
Well, we’ve all had a chance to read many wildfire news stories. Reporters of all abilities and proclivities have swarmed upon the tragedy in LA like ravens on a bison carcass.
I’ll attempt to group them here. It’s interesting to me that the blaming effort tends to be big picture, and the fixing effort tends to be lots of little things. This is not unlike our NEPA/project planning discussion. Similarly, the policy discussion tends to take place in “big picture” places, like think tanks, law schools, other academia, and political entities; while practitioners are often not involved in the discussions. We also need to pay attention for how the specific can lead incorrectly to grandiose prescriptions and vice versa. For example, these fires are not in forests… so let’s not even introduce our usual forest discussions. This seems obvious, but folks like to ride any disaster horse toward their preferred destination. Specific- not forest.
So let’s start with the biggest of big pictures:
(1) They shouldn’t have built there. In this Leighton Woodhouse piece
Twenty-seven years ago, Mike Davis wrote Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. One of the chapters is titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” In it, he argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.
OK, as a former resident of a nearby and less well-off area, I would have liked it all turned into a park so I could visit. And that (Malibu and environs) is a specific area. But does this apply to Altadena, or other places destroyed in this set of wildfires? In fact, some people are suggesting this about all of the west, as well as the SE (hurricanes and floods). Then there are earthquakes.
(2) There’s nothing you can do. High winds, dry veg and houses, and ignitions.
Well, that’s a cheery, and not very helpful, way of looking at things. And as we shall see, there are plenty of things homeowners, communities, and suppression folks can do. In fact, other places, like the Front Range of Colorado have similar conditions in the winter (see the Marshall Fire).
(3) Various “it’s all about climate change” narratives
Then there’s “it’s all about climate change and things will get a lot worse!” and/or “it’s all about climate change so we need to change drastically to keep up.” As you can see, climate change itself can go either way.. giving up and freaking people out, or adding to the impetus for implementing a reset of the whole interlocking systems of development, home hardening, vegetation and suppression.
So many people get stuck here at climate change . but scientists disagree on the proportionate contribution as well as on what we should do about it. Most of us see some possible climate impact. But why is it so important for some to blame climate? Sure that gets politicians off the hook, but is that a good goal? And I don’t understand why the details are so important. Let’s see, what should we do differently if models predict we get these conditions 10 percent to 30 percent more often. How much would our potential fixes change? The conversation also devolves weirdly. Like Steve Koonin writes an article saying “not so climate change”; he’s got the political street cred (Undersecretary for Science at DOE under Obama) but is criticized because he’s “not a climate scientist.” So, as we have seen, Jon Keeley who studies wildfires has one view based on historical records and his own research. But we’ve also seen Dan Swain say (who now works for UC Ag and Natural Resources) quoted.
Swain is big on the “whiplash” of wet springs and dry winters (this is similar to the Marshall Fire). I thought that this was an interesting take by ABC news.
“As Daniel Swain, the lead author of the research and a climate scientists with UCLA explains, “This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”
Less than a year ago, Los Angeles had historic flooding and is now facing severe drought conditions. That literally adds fuel to the fire.
Finally, it’s important to reiterate that California has and will always be particularly vulnerable to wildfires simply due to its natural climate. The state historically experiences highly variable weather and climate conditions, typically shifting from periods of very dry to very wet weather.
Across the continental U.S., California has the most year-to-year variability between wet and dry conditions. As you move down into Southern California, that variability increases even more, according to Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist and deputy director of operations at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Conceivably, wet winters in and of themselves, are not a problem for urban areas. The LA area has a sophisticated system of flood control. An example is the watershed management plan of my home watershed of La Ballona Creek. The urban area is already managed for whiplash, so it seems to me that increased whiplashiness would mostly affect the dry wildland veg getting drier. But how much drier can they get? It seems like too much of this climate discussion gets stuck at the “it’s bad and the reason sounds vaguely plausible” rather than going deeper, into the vegetation or fuels characteristics, and how they are managed today and how that might be expected to change. Because atmospheric scientists aren’t experts on those topics. So when folks say “Koonin isn’t a climate scientist”, I’d say “impacts of climate change are mediated through vegetation, hydrology, suppression and other areas of scientific expertise. It’s the scientific equivalent of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
(4) Then there’s the political view.. articulated by Sammy Roth, who has changed from being a reporter to a columnist.
For many Angelenos, this is our most jarring confrontation yet with global warming. But hundreds of millions of Americans have faced fossil-fueled disasters, and the politics of climate obstruction have hardly budged……………
None of those climate disasters changed the fact that the Republican Party is almost totally beholden to the fossil fuel industry. None of them changed the fact that the Democratic Party, although largely committed to climate action — see President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — still hasn’t done nearly enough to phase out fossil fuels.
