Los Angeles is burning

THE SCENESLA kept getting worse. People abandoned their cars and fled on foot as the flames approached. Firefighters then bulldozed their vehicles to reach the blaze. Workers evacuated patients in wheelchairs from a nursing home. The sky above the Pacific Coast Highway turned orange and thickened with smoke. Palm fronds smouldered. A man walked his horses down the street as embers flew around them. Flames licked up the grounds of the Getty Villa, an art museum. Extreme winds sparked across Los Angeles on January 7th. Nine months without measurable rainfall had primed the city to burn.By January 8th, two large fires, each covering roughly 11,000 acres, were burning at opposite ends of Los Angeles County. One was scorching the hillsides north of Pasadena. Another was burning in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighbourhood on the coast, causing at least 30,000 people to flee their homes. Local officials ordered parts of Santa Monica, home to about 90,000 people, to evacuate too. Other fires erupted across the foothills and valleys of greater Los Angeles. The destruction is so fresh, the winds so fierce and the fires so unrelenting that it is hard to count the damage and loss of life, but so far officials have confirmed at least two people have died and over 1,000 buildings have been destroyed.Los Angeles is particularly vulnerable to fire. Its wealthy neighbourhoods and the county’s exurbs are where cities meet nature, stretching into the region’s rambling mountain ranges: the Santa Monicas, the Verdugos, the San Gabriels. Even though climate change is causing more extreme and more frequent fires, ever more people are moving into these areas to find cheaper housing or, for ’s celebrities and well-heeled, that perfect mountain view. Until recently, January wouldn’t have been considered part of fire season, even in fire-prone California. But planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions have also increased the number of days each year with fire-starter weather conditions.On this occasion, north-east winds with gusts reaching almost 100mph (160kph) in some places swept over the mountains that cradle the city. These are the Santa Anas, also known as the “devil winds”. Common in cooler months, they blow warm, dry air from the vast desert of the Great Basin towards the coast. The winds can dry out vegetation already parched by the drought that has set in after two unusually wet years. But they can also carry embers great distances, breeding new fires as they blow.At a press conference officials cautioned that the worst may be yet to come. A huge swath of southern California, from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, remains under a severe fire warning. The winds have not relented: they howl through the canyons and streets of the city, felling trees and power lines. Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, declared a state of emergency and requested federal disaster funds.The ordeal reminds Angelenos of their vulnerability. At any given time Los Angeles is at risk of fire, flood, extreme heat, mudslides and earthquakes. A county of nearly 10m people persists in precarity. “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse” wrote Joan Didion in 1969, in an essay about the Santa Anas. The violent winds “affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are”.