Everyone knows California is disaster-prone, but there’s a familiar logic to the calamitous geography in this high-maintenance beauty of a state.
Wildfires are supposed to be in the hills — in the wild — not on the beach, and certainly not inside the borders of one of the biggest and best-prepared cities on the planet.
The devastation from the Palisades fire extends for miles along Pacific Coast Highway.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
But the fire that tore through coastal urban Pacific Palisades this week was driven by the kind of unholy wind speeds typically confined to high mountain passes or the crest of the Sierra Nevada. Astonishing gusts of 70 to 80 mph blew all of those preconceived notions away.
“I never thought we’d have to evacuate, because we’re so far away from the mountains,” said Denise Weaver, who lives on a bluff overlooking dozens of burned houses on the Pacific Coast Highway. She struggled to find words to describe the tragedy, and the irony, of friends losing everything to fire on the edge of the world’s largest water source.
“We’re, like, 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean,” Weaver said. “It’s just nuts.”
What amounted to a flaming hurricane erased all of the presumed safety advantages of fighting a fire in a well-equipped city.
The small air force of nearby tanker planes and helicopters was grounded. Powerful streams of water from a veritable traffic jam of firetrucks were snatched by the wind and carried away as mist. And with so much sudden demand on the city’s water system, hydrants quickly ran dry.
At that point, all of the affluence, urbanity and privilege in the world wasn’t much good. Desperate residents might as well have been alone on a remote, flaming mountainside.
“Fires under those conditions are essentially unfightable,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. “The best you can hope to do is get people out of the way.”
To understand what made Tuesday so shocking, so confidence-shattering, think of wind like flowing water. In the usual Santa Ana storms, most of that flow streams out of the desert, through mountain passes and into the valleys along predictable pathways, like water coursing down riverbeds.
To the north, the strongest winds flow through the Newhall Pass, in Santa Clarita, and into the San Fernando Valley.
In the center, they flow down along the Santa Ana River — for which these storms are named — past Riverside and Anaheim on the way to the coast.
To the south, the wind comes through the Cajon Pass, between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains.
But on Tuesday, there was so much wind high in the atmosphere that it all just flooded over the tops of the mountains and came crashing down into the valleys like a massive wave against the shore.
It was “geophysically chaotic”, Swain said. “You didn’t just need to be in those gaps between the mountains to get the strongest winds.”
Then, just like a tidal wave, it went everywhere. In this case, it literally bounced over the Santa Monica Mountains — Swain called it a “hydraulic jump” — and crashed down along the coast of western Los Angeles County, straight into Pacific Palisades.
There have been windstorms like this before, including one in 2011 that caused a lot of wind damage in the San Fernando Valley, Swain said. But, fortunately, they didn’t spark catastrophic fires.
On Tuesday, the city wasn’t so lucky.
By Thursday, neighborhoods still smoldered for miles up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, more than 5,000 homes and businesses scorched. Residents, desperate to see what had become of their homes, argued with cops who had been ordered to keep people out of the evacuation zone.
It was a scene reminiscent of the aftermaths of so many other tragic fires — the Camp fire in Butte County in 2018, the Lahaina fire on Maui in 2023 — but this time the landscape seems oddly familiar, even for people who have never actually been to the Palisades.
That’s because, for anyone who grew up in the Midwest or on the East Coast absorbing images of California served up by shows such as “Baywatch” and films such as “Point Break,” this was the Los Angeles of their dreams.
A slow, sad drive up the coast on Thursday revealed so much of that familiar territory reduced to ashen ruins.
The ruins of beachfront homes smolder along the Pacific Ocean.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Remember Moonshadows, the restaurant perched over the Pacific where Mel Gibson got drunk in 2006 and launched into a nearly career-ending anti-Jewish tirade when police pulled him over just down the road?
Gone.
So is Gibson’s $14-million house in Malibu, burned while he was in Austin, Texas, doing Joe Rogan’s podcast. “Well, at least I haven’t got any of those pesky plumbing problems anymore,” he quipped to the Hollywood Reporter.
Paris Hilton, Billy Crystal and Jeff Bridges — who played the title role in “The Big Lebowski,” a classic film in which Los Angeles’ Westside is arguably the real star — all lost their homes, too.
And that chubby-cheeked guy all over social media, bathed in an apocalyptic orange haze and pleading with people to leave their keys in their cars when they abandon them so he could move them to let firetrucks through, that was actor Steve Guttenberg from all those “Police Academy” movies in the 1980s.
How L.A. is that?
That “is this real, or a movie” sensation persists, even while you’re sucking in the acrid air and rubbing the ash out of your reddened eyes, as aerial tankers skim water off the ocean and lumber into the sky overhead. It feels like the set of a disaster film.
It gets real again, quickly, when a regular guy comes shuffling down Temescal Canyon Road in a Dodgers hat, N95 mask and dusty surgical scrubs.
Paul Austin, 61, is an orthodontist. He’d left at 6 a.m. Tuesday to go to his office in Simi Valley and straighten a few teeth. While he was gone, his home of 20 years and almost everything in it was “totally, totally destroyed,” he said. He hadn’t changed clothes in three days.
He started the interview joking that the only thing left on his property is a giant Santa in his frontyard, a holdover Christmas decoration that he thought for sure would have blown away.
“I don’t think for any of us, really, it’s even hit home what we’ve lost,” he said, and then he paused, overcome by sudden sobs behind his mask and his goggles.
“Everything.”
