GeoLegal Weekly #50: Fires, Blame and Inflatable Unicorns

I've been both a climate refugee and an analyst making sense of how so many places I loved went up in smoke. The trauma of loss and disaster is hard. Watching the politics of blame makes it harder.

Last week we had to evacuate due to the Los Angeles wildfires. Whole neighborhoods within 10 minutes of my house were burned to the ground. Friends lost houses and my family has lost landmarks that matter to us.

The campground where I took my son for his first camping trip. The park where my daughter had a recent unicorn birthday party. The restaurant where we celebrated my wife’s last trip around the sun. My children’s favorite frozen yogurt shop and my favorite car wash--both of which we had visited 48 hours before. All gone.

Memories of bouncy unicorns in Pacific Palisades

Our street has been closed off as a national guard staging site to prevent looters from accessing burned areas. I’ve kept the family on the road largely to protect our lungs, as all sorts of nastiness is flying around in the otherwise beautiful California sun. I never thought I’d go to Mexico City to get better air, but we pushed forward a family vacation to do just that.

Oh, and the fires are not yet contained. They may burn for weeks.

We have all experienced crises. Once the bleeding stops, politicians focus on rebuilding and then taking steps to make sure the bad thing “never happens again.” After 9/11 it was getting terrorists and rebuilding the WTC. After COVID, it was pushing vaccinations and “building back better.” But today’s fractious political climate undermines the likelihood of any type of “rally around the flag effect.” Worse, it means we won’t be able to learn from the mistakes of today.

Fire Strikes Twice

I lived through this once before, when I was a child and Laguna Beach burned down in 1993. On evacuation day, I remember my Dad taking me to get milkshakes and show me the world was still ok; last week we took our kids a couple hours south to Legoland to show them the same. In Laguna, the fires had come to our backyard and swallowed up my friends’ homes. I remember digging through the rubble of their houses for burned baseball cards. The middle school in town burned and I had to go to another school a half hour away for a year. Getting back to normalcy is a long process. We eventually moved away.

I was lucky to have those options as a kid just as I’m lucky that my house is still standing and I can hit the road for a bit with my family today. But the trauma of damage and the challenge of rebuilding takes a toll.

The Politics of Blame

History often rhymes. We look for protagonists – in some cases who started the fire or those who allowed it to burn. In Laguna Beach, the immediate focus was on finding the arsonist believed responsible for the fire. Today, lawsuits are already being filed against a local energy company that victims want to blame for one of the blazes.

In Laguna Beach, anger turned to environmentalists who had opposed a reservoir, much like blame being thrown around today as politicians score points about dry fire hydrants. In Laguna, the city built two reservoirs after the fact, and also prohibited certain types of roofs that catch on fire quickly. It learned lessons from its disaster.

My fear with current politics is that we can’t learn lessons any more because politics has become toxic. As my colleague Dan Currell notes, a big sign of toxicity in discourse is when every issue becomes about the big picture—like a spouse threatening divorce over dirty dishes, which serve as a proxy for broader ills in the relationship.

Today, there is no ability to get to consensus on practical issues, like stopping wildfires, because the discourse automatically goes nuclear. Within hours of the first flames, the incoming president was blaming the fire on the governor in the opening shots of what will be a battle between his administration and California on pretty much everything. Calls were raised for the LA mayor to resign because she was in Ghana instead in Los Angeles; surely the wrong place to be when a crisis broke out but an immediate resignation cloud poisons the ability for the mayor to show any leadership at a time when the city badly needs it. Nasty memes and news stories quickly circulated about how an emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion in the fire department made firefighters less capable, as if we’d have no wildfires if the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision had only come a few years earlier.

None of this is helpful in an immediate crisis and it clouds the ability to learn and adapt. While we don’t know how the various fire started, we know they were carried from neighborhood to neighborhood via a unique wind event – not the winds of DEI. We know that firefighters risked their lives to save people—whether or not the mayor was in town. We know that as much as some politicians want to slam the door on our neighbors to the south or demonize any person who finds themselves caught in the justice system, a troop of firefighters from Mexico as well as prison inmates participating in a firefighting program have both provided needed support that have saved lives and saved property.

There are two sides to each of these angles but we live in a world where we are increasingly programmed to only acknowledge mutually exclusive versions of truth.

What we should learn

Much of the real estate value of California is at imminent risk of fires and earthquakes—a trend that is increasing. It is somewhat illogical to live in such a disaster prone area but the good weather, natural beauty, and economic opportunities are too great to ignore. That hill on fire in the photo below was a favorite hiking spot and home to the campground I mentioned above. It was also a tinder box waiting to threaten my house, which is under the plume.

On some level, we live with the risk, just like those in hurricane or tornado zones. When disaster strikes, it’s rarely surprising because it happens every few years.

But the environment is changing. Hundred-year fires are happening every few years now and freak wind events combined with a lack rain leave us so exposed that many insurance companies have been exiting the fire insurance market in recent years—creating novel exposures like the idea of telling people of normal economic means to “self-insure” (i.e. save money in case their house burns down).

In fact, the sheer property carnage that has come in the wake of the fires raises a handful of additionally scary thoughts. What if malicious actors (arsonists? foreign enemies?) decided to capitalize on freak weather by sparking a new series of fires, if not next month, next year? It’s no longer just the weather that’s a risk - it’s the fact that these conditions leave us even more exposed to those who might want to use it as an accelerant for damage.

In so many contexts we try to control risk: Whether that’s airport security or smoke alarms in our houses. But on a societal level, we can’t take environmental precautions because there is no environmental consensus. Controlled burns, filling reservoirs, beefing up first responders - they all cost money and they all require consensus at a very macro level. Local politics will diverge from national, but local budgets only go so far and taxpayers will quickly reprioritize money today over investing in tomorrow.

This leaves us to try to protect ourselves, and only the rich can self-insure and self-protect. The only building still standing in the middle of Pacific Palisades is a mall owned by a billionaire mayoral-challenger who employed a private firefighting force to look after his property, as you can watch in the video below This is not that different from the scenario I described in GeoLegal #26: Urban Impunity whereby store owners who feel the government won’t protect them from shop lifting take matters in their own hands.

In an unruly world, sometimes there’s not much else you can do.

Looking forward

The next few weeks will go as follows: Hopefully the fires are contained and extinguished. Broken communities will pick up the pieces while those who are displaced and those who are not grapple with dramatic rent increases and strains on the schooling of all our children. For us, this will be the center of our lives for some time coming.

My friend Karin Knox, who lost her home in the 2023 Lahaina wildfires in Hawaii, put a post together with things to know for wildfire survivors. This is critical reading for everyone affected. But its also a reminder that her tragedy was only a year and a half ago, and after doom scrolling the destruction for days on end, the rest of the country simply forgot about it and moved on, while the reconstruction continues.

Rebuilding after the LA wildfires: lessons from Lahaina.

Some day that park that hosted the unicorn birthday will be rebuilt. But my daughter will have grown out of inflatable unicorns by then.

-——-

Thanks for bearing with a more personal post this week. I appreciate all the support I’ve received from everyone in recent days.

—SW