Front Burner - Lessons from the Los Angeles wildfires

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Fires continue to burn in Los Angeles as millions of people remain under an extreme fire weather alert. The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire have already flattened entire neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, leaving nothing but outlines and ash where homes once stood. It is expected that this will all amount to the worst natural disaster in American history in terms of cost and scale.These fires raise major questions about the future of Los Angeles, who is to blame, insurance and just how prepared we are for worsening fires and other climate change fueled disasters.To discuss the size and scope of these fires, and what can be learned from them, we’re joined by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times writer and columnist and author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA... and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hey everybody, Jamie here.

So we are heading into a pretty intense news cycle. Canada is barreling towards an election and Donald Trump's first few months in office will be eventful to say the least. You might be listening to this right now because you searched for a show covering this stuff. Well, why not just hit that follow button and save yourself the search, because we're going to do this five days a week. Follow Frontburner and don't miss an episode.

If we get a new fire start in a different location, it could be very difficult to contain. Hi everybody, Jamie here. That clip off the top was the LA County Fire Chief speaking to CNN on Monday. And by Tuesday morning, a new fire, the Auto Fire, had started up in Ventura County. Tuesday morning also saw the Santa Ana winds pick back up. We're talking about possible wind gusts of up to 112 kilometers per hour. And despite having more firefighters at the ready, this means more danger and fear for a city that has already endured so much. 13 million people under red flag warnings.

The National Weather Service calling the conditions about as bad as it gets. Firefighters battling the flames from the air, but soon those winds could be too strong for aircraft to take to the skies. At least 24 people dead, now the search for the missing. People are saying, I just want to go look at my house and I want to see what's left. We know that, but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors. More than 12,000 structures, many of them homes, gone. One estimate says the insured losses are already at least $30 billion.

The Palisades fire and the Eaton fire have flattened entire neighborhoods, leaving nothing but outlines and ash where homes once stood. It's expected that this will be the worst natural disaster in US history in terms of cost and scale. These fires raise major questions about the future of Los Angeles, insurance, and just how prepared we are for worsening fires and other climate change-fueled disasters.

To work through all of this, I'm glad to be joined today by New York Times writer and columnist David Wallace-Wells. David is one of the most insightful and knowledgeable writers on climate change and our preparedness for it, something he explored in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. David, thank you so much for making the time. Thanks for having me. So just before we get going, I want to note that we are talking Tuesday afternoon around 2 30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

This morning we saw a new fire break out in Ventura County and the conditions are expected to be very unfavorable until Wednesday around noon. The palisades and Eden fires are still far from contained. So this is still very much an ongoing fight. But I want to start with your reaction to what we've seen over the past week. What's been going through your head as these fires have raged on and the scale of the destruction and devastation has really come into focus? Well, personally, I start with that scale of devastation and destruction.

I think, um, too often in this business, we, we rush from a disaster to try to make meaning of it. Increasingly, it seems, by pointing fingers at one another and scapegoating. And I'm sure we'll talk in a little bit about lessons we might learn from this fire. But I think it's worth just pausing first with the sheer scale of destruction. Overnight, in a single night last week, a large urban neighborhood, Pacific Palisades, was effectively wiped off the map. There are 23,000 people that live in this beautiful coastal community between the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Those tens of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate because

of exactly what you're seeing. The famed Sunset Boulevard from where I'm standing right now, all the way into the Palisades Village, every marker of this once vibrant community is gone. Another neighborhood in Los Angeles, Altadena, is now pockmarked with as many as 5,000 destroyed homes. The Eaton fire has wiped away decades of rich Black history and culture in Altadena, a town that became a sanctuary for Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow era segregation in the South.

This is not something that even those of us who follow fire closely can make sense of it in terms of scale. It is just an absolutely horrific scar that I think is going to last for quite a long time for Los Angeles and the people living in it. Mercifully, somewhat miraculously, the mortality count is relatively low, but the actual devastation to the built environment is really, really astonishing.

And I don't think we're anywhere near understanding what it will mean for the city and its future to look up at the skyline and see a reminder of this devastation somewhat forever after. Now, that all said, there also is a lot to take from this. And personally, I spent a lot of last week quite agitated about the blame game that was going on. I think a lot of it quite ill-informed, a lot of anger and rage, but there's something so human in an ugly way to see blame being placed at the foot of individual actors as though a disaster of this scale could possibly be the responsibility of a few bad political figures, of political leaders. And I think pretending that that is the case somewhat allows us to avoid reckoning with the true scale of what we're

facing here and ultimately the true scale of what we need to protect ourselves against that new risk. protect ourselves against that new risk. I want to get into that more with you. But first, I wonder if you could just spend a little bit more time explaining to me why this fire is so different from other major fires that we've seen in the past several years. So I'm thinking of Fort McMurray here in Canada in 2016, the Australian wildfires in 2020, the Lahaina fire in Hawaii in 2023. Of course, the scale, but you know, it is ripping through this densely populated urban area, I think, in ways that the other ones didn't. Well, I would sort of tell the story in two different ways, one of which actually puts the Palisades fire and the Eden fire in the same category as Fort McMurray and Lahaina.

