Dark City

Ep 28 FIRE: Everyone in LA Knows Someone Who Lost Everything | Los Angeles, CA

• Dark City Productions • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Speaker 1:

Hi everyone. This is Leah. I'm going to be going solo for this episode, if you're just joining us. Normally co-host April would be joining, but this is going to be an exception to our normally scheduled programming. Now, normally this show is about the dark history of major cities. Our current season is on Los Angeles, but in light of the dark history currently unfolding right now, we felt like this was not the right time to talk about all of the dark things in Los Angeles' past, especially when we're going through a very dark moment right now, and that is, of course, the fires that have been ripping through the regions.

Speaker 1:

So if you've even remotely been paying attention to the news I know many of you are international we are going through one of if it doesn't turn out to be, the worst natural disaster in this region, possibly the US disaster in this region, possibly the US. Since Tuesday, january 7th, multiple fires have broken out in LA. They've varied in terms of severity and scale and the devastation is just awful. If you've seen the images, you know thousands of homes have been destroyed. Businesses, schools, neighborhoods are just entirely erased. Some of the aerial footage that I've seen. It's almost like if you were to just kind of squint or not really be paying attention. It kind of looks like a barren winter landscape that just had snow. But that's not snow. Those are ashes from all of the things that have burned in the wake of this fire.

Speaker 1:

Here's how I'm going to run the episode, because I feel like it's very important for us to talk about it and acknowledge it and explain what's happening, especially as someone on the ground. So here's what I'll do. I'm going to give you a quick recap of what's happened so far. Why did this happen, how did it get so bad and what does it all mean for the region? But first I'm going to just start off on a few personal notes. I know many of you who are listening are local, which means you could have been directly impacted by this fire. You certainly know somebody who has, and to those people, I am just so sorry. I don't think there are any words that could be said, and even if there were the right words, I don't think I could find them. It is just so devastating and I am just so sorry. To the first responders on the ground, I think safe to say we all appreciate them, but, boy, you don't know how much you appreciate them until something like this happens even if you already did the firefighters, the police, the emergency technicians, among so many others who are literally out there risking their lives, even if you are living in I don't know Germany and I know some of you are Go treat your local fire station to lunch or hug your local firefighter. I mean, they are out there doing double, triple time.

Speaker 1:

And then also to the media. So we're normally a history show. We are not journalists. We have so much appreciation and praise for journalists and historians and what we do is we take all the great work that they do and package it into stories that you can listen to while commuting or doing your chores. And I think times like this also highlights how important the local media is. If it weren't for them and their coverage, we wouldn't really understand the extent of the damage and also inspire the sort of help and support we need from all corners of society to get past where we are today. For myself, I live in the LA area, so if you listen regularly, you know that April is in Phoenix. I live just a few miles south of one of the two biggest fires, the Eaton Fire. So first question is are you okay? Yes, we're fine, my family's fine, everyone's fine outside of being shell-shocked. There certainly could be a worse scenario here.

Speaker 1:

But one story I wanted to just relate, being so close, on top of all the personal tragedies and stories I've heard so far. So the fire started on Tuesday night and on Wednesday morning when I looked outside, the light is really, really weird because of all of the smoke and haze, really weird because of all of the smoke and haze. And then when I looked a little bit closer I saw it looks like it could be snow flurries floating around, but those aren't snow flurries, those are ashes, ashes of people's houses, their schools, their kids' toys, and it's just really I can't really describe it. I've never seen or experienced anything like it. It kind of reminds me of to lighten this up for a second, because this is a heavy episode. Then again it's Dark City, so everything's heavy. But it reminds me of Stranger Things when they're in the upside down. You know how it's like, got that eerie light and there's all that white stuff floating around in the air which is actually alien spores, in case you're curious. But yeah, it was kind of like that. It felt like I was in the upside down, my normal world just turned upside down.

Speaker 1:

Now let me talk about the devastation so far. I saw a post on social media that said everyone in LA knows someone who lost everything I mean, if not everyone, just about everyone or you're the person who lost something. This is just massive in terms of scale. So I'm going to start by zooming out and give you a summary of the destruction, again as we know it so far as of Monday, january 13th, keeping in mind this is an evolving story and the numbers I'm going to share below what they actually are.

Speaker 1:

According to the New York Times, as of Sunday evening, the combined area burned by the past week's fire is about 40,000 acres. Now, to put this another way, because most of us don't think in terms of where the fires have are raging, it would be 62.5 square miles. So, just if you have a sense, in any direction, what's eight miles away? That's just one side of the square. The total area is larger than the city limits of major US cities, including San Francisco, pittsburgh and Boston. The last count, I saw 12,000 structures destroyed across these fires. Those structures include houses, businesses, schools, cars, outhouses. According to NPR, as of Sunday, at least 153,000 people had been forced to evacuate and probably will not be able to return until later this week due to continued fire risk. Another 166,000 people, I believe, are still under evacuation warning.

