47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight

I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades.

It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I don’t remember everybody doing this, but my Dad is a Meteorologist, and back then he worked at the SCAQMD, the regional agency charged with studying, regulating, and improving air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Because of his specific remit and where we lived, he had a deep understanding of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on the Palisades.

When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.

We ended up living in the Palisades until I was 15, when we moved up to Seattle, but in that time, these sorts of fires happened almost every year to some degree. The 1978 one was a big one though, and my dad had a flight scheduled to New York the following morning. He woke up every hour during the night to check the wind readings, and loaded up our Impala wagon for a prompt evacuation. That is how precarious things were, even 47 years ago. By sheer luck that night, the winds subsided, and the Palisades were spared. A few more hours of wind and 1978 would have been 2025. Same damage. Completely flattened.

I guess Pacific Palisades has always been a wealthy area, but wealth back then seemed less of a step-function than it is now. The “alphabet streets” where we lived seemed like the most modest of the neighborhoods; the place where teachers, government workers, and clerks lived. My parents bought our 1200 square-foot rambler for $38,000, and pretty much no one in the neighborhood had views of anything. The neighborhood was so named because the streets went from Albright, to Bashford, to Carey, to Drummond, to Embury, to Fiske, to Galloway, to Hartzell, to Iliff, to Kagawa. Felt really great not having to even look that up just now, but I will admit that I was Today Years Old before realizing there is no J. I wonder why. Each street was basically the same, although I distinctly remember Galloway having more tree trunks pushing the sidewalks up, making it a better route for jumping your Mongoose bike or Powell-Peralta board.

As a kid growing up in the ’80s, the Palisades had everything you could possibly want. It was a “free-range” neighborhood, where we could ride our bikes as far away as the Santa Monica pier without worry. Palisades Park was home to AYSO soccer, tennis, basketball, “Par Course” stations, and most importantly to me, little league baseball. I was part of the “orange” franchise which started you off as a Ranger, then a Twin, and finally an Oriole. Our patron saint was Mel Haggai, who up until now, I didn’t know had been a WWII fighter pilot (!!!). Mel got me to switch from first base to catcher, where I could have more impact on games. We didn’t have a single left-handed catcher’s mitt in the entire league, so he bought me one with his own money. I also remember perennial umpire John Meyers, who took me, my friend Adam Segel, and a few others to Disneyland, only to have to deal with us getting thrown out of the park for jumping off of a few of the rides and causing havoc.

I remember several restaurants like Jacopos, Barerras, and Gladstones, but the center of the food universe in the Palisades from 1972 to 2007 was Mort’s Deli. I have never seen more of an institution in any town than Mort’s was to Pacific Palisades. What I wouldn’t give right now for a plate of latkes and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s.

Just a few more quick memories before moving back to the fires:

• Our immediate neighbors on Iliff: Rick & Chickee Jensen, Sue & Gene Stratton, Norman & Mimi Rainwater, Cathy Crantz and her family, John & Robin Tripp and their family.
• Classmates who would go on to become very well known: Leonardo DiCaprio, Oliver Hudson, Redfoo, Jason Segel, and Will.I.Am, amongst others.
• The shocking murder of Teak Dyer.
• My shortlist of favorite teachers: Mrs. Wong, Mrs. Petrick, Mr. Freedman from Pali Elementary and Mr. Baker from Paul Revere.
• The Malibu Feed Bin, where a giant ostrich chased me when I was 4 years old and scared the living shit out of me.

I imagine there are people around the world picturing everyone caught up in this recent disaster as multi-millionaires with 5 homes who will Pay Any Amount to Not Pay Their Taxes. The Palisades, however, also contained everything from people who moved there when it was more modest, to food service workers in mobile homes, which have now also burned down.

The displaced residents of the Palisades (and other burning areas of LA like Altadena) perhaps don’t look like what you think of when you hear the term “climate refugee” but that is what they now are. That is also what many more of us are likely to become as weather events get more extreme. We can pat ourselves on the back for not living in a fire zone or in other precarious places like Florida, but quite literally at any moment, we could experience a 9.0 earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone that will be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. If something like this hits Seattle in the next few decades, count me as completely unsurprised, and hopefully not dead. Some areas may be a bit safer than others, but we are all increasingly susceptible to something unexpected hitting. Even if you’ve convinced yourself the weather can’t hurt you, there are always meteors.

