Column: The L.A. fires will eventually be extinguished. The terrible loss will remain
- Share via
My niece and I walked to the end of the Venice Pier on Tuesday to watch brilliant, orange flames creeping up the Santa Monica Mountains in Pacific Palisades. Thunderclouds of smoke loomed over the ocean as ferocious winds drove them offshore and whipped sand at our faces.
On Thursday, I drove into the Palisades with my friend Chris Coté, who owns a modest home near the bluffs overlooking the ocean. His children grew up there; now he rents it to a couple with three little girls.
At checkpoints along Sunset Boulevard, police blocked access to the now-ravaged community. Only credentialed media, emergency vehicles and work trucks were allowed to pass. Chris and I made it through two police lines before a stern officer at Allenford Avenue refused to let Chris pass.
I dropped him off next to Paul Revere Charter Middle School and continued along the curves of Sunset into the Village, the commercial heart of Pacific Palisades. Stretches of the iconic boulevard, as you’ve undoubtedly seen on the news, looked like the aftermath of a firebombing.
A request from the fire department was misconstrued online, illustrating the untapped resource of civic-minded neighbors eager to pitch in.
Except for various official vehicles, the streets were mostly empty. Downed utility wires and trees were scattered across roadways. A few residents surveyed the damage here and there. Teenage boys roamed the streets on mini-bikes.
What a stark contrast between the fire that ravaged the town two days earlier and the quiet left in its wake. A fire is all dancing orange flames, flying embers, heat, smoke and terror. But the aftermath is calm and bleak. Adrenaline gives way to overwhelming grief, loss and gloom.
The fire, driven by winds that reached 100 mph, was irrational, making nonsensical choices about what to destroy and what to spare. Some buildings and homes appeared untouched, as if shielded by an invisible, benevolent cloak. Others had simply evaporated into the inferno.
Much of the Palisades, once vibrant and green, is now monochromatic, like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse. Brick chimneys rise from the debris, one of the few signs that houses once lined the streets of this suburban paradise — now hell.
Industries such as agriculture and construction rely on unauthorized immigration. But the people who hire undocumented workers rarely face repercussions.
From Sunset, I turned left onto Via De La Paz and drove past businesses, some leveled and some — such as a veterinary clinic built of impervious brick — still intact. I parked on North Beirut Avenue, a three-block street that ends at Via De Las Olas, the winding road that runs along the bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway. Normally, from that perch, the view of Santa Monica Bay is postcard-perfect. On this day, though, with fires still ringing the city, a haze hung over the vista, graying everything out.
When I stepped out of my car, the sharp, acrid smell hit me like a campfire blowing in my face. Ashes swirled through the air like poisonous snowflakes. Wisps of smoke rose from smoldering piles of blackened rubble. Utter devastation.
As I write on Friday morning, the four major fires that ring Los Angeles are still burning. At least 10 people have died, an estimated 10,000 structures have been destroyed and the damage is in the billions. The National Guard has been deployed to protect evacuated neighborhoods from looters.
Thousands of people — each with their own heartbreaking story — have been displaced. Schools are closed. My friend Jean De Longe, who teaches first graders at a Palisades school that burned down, told me one of her students, whose family lost their house, was especially upset about losing his stuffies.
The trauma will be with us for a long, long time.
This catastrophe will force a civic reckoning that has already begun. We no longer have a fire season; we have fires all year. You can call it climate change or you can pretend it’s something else. Doesn’t matter: Our world is hotter, weather patterns are more extreme, and none of that is good news for California, which swings between wet and dry years.
Extreme drought conditions coupled with some of the fiercest Santa Ana winds we have ever seen produced this devastation. Fire hydrants ran dry; firefighters were overwhelmed.
Right on cue, the political finger-pointing commenced. Does it really matter that Mayor Karen Bass was not in Los Angeles the day the fire broke out? She was in constant communication with staff and fire officials, a thing that is, you know, entirely common in our hyperconnected era. And will it ever sink in that Bass did not strip money from the Fire Department and that its budget actually grew last year?
President-elect Donald Trump, who never misses the chance to blast his Democratic antagonist Gavin Newsom, has blamed the governor for failing to divert enough water from Northern California to the south, a laughable misunderstanding of the state’s water system.
Conservative cable news pundits have naturally blamed the fire on city diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, measures. But the Fire Department, with its high-paying jobs and exceedingly generous retirement benefits, has been under pressure to diversify its overwhelmingly white, male ranks for decades. And rightly so.
For the first time in our history, the city’s fire chief is a woman — and a gay woman at that — which has provoked the MAGA hordes into mouth-frothing inanity. At this point, I have run out of adjectives for Elon Musk, who wrote on his X platform Wednesday that “DEI means people DIE.”
Meanwhile, in Pacific Palisades, I finally figured out which house belonged to my friend Chris. All that was left standing was the chimney and an iron porch railing.
As I drove back to Venice along Chautauqua Boulevard, I saw a young man walking toward the beach, cradling a deflated football that he had pulled from the ashes. I could only imagine what he had lost.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
A cure for the common opinion
Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
