Disaster by Design

HISTORY REPEATS -

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” From The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, by George Santayana

Two months after landing in Los Angeles as a nineteen-year-old naif from the rural Midwest, I found myself staring transfixed by an enormous billow of smoke above the mountain range at the edge of the suburban valley where I was temporarily living with my aunt. She had been born and raised in the city, and her house wasn’t in harm’s way, so an outbreak of fire in those mountains didn’t concern her. But I was fascinated. Where I grew up, natural disasters came packaged as floods and tornadoes, not wildfires. When I wasn’t at my menial job in a dry-cleaning plant, I would get in my car and drive toward the cumulonimbus cloud on the horizon to get a closer look, stopping only when I encountered roadblocks. At night I watched apocalyptic scenes on my aunt’s black and white TV. Fire clawing up canyons, erupting from ridges, and most ominously, devouring houses as if they were flimsy constructions of cardboard or straw.

It was the Bel Air fire, named for the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood that was home to luminaries in the worlds of business, government, and entertainment, including Richard Nixon, who appears in a news photograph on the roof of his rented house with a garden hose in his hand. When the tongues of flame were silent and torrents of smoke had shriveled to feathery wisps, 484 houses had been turned into mounds of ash and rubble. Six thousand acres were stripped of vegetation, both natural and otherwise. And the atmosphere was tainted not only with the remnants of smoke but with recrimination and efforts to assign blame for the catastrophe. Just as it is now, when the even more destructive fires that erupted two weeks ago are not yet contained.

Why did some fire hydrants run dry? Why didn’t the fire department respond more quickly, with more personnel? Was the mayor at fault? (then the nominally Democratic but reactionary Sam Yorty, now the liberal Democrat, Karen Bass) Surely, someone was to blame and should be held to account for the massive loss of such valuable properties. Or was it just an act of God, the onset of Santa Ana winds that treat the chaparral as ready tinder? The only thing that didn’t come under scrutiny was DEI hiring policies, ostensibly because such initiatives didn’t exist at the time.

The fire department duly commissioned an investigation, and produced a 26-minute film titled “Design for Disaster.” Narrated by actor William Conrad, best known for his role as a TV detective in the 1970s series “Cannon,” most of the film consists of narration and dramatic fire footage, but the last six minutes explain how such wildfires start and spread and why those driven by high winds are nearly impossible to stop. Flaming brands and embers could land more than a mile from the central inferno, and even the most modern city water system couldn’t replenish storage tanks fast enough to keep up with the demand from firefighters and homeowners using garden hoses to try to save their properties. A person identified only as “one of the nation’s foremost conflagration experts” says in a voiceover that “no definite line of defense could be found, and when a chain reaction of this kind occurs, a fire department can do nothing more than pick out individual houses and try to save them.”

The final minutes of the film are devoted to the subjects of building construction and location. Two years earlier, experts from the National Fire Protection Association had surveyed parts of Los Angeles, pointing out specific elements that make houses in high-risk areas more vulnerable to fire, such as wood roofs, wide eaves that trap burning embers, and picture windows that blow out and allow easy entry to fire. They also questioned the wisdom of allowing dense construction on narrow, winding streets in mountain areas with highly flammable ground cover, where fire trucks and emergency vehicles could encounter congestion and delay. They predicted future conflagrations like the Bel Air fire and others, ignited by lightning, downed power lines, fireworks, and arson, among any number of causes, fanned into infernos by the malign breath of Santa Ana winds. They called the city’s approach to development in these areas “a design for disaster.”

The city did take a few steps to help mitigate future fires before memories of the Bel Air disaster faded. The most important was probably banning wood shakes and shingles. Homeowners were also required to clear brush around their properties. But many residents opposed the building of new fire and pumping stations that would mar the natural beauty that is such an attraction to living in the mountains, and taxpayers resisted new levies to expand the fire department’s capabilities. And because real estate and development interests have long held outsized influence in city politics, the question of whether dense residential development should be allowed in fire-prone areas was never really debated.