But what was running the cars that folks evacuated in? Water pumps? Fire trucks? Aviation resources? Could it be that our current physical reality needs to be dealt with alongside climate aspirations? It makes me wonder a bit about whether there is an element in the climate change advocacy movement that was never really about rational approaches to decarbonization, but about sticking it to the the industries- who have traditionally donated and voted for the wrong people in the eyes of some. Will we see big “thank you” banners hanging out for the people who supplied the energy to fight the fires?
And just like the Marshall Fire, we seldom hear “maybe houses shouldn’t be so close together”; “without cars, could people have evacuated safely?” “does it make sense to electrify everything if you have to turn electricity off in high winds?” “could intentional densification have downsides with regard to wildfire resilience?” or other questions that question currently dominant planning paradigms.
On the other side, it’s the “poor management by D Administrations” political view. The political view, in either direction, doesn’t help us at all. Like the framings above, it’s too far away from the real problems and the idea that “if you vote for us everything will be fine” doesn’t seem to be working for either party, and especially not for citizens in general.
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Maybe, just maybe, if we paid more attention to how to fix things, we would involve more people and scientists who understand the problems, practitioners and actually, mutually, improve. With less blame and more creativity; after all that’s the culture of wildfire. Learning organizations, after action reviews, and all that.
As for me, it’s the next layer down that’s interesting. What could communities, homeowners, fire suppression and allied folks, and planners do better? We’ll try to round up those news stories in the next installment.
If you have any other stories you’d like to draw attention to, of the generic persuasion, please post below and add the specific quotes, or describe what about it you think adds value or is off base.
Great summary and analysis. Loved this quote: “folks like to ride any disaster horse toward their preferred destination.”
Have you looked at the fire history maps for SoCal? Pretty much all of the undeveloped areas have burned in the recent past, and many times as many as 3-4 times over the past 70 years. Shoot, some of the repeated fires have been almost exactly the same shape as the ones that occurred 20 years prior, with some lots having had houses be built, burn, and rebuilt, more than once. To me, this means it cannot be all about wildland fuels or all about climate change in SoCal, and there is some decent evidence we keep doing the same dumb thing over and over. That all said, why did so much of the built environment burn this time?
Jon Keeley did hypothesize that there may be some relationship to the loss of agriculture buffering the built environment from the wildlands, which would make sense. However, pulling up the Google Earth time machine, which only goes back to the early 1980s, there doesn’t seem to have been agriculture buffering palisades or Altadena from the wildlands or the ignition source for as long as the images go back. I’d be interested in seeing an actual science-based look at this across SoCal, beyond my eyeballing old blurry aerial photos
The climate blamers do have data showing this year is on par with the driest on record and there is science support for climate change resulting in CA drought events occurring more frequently, as well as a lengthening the average fire season. Could this simply be a case that the odds of such a thing happening are a bit greater now and these recent fires happened to have ignitions in the worst place at the worst time? I think that is entirely possible, but that’s not a click-bait story that hits the angry algorithm.
Rather than blame poor shrub management or the delta smelt, I’d really like to hear thoughtful ways to rebuild smarter and ways to thoughtfully reduce the amount the public will be on the hook for to bail out the next event, without totally ruining the western housing market. Also, for anyone that rebuilds in these locations, the insurance premium needs to accurately reflect the risk. Fool me once, or in some of these cases, 3-4 times!
That’s tomorrow. Thoughtful ways to rebuild and other improvements.
Yes they are going to have to build smarter. The property owners are not going to just walk away from their properties. Unfortunately with the insurance situation and inflation, it’s going to be financially challenging for people to build smarter. Often, although not always, “smarter” is more expensive.
Maybe some residents will have to downsize at the same time, just to be able to afford the increased fire-proofing. One can also be smarter with how they utilize smaller spaces, or the interior finishes can be more economical and the focus be on exterior home hardening. The rest of the public really should not remain indefinitely on the hook for the local’s decisions to live in this area. Some help is good, but there should be a limit.
The value of the climate change discussion concerning the LA area fires is that it will hopefully provide more motivation to build back better in addition to more aggressive fuels mitigation (e.g., buffers between housing developments and chaparral). One the more challenging hurdles to overcome in order to accomplish this is the diversity of human behavior. Many people don’t like being told what to do, thus the perpetual push-pull of more and less regulation among politicians at all levels.
The knowledge, methods and materials are already there with how to significantly reduce the chance of uncontrollable urban wildfires, but can people actually come together to do it? In my experience in dealing with people in the rural WUI, so many have the attitude of “it won’t happen to me,” “it’s too more work or expense,” or they shrug their shoulders and say, “I will just rebuild” without really thinking about all that they lose when their home for 40 years burns down.
Ultimately, it is dealing with human inertia and attitudes that is the problem.
‘Many people don’t like being told what to do.” Yup. And they are not too concerned about how what they do affects anyone else (see covid 19). It seems like lately we’ve agreed (elected those politicians) that this is ok. One might hope that examples like this might change some thinking, but how realistic is that?