Reportage
The big one has arrived: Hell descended on the City of Angels
It appears that the limits of that sustainability have truly been reached under the pressure of an extreme climate.
The firestorm with 90 mph gusts that brought hell to the City of Angels has subsided for now, but many fire hotspots remain active in the urban area and a strong smell of burning hangs over the entire city. As the smoke clears, we are starting to see the full picture of the worst fire in the history of a city already accustomed to such disasters.
Authorities have started to let some residents return to evacuated neighborhoods. In the Pacific Palisades, where the flames cut a broad swathe of devastation from the heights of Sunset Boulevard to the coast, they didn’t spare churches, supermarkets, businesses and restaurants in one of the city's most charming neighborhoods. As they reached the shoreline, the flames driven by the winds veered north and charred entire rows of houses overlooking Malibu's famous beaches, including many luxurious homes around the Getty Villa and the valuable collection of ancient art it houses (including Lysippos’ Victorious Youth, also known as the Getty Bronze).
The situation is similar at the other end of town, in Pasadena and the nearby suburb of Altadena where people are wandering, dazed and weeping, among the remains of what until Tuesday morning were their homes in a historic district of Los Angeles. As the intensity of the winds coming from the hills dropped, the flames began to creep up the hillsides, moving away from the denser built-up area but threatening semi-rural homes in canyons such as Topanga and the Mount Wilson Observatory, where the city's radio and TV antennas and repeaters are located.
President Biden canceled his planned trip to Italy to monitor the situation, assuring local authorities and Governor Gavin Newsom, who has declared a state of emergency, that they would get full support. As the flames continued to engulf the city, Donald Trump instead took the opportunity to rage, attacking the victims and blaming the Democratic governor for the disaster in a statement full of the usual self-praise, a painful foretaste of the kind of leadership that awaits the country, destined to face natural disasters of ever greater intensity.
The reality is that the Californian metropolis is a case study in urban development on arid and earthquake-prone land, made possible through massive environmental engineering aimed at exceeding the natural capacity to support a huge population. Furthermore, as described in Mike Davis' seminal Ecology of Fear, natural disasters make up a “catastrophic imaginary” that is regularly expressed in cinema and literature with an exorcizing function.
As a result of increasing anthropogenic pressure and real estate development that spreads into ecosystems where fires are part of the ecological growth cycle, just like in Mediterranean scrubland, the effects have become progressively worse. The natural cycle does not include the permanent presence of villas, SUVs and golf courses in locations that are as lovely as they are high-risk from a climate and hydrological point of view.
Still, the fire has given rise to the feeling that this city, built and grown at the furthermost edge of ecological risk, has experienced its “Big One.” It wasn’t a mega-earthquake this time, but it was still a catastrophic event capable of raising the inescapable question of the sustainability of a model of development predicated on unlimited growth over a fragile territory. It appears that the limits of that sustainability have truly been reached under the pressure of an extreme climate. From this point of view, regardless of the inconsiderate outbursts of the incoming president, the thousands of people who have lost their homes in recent days and the more than 100,000 who have been evacuated can be considered climate refugees.
Atmospheric warming is a proven cause of the worsening of these phenomena: the fire season now lasts 78 days longer than it did in 1970, and there has been no rain in Los Angeles since May, marking the driest winter since 1964. The weaker winds did allow helicopters and Canadair firefighting aircraft to take flight, but the weather forecast does not bode well. Winds could regain intensity in the coming days, and, as shown by the fire that briefly broke out on Wednesday in the Hollywood Hills (contained within hours), it takes very little to reignite the flames.
With thousands of homes and buildings destroyed, the fire is certainly already destined to become the costliest disaster in the city’s history. The magnitude of the damage sustained is likely the sign of a coming crisis in the world of property insurance, a private sector that was already in the process of abandoning the California market, deemed excessively risky. The enormous cost of reconstruction is likely to deal a death blow to an industry that also underpins the value of a housing market inflated to extreme and just as unsustainable levels.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/e-arrivato-il-big-one-linferno-si-abbatte-sulla-citta-degli-angeli on 2025-01-10