FIRE! A bit about the age-old origin of the Los Angeles Wildfires
To get to Amy F.’s parents’ house, we’d hop on Business 80 in Sacramento, segue onto 80 East. After about 30 miles, we’d hit Auburn, where we’d get on Highway 49 and north towards Nevada City. Ten miles shy of Grass Valley, we’d hang a right on Alta Sierra Drive and then right-left-right ten more miles, up hills, through small valleys, until we got to Amy’s folks’ place, a funky house cut into the hillside, surrounded by trees, a small pond a stone’s throw away.
It was a great place, a mostly pleasant escape from the “Big City,” at least for me, anyway. Birds, frogs, crickets, the occasional howl from a coyote or wolf, the wind, the sound of whatever penetrated to pond’s surface – that’s most of what there was to hear. Unless Amy’s dad was fussing about, her brother skating the half-pipe, or a car coming up the way, human-noise was whatever was coming out of our mouths. It was fairly easy to pass the day in quiet and lose yourself in the beauty of it all…except one thing: Unless it was pissing down rain, I was always aware that we were in a fire trap.
Amy’s parents built their home some time in the 1970s, when Nevada County was still very rural and economically dependent on logging and mining, two industries on their way out. Because land was cheap, hippies and counter-culture types started buying plots, doing their part to ruralize Hippie in the Back-To-The-Land movement. The much more conservative old timers hated the “intruders” but liked the money that they were willing to spend, so folks like Amy’s parents – who were young but not hippies – bought land and built their houses, businesses, and communes, sometimes in places that probably should not have been built out.
When I wrote that we’d hang a “right-left-right” ten miles to Amy’s parents’ place, well, really it was more like a right-right-left-right-left-left-right-left-right-right-left, up and down and up and down and more, through trees and brush, first on paved and then partially-paved and then, once outside the county-maintenance line, gravel and dirt. And every time we took the trip, there were more and more houses and outbuildings, some modest, others rural fancy, some legally built, plenty not, almost all of them constructed in places that should have remained wild.
Fueled by White flight, today, Alta Sierra is a suburb of Grass Valley, which with Nevada City, Auburn, and every place between there and Sacramento, is part of the “much greater Sacramento area,” not on the map, but in reality. What was truly rural, if not wilderness, is now strip malls, shopping centers, “planned communities,” and housing developments broken up by un- and “under” developed land, mostly forest, parts of which are heavily impacted by development. And, though hundreds of small roads snake through the area, there are only two passages to “civilization” – Highway 49, running north/south from Nevada City to Auburn, and Interstate 80, the main route from San Francisco to Sacramento to Reno and points east.
As much as I felt trapped in a tinderbox back in 1980s Nevada County, I’d bug out today from the realization that I was one firebug and a bad day away from being burnt to a crisp in what I thought was a bucolic Eden. There is no question of if Nevada County will go up in flames, it is just a matter of when it will join the Berkeley/Oakland Hills, Paradise, Clear Lake, Santa Rosa, and now Los Angeles as one of the preventable and predictable victims of fire, over-development, and greed.
As responsible as Amy’s parents were and as nice as their place was, there is no reason why the land should have been sold to them to build on. There’s no reason why the houses that were there before her parents homesteaded should have been built and, certainly, no reason why anything should have been built since (or is still being built), no reason except greed. The greater good would dictate leaving rural areas rural and forest lands free from development, and not just for environmental reasons. Human safety and security are good enough reasons. Unfortunately, individualized greed demands that everything is for sale no matter how bad it might be for anyone but the seller. Caveat emptor.
Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Topanga Canyon, and all the urban areas that have crept up Los Angeles’ hills, into once rural valleys, now dotted with estates, surrounded by buildings that service the well-landed, as well as more modest housing – none of that should be as it is and was. Hell, if we are talking common sense, Los Angeles itself should not be much more than a small city.
Pre-colonialization, what was to be Los Angeles was occupied by the Tongva people, who settled where the Los Angeles River met the Pacific Ocean. Southern California is semi-arid, so while the region experiences wet years, they are more than balanced by droughts. Occasional wet years, usually meant the river flooded; however, droughts had a minor impact on the river. Its source is an underground aquifer in the San Fernando Valley, which enabled the river to flow year-round, something it hasn’t done for decades.
However, droughts did and do impact the area in other ways, especially when a drought followed a wet year. Plants need water to survive, plants need lots of water to thrive. When plants thrive, they grow and vegetation becomes lush, which is great if the area stays green and wet, but when drought comes and everything starts to dry out, what was once soothing landscape becomes deadly fuel; what was once a natural paradise becomes a potential Paradise. One spark and all that dried-up vegetation goes up in flames, as do trees weakened by lack of water and whatever humans have built.
One spark is not a big deal when wildfires are part of a natural process, occurring in areas that they are known to occur, impacting the land and people in ways that are predictable. Rain falls for days, people move to higher ground, floods come and go, rain stops, stuff grows, rain does not return, stuff dries out, people move to safer ground, fires come, things burn, people move back and rebuild, rain comes, and the process starts over again, as it has for thousands of years.
