The fires in the west are tragic. Anyone been impacted by them?
Craig Hullinger
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Taffy Cannon responded from Carlsbad, California, in San Diego County:
I am not aware of anyone from Empehi who has been directly affected by the multiple wildfires raging through the Los Angeles area, but that doesn't mean that classmates have not been burned out or evacuated. This is a huge event, unlike anything I've ever seen or experienced, and communication is sketchy.
The short answer, however, is that everyone in Southern California has been impacted.
I have friends and colleagues who've been evacuated or directly hit, and my local friends and relatives in the Southland almost all have extended relationship groups all over the place. I've spent nights in houses that are now rubble. We always loved the quiet, rather midwestern charm of Pacific Palisades, near where we lived in Venice for 12 years.
[A quick geography note for those unfamiliar with the area: Working from the south, California's coast begins at the Mexican border with San Diego County where we live, then moves north through Camp Pendleton and into Orange County, home of Disneyland. North of there comes Los Angeles, which is HUGE. LA County is bigger than Rhode Island. Continuing northwest up the coast come Ventura County and Santa Barbara.]
I just saw a post from a TV writer I've known since he wrote some mysteries in the 90s, confirming that his house was gone. We're hearing a lot about celebrities and why we should or shouldn't care about their losses. It's the regular people who are truly being destroyed here. Like my writer friend, for instance, a hard worker who was able to get into Pacific Palisades when real estate prices weren't so cockamamie. He raised his kids there. He's caring for a nonagenarian father back East. He specifically mentioned losing his ball cap collection. Just a regular guy that most of you would like.
Altadena, on the other hand, is what we used to call a working class community, full of retirees and recent immigrants and descendants of the tough Midwesterners who originally walked here across the Southwestern deserts. A lot of Altadenans traditionally worked for the wealthy residents of wealthy next-door Pasadena.
There have also been a bunch of other fires all around the place, mostly in rural-ish areas. Most of them have been knocked down or at least contained fairly quickly. Some of those are probably arson. Bad fires around here (and, I suspect, everywhere) almost always spawn some copycats.
There are firefighters here from all around the state and the country, as well as from Mexico and Canada. Wildfire fighting is very different from knocking down a single residence blaze near a fire hydrant. Wildfires are mostly managed by cutting firebreaks, and by dropping fire retardant and water from aircraft of all sizes, designed for just this purpose. We are right by a very large water source, the Pacific Ocean, so that system works particularly well here.
We always talk about The Big One in reference to earthquakes. It is starting to feel as if these fires, still mostly out of control and growing, are actually The Big One. Never saw that one coming.
I never knew about California wildfires until my first visit, when ash rained down gently on my VW Beetle parked in West Hollywood. Since then they have been horrible but infrequent. I remember standing at my kitchen window in Venice watching the first plume of white smoke float across a clear blue morning sky. That was a Malibu fire, with endless young volunteers eager to help by sandbagging Linda Ronstadt's house.
About ten years ago, right here in Carlsbad, I got caught in the busy end of town during a wildfire that started at the La Costa Resort and took out chunks of the community. The customary roads toward home were blocked as I drove toward the ocean on a four-lane road. On one side of the street, small firefighting planes were scooping water from a nearby lagoon. Flames were burning on the other side, up to the curbs. Just another day in Paradise.
I have always kept an earthquake kit, which I update every five years or so, freshening the meds, changing out the food, etc. When my daughter was growing up, we had to switch out her clothes every couple of years. In Venice, I never once thought about being burned out by wildfire.
A couple of years after we moved to Carlsbad, we experienced the first fire that could have taken out our house. I stood in the backyard and watched a line of flames flicker along the southeastern horizon. It wasn't close, but there was nothing between us and the flames but a few miles of chaparral. An errant wind could have reached our house in forty five minutes. (A lot of overdevelopment since then has created a big stucco world in that space, which would build in more time for us to evacuate.)
That was the first time I packed to evacuate.
I've packed to evacuate four or five times, now, and there are boxes by the front door ready to go as I write this. After that first time it's been relatively easy. Bare essentials, meds, change of clothes, old family photographs, my grandmother's magnificent hand-painted Dunes china, the greenware Nativity scene my mother painted in the fifties, current computers, chargers, important papers, and the cats. That's often the trickiest, because they hate going into carriers and it isn't as easy as it once was to get down and remove them from under the bed.
And it ain't over, even down here which hasn't been directly targeted -- yet -- by any of this fire cycle. Winds are expected to kick up again here on Tuesday.
