Nine months ago, I moved my family from Venice to the Pacific Palisades—a “managed retreat,” I joked, to higher ground. In low-lying Venice, even an inch of rain would turn our narrow street into a soupy, gray canal, just like its namesake city, without the gondolas. Rising sea levels, tsunamis—they might inundate Venice, but they would never in our lifetimes overtop the hundred-foot bluffs that form a medieval barrier between the Palisades and the ocean below.
On Monday morning, I woke up in the dark, with wind-flung trees hurling themselves against the windowpanes, as if they were trying to get in. A quick look at my phone—“Are you guys evacuating?” a friend texted, offering her parents’ apartment as a place we could regroup—told me we had to get out. Whatever alerts had buzzed in during the night, I’d been too out of it to read.
Around 1:30 A.M., a fire had broken out near the Getty, on the west side of the 405—across the freeway from the area where the Skirball Fire had torn through Bel Air, in 2017—and the wind was blowing west. A large swath of western Los Angeles—from the 405 to Temescal Canyon, Mulholland Drive to Sunset Boulevard—was potentially in its path. All ten thousand structures in “the box”—a term that officials started using for the red patch on the map, and one that has come to define the limits of our hopes and fears—was under mandatory evacuation. Our new house was in the red. The wind was predicted to return, with unprecedented intensity. The Woolsey Fire, which consumed Malibu last year and was responsible for three deaths, was for several hours the fastest-moving fire in the state’s history, driven by gusts up to seventy miles an hour. (Imagine being in Superstorm Sandy, but instead of rain, it’s fire that is swirling around you.) The coming Santa Anas were expected to blow at fifty to seventy miles an hour, with eighty-mile-an-hour gusts. It would be one for the record books.
I’ve been living in California, and writing about fires, for fifteen years. There is something repetitive and defeating about the narrative, though the force, frequency, destruction, and death tolls grow more horrific every year. This fall, I ordered a set of brush gear from Amazon at the beginning of October, along with the Halloween costumes. But waking my children up to tell them to evacuate was not a mothering moment I prepared for. Forgetting lines, I improvised with urgent, italicized ones and had to stop for tears and reassurances instead of packing toothbrushes. When we finally got out the door, just before sunrise, the streets were quiet. A few families were packing up their trunks, engines humming and lights on. An older woman, wearing a bathrobe, walked toward me, confused. She was on the phone with her son. “I’m losing you,” she kept saying to him. I told her the area was being evacuated. She hadn’t heard.
We drove south, to Venice, ironically, to find breakfast. Forced out of my house for the first time, I caught a glimmer of what the fire refugees I’ve interviewed over the years knew fully—that eerie slip from normalcy. Just a couple of miles away, it was life as usual, but I couldn’t access it. It reminded me of grieving on a crowded subway. It is how I imagine time travel might be. I bought a couple of chocolate bars and gassed up the car.
When my kids were settled, with friends who offered to take us in for the night—a generosity we’ve now stretched to two nights—I set out to see how preparations were going in other parts of the city. I headed to Topanga Canyon, which was under voluntary evacuation: yellow on the map. Topanga, a densely wooded mountain community, is known for crystal shops, neo-hippies wearing buckskin suits, and lawyers who moved from Santa Monica in search of a bigger back yard. Reporting on the Woolsey Fire last year, I often heard about the threat to Topanga, which lies between Pacific Coast Highway and the 101. Of the four passes through the Santa Monica Mountains, it was the only one that the Woolsey didn’t touch. Eighty-five per cent of the Santa Monicas burned; some fifteen per cent of the remaining fuel is in Topanga.
“Everybody calls it the Perilous Paradise,” James Grasso, the director and agency liaison of the Topanga Emergency Operations Center, an all-volunteer communications unit that residents established after a catastrophic fire in the canyon in 1993, told me. The E.O.C. occupies a couple of trailers across the street from the Inn at the Seventh Ray, a restaurant where, well into the two-thousands, the menu was organized by vibrational frequency. Describing the local ethos, Grasso told me that last year, on Halloween, at the site of a bar where Neil Young used to play, a woman named Moonshine accidentally burned down her sweat lodge, though the fire was contained before it spread—a near-miss. Grasso is in his fifties, with neatly brushed white hair and blue eyes. He moved into the canyon in 1994, an ex-New Yorker who works as the first assistant director on commercials and music videos and likes the outdoor life: off-roading and camping and seeing mountain lions in his front yard. He lives at the dead end of a narrow, oak allée—the house that was there before his burned to the ground, and the fire department has warned him it will not go to his property. He compensates by keeping two sets of brush gear and a fire-shelter tent in his car, and he built a concrete bunker on his land, where he can hide out during a burnover if his property is engulfed.
