Part 113: The Great Heat Wave of Los Angeles – Human Desperation and Climate Catastrophe

Published September 20, 2024

Sep 21, 2024

Photo of the San Bernardino Mountains from Red Rock Scenic Overlook looking down toward the area burned by the Line Fire by author GoPro Hero 11 Black).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

The heat dome descended on the Los Angeles Basin with unnerving certainty. For five solid days, temperatures rose above 100 degrees across the region before the forecast showed two days of cooling that would inevitably lead to high winds. For much of the summer, I had roamed the mountains, including in prior heat waves in August and July, but this one was far worse because the record-setting temperatures would spell an extreme temperature fluctuation. Already, the area had seen a series of smaller fires, a number of which the authorities had succeeded in rapidly extinguishing, a few after a good burn. The pressure was on to balance recreational access, fire prevention, and policing, including towards the unhoused population that so often is the first to have the finger pointed at them as the source of such incendiary conflagrations, even when it’s not true to the chagrin of advocates.

Even the New York Times reported on the power outages that afflicted such an esteemed venue as the Hollywood Bowl. The grid was becoming strained. The Southern California Edison outage map showed losses of power across the region, restored as quickly as possible by crews. The County of Los Angeles issued instructions on how to make your own air conditioner: “Place a pan of ice between you and a box fan to cool the air down.” The advice wasn’t unsound, but for those on the streets who didn’t have electricity, the advice didn’t apply. Cooling centers were opened, and activists were able to push the City of Los Angeles at least to stop sweeping people, but not more broadly across the County. Then the fires started, first in neighboring San Bernardino, then in the forest above Glendora, and to the south in sprawling Orange County. The great heat wave had brought a predictable disaster.

According to the report from ABC 7 journalist Rob McMillan, as of September 6, Los Angeles County had only recorded 2 heat deaths in contrast to neighboring, sweltering Riverside and San Bernardino, with two dozen deaths and a dozen deceased, respectively, and “none in Orange or Ventura counties.” Los Angeles County could take up to 3 months to tally such information, with far more population than its neighbors in what forms the greater expanse of Southern California. The Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s office confirmed that neither of the two deaths were “unhoused individuals.” Attempts to gain further updates were unsuccessful.

Thankfully, to date, no fatalities have been recorded from the Line Fire, Bridge Fire, or Airport Fire, although there have been injuries related to both the smoke and heat. As of first reports on September 11, they have now burned a combined total of 104,939 acres of chaparral and pines. Approximately 20 homes have been lost in Mount Baldy Village, 13 in Wrightwood, and 6 in other areas. Thankfully, only a few structures were lost in San Bernardino, but 80 homes were lost in El Cariso along Ortega Highway in Riverside County, just over the Orange County line, with some only narrowly saved.

Full information could take some time to confirm as damage assessment occurs and as the fires continue to burn. One arrest for arson has been made by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in the Line Fire of a package handler and former postal employee. The cause of the Bridge Fire on September 8 was near the popular The Bridge to Nowhere trailhead along the East Fork of the San Gabriel River. It remains unknown and is under investigation. The Airport Fire was started in Trabuco Canyon, a popular off-roading area with a number of residences at its terminus, after public works crews moved boulders to protect vegetation on September 9. Even in a blistering heat wave with an ominous fire risk, some people simply don’t know when to stop working. During the Line Fire, warehouse workers for Amazon marched to demand that Amazon stop operations due to smoke percolating into the distribution center, and thankfully management relented and shut down operations for safety.

California has a housing shortage, no doubt, with pricing for shelter far out of reach for so many. For many decades now, this has led to relentless expansion of suburbs against the front country of the transverse and coastal ranges that ring the Los Angeles Basin, Inland Empire (Riverside + San Bernardino), and well-to-do Orange and Ventura Counties. Historic mountain and canyon towns are at the greatest risk. They’re not alone though; despite the best of firefighting technologies, when fire moves fast, driven by winds, it can destroy even the homes of the wealthy. This has happened in recent times in both Malibu as a result of the Woolsey Fire of 2018 and in Laguna Niguel in 2022. Some will leave undoubtedly, but others will rebuild. Make no mistake though, Southern California is supposed to burn, and it’s decades of fire suppression strategy combined with a changing climate that create the perfect conditions for these disasters despite all best efforts on the ground.

Despite the loss of homes, people are not likely to abandon fire-prone areas. So what can they do to build for greater resilience, and what if any lessons can be learned from these most recent events? Is California simply doomed to burn? According to Ben Stapleton, Executive Director of the U.S. Green Building Council California (USGBC-CA), "our homes—especially in the wildland urban interface—should be built with sustainable materials and by leveraging strategies to exist with fire.” For example, Stapleton recommends “landscapes designed to burn less intensely and to regrow.”

USGBC-CA started their “Wildfire Defense” program after the destructive 2018 Woolsey Fire scorched 96,949 acres from Simi Valley through Malibu, with the goal of homeowner education, including by offering “tours of well-prepared homes and a free toolkit, along with trainings for construction professionals and landscapers.” By using “peer-to-peer knowledge sharing,” USGBC-CA, according to Stapleton, is “working to empower communities with proven, clear, immediately actionable risk-mitigation strategies; combat persistent and counterproductive myths; and provide locally relevant, step-by-step guidance.”

