Christopher Flavelle
Appearances
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Meanwhile, you know, on the other hand... Can you address the criticism now over the budget issue and the slashing, the $17 million slashing?
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days. And then there was a little bit...
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
The first thing that's really important to make clear is climate change makes this all harder. The combination of rising temperatures and longer droughts mean you've got more vegetation ready to burn. You've got hotter temperatures making it easier for that vegetation to burn. You've got even more of a challenge putting it out. This is fundamentally a climate story.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
But if any state is prepared for these things, it's California. They've done all the things that you'd want a state government to do to get ready for those climate risks. And still, it didn't really work.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Yeah, the first thing to know about California is they've had wildfires throughout their history, including some really devastating blazes, not least the disastrous fires in 2017 and 2018. So first of all, this is a state that knows fire is a part of the landscape, but also there's this question of vulnerability.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
California is painfully exposed to wildfires because of the physical nature of the state. The risk in Los Angeles is high for a bunch of reasons. One is you get very little rainfall, so you get dry terrain that can burn easily. But also the topography, right? The hills around Los Angeles are sort of a delight. You get to live somewhere with a view. You get a wonderful breeze, which is nice.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
But you also get really high fire risk. Fires can move quickly up hills. It's harder for firefighters to access those homes. As you saw, the fire hydrant's harder to move water up the hills. So we're sort of now realizing that these neighborhoods in Los Angeles that seemed like wonderful places to live, like Pacific Palisades, like the Hollywood Hills, have a really high risk rate.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
And also, you've got these Santa Ana winds. The Santa Ana winds, as we've all learned to devastating effect, can push hot, dry air at huge speeds, which is catnip for fires. Then the vegetation. This vegetation is meant to burn. If you get a long drought coupled with fires,
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
in our case, a huge burst vegetation after last year's rain and snow, you get sort of the ideal conditions for wildfires that grow quickly, spread fast, and are hard to put out.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
That's right. They're not just foreseeable. They're almost guaranteed to happen. And as a result, California has been pretty thorough at setting up a system of prevention and toughening that can make these fires, in theory, more manageable. start with their building code.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
California has one of the best building codes in the country for how to build homes in fire-prone areas so that they're less likely to burn. That means using materials that are less likely to catch fire, so stucco or concrete, steel roofs, not having wood exterior, not having openings that embers can fly through to ignite the interior of the home.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Those rules also include things like what you can plant and how close to your house. This idea of defensible space, those rules say that as far away as 100 feet from the edge of your structure, you've got to manage the vegetation to reduce the amount of shrubs and mulch and trees, they can catch fire. Very thorough.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
And then beyond that, California, pulling out to the macro level, does a lot of things other states I'm sure would love to do. They've got a really well-funded state agency called CAL FIRE that predicts fire activity, draws maps, but where the risk is the highest, has armies of really well-trained firefighters and resources to move in when they're needed. They've got a political culture
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
perhaps most importantly, that is open to this idea of rules that homeowners have to abide by to reduce their risk. And then they've got money. California, one of the largest economies in the world, and the result is they've got a tax base that can fund just a huge array of measures to harden and protect communities against fires.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
So it's exactly the right question. It creates kind of a puzzle. If California was, in general, pretty ready, what went wrong? But at a big level, California was pretty ready. So that raises the question, well, can you be ready enough? Is it even possible to do enough as a city or a county or a state or a country?
