From a commemoritve booklet produced for the community’s 125th birthday, Nov. 3, 2012.
Altadena is an unincorporated community of Los Angeles County, next to and within the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. It is bounded on three sides by wilderness (the Arroyo Seco, Angeles National Forest, and Eaton Canyon), and on the south by the city of Pasadena. Throughout its history and up until today, as Altadena celebrates its 125th year, this distinct geography has nurtured an independent spirit and given the community a close-to-nature feel. Citizens here have consistently resisted annexation to Pasadena (although that city has taken 46 “bites” of it over the years, seeking tax revenues), and voted down incorporating as a city. Altadenans prefer a looser political structure that still manages to foster an unmistakable identity.
One essential aspect of the California wildfire story which almost no one from back East gets right and a disturbing number of local journalists fail to convey is the tremendous range in risk level from town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood. While smoke is a serious problem for almost all of the area, danger from fire itself is largely limited to wildland urban interfaces. Even within WUIs, the threat varies greatly.
If you look up places like Paradise, Pacific Palisades, and Altadena, you will see that they were all tinder bundles, literally disasters waiting to happen. In some cases not waiting all that patiently. 10 years before the deadly Camp fire, residents of Paradise experienced two major evacuations from two different fires a month apart.
In the aftermath of the Camp fire, NPR did an excellent story on the "next Paradise," which discussed a number of towns as or more vulnerable than that town had been before the conflagration. (In general, NPR has one of the better track records when it comes to Western wildfires.) There will be more Altadenas, perhaps very soon, but any discussion of how to address this crisis will have to be more accurate and nuanced than most of what we've been seeing.
While some of Altadena is indeed at the wilderness interface, I resist that characterization for most of it, which was not even classed as a wildfire high-risk area for insurance purposes. Homes were destroyed that were 1.5 miles away from the mountains. The big factor were the exceptional (and now perhaps new normal) winds that made the fire jump incredibly rapidly house-to-house, without time to defend them. If the winds had continued, half of Pasadena would have burned too.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised to see the Tubbs fire burn so far into Santa Rosa in 2017. The spread was mostly driven by landscaping, but air vents on the houses were also a problem. The winds were strong but not like the recent Santa Anas, and the houses were farther apart.
DeleteThe extent of house-to-house burning in first Paradise and now Altadena and Pacific Palisades is something different again. I question whether any changes have occurred in the winds. The Santa Anas have hit triple digits before. The Diablos - with the same root cause as the Santa Anas - can blow like crazy in the Bay Area. And to top it all off, California can get some pretty strong fairweather gales that reach on shore in the summer. Since these winds are driven by temperature differences rather than the magnitude of heat energy in the atmosphere, climate change models just shrug at them. Where the models do show changes, they indicate future reduction.
There is no doubt that generally higher temperatures have contributed to a steep increase in warm-season fires on the west coast, often in east wind events. The most striking portrayal of that is a false-color map showing which areas have burned over the last 20 years. The Sierra foothills have been hit especially hard.
It is quite frustrating that we learned a long time ago that the power should have been off in the red flag areas. Didn't the power company (Southern Edison mostly?) announce in advance that there would be strategic use of power outages? And since all the wind speed maps were purple in both Altadena and Pacific Palisades, why was the power still on? All that stupid blaming that happened, but few mentions of the scheduled power outages that apparently did not happen.
Matt -- There were lots of power outages that night, just not scheduled and not where they were needed.
DeleteMark,
ReplyDeleteI was talking with some people about the criticisms of local politicians regarding how the fire was handled. Having read your posts during the past several years, my take on it was that no government policy would've helped here--other than a policy of controlled burns or something like that, which it seems was never on the table. To put it another way: the people who criticized the government for letting this fire happen are pretty much the same people who would've screamed had the government been doing controlled burns in the past few years. I don't think this is a left or right thing: my guess is that voters and political commentators of both parties would've been upset at such policies.
Do you think that's an accurate assessment?
Andrew
Andrew,
DeleteWe'll hit in the criticism of Bass in an upcoming cigarettes-and-cocaine post but at the risk of giving away the ending, not only was there almost nothing she could have done but most of the deaths were in Altadena which isn't even in the city of LA.
Unlike the attacks on Bass, the pushback against aggressive forest management appears non-partisan, a combination of smoke NIMBYs and perverse incentives -- agencies conducting controlled burns are held responsible for air pollution and property damage even though they are preventing far worse.
MP