Fires and Los Angeles

Terry H. Schwadron

As I consider how to write about the devastation in Los Angeles stirring so memories about our home for 20 years, the winds have changed direction again. The sprawling, out-of-control flames are now headed for the neighborhood abutting my parents' former home.

One giant whoosh downhill, one more arroyo, and the Palisades fire will jump the last of the natural obstacles to their house -- much more modest than those we have seen destroyed in the multiple simultaneous blazes. Their brick-fronted stucco house had the Meyer lemon bush that my dad, who taught music at nearby UCLA, tended assiduously, and the overhanging avocados from the neighbors that mom. who helped patients with pain, would bag up for us because they didn't eat avocados. From their house, the terrain south and east flattens, and the unpredictable, desert-dry Santa Ana winds could be on our own home for 20 years within minutes and continue straight on through the L.A. basin.

It's a reminder that once in the grip of these blowtorch horrors, there is no control, other than getting out with whatever you can grab. Anyone who lives in California is aware that wildfires with their five-story-high flames take on a noisy, dangerous life of their own. They move furtively, like some kind of creature hungrily seeking out fresh sustenance in the dry brush that litters drought-ridden California. In a moment, hurricane-force winds can send the fire temporarily over there suddenly is bearing down, like the stories you hear about tornados across the Plains.

We're watching on television as the flames spread across urban areas where they have no place, along ridges and down hills to streets who we know. That shot is in Pacific Palisades where my mom took Hannah for piano lessons, that image of hillsides ablaze above Hollywood are just beyond streets where Julia and Louis were in a youth orchestra, that destroyed school in Sylmar is where we went for Julia's high-school volleyball competition. Those homes where someone is hosing down the roof in Pasadena are where friends still live, however worried. And everywhere, people are trying not to breathe in too much smoke. Most of West LA, where my wife Patch worked for a career counselor, so far has remained just outside the damage zone.

The images of destruction are so devastating, so widespread, that our prayers only can focus on getting through the immediate. Whatever is to follow will prompt ugly and enormously expensive headaches for individuals, families and the city itself. Even with non-stop cable television imagery, it seems impossible to explain that this is the equivalent of five or six whole cities elsewhere simply disappearing. There are block-after-block, tornado-proportions of emptiness hopscotching a giant population basis. The place is so big that you can have both devastation and survival of large neighborhoods with the populations of small cities.

We are accustomed to swallowing news about fires one at a time, building by building. A story this week about a Bronx fire leaving 100 people homeless is a tragedy. We lack sufficient words to encompass the impact of the loss of 10,000 homes and businesses at once.

Wildfires were a reality from the start of our time in Southern California in 1980, when ny Los Angeles Times mentor Noel Greenwood called and said the newspaper had created a job for me, and that we should move from The Providence Journal as soon as possible. I can remember the crazed feelings that came with driving home from downtown Los Angeles on the 10 Freeway, seeing the entire western ridge aflame, and recognizing that with uncontrollable change in wind direction, our part of the city could be in play. In The Los Angeles Times newsroom, where I was an editor, there were many times for heart-in-mouth about sending photographers and reporters into the middle of wildfires to document it all. In the last couple of years, we have watched from afar as mountainous wildfires bore down on the home of our children in South Lake Tahoe, only to turn aside at the last moment and save the town and their home. CalFire bulldozers had been clearing their backyard of brush, as they were forced to leave the unbreathable air.

Still, even the concept of multiple, huge wildfires in Los Angeles itself boosted by 100 mile-per-hour winds was beyond anyone's planning, as we're hearing in the various questions about why water pressure could not be sustained everywhere at once and hydrants were not working in some areas under duress. Whatever the specific issues, the simple truth is that these wildfire storms were overwhelming even for trained firefighters, for even the best preparations for fires of more expected proportion. Maybe this is the disaster that will force government to embrace the kind of policy commitments that will be needed to deal with climate change.

Even as fire seasons and Santa Ana winds returned every year, even as climate change has changed weather patterns and made fire season a year-long danger, we always thought the epochal event in Southern California would be the unpredicted earthquake that would trigger fissures all along the multiple faults that cut through the city.

Amid the shared shock, the assessment will go beyond damages to individual homes, businesses, schools, churches, synagogues libraries, stores. Rather, it will be about destroying whole communities. Much of the damage this time has been in wealthier, whiter areas of the city Still, it seems as if for once, fire has been a devilish unifier in a city always torn by race and class.

From its start, Los Angeles was an odd geography for a world-class city. It sits in a virtual bowl amid mountains that keep any bad air trapped above the city and built on crossed earthquake faults that make destruction an ever-present possibility. Even before we insisted on hubris to build10-lane freeways to crisscross the region, what we think of as seasons are replaced in LA by times of heat, morning fog, rain and mud. Still, when the sun shines, and that glorious Southern California light shimmers, Angelenos celebrate living much of their lives outside.

Los Angeles is a place of dreams, not just for moviemakers and would-be starlets, not just for the already forgotten achievements of aerospace engineers who got us into space, not just for those who recognized the doorway to Asia. Daily life often seemed about possibility, or that's what we all told ourselves as we moved from New York or Iowa or Mexico or Israel or all the other places that account for its vast majority of non-Californians. It feels to be a place of constant strife based on race and wealth, much more about lifestyle choices than along political lines, of the pull of beach, mountains and recreational good life to avoid spending time in the city center. At the LA Times, we always were conscious that there was no effective central authority -- political or other -- no dominant voice, and, for a time at the golden age of journalism, we imagined foolishly that it might as well be us.

Our California time came to an end in the least California way possible -- a corporate change that left the full team of leadership at The Times out on the street. Otherwise, we might well have stayed Angelenos. For me, it was a two-week hiatus to starting work at The New York Times, though it took some months until Hannah finished her school year and we could become apartment dwellers in our very different Manhattan culture.

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