When our city went up in flames last week, everyone I know in Los Angeles was in emergency mode. As a new week begins, it's hard to know how to feel.
For those of us who live in neighborhoods that have not been decimated by fire, the serious threat appears to have passed, at least for the moment. The sky is blue and a light breeze is blowing as I write this. There is ash on the ground, but less in the air. Fortunately, most LAUSD schools have reopened. Friends and neighbors who left town are returning home.
And yet, the National Weather Service warned of a “particularly dangerous situation” with wind gusts of up to 45 to 70 mph from 4 a.m. Tuesday to 12 p.m. Wednesday in swaths of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Additional strong winds are also expected throughout the week.
“We are not out of the woods yet and we must not let our guard down,” Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at a news conference. press conference on monday.
And so, at least in my house, the evacuation bags are still packed and waiting at the door and my phone remains within arm's reach at all times. But how much longer will we have to live like this, allowing Watch Duty alerts to interrupt our sleep, ready to fly? When will we stop feeling the threat of fire above our heads? Or has the threat always been there and we are only now seeing it?
“The reality is that there will always be events that nature throws at us that, no matter how good our technology is, we will not be able to combat,” said Costas Synolakis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC. “We don't have to live in fear, but this should make us reflect on how vulnerable we are.”
A high risk season
Fire experts say it was the deadly combination of extremely strong winds in Santa Ana of up to 99 mph and a city that had not seen significant rain in eight months that set the stage for the two most destructive fires in Los Angeles history. : The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire. Together they have burned more than 37,000 acres and killed at least 25 people.
“How a fire starts, grows and spreads has a lot to do with wind and precipitation,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, assistant professor of fire policy and management at the University of Oregon. “We had this duality of high drought risk that makes things very favorable for fire growth and proliferation, plus fast winds that will blow them away quickly, make it more difficult to suppress and challenge the safety of firefighters.” .
The winds may have died down for now, but dry conditions remain unchanged, making it easier for new fires to break out from a long list of sources. If the underside of an overheated car comes into contact with completely dry vegetation, it can cause a fire. If someone accidentally drags a chain behind their truck, unknowingly sending sparks into the air, that can set our hills on fire, too.
“As long as these drought conditions last, having that packed is not a bad idea,” Stasiewicz said. “If there is a wind event, there is the opportunity for a fire to grow larger and faster, and larger fires are more difficult to contain.”
Your advice? Keep an eye on the weather forecast, paying special attention to wind advisories. “It's a bit of staying on your toes,” he said.
this ends with rain
Despite the frightening images and intense warnings, keep in mind that the strong wind gusts predicted for next week are still significantly lower than the howling “Wizard of Oz”-like winds that blew through the city last night. when our two deadly fires started.
“To be clear, it seems very unlikely that we will see strong northerly winds of any magnitude close to what we saw earlier in [last] week,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a YouTube livestream on Friday.
However, he doesn't think Los Angeles is out of the woods yet when it comes to fire risk.
“The relatively strong Santa Ana winds have a cumulative effect on the intense drought,” he said. “I call them hair dryer-like atmospheric winds. The more they blow, the drier and more flammable the vegetation becomes.”
According to Swain, the city of Los Angeles won't really be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief until we see rain.
“What we really need is an inch or two of rain to really and definitively put an end to the fire season in Los Angeles,” he said. “Until then, any time there are dry wind conditions, we will see an additional risk.”
Unfortunately, scattered rain is forecast for the next two weeks.
“There's a chance we could continue to see fire risk into February or even March,” Swain said.
Facing a new reality
Even with no rain in the forecast, Synolakis, who has studied people's response to natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes and fires around the world, thinks most of us are likely to relax our state of hypervigilance fairly soon.
“Last week, the feeling in my community in Venice was eerily similar to the first days after 9/11, when people didn't know if there would be more attacks in other parts of the United States,” he told me. “Hearing helicopters and seeing these gigantic columns of fire increased our uncertainty. “People didn’t know if the fire was going to spread here.”
But as the plumes of fire continue to dissipate and evacuation orders continue to be reduced to warnings or less, he hopes that people who have not been directly affected by the fires will return to a semblance of normality.
“If there is no new outbreak, I think by the end of the week people in the surrounding communities will breathe a deep sigh of relief,” he said.
However, it is worth considering whether that relief is justified. The sense of dire threat may have passed, but climate scientists have been warning us for decades that a warming world will be accompanied by more intense weather and more intense fires.
“These fires are completely unexpected, but this is what I keep telling people about climate change,” Synolakis said. “You're going to have more unexpected events and you won't be able to deal with them.”