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
to prepare communities against these fires that are getting worse because of climate change. And it's a question that, for the moment, doesn't have a good answer.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
That's bang on. One question is how fast can you improve the protections for places like Los Angeles? But another question is how much can you improve it, right? All the things we talked about, the way home construction is regulated and the way people try to squeeze the flammable vegetation out of a landscape, you can always do more of that. You can build concrete buildings.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
boxes that are just surrounded by gravel and pavement and there isn't a shred of wood anywhere in sight or even a tree. I don't know if people want to live like that, but in theory you could. You could put more space between houses so that fires have a harder time jumping from house to house.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
You could build bigger buffer zones between the forest and communities so that embers would have to fly even further distance on the wind. All of those things would help and they're all possible, but they're all hard. And they would not eliminate the risk, which, as you noted, is getting worse just about every year.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Yeah, and we haven't even talked about cost. Even if people were willing to stomach the loss in beauty that these kinds of changes would entail, they're not cheap, right? If you want to replace your roof with something that is flame-proof or more flame-resistant with a steel roof, something like that, very expensive.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Even just managing the vegetation on your property in a way that is effective is not cheap. And then there's the community and sort of public level of cost.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
If you apply these rules more aggressively and you have more space between homes, so fires that are hard time jumping, and you have fewer homes getting built into the forest where the risk is highest, that reduces your fire risk, but it means fewer homes. And in California right now, as we all know, the housing crisis is really severe.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
So the idea that you would try to combat wildfires by having fewer homes would help, but it would also make another problem Even worse. So the tradeoffs of trying to further squeeze the fire risk out of Los Angeles and out of California are real.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Yeah, it's hard to even say what California should do because arguably the homelessness crisis is as urgent or more urgent than the climate crisis and wildfires. There's really no good answer to these questions.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
The fundamental question after any big fire in communities like this, the first question has always got to be, how will you rebuild? In fact, it's already started. Governor Newsom issued an order directing officials to look for ways to
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
ease or suspend provisions of the building code that would make it easier to build back more quickly but also would not be unsafe what does that mean we don't know yet but in the past these fires often have been followed by attempts to weaken or loosen temporarily the standards around how you build For good reason.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
People want to rebuild as fast as they can, and they want to rebuild as inexpensively as they can. And governments just want to do their best to serve the needs of people who've lost their homes, right? It's the most obvious thing you could do. The problem is that sets you up against a future where these fires get worse.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
And so this is also the moment where people who study resilience and climate change will say, actually, this is a good time to tighten the standards so that when we build back, we build back homes that are more resistant to wildfires. But typically that takes longer.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
So historically, often those two forces are in opposition after a fire and usually the people calling for easing the standards win out. But this time is different because the scale is bigger and because there's no longer really a debate about climate change. No one is saying that we won't have more of these fires.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
So the question that I'll be watching is to what degree do state and local officials and homeowners use this time to say this really is worth taking a moment and finding a way to build back in a tougher environment because we know the fires will get worse.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
These LA fires are folding into a bigger conversation in the U.S. about whether some communities are just too hard to protect against climate shocks. And you're right, until now, the climate shocks that prompt that conversation have mostly been rising seas, repetitive flooding, and storm surge. But these fires might become a turning point. They might raise the question of,
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
are some communities too exposed to fires to have a reasonable expectation that we can protect people who live there. Obviously, we're not talking about emptying out all of LA. That's insane and you wouldn't want to, but there may be some neighborhoods around LA
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
where because of the topography or something else that the risk is so high, experts look at them and say, boy, we probably shouldn't have built homes there in the first place. And people might start to ask, maybe it doesn't make sense to build back there. And it's important to note, even if the changes...
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
only affected some small sliver at the edge of LA, at the edge of the forest, it would change all of LA. Those people have to live somewhere, right? So you'd really have to pair pulling back from a handful of high risk areas with probably building more density in the downtown, in places that are easier to protect.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
So the transformation that that would entail would be really significant for all of LA. And it's a hard conversation. There's no, no guarantee it's going to happen, but it's the kind of thing that I think people are more likely to start talking about because these fires were so bad.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Yeah. And look, I've covered these conversations for a long time. Anytime you're talking about changing a community deliberately because of growing threats, it's really hard. You'll get many homeowners who just say, no, I want to rebuild exactly the way it was. My life has been turned upside down enough. I don't want anyone talking about maybe I should leave. But others will say, oh, why?
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
what we just lived through was terrible. I'm not sure I want to do it again, right? Then there's the question of, is it even fair to put future homeowners in that situation where, as we now know, fires can emerge almost out of nowhere in January that cause disastrous scale damage.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Fires like this open the door to talking about maybe the change that's going to happen anyway at this fire should include some sort of calculated decisions around are there places that you can't protect.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
Yeah, it's almost too hard to ask, right? But the last week of fires show that you have to at least think about it. Because fires like this demand that you at least try to be honest with yourself and your neighbors and your voters about the kind of risk we're taking on when we build or rebuild in places that we know are inherently dangerous and getting more dangerous.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
In some of those really high-risk places, maybe we can't keep pretending that we can save every house if it's facing a fire, which is a terrifying thing to admit. And it's a huge shift in attitude because this country wants to say that we're ready and prepared to protect homes, to have firefighters come to the rescue. But as we've seen from Los Angeles, sometimes there's still nothing safe.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
they can do. So, you know, at some point, the U.S. might have to say to itself, if you live in these high-risk areas, there's no guarantee for safety. And that kind of brutal honesty is the hardest thing to do. It's not how Americans want to think, but climate change is pushing us in that direction. And none of those solutions are really satisfying. But here we are.
The Daily
Could the L.A. Fires Have Been Stopped Sooner?
We've got a gigantic city in a fire zone. So maybe that's the best there is.