And that is that we have seen over the last decade or half decade, depending on how you want to count something like what's been called the return of the urban firestorm. So it used to be that even as we were watching, you know, that the total acres burned across the American West into Canada grow year on year, even as we were reckoning with the fact and the threat of larger and larger fires burning hotter and hotter, even as we were sort of wrapping our minds around that phenomenon, we were mostly looking, say, in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, we were mostly looking at wildland fires,

wildfires, brush fires, you know, they're called different things in different parts of the world. And that meant that we were primarily thinking about the future of fire in terms of our forests and what we could do to reduce risks in them and reduce risks from emerging out of them into the human environment where we actually all live.

But really beginning with the Fort McMurray fire, we start to see a really new pattern, which is quite concerning. And it is the fact that the fires are now escaping those environments, those wildland environments, and don't even need all that much time or space in the wildland to get going, but can quite quickly jump into, you know,

suburban, semi-suburban, sometimes even urban environments, like we saw in Palisades, not burning from tree to tree and occasionally destroying a house, but actually burning from home to home turning the homes themselves into sort of a fuel landscape. Firefighters call it the beast 240,000 acre inferno shifting with the wind in Fort McMurray firefighters found a smoldering

wasteland 15,000 were trapped outside the burn zone. Millions of dead trees are making the fire impossible to stop. And that really is a new thing you know it's it's not something that firefighters in the 1990's early 2000's were thinking all that much about how do you fight fire in an urban environment how do you prevent fire in an urban environment. We basically thought we had solved that problem we thought thought we had retired it, you know, sometime

towards the end of the 19th century, the early 20th century, and basically didn't have to worry much about large-scale fires in urban settings. Maybe a building, you know, a building suffering or going under here or there, but it was not, you know, we were not regularly encountering environments and disasters like we saw, for instance, when the Great Chicago Fire or going farther back in time, the Great London Fire. Those were understood to be relics of the past. We're now entering into a new era in which they no longer are. And in fact, some of the most harrowing, distressing, tragic fire events of the last few years have been precisely this kind of event, not defined by huge acreage or devastation across, you know, whole states or regions,

but something much more local that is nevertheless home to so many people in so many homes that the human tragedy is much larger. The other big part of it is just that Los Angeles is not Fort McMurray, Canada. It's something much more like New York City, like London, like Paris. I mean, it is one of these major cultural capitals full of incredibly wealthy, powerful, well-connected people with huge social media reaches. And so it reverberates much more profoundly

around the world. It feels like a much larger lesson. That's because of the connections we feel to it. And it's also because, you know, we tell ourselves that Los Angeles is a city. It's not set in the wildland or urban interface, even though that's not true. It is the wildland or urban interface. But when we think of it, we think of it as such a major megalopolis that we can't imagine that it would be vulnerable to burning through like this in the same way that, you know, small towns in rural Canada might be. And so you have a combination of the scale and the sort of felt relevance, the human proximity,

because of the cultural footprint that Los Angeles has in the world. And I think that's what makes it a kind of uniquely harrowing or horrifying fire. And for many people watching around the world, I think a kind of a worrying portent of what may be to come. I take your point that you made earlier that there's no like one thing or two things that actors could have done here.

But I do want to drill down into some of the blame with you for a few minutes. What are the individual mistakes that you've come across since you started reporting on this? — Well, in Southern California, the risk of fire is determined by the growth of brush, primarily this chaparral brush that exists in, often in state parks and protected environments, sometimes in the backyards of large homes. The brush grows back as soon as you clear it. So if you're going to be clearing it in order to reduce fuel, you need to basically be doing that every year. It's in fact replenished by rain because it promotes growth.

