What world can learn from the worst urban fire – Firstpost
On Tuesday, January 7, Los Angeles, the American dream city of 4 million residents, turned at the mercy of Hephaestus and Anemoi, the ancient Greek gods of the fire and the wind. Ever since the towering infernos have continued to worsen by the day. For a record sixth day straight, several wildfires continue to rage on Sunday in Los Angeles County. Worse, aided by the strong winds, supporting new fires and human incapacity to tame this apocalyptic spectre, the LA fireball is set to spread further through the next week if not more.
To get a handle on the blazes is still a long way to go.
Counting the Fire
And at the time of writing this piece, there are six fires still burning in Los Angeles. The largest is the Palisades Fire, followed by the fires of Eaton, Kenneth, Hurst, Lidia, and the newest baby on the block, the Archer Fire.
With the Red Flag Warning unfurled until Wednesday, more fires may get added up. According to the National Weather Service, the next few days will prove critical to the firefighting effort, with dry weather and strong winds expected to continue before temperatures cool toward the end of the week.
Meanwhile, this worst urban fire disaster in recent human history has already caused inexplicable, humongous devastation and consequential human misery of monumental proportion.
But before I count the debris, I begin with where it all started.
Where It All Began
The sequence of fires as it happened was:
First, the Palisades Fire broke out about 10:30 am Tuesday on a brushy hillside between a residential street and a ridgeline trail in Temescal Gateway Park with sweeping views of the San Gabriel Mountains and Santa Monica Bay.
Second, the Eaton Fire ignited shortly after 6:15 pm Tuesday just east of Altadena near Mount Wilson Toll Road, a historic roadway ascending Mount Wilson.
Third, the Kenneth Fire was first reported about 3:30 pm Thursday in an open space preserve near Calabasas and the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It expanded to 960 acres in a matter of hours on Thursday, and as of Friday morning, the forward progress of the Kenneth Fire stopped at 1,000 acres.
Fourth, the Hurst Fire broke out about 10:30 pm Tuesday in a park and burnt 799 acres around Sylmar near Santa Clarita. As of January 11, 2025, the fire was burning in Sylmar, Los Angeles County, California, and was active near Diamond Road, destroying approximately 771 acres.
Fifth, the Sunset Fire started on Wednesday in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. It quickly grew to 50 acres and was burning out of control near Runyon Canyon. The blaze has created a new level of fear in residents used to thinking about wildfires as a concern only for those who live in hilly communities. It threatens landmarks like the Hollywood Bowl, the Dolby Theatre, where the Academy Awards are held, the TCL Chinese Theatre, and the Capitol Records building.
Sixth, the Archer Fire, yet another small fire, the Archer, broke out Friday morning, triggering evacuation orders in Granada Hills, northwest of downtown.
Extremely high winds, low humidity, and dry fuels in the Los Angeles County region contributed to faster fire growth, and the most destructive fires remain largely out of control nearly a week after it all began.
Surreal but Apocalyptically Real
Infernos ravaging Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Pasadena have made large parts of Los Angeles resemble bombed-out war zones. Where there once stood houses, now there is only rubble. The blackened trees stand out amid this rubble. Street by street, there is little but dark ash and ruins. The mayhem has refused to choose between the poor and the super-rich, between schools, libraries, neighbourhood stores, and mansions of the super-rich. Among the destroyed properties are homes belonging to Billy Crystal, Jeff Bridges, Paris Hilton, and R&B star Jhené Aiko.
Delphic, Tenebrous, Inscrutable Mystery
There is neither a first word nor a last word available on the causes of the tenebrous mystery of the fires. But a combination of dry conditions and powerful, hurricane-force winds propelled the spread of the new urban fire. And the extreme behaviour of the fires so far has made control nearly impossible.
The direct or indirect cause of the fires will take time to be determined. It may not be determined at all. All that matters today is that the world has a burning city. It can be due to nature’s fury or manmade global warming. Fires could have been ignited by power lines, a tossed cigarette, or any of the other ways people or human infrastructure cause fires, either on purpose or accidentally.
Collateral Damage
It is too early to estimate the comprehensive collateral damage caused by LA’s real-life apocalypse movie. But here is an early account of the devastation:
One, area burnt and extent of fire contained: Fireball has swept through 37,000 acres in the greater Los Angeles area, destroying entire communities and more than 12,000 structures. Below are the details of areas burnt and the extent of fire contained:
-
Palisades fire: 23,654 acres burnt, 11 per cent contained
-
Eaton fire: 14,117 acres burnt, 15 per cent contained
-
Kenneth fire: 1,052 acres burnt, 90 per cent contained
-
Hurst fire: 799 acres burnt, 76 per cent contained
Two, counting the dead and missing—as of now, the number of dead, which currently stands at 24, will likely increase because it is still not safe to conduct a thorough house-to-house search. At least 16 people are missing. Among the dead, 5 have been reported from the Palisades Fire and 11 from the Eaton Fire. Regarding the deaths, Robert Luna, the Los Angeles County sheriff, said that he was praying the death toll would not rise, but he added that it was likely to do so.
