The monster that roared through L.A. County last week is still alive – but firefighters seem to have it cornered. People have started returning to their homes, or what’s left of them. Insurance, if they had it, is a whole other battle.
The focus now is turning from what happened to why it happened, and what in the world is next? This disaster is as bad as just about anybody here can remember … but is it really just the new normal?
Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
John Vaillant, author of “Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World,” said, “Nature is telling us, ‘I can’t take this anymore. I cannot support you if you keep treating me this way.'”
Vaillant says climate change is making disasters like the wind-driven L.A. fires even fiercer. “We can expect fires of this intensity, and worse, in the future,” he said. “The types of fires we’ve seen over the past ten years are qualitatively different from the previous hundred years.”
“The types of fires are different?” I asked. “How has fire changed?”
Vintage
“In a number of ways. The most potent and frightening way, the most obvious to the layperson, people like us, is it moves faster and with greater intensity. When you talk to any firefighter with any sense of history, they are seeing different [fire] behavior that is, in many cases, un-fightable.”
And Vaillant says the cause is something science has been telling us for decades: the CO2 that our combustion engines keep pumping into the atmosphere. “We don’t feel it; we don’t smell it; we don’t notice it,” he said. “But if you were to take the car engine that brought me here and set it up on the floor here and fired it up, we would go deaf, and then we would die from its emissions. And that’s under the hood of every internal combustion engine car. And there are hundreds of millions of them. So, the emissions from fire, these trillions of fires that we make every day, has created this artificially warm climate.”
And so, he says, we get more intense fires … stronger hurricanes … and hotter heatwaves.
Climate scientist Peter Kalmus has been sounding much the same alarm for years – and feels like, while he’s trying to share the science of climate change to the world, no one is listening.
We met him in 2022 near his home in Altadena, California, just as he was about to move his family to North Carolina.
“So, for a few years I wanted to move to some place a little bit less fiery,” he told us this week. “But I want to make it clear, I don’t think there’s any place safe from climate change.”
Kalmus learned that firsthand last year, when North Carolina was trashed by Hurricane Helene. And the California fires were a disaster for him as well; his old house in Altadena, and his friends’ homes, all burned to the ground. He said, “I am hopeful that, if there’s a silver lining to this tragedy, it’s that, you know, the public will wake up and get angry and say, ‘We need to do something about this. Enough is enough.'”
Scientists like Kalmus have been warning the world about impending climate disaster for years now. But on January 6, as the fire closed in on Altadena, perhaps the most effective warning came from an amateur meteorologist.
Edgar McGregor has been picking up trash in Altadena every day for more than five years. He’s also into meteorology, and runs a Facebook page about weather. Days before the fires even started, he warned his Facebook followers about dangerous conditions, and on January 6, he posted a video telling them to drop everything and get out of town.
“I said, ‘Get out,'” McGregor explained. “I stood in the middle of my street at home, filmed myself with the mountains on fire behind me and told people, ‘This is serious. Get your Social Security cards. Get the deed to your home. Get out. Like, this is the Big One. I’m not joking around. This is not gonna blow over.'”
Jenn Siebert, an Altadena mother of two, didn’t need to hear that twice. “I think he, well, he definitely saved my family’s lives,” she said. “We all listened to him. We were like, ‘This kid knows what he’s talking about!'”
Her own house somehow survived; her neighbors weren’t so lucky. “My best friends, like, they’ve lost everything,” Siebert said. “They’re alive, because, probably because of Edgar, I would imagine. Everybody in the Beautiful Altadena group is alive because of Edgar, right now.”
Siebert, who had never met McGregor in person, embraced him when she was introduced. “I’m so appreciative of you,” she said. “You saved my family and you saved so many people. So, thank you.”
The fires, experts say, are a warning on a much bigger scale, that the Earth will continue to get drier and more volatile unless we do something about climate change. But of course, warnings only work when people listen.
I asked Vaillant, “Have we just pushed Nature too far?”
“The upside to all of this is, Nature is inviting us, sternly, to reengage,” he replied. “It’s only going to get hotter. And so, Nature is saying, ‘Wake up! We are in this together.’ It behooves all of us to focus on the real causes, and to understand that this really can happen to us, to us, to you and to me, not just to people we know, or people on TV.”
READ AN EXCERPT: “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant
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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: George Pozderec.
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