who likes solutions, but what do you do when the solutions are unequipped for the flames?