There have also been several significant injuries among people who didn’t evacuate their homes.
President Joe Biden reaffirmed on Friday that “there are still a lot of people who are unaccounted for”.
Three, destruction of properties—huge swaths of Pacific Palisades and Altadena stand devastated, with entire neighbourhoods overwhelmed by the flames. More than 5,000 homes, businesses, and other structures have been destroyed in the Palisades fire and 7,000 in the Eaton fire. More details are emerging.
Four, displacement—At least 153,000 LA residents are under evacuation orders, and another 166,000 are under evacuation warnings. These numbers are set to increase with the fire now expanding east to Brentwood and Encino.
The Red Flag Warning
Worse, the worst is still to come.
Amid strong winds gusting at up to 55 mph (88.5 km/h), a Red Flag Warning has been issued until Wednesday for parts of Southern California. Fire Weather Watch Warnings, the stage before a Red Flag Warning, are also in place from Monday through Wednesday in the Riverside County Mountains, the San Diego County Mountains, and the San Diego County Valleys.
A red flag warning kicks in when meteorologists and forecasters believe conditions could lead to extreme fire within 24 hours. As per the red flag warning, “If fire ignition occurs, conditions are favourable for very rapid fire spread and extreme fire behaviour.”
Costing the Devastation
It is too early in the day to estimate the cost of the devastation.
But indubitably it is the spectre being witnessed that is the worst urban fire accident in the history of America.
As per a preliminary estimate by AccuWeather, the cost of devastation caused is close to $150 billion.
And Aris Papadopoulos, the founder of the Resilience Action Fund, a nonprofit helping raise awareness about building resilience in homes against natural disasters, estimates (based on the similar disasters in the past) that rebuilding the wildfire-affected areas could take up to 10 years.
Field Day for Looters
Despite it being the biggest human tragedy in the supposedly world’s most developed nation, looters are having a field day undeterred by the curfew in place in all mandatory evacuation zones, meant to protect property and prevent burglaries or looting.
Though Los Angeles police are cracking down on looters in mandatory evacuation areas, looting is a misdemeanor under LA County code, where the conviction may result in a fine up to $1,000 or jail time, it is not proving a deterrent enough.
Fire Hydrants Run Dry
As wildfires tore through Los Angeles, one of the most exasperating scenes the firefighters had to contend with was hydrants sans water.
And what a chaos it was.
In Pacific Palisades, hydrants failed after three tanks, each holding a million gallons of water, went dry within a span of 12 hours. Across the city in Altadena, residents said they futilely tried to extinguish flames with water from pools and garden hoses.
Elsewhere it was no different.
New Fires, New Needs
The LA fireball is the new normal, a new genre of urban fire, and needs novel thinking and next practices response. It is not a question of having the desired level of water to combat this type of urban fire, which spreads so quickly and ferociously in hours and destroys an area equivalent to at least double of Manhattan.
Firefighting systems need to reinvent themselves in America and globally, as the way fire departments are set up is to fight a fire at a house or maybe two houses or a block; they’re not set up to fight a fire that’s an entire neighbourhood or an entire city.
The Learning for the World
The world has just witnessed how a small urban fire turned into a monster, hour by hour destroying the dream city of LA and obliterating in the process decades of development. And it was not that there was no foreboding. Before the fire started on Tuesday, the National Weather Service Los Angeles reported on Monday, “Strong winds are coming.” “This is a particularly dangerous situation—in other words, this is about as bad as it gets in terms of fire weather.”
Climate change may or may not be behind the LA catastrophe, but make no mistake: it is making disasters more common, more unpredictable, and with sinister consequences across the world, altering the background conditions and increasing the likelihood of more abrupt future disasters.
One lesson climate change teaches us again and again is that bad things now will happen ahead of schedule. Model predictions for climate impacts have tended to be optimistically biased. But now, unfortunately, the heating is accelerating, outpacing scientists’ expectations. And Earth is at the mercy of nature.
The world must face the fact that no one is coming to save humans, especially in disaster-prone places that are wildly increasing in number.
Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere resulting in fire at one extreme and wild floods and inundation at another, is the new normal. The time is running out for humanity to avert the apocalypse.
Yesterday was already late, but today is the last chance. It is action time. Yesterday itself was late. If we do not wake up today, humanity as we know it might become history sooner.
The author is a multi-disciplinary thought leader with Action Bias and an India based impact consultant. He is a keen watcher of changing national and international scenarios. He works as President Advisory Services of Consulting Company BARSYL. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
Post Comment