The fire that became known as the Bel Air Fire broke out on the morning of November 6, 1961, in a patch of trees north of Mulholland Drive. The flames, fanned by Santa Ana winds, jumped and spread toward the homes of the rich and famous. By the time the Los Angeles Fire Department successfully extinguished the fire, more than six thousand acres had burned and nearly five hundred homes had been destroyed, including those belonging to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Huxley.
Faulty in the disaster, the LAFD turned to Hollywood. In 1962, she released a film narrated by actor William Conrad, with the aim of responding to her critics. Part educational video, part film noir, the film opens with the sound of wind whistling and a shot of rustling plants. When the Santa Ana winds blow, Conrad intones, channeling Raymond Chandler, “The atmosphere becomes tense and oppressive. People tire easily, they argue more. Even the suicide rate goes up.” According to the film, the LAPD knew danger was coming and deployed crews throughout the city As the flames raced through the jungle, the chief engineer ordered “everything available to be put on fire” but “everything was not enough and the streets became clogged with people trying to escape by car or on foot.” Feet then ran out of water.
The film wondered how the situation got out of control to this extent. The answer lies precisely in those qualities that made Los Angeles such an attractive place to live: its climate, its valley-side homes, and its wild hills accessible only by narrow roads. The entire arrangement was a “design for disaster,” which was also the name the LAFD gave the film. “These are the possibilities,” Conrad said in conclusion. “If you win, you keep what you already have. If you lose, Fire, the winner, takes it all.”
the Fires that swept through Los Angeles During the last two weeks – the Palisades Fire, Eaton fireAnd the Hearst Fire, the Lydia Fire, the Sunset Fire—they broke any number of records: for acres burned, buildings destroyed, and value of property burned. (The Griffith Park Fire, in 1933, remains the deadliest fire in the city’s history, killing twenty-nine people, but that record, too, may fall, as many more victims of recent fires are likely to remain unaccounted for.)
The fires appear to set a new standard for finger-pointing. Some blamed the disaster on the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, who was in Ghana when the fire broke out. Other – most notable Donald Trump– California Governor Gavin Newsom lit up. (Trump claimed that Newsom withheld water from Southern California for the benefit of an endangered fish, the delta fish, which is native to the mouth of the San Francisco River — a claim that, as many commentators have pointed out, has no basis in fact.) For his part, he ordered an investigation into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which left a tank in Pacific Palisades empty while it made repairs. Los Angeles times He said the LAFD delayed calling in additional firefighters until the Palisades fire became unmanageable. LAFD President Christine Crowley criticized Bass and the City Council for cutting the department’s budget. “The fire department needs to be properly funded,” Crowley said. “it’s not.”
With the exception of the innocents, it is likely that all parties attacked could have been better prepared, and that could have made a difference. But only on the margin. On January 10, while the fires were still raging out of control, several of the world’s leading scientific organizations announced that global temperatures in 2024 had reached a new high. NASA It calculated that the average for the year was 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.65 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. NASAIts European counterpart, Copernicus, put the increase at 1.60 degrees Celsius (2.88 degrees Fahrenheit). “Frankly, I no longer have metaphors to explain the rising temperatures we are seeing,” the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service told reporters.
As the air temperature rises, its ability to retain moisture increases, and the increase is not linear but dramatic. Higher temperatures thus lead to increased evaporation, leading to two seemingly opposing outcomes: heavier rainfall and deeper droughts. Southern California has seen both extremes in recent years: the past two winters have been exceptionally wet; The summer and fall of 2024 were exceptionally dry. During rainy periods, the grasses and shrubs on the hills and canyons of Los Angeles flourished. In dry seasons, the brush withers and smolders, waiting to ignite. In a paper published earlier this month, a group of researchers led by… Daniel SwainA climate scientist at the California Institute of Water Resources has called such swings from wet to dry a “hydroclimate strike.” The study showed that this phenomenon is on the rise around the world. “I don’t see this as a failure in firefighting, but rather as a tragic lesson in the limits of what firefighting can accomplish under extremely extreme conditions,” Swain said of the devastation in Los Angeles.
Indeed, at the time of the Bel Air fire, the suburban sprawl in the hills was a firefighters’ nightmare. Thanks to Los Angeles’ rapid growth, the situation today is much more dire. Since 1961, the population of Los Angeles County has increased by about sixty percent. More and more people live at the foot of mountains or along tree-covered canyons, in areas designated by the province as “high-risk fire danger zones.” California has strict building codes for building in high-risk areas, but most of the rules don’t cover older homes, anyway, as Patrick Bayliss, an environmental economist at the University of British Columbia, recently told The Washington Post. mailAnd with weather conditions like those experienced in Los Angeles over the past few weeks, “even the best-built homes can get sick.”
On the other hand, it seems likely that whatever progress the United States has made in limiting climate change will either stall or reverse under Trump. Last week, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, who heads a fossil fuel company, told senators at his confirmation hearing that he stood by a 2023 LinkedIn post in which he described the connection between climate change and more dangerous wildfires. Just noise.”
Addressing fire risk in Los Angeles – “designing the city for disaster” – will require the kind of foresight and determination that we know we lack in 2025 America. In order to speed up the rebuilding process, Governor Newsom has already suspended the county’s environmental review requirements. The allure of Los Angeles is irresistible, and the dangers that will continue to grow in a warming world are, as the screenplay suggests, inevitable. ♦
