The California Fires are Still Burning

You had probably forgotten them.

The fire in the Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles started on January 7th. As I write this on January 22nd, the fire is still burning. Here is an update for some of the fires.

Palisades fire

• Containment: The fire was 68% contained as of 7 a.m. Wednesday morning. It has burned more than 23,400 acres.

• Damage: Officials have confirmed, so far, 6,662 structures have been destroyed and 890 damaged.

• Lives lost: Officials have confirmed that 11 people are dead from the Palisades fire.

Eaton fire

• Containment: The fire was 91% contained as of 7 a.m. Wednesday morning. It has burned more than 14,000 acres.

• Damage: Officials have so far tallied 9,418 structures destroyed and 1,073 damaged.

• Lives lost: Officials have confirmed 17 are dead from the Eaton fire.

Hughes fire

• The Hughes Fire broke out late Wednesday morning and in less than a day had burnt nearly 16 square miles (41 square kilometers) of trees and brush near Castaic Lake, a popular recreation area about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the Eaton and Palisades fires.

With a new President, and people living their lives, the rest of the world and the rest of the country has largely moved on. But California hasn’t moved on, and we will be reminded of what happened when the fires stop and the bill comes due. We will be hearing more about the costs soon. The estimated cost of the California fires ranges from $135 billion in damage and economic losses to $275 billion.

Sure, there are things that authorities and the ground could have done better, but climate change played a big role here. Climate change isn’t going to be a smoking gun for a particular storm or catastrophe, but climate change makes our weather more extreme. So there were wildfires before climate change, but there will be more of them and they will be more intense because of climate change. The damage in California is as high at it is thanks to climate change.

Last year California was blessed with an abundance of rain, a different type of extreme weather. This helped a lot of the brush and small trees in the wildfires grow. California is now again in the middle of a severe drought - in the middle of the rainy season - which made that vegetation that grew since last year a tinderbox. Add stronger Santa Ana winds than usual - due to climate change, and you have the recipe for what happened. It will likely happen again.

Why build here? Why live here?

Los Angeles wants to be a desert. It is a beautiful place to live, if you can avoid the traffic. But water has to be shipped there from other places to make Los Angeles viable. If any of you haven’t, watch the film Chinatown for a great and entertaining history of how Los Angeles was made, thanks to water taken from someplace else. It is also one of the best screenplays ever written if you ask me.

It is easy to say just don’t live there, but I’m not going to say that. What is happening in Los Angeles will happen to other major cities on the edge of deserts, or on the edge of oceans, or on the edge of rivers, or in places that get unimaginably hot. We don’t know what they are, but we will in 10, 20, 30 years. Los Angeles 2025 will just be one of a long list of places that will be changed forever, and we will ask the question of if people still want to live there.

To get an idea of what we are in for, just read the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's book The Ministry for the Future. If you are having trouble imagining what we will be in for. What Robinson writes about will happen, it is just a matter of when.

If you want to live there, you may have to be uninsured.

Insurers had already stopped offering fire insurance in California before the fires started. Insurance companies have left Florida due to unacceptable financial risk connected to homeowners’ insurance. You may not believe in climate change, but your insurance company sure as hell does, and they know the math behind the risk better than you.

People will rebuild in Palisades, but should they?

When the insurance companies walk away, only the wealthiest of the wealthy can afford to live in such danger zones. The rest of us can live there, but after one catastrophe we will be financially whipped out. In the coming year, ignore the stories about celebrities bravely rebuilding. Look for the stories of the gardeners, restaurateurs, the movie industry middle class and all the others who serve the wealthy in LA leaving because they can’t afford to risk everything again. Those stories will only increase, in a lot more places.

Actuaries and the insurance companies that employ them are the ones that will empty LA, Phoenix, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, New York, Boston, Venice, London, Beijing, Jakarta, Bangkok, Shanghai, Dhaka. These places won't be empty entirely of course, but over time people will begin to see the writing on the wall, and insurance companies won’t cover their risk of just living there anymore. Cleveland will boom. Phoenix will bust.

It’s not a popular opinion now, but strategic retreat from these places may be the best play. It is the one insurance companies have already made. Those who believe in reality might not be far behind.

Better buildings, better policy.

Yes, LA authorities could have done better, and I have already seen stories of why some houses in the Palisades are still standing because they were built to survive fire. But those houses are more expensive, so again you may be pricing out the middle class by requiring each house to be a fortress. Some people will make that choice, but increasingly I believe that more of them will hear “check” from mother nature and will retreat, not waiting around for “checkmate.”