Dubroff: How the Palisades, Eaton fires will impact the region
The costliest fires in modern times in Southern California are going to be with us for a long time.
Recovery will take years, home insurance will get more expensive and harder to get, and some people who lost everything will never come back.
We may never really know what caused the Eaton and Palisade fires, but arguing about whether climate change contributed to the extremely dry conditions and hurricane-force winds is not going to bring back thousands of houses.
Politically, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is going to have to win over skeptical voters if she wants a second term.
She might begin by putting developer Rick Caruso, a sharp critic, in charge of reconstruction.
He knows how to build things — and build them to last.
All eyes should be on the 2028 Olympics.
Like Paris and Notre Dame, if Los Angeles can have the Palisades and Altadena reconstruction substantially completed by the time the games arrive, it will turn tragedy into triumph.
Here are a few other takeaways from a week that has changed the way we all think about fire.
• Until the past week, the Thomas and Woolsey fires, along with a dozen others we’ve witnessed in recent times, were taken as isolated, tragic events brought on by powerline failures or other human errors, in small communities that interface with forest land. We shrugged our shoulders and moved on. Now with the Palisade and Altadena fires, happening simultaneously in heavily urban areas, we have to think about a fire-risk situation where no one is safe. I happen to believe these are climate-driven events but whatever your politics you have to sit up and take notice.
• Infrastructure fixes are being called for, but they are not going to happen overnight — if at all. Rebuilding water systems to accommodate hundreds of fire engines pumping simultaneously may prove too expensive for municipalities and water districts. Burying overhead electrical wires should have been done years ago, but that won’t happen quickly, and ratepayers will likely pick up the tab. It may not be possible to replace the largest power transmission towers and their main transmission line lines with underground systems. It would, however, be a shame if political gamesmanship derailed some important and necessary fixes.
• There are likely to be payoffs for really understanding how to mitigate the risk of a community going up in flames. Designing a bucket brigade of tanker trucks could be cost-effective in saving neighborhoods. Beefing up UC San Diego’s early warning system of sensors looks like a no-brainer for California. Elon Musk had a good idea about sending Cybertrucks equipped with Starlink to quickly restore cell service.
• Communications around evacuation and preparations for evacuation have come a long way. During the Thomas Fire from December 2017 to January 2018, evacuation orders were not always clear and not everyone paid attention. Go bags were a relatively new phenomenon. Every death is a tragedy, and the death toll was 24 and rising as I wrote this column, but it appears that orders were very clear and Pacific Palisades and Altadena were evacuated with a great deal of success.
• The fire-fighting season is year-round but that fact has been missed by many local governments — even as they ramp up climate change rhetoric. Many memories are shaped by the Painted Cave Fire in Santa Barbara which arrived in July 1990. Since then there has been the Thomas Fire in December 2017, the Woolsey and Hill in Ventura County in November 2018, and the Mountain Fire in November 2024. The Marshall Fire on December 30, 2021, outside Boulder, Colorado shares many common features with the brush fires that have devastated California — ultra-dry conditions, andhurricane-force winds. That means elevating firefighting budgets and not being cheap with anticipatory overtime — even if no danger appears.
We have entered a new reality when it comes to winter fires in the West. Beyond the finger-pointing, the future will belong to communities that are prepared.
Henry Dubroff is the founder, owner and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times. He can be reached at [email protected].
