“It’s fire season in Los Angeles.” Joan Didion once wrote:Every year, “the Santa Ana winds start blowing over the passes, the relative humidity drops to numbers like 7, 6, 3 percent, the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people watch for smoke on the horizon. Start.” And to look beyond local extremes to other possibilities, in this case the possibility of imminent destruction. “of new yorker published this article in 1989, when Los Angeles’ fire season was “particularly early and bad,” but it’s the same phenomenon that’s circulating again now that the highly destructive Palisades Fire is still burning. This is one of many works on the subject.
In 1989, longtime Angelenos would have said: 1961 Bel Air Fire This stands as a particularly vivid example of what kind of misfortune the Santa Ana winds can bring. Widely considered synonymous with affluence, Bel Air is home to the likes of Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Aldous Huxley, all of whom count 484 homes. It was destroyed in a huge fire (miraculously no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air fire and its aftermath. “Design for disasters” A short documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department and narrated by William Conrad (whose voice would still be instantly recognizable as that of Marshal Matt Dillon from Golden Age radio dramas). gunsmoke).
It’s probably too much that Los Angeles is repeatedly plagued by these fires. Factors include not only the terrifying Santa Anas, but also the topography of the canyon, the dryness of the plants in the chapel (not so). pace Didion, desert) ecosystems, and the inability of water supply systems to cope with such sudden and huge demands (this also proved fateful in the Palisades fire). It also didn’t help that the typical house of the time was built with a “combustible roof.” A wide, low eave to catch sparks and fire. And the fact that such dwellings were “closely arranged in bush-covered ravines and ridges with narrow roads” also had large windows for entering fires. The Bel Air fire led to a ban on wood shingle roofs and more intensive brush removal policies, but given the 60 years of fire seasons since, what, if any, measures have been taken to protect these unique natural habitats? Some may wonder if it is possible to quell the power of .
via Boing Boing
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. His projects include the Substack newsletter books about cities and a book Stateless City: A Stroll Through Los Angeles in the 21st Century. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