Speaker 1:

To fight the fire the region has pulled in from not just the bench of firefighters here in California but other US states. It's an international effort. At this point we have firefighters coming in from Mexico and Canada, firefighters from a private firefighting force, even firefighting air tankers being used, though unfortunately those had to stay grounded when the winds were so bad at the beginning of last week. But they're out there and they're in full force now. I'm going to break down the multiple fires and give you a sense of where they are, especially for most of you that don't actually live in Los Angeles County. The largest by far is the Palisades Fire. This one has consumed 24,000 acres it's about 17% contained as of this recording and it's a very, very small fire.

Speaker 1:

This fire is taking place in a neighborhood that is located on the coast. It's between Santa Monica and Malibu those are two cities that you might be familiar with and it's in the Santa Monica Mountains. So I think there's a lot of luxury homes with ocean views, winding canyon roads. Because of that geography, it has been a nightmare to evacuate. I was listening to the New York Times, the Daily, and they reported that there were points when the traffic on these narrow roads getting out were so backed up. People were told just get out of your vehicles and run if you want to live. There's this one story, the actor, steve Guttenberg, who lives in the area. He was running around and shouting to people. Steve Guttenberg, who lives in the area. He was running around and shouting to people exiting their vehicles leave your keys in the car, because firefighters, if they have to come and move it and they probably will at some point it makes it easy for them to get in there. The picture of that is just insane.

Speaker 1:

Now, the Eaton Fire this is the one that is burning north of where I live. This one's roughly 14,000 acres it's about 35% contained. So geographically this area is north of Pasadena. The place that's being hard hit is out to Dana and it's devastating how it is erasing this community. Also, to give you a sense of where it is geographically, if you're familiar with the Rose Bowl, it's north of that and it goes into the Angeles Forest. There's beautiful hiking trails up there that I'm sure no longer exist. I have memories in both the Palisades and in Eaton Canyon, of places that just don't exist anymore.

Speaker 1:

There are several smaller fires around LA County, including the Kenneth Fire that burned about 1,000 acres. That one's contained. There's the Hearst Fire that was about 800 acres, it's just about contained. And then the Sunset Fire in Hollywood Hills, and that one is contained and I believe it's extinguished as well. Now, this is crazy because the day after the fires broke out I was texting with a friend of mine who was out of town about how terrible it was, and she and I were texting just as this one was breaking out and fortunately thank God, this is a pretty heavily populated area. No homes were destroyed. They were able to get it into under control pretty quickly, but it was a very tense moment. She sent me a video of a friend who was literally taking video of it from a distance in her office building. You could see the fire in the horizon.

Speaker 1:

A note on containment and what exactly it means. Containment refers to percentage of control lines that have been established around a fire's perimeter to stop its spread. So those barriers could be natural, like rivers or lakes, or man-made, like dugout. Fire breaks cleared zones, but when they say a fire is 100% contained, that doesn't mean the fire is extinguished so like. With the heightened wind risk we still have through Wednesday. It means you could have a situation where the embers could cross those lines or just continue to wreak even more havoc within those lines. So it's good when the numbers go up, but it by far and away does not mean that it's over.

Speaker 1:

Now there are countless stories of tragedy that are emerging. I can't possibly recount all of them, but I'm going to share just one in particular that I found so tragic as I was reading about those that have lost their lives in this fire. There's a man named Anthony Mitchell. He lived in Altadena. This is where the Eaton Fire is. He lived in a house that has been in his family for a few generations, with two sons both in their thirties. One of his sons, justin, had cerebral palsy, and so he can't get out of bed on his own. Anthony himself, I believe, is also disabled. They had another son who normally lives with them and cares for both of them. He was actually hospitalized himself with an illness this week. So Anthony was in touch with two of his other children telling them you know, we're fine, even though his son, jordan, wasn't there to help them evacuate. He said we're going to get evacuated, but then they were later found dead. No one ever came to get them. I don't know what the backstory is. Of course, the family is devastated and they feel like they have been failed by the system, and I understand that.