The brush can then dry out very quickly. It's almost a Sisyphean challenge to make this landscape relatively fire safe. But I think ultimately the challenge is more on the sort of housing and urban planning side of things rather than on the fuel reduction and mitigation side of things. And that means making sure that homes that are built anywhere in harm's way are up to a quite progressive code. Doing things like clearing brush from five or more feet around the house, it means making sure that the roofs

are made out of the right materials. It means handling things like the direction of street pathways so that they don't channel winds and become wind tunnels in a crazy wind event. And a lot of these things are quite longstanding issues with many of the urban environments of Los Angeles. Many of them were called out in particular in the Pacific Palisades at various points over the last decade or two. But it's not like there were political

decisions made in the last three or four or five years that took this environment from a place of true safety to a place of true danger. These are accumulating risks that have been created many, many decades ago by the decision to build at all in these environments and especially so expansively into these environments without really reckoning with the risk of fire. And we haven't done enough to account for that, to adjust for that and to allow ourselves a decent chance

of navigating the real fire hazard that emerges as a result. But when I look back at these fires in particular, we're talking about Santa Ana winds that were at times blowing over a hundred miles an hour. A fire powered by those winds cannot be stopped. You can't fly water planes over them in wind conditions like that.

You can't have firefighters in the path of flames like that. And so in this instance, you know, I think there probably were things that could have been done five years ago, 10 years ago, even 50 years ago, along the way that might've made many of these homes more resilient and less sure to burn down to the ground as they did.

But it's not like anything that could have been done in the recent past would have contained this fire. Going forward, you know, thinking not just about the future of Pacific Palisades, but all of the areas of Los Angeles that are in similar positions, which are many. I think we want to, you know, implement as many of the lessons from those last 50 years as we can learn through this fire as possible. It's not going to get better by the force of climate and it's not going to get better by California water policies. It's really only gonna get better if we decide to make affirmative choices

to make our homes less vulnerable and more resilient in the face of fire. ["Dreams of a New World"] In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. How inevitable was this? How much of it is like a terrible confluence of factors that came together at the same time? And how much of it was the people were expecting something like this at some point?

Well, you know, when people talk about questions like that around fire, they tend to try to divide the question to a few different buckets. One is the question of ignition. Like, why did this fire start when it started? Is that preventable? And they also talk about the underlying ecological and environmental conditions.

Like, what made the shrub land that gave rise to this fire, what made it as flammable as it was when the fire broke out and how unusual or how rare were the winds that really powered it and pushed it into the communities that it ultimately destroyed. And then there's the question of how vulnerable those communities are to fire when fire comes. And each of them, I think, has to be answered a little bit differently. We still don't know exactly what gave rise

to the Palisades fire. The best reporting that I've seen suggests that it may have been ultimately caused by a fireworks display on New Year's Eve, which was extinguished according to the local file department, but which sort of smoldered, possibly underground, possibly just without giving up big flames for a period of whatever that would be,

a week or 10 days afterward, and then flared up again when the winds picked up. And that's quite distressing because we can talk all we want about making sure that our power lines are safe and secure. We can worry about how we're policing arson, and there are instances of arson giving rise to large wildfires. It's also the case that many fires are started by lightning, so can't be controlled. But here's an instance of a fire that we knew about, we took action on, we got a hold of, and it snuffed out. And then, you know, 10 days later, here it is roaring again.

That really makes the whole thing a little bit hard to, you know, get a handle on because, you know, we do certain things with fires with forest management, mechanical thinning, controlled burning. We do these things under certain fire conditions. But if the fires can actually persist until the conditions are ripe for a truly catastrophic fire, it means that the challenge of taking control of the underlying landscape

is much, much, much, much harder. So I think there are real challenges there. The second set of conditions that's sort of basically like the climate context in which this is happening, most people would say that these dynamics are inevitable and increasing. We're seeing more overlap of incredibly dry landscapes and incredibly powerful winds. As climate change worsens, it's different in different parts of the state and different, you know, different ecologies respond differently. But this

is, was something that could have been foreseen ahead of time. And we can also foresee now that it will get worse going forward. And the third part is the piece that we were talking about a few minutes ago, which is how much when we build and when we remodel, how much when we design new urban environments and do new development, how much are we really taking seriously the natural and increasing fire risk that shadows those environments and those communities? How much are we building genuine resilience into those homes? And how much are we basically choosing to live in delusion,

preferring to believe that no real risk is coming and that we can sort of under attend to, rather than over prepare for fires like these? I think one of the lessons of this disaster is that we've been doing far too much of the former, you know, which is to say, basically pretending that we weren't nearly as vulnerable as we were, and not nearly enough of the latter, which is to say taking seriously the people raising the alarm about risk and actually undertaking a new program of home-hardening and urban planning that tries to at least blunt the risk,

if not eliminate it entirely. Given that ongoing risk, what do you think is gonna happen now to these areas? Are they going to be rebuilt? If so, how do you think that that's going to go? The people that live there, like what kind of battles are they going to face with things like insurance? Yeah, I, the truth is, I can't say I know. I wrote a big story about fires in Los Angeles five years ago, and I've written about fires there and in the region pretty regularly ever since.