In the 1800s, businessmen were determined to make Los Angeles a major city. They bought land, sold it, developed it, engaged in scams and corruption, and made a lot of money. The more they developed the more Los Angeles’ new residents gulped down water. More people meant more jobs which meant more industry which gulped down even more water. The Los Angeles River got smaller and, during dry years, became a trickle. High demand starting to tap out the San Fernando aquifer, and the lower it got, the more toxic the water became, water which was now unusable for human or animal consumption. Los Angeles needed new water sources if it was to survive and grow.
Enter Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, Fred Eaton, and William Mulholland. These four men – as speculators, newspaper publishers, businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats – forced Los Angeles into the sprawl that it has become by using corruption, theft, fraud, intimidation, terrorism, and murder. To bring more water to L.A., they manipulated and lied to the public, bribed politicians, officials, police, and landowners. They identified the Owens Valley as their new water source. To get it, they stole water and land rights from farmers and ranchers. They built the Los Angeles Aqueduct and drained the valley of water, impoverishing thousands so that the four water-men and their allies could become some of the wealthiest men in the West. Seriously, Donald Trump is a cream puff compared to these guys.
Owens Valley water was never going to be enough to quench Los Angeles’ thirst or fuel further growth. In the 1960s, California developed the State Water Project as a way to water Southern California. “The State Water Project spans ⅔ of the length of California and consists of 22 dams and reservoirs, a pumping plant, and a 444-mile-long aqueduct. It begins at the Oroville Dam on the Feather River and ends at Lake Parris near Riverside.” Los Angeles also gets water from the Colorado River, which is drying up.
The state of the Colorado River and years of drought has had L.A. turning inward for water. Still, according the L.A. Department of Water Resources, “[o]n average, up to 90% of Los Angeles' water supply comes from imported sources. The water supply is composed of 34% Los Angeles Aqueduct water, 45% from the State Water Project, and 8% from the Colorado River. In addition, 12% of the water supply came from groundwater and 1% from recycled.”
Look at that stat again: Nearly 90% of Los Angeles’ water is imported. Worse, L.A.’s water sources are not doing so great. As noted, the Colorado River is in serious trouble, so much so that water allocations to the river’s stakeholders – Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and California – is being reduced. Owens Valley water and that which comes from Northern California via the California Aqueduct is impacted by drought, drought that hits the Sierra Nevada and Central Valley regularly and hard.
It would be nonsense to demand that the near 20 million people living in the greater Los Angeles area move to wherever water is plentiful. That’s no going to happen. However, it is not insane (or cruel) to point out that given Los Angeles’ terminal troubles with water - going back to before European colonization, poisoned by 19th Century greed, and worsened by 20th Century mass development – the area should not have been built out, especially the way it has been, and double-especially up hills, down valleys, and into wilderness and forests. The same goes for all the urban, suburban, and exurban areas which have encroached on wilderness.
So, what do we do? Well, first thing is that we ignore Donald Trump and Elon Musk. While one would expect that the incoming president and the “Richest Man in the World” to study up on wildfires, water, California, etc. before they speak, or at least hire people to do solid research for them, that’s not going to happen. Though, to be fair, even if they’d shut the hell up, neither man can do much about a problem that predates them by more than a hundred years.
Still, the fixes are known: Limit and stop development in areas that can be hit by wildfires. Clear land adjacent to buildings in fire zones. Create greater access in and out of rural and once-rural communities for evacuation and firefighting. While the first answer requires much political will and a hell of a fight, it is as doable as the second two.
Another fix, which is difficult and expensive, is to update urban water systems, especially emergency water systems, so that they can deal with wildfires. Right-wingers are savaging Los Angeles and California for “running out of water,” which is stupid, even though it is what happened. They are taking aim at politicians, which seems fair enough, until you realize that the disaster is the result of hundreds of decisions made over more than a hundred years. Office holders might have rubber stamped developments where they should not have happened (and were sometimes bribed to do so) but most of the blame lies with developers who insisted on building, bent the system to their will, and then refused to pay and plan for water systems and upgrades for decades. Instead, they’ve acted like developing wild spaces is just the same as creating infill projects. If planners and politicians had held developers to a higher, saner, more responsible standard than “Make as much money as you can” back when these projects were mere proposals, things could be much different.
I am not downplaying the tragedy of the Los Angeles Wildfires by writing that what is happening is as predictable as the Santa Ana Winds. Five hundred, one hundred, fifty, twenty, two years ago, we knew that when the dry, hot Santa Ana Winds push their way through Nevada and over Southern California mountain passes, that once in California, the winds become a very effective blow-dryer and, if bad luck or arson has it, a fire multiplier. Whether the Santa Ana’s result in fire or not is reliant on a spark; how bad those fires are depends on the fuel. Dried vegetation is great kindling. Buildings are a fantastic base fuel. Automobiles are great fire bombs.
While we do not control the winds, we create and can manage much of the fuel. We determine what is developed and where. We figure out how to allocate water depending on how we prioritize its use. We center our lives on making a lot of money for ourselves or thinking about what will enable us all to live a good life.