Hollywood Hills fire threatens the Sunset Strip. Four friends have fled LA. Two went south to Ensenada, two to Palm Springs where I have arrived for the week. The friends here both grew up in LA, they know every inch of the place, every mood, every era, every nook and cranny.
Robbie said he has never experienced as powerful a windstorm. Before ordered to evacuate he had been awake with the power out listening to limbs falling in his yard. He was unaware in the town over, in Altadena a fire had broken out and a friend was losing his home to wildfire, everything was gone.
Alerts sounded on his cell phone, authorities directed them to flee now, that for their safety they needed to get out.
There have been many high wind events in Southern California, powerful storms exceptionally powerful, unleashing a much more devastating set of consequences. This is the most significant wind event of its kind in the last three decades to strike at the heart of this city.
Fires on the coast in the Palisades are burning while 30 miles inland, still by boundary part of LA County, more fire has engulfed the region near Pasadena.
Winds are not as strong as last night. In the Hollywood Hills as of tonight on January 8th the fire is being windblown south into the heart of West Hollywood. This is a densely packed urban area and is as complex and layered a place as any in the country.
These firestorms are some of the first ever to threaten the most urban parts of LA. You wipe Santa Monica off the map, erase half of West Hollywood and you have all but cut out the beating heart of the west coast’s biggest city.
Having lived in West Hollywood briefly for a few years back in 2016 I know how this chunk of the urban core plugs into the culture we all somehow super identify as quintessential California.
Everywhere are landmarks. Where there is nothing to name there is parked a Roll’s. Down one street the backdoor into a production studio, another door to a Jewish Deli. Record shops, funky head shops and the most exclusive clothiers in the world are here. Walking Melrose from Brea to Fairfax is always fun. It is an improbably packed space filled with fabulous alive souls clad in tight jeans and festooned in tattoos and ornamented piercings.
Grab an outdoor table at Ivy’s near Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. Check out all the beautiful people, all the planners, plotters and fabulously stealthy monied schemers.
Here it turns out you may live and you may die for your car. All of us are in this same struggle, nobody is exempt from this fire, you run for your life rich or poor, famous or wanted, the fire if it catches you cares nothing about your social circumstance.
What we now know is that Mother Nature has put us on notice. As the climate has shifted so has our environment. We still can’t quite wrap our head around the reality that some of the most prized most urban most exquisitely complicated pieces of our inner-city world’s face a new and more formidable foe. That it isn’t just a nameless piece of coastline, some forlorn hillside off some seldom seen corner of nowhere, no it is not that.
Everything points to the future in LA facing more of these kinds of conflagrations. Just as Big Sur will suffer landslides, just as Redding will face a series of relentlessly hot triple digit summers.
California once famous for earthquakes is now gaining fame for all its other unique forms of natural disaster.
Adaptation will be key. Fireproofing LA has now been switched to full-on, there is no other choice. We are still another day away from having a good damage assessment. Crews will soon move in to take measure of the fires toll.
From reports so far I have tallied thousands of buildings lost, how many thousands I don’t have a feel for as yet. Anyone living here knows someone displaced by this event. The magnitude of the tragedy cannot quite yet be scaled to imagination, events are simply too far flung— too complex— too so sudden— out of the blue… California is not the same dream tonight. We have come of age, we are grown up now, we know there is much to do in the time ahead.
Just received this message— It’s a fucking nightmare. A friend has baby twins and lost their house this morning in Altadena—