We are now starting to hear a lot of pontificating about who's responsible, and politicians to blame, and a whole lot of other nonsense that misses the main point. Southern California is a desert, which in normal years has no rainfall for at least six months. Capricious hot winds blow in from the desert, on their own schedule. The area has been filled with houses and people for well over a hundred years.
We no longer have much of a wet season. It hasn't rained for eight months. Winds were coming off the desert at a hundred miles an hour. It wouldn't have mattered, for instance, if there were a dozen full reservoirs above the Palisades. There was no power to refill them because electricity was out. And it happened really FAST. Remember how people were ordered to abandon their cars to get out faster, and then the cars had to be bulldozed out of the way? People left on their bikes and had to abandon pets.
This is the same kind of oversized weather we are now seeing in the elongated hurricane seasons that our Floridians know far better than they'd like. The fantastically wide tornadoes which no longer confine themselves to Tornado Alley but show up where nobody expects them, like Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest. Flooding in the Carolina mountains. And blizzards -- well, actually I'm not sure that's changed much. I have never regretted leaving Midwestern winters.
I'll link to a couple of relevant articles:
Joan Didion wrote this piece about the Santa Anas in 1965, when we were still in high school:
https://www.nationofchange.org/2025/01/08/the-santa-ana-by-joan-didion/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1fvp89aj_dQU6THuTuqLsu5bvFq7E-7Ho3ZHgjzsJFfs0tgTeTNS0fm9Y_aem_sAamgl7frySIiJgo416MVg
This FB post addresses a lot of the current blame-hurling. I do not know the writer personally, but I mostly agree with her. I'm cutting and pasting it for those not on FB.
CALIFORNIA FIRE FACT CHECK
Having lived in both northern California for the Camp Fire in Paradise and southern California for these L.A. fires, I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions and inaccuracies about my state.
1) Blaming Governor Newsom for anything related to firefighting techniques is ridiculous. Politicians rely on experts to determine how to best fight a fire. The Governor is also not responsible for infrastructure built over the last 100 years.
2) Firefighters are the most qualified when it comes to the use of equipment, when to evacuate, and how best to protect lives and structures. Ordinary citizens' opinions, especially those from outsiders unfamiliar with the area and the terrain, are not useful.
3) Often outsiders try to blame the fires on Californians having too many trees or not enough water or bad planning or horrible politicians. None of this is true. Changes in weather patterns have made conditions conducive to fire. California has been surprisingly responsive to these dramatic changes, both in planning and recovery.
4) Those who are cheering for the loss of "rich people's" homes are not only cruel, they're mistaken. Hollywood is filled with struggling actors, film crew people, and everyday restaurant and retail workers. Pasadena has many elderly residents whose homes were bought decades ago. The foothills are home to ordinary folks in the service industry and family businesses.
5) The myth circulating that the Governor wouldn't let northern California send water to southern California to help fight the fire is ludicrous. First of all, ill-informed northern Californians are always claiming southern California is stealing their water for their swimming pools. The outside water southern California gets is mostly from Colorado, and we pay for it. Colorado is probably delighted to have the extra revenue. Secondly, L.A. has enough of its own water in reservoirs to fight the fires. In a pinch, the ocean is RIGHT THERE, and water can be scooped and dumped by aircraft. Only in Pacific Palisades, which is a very small neighborhood, did the fire hydrants lose pressure. All other areas had adequate water pressure.
6) The trouble in Paradise was due to a) the high winds, b) the dryness of the brush and trees caused by drought, and c) the lack of roads to evacuate (firefighters had to give priority to getting people out rather than trying to go in to fight the flames). The trouble in L.A. is mostly due to the high winds and dry conditions. There are plenty of evacuation routes, so the relative casualty rate is going to be much lower than Paradise.
7) The stories about California insurance companies eliminating fire coverage just 10 days ago should have us all up in arms. Just like health care, perhaps we're waking up to the fact that insurance companies are profit-motivated. Their bottom line is to take in as much of your money as possible and pay out as little as they can get away with.
I remember how my little town of Paradise pulled together to help each other out. It's no different in L.A. People are people. Neighbors help neighbors. In fact, L.A.'s sense of cooperation is even more impressive, considering the diversity of people we have here.
If you're an outsider, please don't believe the blame-throwers. There are a lot of inspiring stories happening here of hotels and restaurants offering relief for those left homeless, of people rescuing animals, of international first responders working to save people and homes. Don't let myths and malcontents divide us!
Taffy Cannon___________
Thank you for such an informative background and inside perspective. This is better than any media reporting I've heard or read.
Marie Buti
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Thank you, Taffy, for painting such a clear picture of life in Southern California during the fires. Be safe.
Sue Mulcahy
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Yes, Taffy. Very informative. Thank you.
Carl