And I've had this experience that as a New Yorker, as a lifelong New Yorker, whenever I'm working on those stories, I'm told by the people in California that while my facts are right, I'm portraying it accurately, that there's something a little bit hysterical in my tone. And they say to me, we've always had fire here.

We know it's getting worse, but we also know how to handle it. We haven't done that stuff yet, but we can. It was a sort of like, you're an outsider and we know it looks really horrifying to you, but here it seems like a much more manageable and familiar threat. But this fire season and these fires in particular,

the people I've spoken to are telling me a very different set of things. They're much more likely these days to be comparing what's happened over the last week to 9-11. They're not as likely to be telling me, you know, I basically heard from nobody who said that I was overreacting and talking about this, you know, these fires. Many of them are thinking in quite profound ways about the, you know, the settlement patterns in the whole region, often crassly about what it will do to, you know, real estate

values and home values. Just, you know, significant for many people, of course. But it seems to have prompted a much more profound reckoning with the new landscape of risk than any of these other fires that we've seen over the last five or 10 years. And that's really saying something since a lot of those fires were quite destructive. Now, what that means in terms of development or redevelopment, rebuilding, I think is very much an open question. Five years ago, I would have told you, the people I spoke to in LA told me, we're rebuilding here. We're resilient people. We're fire resilient. And in fact, a lot of people said, it's kind of nice.

I get to rebuild my dream home with the insurance money that I got. And they might say, my insurance premiums haven't even gone up yet. How can you tell me that this is an existential threat to this neighborhood or this landscape if the insurance company isn't even making me pay more for protection against fire risk? That has changed dramatically over the last five years. And now it's the case that in many of these parts of LA, you can't get private fire insurance. As climate caused disaster surge in frequency and cost,

insurance companies are pulling back on coverage. Last summer, California's largest insurer canceled or refused to renew 72,000 policies because of the wildfire risk. We had to pay $65,000 to buy another insurance right away because I was afraid of fire. Many homes are covered by the state's insurer of last resort plan. Those payouts will be capped at, are supposed to be capped at $3 million,

which sounds like an awful lot of money. And it is, but actually in a neighborhood like Pacific Palisades, it certainly doesn't get you the full value of most of those homes. And I know, you know, in Malibu, many of the homes that were destroyed were much, much more valuable even than that, you know, 10, 20, even $50 million homes. What will happen as these claims are made through the insurance market is very TBD. The insurance program, the last resort insurance program, does not at the moment have sufficient money to cover all of them. My understanding is that presumably it will extract some additional money from rate payers

elsewhere in the state to cover these losses. That is the way that that program was set up. But the political blowback that that will produce is likely to be quite immense, especially if that additional money being paid for by a middle-class homeowner is subsidizing the rebuilding of Mel Gibson's Malibu Mansion or whatever. And so exactly how the California insurance market shakes out from all of this, I think is going to be quite a battle over the next several years. And I'm not sure that I can say or anyone can say with confidence where it'll end up. One possibility that many have floated is that it simply won't be possible to buy fire insurance anymore in many parts

of the state. And what that means in terms of patterns of development and the future of a neighborhood like Palisades, or indeed of Topanga, of Malibu, of many of the communities up in the hills of the Santa Monica Mountains, I think we just don't know. But I certainly think we can't count for certain on the developmental pattern that we've observed over the last few decades, where whenever there was a fire, there was not just a rebuild, but a rebuild towards more opulence and wealth. I think that it's possible that, you know,

other parts of LA will become more desirable in part because of their seeming safety from fire risk. And what that means, you know, more broadly, I think is an even more profound question. You know, I think I mentioned 9-11 a few minutes ago, and a number of people in LA have used that analogy with me. I live in New York and I walk past ground zero regularly. And the way that that neighborhood remains scarred

by that event is ambiguous. Most people walking those streets, just walk those streets to work and to the subway and home. But it's also a huge museum that draws many millions of visitors every year to mark that tragedy. And I think that it's quite possible that whatever happens in Palisades, the neighborhood will be remembered, not just for years,

but for decades going forward, as the site of a truly generational horror and trauma of the kind that even fire-hardened Californians simply couldn't imagine just a few years ago. David Wallace-Walls, I want to thank you very much for this. This was great. Thank you. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.