Speaker 1:

Outside of all of these individual stories of tragedy, we're losing historical and culturally significant sites. One of these, just to lighten this up for a minute, there's this museum in Altadena called the Bunny Museum. That's called the Hoppiest Place on Earth. Now this museum was started by a husband and wife, steve Lubansky and Candace Frazee. They each called each other Bunny and obviously loved Bunny so much. They started a museum that had 46,000 rabbit related items. This was everything from like stuffed animals and porcelain figures to movie posters, costumes. So that has burned down, though they are committed to rebuilding it and I hope that they do. I remember seeing that and thinking that was the most random, awesome thing and making a note to visit it. The Palisades Fire. So on the other side of LA, on the coast, the Will Rogers State Park has burned down. That park you might be familiar with, you might recognize the name Will Rogers. He was a Hollywood actor. In the 20s he developed the land into a ranch and put in golf courses and riding trails, and it was donated by his widow in 1944 to become a historic state park that has been decimated.

Speaker 1:

Now let's talk about why the fires were so bad. I'm going to go over why. We had the conditions for the quote unquote perfect storm. And you're probably thinking, okay, that's all great, but you have to have a spark to start a fire. And what was that? I'll get into that Now.

Speaker 1:

Typically, los Angeles is really dry, with minimal rainfall in the months between June and September, but usually there is follow-up rain after this fire season in the late fall to winter, but that wasn't the case this year. To give you a sense of how severe the dryness was in the last three months of 2024, typically we would get around 3.5 inches of rain. However, we only got about 0.03 inches of rain, according to what was recorded at LAX during those months. Because of this, you have all of this vegetation that normally would have been hydrated by midwinter rains now turned into this vast supply of easy-to-ignite fuel. There was a lot of dried vegetation too, because the last two rainy seasons in 2023 and 2024 were unseasonably wet. According to CNN, a weather station near the Palisades fire recorded 19.3 inches of rain in February of last year. That's compared to the usual 4.7 inches. All that rain encouraged explosive plant growth and I remember thinking at that time I'm so grateful for the rain we certainly need the water but also being terrified at all of those beautiful flowers, because I knew when we would go through these periods of no rain. It would just be fuel for the fire.

Speaker 1:

Then add in the Santa Ana winds. These are hot, dry winds that originate in the winter months in the Great Basin north of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They form when cold air from high-pressure systems circulate clockwise, forcing dense air downslope towards Southern California. As this air descends through the many mountain passes and canyons, it compresses, heats up, dries out and picks up speed, and can reach up to 110 miles per hour. This week we experienced winds as strong as 100 miles per hour. That is equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane. And these winds, they don't just blow, they create chaos. When fires do break out, they can carry embers miles ahead of the fire, allowing it to hop over fire breaks like freeways and roads, with embers igniting new fires far from the point of origin. Fire behavior becomes incredibly hard to predict or control. At one point we were seeing the equivalent of three football fields burning every minute.

Speaker 1:

So now on to the big question so what sparked the fires? According to the National Fire Protection Association, the leading cause of wildfires is lightning, which obviously did not apply here. The next most common causes are human-related intentionally set fires or those sparked by utility lines. In the case of the fires that broke out here, we don't have definitive answers yet. Investigators are still piecing things together. According to LAist, some reports suggest that the Palisades fire could be a rekindling of an earlier blaze caused by fireworks on New Year's Eve, which is a week earlier. Meanwhile, the LA Times reports that investigators are examining the transmission line in Eaton Canyon as a potential source of the Eaton fire. Southern California Edison has denied responsibility for the fire and says it hasn't been officially accused, but they're still facing lawsuits. Determining the exact cause of a wildfire is notoriously difficult. As Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, put it, you're basically throwing a crime scene in an oven. So it might be some time before we can say anything with certainty as to what the causes were.

Speaker 1:

To quantify the cost of the fires. Accuweather's preliminary estimates place the damage and economic losses between $135 billion and $150 billion. This, of course, does not reflect the countless personal stories of loss and tragedy. To put the numbers in perspective, hurricane Katrina's impact was about $200 billion. These fires represent a turning point for the region. Entire communities are going to need to be rebuilt. The loss of cultural landmarks erases pieces of LA's unique character. With climate change intensifying both wet and dry seasons for the foreseeable future, and as evidenced by last year's record February rains followed by extreme drought, los Angeles faces difficult decisions about its future. How we rebuild, where we allow development and how we strengthen our emergency response systems will shape the region for generations to come. The fires of January 2025 will likely be remembered not just for their unprecedented destruction, but as the moment that forced Los Angeles to fundamentally rethink its relationship and designed environment with wildfire risk.

Speaker 1:

So for all of you out there, there's no shortage of ways to help. If you want to help, donations to established and trustworthy nonprofits are always welcome. You can donate clothes, books, toys All of those things are needed. And if you live here, like me, and want to help with cleanup once it's safe, there's going to be a number of efforts that will be organized. I know personally I'm going to help with rebuilding trails, among other things. We'll put links on how you can help in our show notes to reference. Until next time, stay safe and we'll see you soon. Thank you.