Predictably, thousands of people on social networks have suddenly become experts in large-scale fire prevention. Some people are convinced the Palisades was lost because of too little water pressure, too few firefighters, an offline reservoir, insufficient controlled burns, a mayor who happened to be on a trip, a losing mayoral candidate who allegedly would have prevented the whole thing, a firefighting budget that was supposedly cut but really was not, and yes, even DEI programs.

My meteorologist dad is now 90 years old, and still in perfect intellectual health. I went to visit him and my mom this weekend, and we talked a little bit about the fires and this formative piece of our lives that had been completely destroyed a few days earlier.

The thing I wanted to know most was the same thing everyone else probably does: could anything have prevented this, and if so, what? After all, we’ve known about this precise danger for at least 47 years and probably a lot longer. And when I say “precise danger”, I mean the entirety of Pacific Palisades getting burnt to the ground by a Santa Ana fueled fire.

I asked a lot of questions.

The first was whether that 1978 fire would have done essentially the same damage as this one if we didn’t get lucky with the winds dying down. He said it probably would have. This is important because it shows that no one thing that we did in the last 50 years caused this. Or more precisely, I should say “caused this possibility”. Perhaps it will come out later that a certain power line caused some sort of initial spark, but the important bit is that the likelihood of a catastrophic fire like this has been around for a very long time, and the possibility was only getting stronger. It was when, not if. Sparks happen.

The second thing I asked was about all of the ways fires like these can start. It turns out there are sources you probably already know about, like arson or lightning, but even a piece of glass lying in the dry brush can act as a catalyst. If you remember burning things with a magnifying glass and the power of the sun as a kid, you can picture what that might look like. Another potential source is sparks from power lines, and it’s particularly concerning to read that power lines near the flashpoints of the biggest fires don’t seem to have been de-energized during the peak winds. My dad explained that this is usually a last resort as people will not tolerate outages for days at a time for a risk they feel is so remote (more on this later), but certainly during the several hours when the winds were forecast to be hurricane strength, it seems plausible to have done something there. Like many aspects of this disaster though, it’s best we get the facts before passing final judgement. One thing my dad was particularly impressed by is that Ariel Cohen and the weather bureau got the prediction of wind conditions exactly right, to a level of accuracy you almost never see. We indeed knew everything was lining up for a catastrophically dangerous couple of days, and if you believe the governor of California (which I do in this case), we began a proactive response before the fires even started. Did energized power lines play a role, however? We’ll have to wait and see.

The next thing I asked is if he thought any of the things I mentioned above (i.e. controlled burns, more pressure in the hydrants) would have stopped this. He said probably not. We were not “50% more water or firefighters” away from preventing this. It was simply too big and spread too fast. This is the key bit: even though a lot of these fires start in the hills, far away from houses, the hurricane force winds carry the embers at hurricane speeds for miles. So even if the main fire is only advancing at a few miles per hour, the embers are spreading out like thousands of Molotov cocktails. This is why you can’t just do a controlled burn between the hills and the houses as a buffer. The Santa Anas launch the embers right across whatever your best laid plans might be.

So finally, we get to the most important part then. If we couldn’t have stopped the fire this week, was there anything we could have done to prevent this in the 47 years since the last time the Palisades almost burnt down?

The answer? Yes.

The first and most important thing that hasn’t happened in the decades since the last near-miss is establishing fire as an ever-present, existential threat in the community’s mind. You can tell this is the case by the sheer influx of money and people into the area lately. As a small example, I have some friends who moved there (on Iliff Street, in a rare twist of coincidence!) recently and probably spent a lot of money for the privilege. If you told them there was a pretty good risk the entire town would burn down in their lifetime, I’m pretty sure they would have looked at other areas. Ditto for all of the real estate and business development that has transformed the formerly quaint village area over the last few years.

I am absolutely not implying that anyone already in the Palisades should have moved away. I don’t think I would have. You don’t just leave wonderful places you’ve put so much love into for a threat that may never affect you.

But the fact that this seemed like such a safe haven for newcomers shows the information gap that existed before last week. The insurance industry seemed to catch on recently, but to the average person in the Palisades, the risk of fire seemed more like perhaps an unlucky block getting destroyed, rather than the entire town.

