California Has Its Own Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

And one of them is FIRE. Updates and a guest post from Reason Foundation president and SoCal native David Nott

The winds did pick up last night but have not been as fierce as expected, making fire fighting easier and limiting the spread of new fires. Tonight and tomorrow will be the decisive days, both for us personally and for the region. As Steve says, if the fire jumps the 405 we will be part of a much larger story. The same is true of the 210 freeway, which cuts through Pasadena. I just got off the phone with a friend whose Pasadena condo is probably safe but who has her car packed in case she needs to evacuate suddenly. We’re all on tenterhooks—a good textile metaphor—as we wait to see what will transpire.

Oh, yes, and I turned 65 today. Jeez that sounds old! I even have a Medicare card.

This is a good LAT article on the air battle that started Friday and kept the Palisades fire from spreading to Brentwood and Mandeville Canyon.

The video above is one of many posted by Fabian Lewkowicz, a local photojournalist and videographer has been simply been driving around and recording what he sees. For more, see his YouTube channel, whose playlists include range from reports on homeless encampments to Santa Monica sunsets.

This morning David Nott, the president of Reason Foundation, sent out an email about the fires. It impressed me with the quality of the writing and the deep local knowledge, as well as the emotional punch. I’ve been to many events at Sean and Sasha’s house, and, early in our time in L.A., Sean was one of Steve’s MBA students. I asked David if I could share the email as a guest post and he agreed.

California Wildfires Hit Close To Home

Guest post by David Nott

My friend Jan grew up in and among the Santa Monica mountains in places like Topanga Canyon, Santa Monica, and Pacific Palisades. He said, “you grow up assuming any of 4 terrible things could happen and destroy your home.” California’s four horsemen of the apocalypse–earthquake, mudslide, flood, and of course, fire.

The Palisades fire went off like a bomb, resulting from the confluence of a significant accumulation of dry brush in Temescal Canyon, high winds blowing in exactly the wrong direction, and fire. Once the resulting fireball burst into the community of Pacific Palisades, there was no stopping it. The Palisades fire consumed two houses Jan lived in during childhood.

That’s a short version of the story. The longer version starts with the geography of Southern California. The Los Angeles basin is situated between the cold, wet Pacific Ocean to the West, the hot, dry Mojave Desert to the East, and the steep, earthquake-created mountains to the North. Into the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains are carved a parade of valleys that run mostly North to South–Malibu, Topanga, Temescal, Rustic, Mandeville, Runyon, etc.

For most of the year, the cool West wind from the Pacific blows steadily like a reliable air conditioner, giving Los Angeles its famous Mediterranean climate. For a few weeks each year, a high pressure system develops, and the winds turn around. At that point, dusty, arid winds come whipping off the desert to the East. They call these the Santa Ana winds. When they are at their worst, you can almost hear the chorus of crying babies and howling dogs across Southern California.

One of the unique things about this fire was that the reportedly hundred mile per hour winds came out of the North rather than the desert in the East. As a result, Temescal Canyon turned into a river of fire that emptied into the Palisades, right where water would normally dribble out and into the Pacific.

The same phenomenon played out in the Eaton Fire, where northerly winds created a fireball out of Eaton Canyon in the San Gabriel mountains. It wreaked devastation on Altadena and neighboring communities.

My friend John texted that his house in Malibu “burned to the ground.” A high school classmate lost her home in Altadena. Countless people have been evacuated, and many are still displaced.

Now that the smoke has cleared, the carnage on the Pacific Palisades plateau is visible to the naked eye from miles away. The entire neighborhood on that plateau at the mouth of Temescal Canyon was incinerated. That’s where our friends Sean and Sasha lived. Their home is gone. So is their entire neighborhood. Now they face the aftermath.

Sean and Sasha have been gracious hosts for Reason. Many journalists, intellectuals, and supporters attended events and made memories there. Kennedy from Fox News had everyone laughing uproariously at one of them (her Palisades home reportedly survived). Matt Welch interviewed Substack founder Hamish McKenzie about media models at another. And former Reasoner Kerry Howley read dramatically from her book Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughed: A Journey Through the Deep State. Kerry wrote a first person account of her experience with the fires for New York Magazine here.

Competing perspectives are now swirling in the ashes left behind by the fire. The day the fires started, Reason’s Liz Wolfe offered a round up about years-long delays in cleaning up brush that provides the fuel for the fires as well as the idiocy of insurance regulation in California. For wonks who want a deeper dive into insurance issues, you can read Dan Walters from CalMatters in December and Christian Britschgi at Reason on Monday.

Unfortunately, fires will always be a part of California. Matt Welch implores people to look forward and start work now to mitigate the next disaster. In his newsletter The Rattler, J.D. Tuccille parses red tape, forestry management, and possible reforms. The Los Angeles Times offers an important and somber look in "Inconvenient truths about the fires burning in Los Angeles from two fire experts."

Although this fire has resulted in tragic loss for people close to me, I am safe. In addition to feelings of loss, I have the luxury of being outraged at incompetent government—a fire department putting “equity” before its mission, empty hydrants courtesy of the Department of Water and Power, and a Mayor who swore off international trips but was on a plane to Ghana.

My friend Jan first introduced me to the joys of hiking the trails in the Santa Monica Mountains. He showed me the Will Rogers homestead that was sadly destroyed in the Palisades fire. He took me by the hundred million gallon water reservoir that sat empty the last 10 months awaiting repairs that would have cost only $130,000. And, of course, we saw the absolute absence of forest management in these canyons adjacent to some of the most expensive real estate in Southern California.

Then there is the story of the Getty Villa and its priceless collection of art. Management cleared the brush around the museum and created systems to protect the antiquities. When the fires broke out, a spokesman for the Getty Villa declared that the art would be going nowhere because nowhere else was safer. She was right. Hopefully, we can all learn from their foresight, while respecting the incomprehensible force of nature.

Note from Virginia: The Getty Villa is modeled on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, which was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius. When I wrote yesterday about why cities burn I forgot to mention volcanoes.

Top left: Living room inside Will Rogers’ ranch house. Top right: Living room after the fire. Left middle: Exterior of ranch home. Bottom row: Exterior of the stables before and after the fire. Photos from California State Parks.