I don’t know if any serious person thought the Bel Air fire was a one-time phenomenon, since there was evidence that fire had periodically burned in those mountains for thousands of years. But the natives didn’t bulldoze roads through the chaparral and build houses, and in the latter half of the 20thcentury, clear entire swaths for suburban-style developments. It’s likely that few people other than professionals with the perilous job of battling those fires gave it a thought until they looked up at the mountains on the horizon and saw what people saw less than two weeks ago, telltale plumes of smoke being pushed toward the ocean by hot, Santa Ana winds.

When I started hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains forty-five years ago, I saw the evidence firsthand, houses that could only be inferred from the concrete of foundations and brick of chimneys, some so overgrown with vegetation they could be easily missed, others fresh enough to make me think about what I’d do if mounted a ridge and saw smoke and flames heading toward me. There were roads nearly buried by residue from the erosion of the sandstone and shale that is a major geological feature of this juvenile mountain range. There were trees, scorched around the bases of trunks or consisting of nothing more than large blackened splinters poking into the sky. Still, from the ridges I could see recently-built houses, some mansion-sized, on lots carved out of the side of slopes or created by lopping off the entire top of a peak. The grandest were at the highest elevations, where their occupants would have the luxury of 360-degree views.

The most jarring sights were the housing developments spread over slopes once dense with chaparral, live oaks and the occasional sycamores, rows of houses and condominiums set on green lawns with palm trees and other species of non-native vegetation, indistinguishable but for their settings from the newer suburbs that replicate themselves around the Los Angeles metropolitan area like microscopic organisms. The only reason you don’t see them everywhere you turn is that some visionaries worked heroically to raise money and badger politicians and did the other dirty work needed to get large sections preserved as state parks and a national recreation area. Development interests howled that these mountains that rise to just over 3,000 feet at their highest points but surprise some newcomers with the ruggedness of their deep canyons and rocky slopes were needed for housing the city’s rapidly growing population. But to the everlasting gratitude of people like myself, who have spent many hours on trails in those canyons and slopes, they didn’t prevail.

As firefighters bring the current, disastrous fires under control, the subject of rebuilding will inevitably become the topic du jour. Examples of houses that were “hardened” and thus survived while their neighbors vanished in flames will appear in various local publications. I will predict that calls for NOT rebuilding in areas susceptible to fire will be quickly dismissed as infringements on property rights, or the fantasies of radical environmentalists, or examples of social engineering, or simply as impractical—what government entity is going to shell out billions of dollars to reimburse property owners for their losses?

I don’t have an answer. I’d just point to a popular Santa Monica Mountains hiking trail in a place called Solstice Canyon. The area a few miles up the coast from Malibu is now publicly owned, but it was once private property and the site of a home designed in the early 1950s by Paul R. Williams, one of the country’s foremost Black architects. The house, built for grocery chain owner Fred Roberts and his wife Florence and called “Tropical Terrace” after its Polynesian motif, was gracefully sited along a stream that tumbled down the canyon. Unlike newer houses and suburban-style developments on bulldozed mountain slopes, photographs show how skillfully the architect blended it into its surroundings. The house’s design and construction also took into account its location in a fire-prone area. Besides a non-flammable roof and other materials, there was a fire protection system with water collection pools and pumps to supply sprinklers and hoses to douse any flames.

But the only evidence of the house’s existence, other than the photographs, is concrete foundations and floors, some stone walls, and ironically, several large fireplaces. Despite the “hardening” against fire, it was destroyed in 1982 by the Dayton Canyon fire, a blaze that started twenty miles inland but was driven by fierce Santa Ana winds all the way to the ocean. Neither Williams nor Fred Roberts was alive then, and in one sense it was fortunate that they didn’t live to see the destruction. In another, it’s unfortunate that instead of visionary architects like Williams and property owners like Roberts, we have people who want to plop huge, incongruent mansions in the middle of the chaparral and developers who want to create new suburbs of densely packed houses right in the path of the wildfire that will inevitably come raging out of the canyons and down the slopes in front of hot, dry winds.