The sky is filled with smoke from multiple wildfires around the city skyline Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)Etienne Laurent/The Associated Press
Marc Weingarten is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is the author of Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water and The Real Chinatown.
Natural disasters are woven into the narrative of Los Angeles. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote nearly 60 years ago. Perhaps more than any major West Coast city, Los Angeles is defined by what goes wrong here. Wildfires, mostly. We’ve had 15 major fire events over the past 15 years. Now more than ever, to be an Angeleno, as I have been for over 30 years, is to live with terrible knowledge of the city’s contingency, the nagging uncertainty as to whether we are ever living on terra firma.
But it’s also true that, if you have no direct experience with fire, you create a hierarchy of tragedy, so that a deadly inferno miles from your house is a small story, and a fire in a familiar region will hit harder. We gauge disaster according to our needs, and given the city’s sprawl, collective grief is elusive.
I lived in Malibu for 13 years, and fire was a way of life. More than once, I looked out the bedroom window at some orange corona or other, just over the ridge. Still, I would forget about it and the usual stressors would return like old friends. Even the most harrowing firestorms never came close enough to our house for my family to worry about loss. It was only in 2018, weeks after we moved away, that the Woolsey fire swept through the old neighbourhood and claimed every house except ours. I felt more lucky than sad. I had slipped the noose.
This feels different. As it was in Malibu, I count myself among those fortunate enough to not have lost their home in any of the multiple firestorms that continue to rake through the county. In many parts of the city, the air is choked with smoke from the fires, but the winds in my neighbourhood in the San Fernando Valley have quelled, so I think it’s safe to say the danger in my small piece of this vast metropolis has passed.
But this moment feels different, because it is different. On our phones and televisions, we are now seeing clear images from what has become the most destructive fire event in the city’s history – shocking, grotesque ash-and-timber moonscapes that stretch on for miles. It is London after the Blitz, it is San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, it is beyond imagining. What we’re witnessing isn’t just extensive fire damage. It is the unmaking of a great city. The Golden State has had the colour drained out of it.
This is mega loss, and the feeling of loss is pervasive. If we didn’t lose our home, we all know someone who has. On night two of the fires, my parents had to evacuate their home, as did my sister and best friend. Other close friends evacuated and lost their homes, fire refugees with nowhere to go. There are thousands of stories like this, from Altadena to the Pacific Ocean. Overnight, Los Angeles has become a city of physical and psychic displacement, of sitting with loss and not knowing what’s next. When entire communities have been effaced, the imagination is stunted. We are hard pressed to make that leap to the next act, the Hollywood ending.
This has not been the case in the past. If Los Angeles has become synonymous with fire, it’s also an unusually resilient city, and invariably what has been destroyed will be rebuilt. This is the missing piece of the prevailing narrative, the renewal after the storm. My old neighbourhood in Malibu was reconstructed over time, the rhythms of daily life restored, as it has been in other affluent neighbourhoods. (Working-class regions do not bounce back so quickly.)
There are too many what-ifs now, too many imponderables to contemplate. In a city that was already straining from limited resources, primarily its inability to provide shelter to its homeless population, the mind reels at what we will encounter in the next weeks and months, when so much of the built environment has been razed. It is not easily remedied by insurance; many major underwriters have quite correctly deemed Los Angeles a regulatory nightmare and have abandoned it, leaving many – who knows how many – homeowners without the financial means to start again. Where will these folks go? And what will our economy look like? What will be the fate of health care, education and public worship in the communities that have been lost? We have never before been confronted with primal questions about the nature of Los Angeles itself. What I’m feeling, and I’m not alone in this, is futility and impotence in the face of such a cataclysm, the strong sense of a before and after.
I have never bought into the cliché that cities are bound together during natural disasters, that we are united in our mourning. In Los Angeles, which is really a cluster of disparate cities knitted together by a county charter, with a population larger than all but 10 states, it’s hard to find common ground even when things take a dark turn. We extend our prayers to the afflicted community, but what’s absent is a collective feeling, the notion that we are all neighbours. These fires have torn through those boundaries. We know that it will take an indomitable effort of collective will to bounce back from this, because no one has been untouched.
Some are blaming the ineptitude of our political leaders. Others think of it as the wages of sin brought on by climate change. To some extent, it’s human nature to affix tragedy to human demons. That’s the problem with natural disasters; in our finger-pointing world, we need someone to blame. But it is the wind. It is always the wind. We are wearing masks in public again. We can’t stop looking at the helicopter footage, the endless vista of lifelessness. We will soldier on in the fullness of time. It will just be another city. We just don’t know what that city will be.