The problem with Topanga is that it has just one way out. “We’re eleven thousand people in a tight area with only one main thoroughfare,” Grasso said. “We are in what they call the WUI”—he pronounced it “wooy,” like a lost Star Wars character—“The wildland-urban interface. The fuel and the homes are almost one and the same.” The table before him bristled with walkie-talkie antennas—the city and county fire departments, the sheriff, and the team’s own communication. The center is a hub connected to a ham-radio network, a whole homemade chain of radio repeaters that don’t rely on the grid. When the power goes out, the network takes over. Cell service, the presumed backup, barely works in Topanga.
For the past few weeks, in acknowledgment of the role that faulty equipment has played in many of the state’s worst fires, power companies have been cutting service in California as a precaution when the fire threat is high. (The shutdown is known as P.S.P.S., or public safety power shut-off.) On Tuesday afternoon, the fire department tweeted that the likely cause of the Getty Fire was not arson, or an illegal cooking fire (i.e., a homeless camp), but a dried eucalyptus branch that sparked when it hit a Department of Water and Power electrical line. Mayor Eric Garcetti called it “an act of God.” Southern California Edison’s electrical equipment caused the Woolsey Fire; Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest power company, now in bankruptcy proceedings, caused the Camp Fire, in which a town was vaporized and eighty-six people died. Twitter users didn’t see the Getty Fire as inevitable, natural, or even supernatural: bury the power lines! they wrote, a sentiment that I have heard repeatedly over the past few days, sometimes from my own mouth. The obstacles to this are many—conversion would cost three million dollars a mile, for starters—but a future of mass blackouts throughout a fire season, which is now year-round, is hard to fathom.
“We don’t worry on a big massive fire if there’s no wind,” Grasso told me. “L.A. County has the capability, experience, and resources to knock down almost any fire if there’s no wind. When the wind kicks in, no one can do it! Just like Woolsey, they tucked in behind it and chased it and tried to save lives.” Another volunteer, who said she’d moved to Topanga when she was a “young thing,” said she was going to go home for the night and hope to get some sleep. “Tonight and tomorrow is going to be it,” Grasso replied. “ ’Cause Wednesday it’s going to get crazy.”
Grasso agreed to take me up to 69 Bravo, a thirty-four-acre ridgetop fire base—with two helipads, a stocked command post, and a series of “pumpkins,” big orange rubber tubs filled with thousands of gallons of water that helicopters use to resupply—which a private citizen who goes by Simon T. developed and recently sold to the county. At the base, a windsock hung limp. Behind us, the ocean shimmered blue. Grasso pointed east, to the mountain ridge on the other side of which the Getty Fire was burning. A thick band of purplish-brown smoke was painted horizontally across the sky, and tufts of white smoke were visible from just behind the ridge. Grasso pointed out my neighborhood; from this perspective, and with wind, close enough for embers to ignite. We heard a helicopter thrum, and the ominous whine of a wood chipper in the deceptively green neighborhood below. Grasso thought he knew the source. “Edison has been doing brush clearing,” he said. It seemed like exquisitely bad timing.
By Wednesday morning, the Getty Fire had grown slightly, to seven hundred and forty-six acres, and it was twenty-seven-per-cent contained. Twelve houses had been lost, and five damaged. A cold wind was picking up, and humidity was negligible. My neighborhood was safe, but not safe enough to return to yet. We found out that insurance would cover a hotel, and got ready to move on. Planning for a Halloween certainly without jack-o’-lanterns, and possibly without costumes, which I’d left behind, seemed like a good idea. I couldn’t forget what Grasso had told me. “Even if all the embers are gone, that’s still a time not to be comfortable,” he said. “In this weather, one match can create the Woolsey.”