To help explain the importance of threats remaining top-of-mind, my dad reminded me of his journey at the SCAQMD from the 1960s through the 1980s. He was part of a team in charge of improving the air quality of the South Coast Air Basin. This was mostly an exercise in reducing smog, and it was a long, successful journey that carries lessons for our emerging climate and fire crisis.

Growing up as a kid in the 1980s, I remember vividly the smog alerts every summer. One moment you are running around for hours, and then within a few minutes you can no longer inhale normally. You take quick baby breaths, walk inside, and cease physical exertion for the rest of the day. And when I say “can no longer inhale”, I don’t mean that it smells dirty. I mean your lungs reject the air coming in and seize up.

When you fly into LA today and see what you think is smog, rest assured it is nothing compared to what we had in the ’80s. The one advantage this public health problem had though is that it was in your face every day. Everyone in LA felt it daily and supported their government’s efforts to solve the problem. With the community behind it, the SCAQMD, California Air Resources Board, and the EPA introduced legislation that prohibited leaded gasoline, required catalytic converters, and moved forward with a variety of other actions that eventually reduced “very unhealthy” smog days from 160 (!!!) in 1981 to only 1 in 2021 and 2022 (!!!!!).

Think about that. If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, just being alive was hazardous to your health for half the year. Now, it’s a single day where you might want to stay inside.

This achievement was due to the work of Federal, State, and Regional air pollution control agencies, along with the combined research efforts carried out by scientists at Caltech, the University of California, and other academic institutions, but it would have never been possible if the community of Los Angeles didn’t lock arms with their government and perform the collective action necessary to solve the problem.

Getting people to take fire seriously would have clearly been more difficult than it was for smog, but it’s the only way to have created the collective action necessary to change the conditions of the Palisades over the last 47 years to prevent the extent of damage that occurred. What sorts of things would have reduced the damage? Something like the following:

• The replacement of highly flammable large vegetation like eucalyptus trees with other alternatives.
• The xeriscaping of yards with less flammable materials than grass.
• The prohibition of wooden roofs, or at least a big insurance discount for replacing them.
• Improved building materials and methods designed defensively against fire risk.

Although the Palisades is almost completely destroyed, there are some buildings that escaped damage, and to my eyes, they look like modern projects that used more stucco, steel, and concrete than wood. More expensive? Yes. But this is probably the way we need to think about building now, especially in areas even remotely at risk of this sort of thing. Pacific Palisades is one of the nicest locations on earth, and I’m sure plans are already being drawn to rebuild it, but there is no doubt in my mind that those plans will require these methods and safeguards. There is no longer a choice to do otherwise.

If you live anywhere near the reach of the Santa Anas, there may still be time to take action before this happens again. There is a 100% chance it will happen again at some point, perhaps even within the next few days or at this time next year. Los Angeles only has a couple more months to get any rainfall at all this season, and if the Santa Anas revisit in the autumn to an even drier backdrop, who knows what further catastrophes await.

I’m not going to say anymore more about these particular fires because after awhile, it’s just more speculation. Even my dad would tell you this is just his opinion, albeit one rooted in a long career of climate science in and around the Palisades. What I will say though is that if we want to avoid more catastrophes like this, collective action is the only solution.

I haven’t even mentioned the idea of human-induced climate change at all in this post, because it frankly doesn’t even matter at this point. Extreme weather is here, whether we caused it or not. Even if you believe, as some people do, that the earth just does this stuff on its own, it’s beginning to kill us at an accelerating clip, and that should be something we can all band together against. Right?

Often times, it is the artists in society who provide the parables to light the path forward.

If you’re familiar with the graphic novel and HBO Series “Watchmen“, you may remember that one of the plotlines revolves around an ex-superhero named Ozymandias conjuring up a plot to save billions of people from nuclear war by uniting the world’s superpowers against a common enemy. He engineers a giant squid and launches it from space into the center of Manhattan, where it explodes, killing many. The strategy works as intended, and the world bands together upon realizing the threat is ostensibly coming for everyone.

That is exactly where we are right now.

Earth is raining calamities down upon us that should unite us as a species. Will we do what we did during the pandemic and turn against each other again? Or can we use this even bigger, spiraling threat to put our disagreements aside and perform the collective action necessary to maintain human life on earth?

The planet will be just fine without us. It is we who are endangered.