Few have considered what climate change, much less natural disasters, means for the unhoused. Los Angeles is the national capital of homelessness, with nearly 60,000 people lacking a roof over their heads. The National Alliance to End Homelessness suggests one policy measure: “Emergency shelters and increased housing development should be funded year-round, not only as a result of a catastrophe.” Getting people into emergency shelters, much less permanent housing, isn’t so simple though, and this is where timely warnings and outreach among the unhoused population, which often lacks reliable sources of news information, becomes important. With Los Angeles only weeks away from pivoting from extreme heat to the possibility of another tropical storm, much less hurricanes, government and nonprofit partners must do more to plan for taking such measures rapidly in response to impending disasters.

Last year, Hurricane Hillary formed on August 16, 2023, before making landfall on August 20. The storm resulted in three deaths and numerous rescues, including of unhoused individuals who often reside in flood control areas. The storm, whose strength became a subject of debate, nevertheless caused a reported $900 million in damage. No estimate is available though for what the storm might have meant to those who lost encampments. Undoubtedly, the prevailing opinion in California is that there shouldn’t be encampments at all, with Governor Newsom having broadly ordered them to be cleared. This won’t happen before the coming storm season, which again raises the question of what Los Angeles, much less the County or State, might plan to do differently. The reality about disaster planning is that it’s so often only a short-term endeavor, with few built-in protocols or active planning in advance; rather, it’s responsive.

Recently, the inaugural Los Angeles Climate Week was held from September 8th to 15th. Programming featured 100+ organizations, 100+ events, 85+ venues, and 5,000+ attendees. Overall, the goal was to produce “a foundation of impactful core initiatives designed to drive meaningful change.” Steering Committee Member Aura Vasquez said about the event, “From organizing a clean energy expo to hosting a panel discussion about electrifying homes, LA Climate Week provided an excellent platform to discuss climate solutions and foster community.”

The Los Angeles Times, as an addendum to the program, will host an event at Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, September 26 at 9:00 am entitled California Climate Live, featuring journalists from the Los Angeles Times. There will be three panels on “Climate Anxiety and Adapting to a Future California,” “Lifestyle and Sustainability,” and “Climate Activism, Youth, and The Birth of Rage.” The newspaper launched its Climate Section one year ago “in recognition of the fact that not only are Californians living on the front lines of climate change, they’re also leading the nation in the charge toward renewable energy and sustainable living,” according to Environment, Health, and Science Editor Monte Morin.

With the weather changing, firefighters had begun to gain the upper hand in increasing “containment” and extinguishing flames, preventing devastating fire fronts from growing again. Residents had just begun to assess their losses, and the hiking community bemoaned the supposed loss of beloved places and trails. It’s not a guarantee that these places will simply regrow, much less the same, and especially with tree stands that have taken decades to grow. Nature takes time to heal too.

Diminishing snowpacks, less steady rain, and the spread of invasive species mean that the forest won’t simply recover as it was before; instead, it will exist in a diminished natural state. The wilderness before the arrival of Westerners featured species such as grizzly bears and wolves. Nicholas Hummingbird, an expert in native plants, said in an interview with PBS SoCal that the loss of native plants collapses the entire ecosystem.

Right now is time of people learning about these numbers and doing something about it. Because it's not just the plants that are going to go. It's the hundreds and thousands of insects and birds and coyotes, everything you can imagine, that survives off these plants.

Past efforts at replanting have met with only limited success. The scars of the Station Fire of 2009 and the Bobcat Fire of 2020 are still incredibly noticeable in the San Gabriel Mountains. Nature is resilient, and indigenous peoples practiced cultural burns for good reason, but it was never meant to all go up in flames at once in what Hummingbird and others have termed “mega-fires.”

People in Orange County were outraged to learn that such a disaster was the result of a public works crew, but few asked what will change next time. Journalist and author Karen Klein, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called “for a state probe,” writing that “if it finds the county blew it, state fire officials should be issuing common sense protocols for restricting work that can cause this kind of conflagration.” She further concluded that, “Without objective, outside examination, it’s hard to trust that we’ll ever get a clear answer on where the responsibility lies.” The simple answer here is not Sacramento; rather, it’s common sense! Even the best of regulations are not always complied with, and that has to start with greater recognition that the changing climate means we must have greater awareness. In addition to taking steps to curb harmful emissions, we have to adapt to become more resilient by reforming our economy. Investment in our parks systems is shamefully low, with the vast majority of resources directed toward firefighting.

Without preventative efforts, including more cultural/controlled burning, and without having more clearing practices that are not haphazard, we’re simply doomed to repeat this pattern. Governor Newsom was out of state when the fires broke out and is heading for the exit door in 2026. With Donald Trump in Rancho Palos Verdes, where homes are sliding off their foundations due to a manmade landslide, he took the opportunity to withhold federal relief funding for firefighting. Trump may have been right about exactly one thing in his entire run at power: we have to take better care of our forests, and that starts with more and better environmental education. The thing people in California seem to care most about next to their homes (at least for those who have them) are cars, but not each other, and certainly not the environment. The Palos Verdes Peninsula, in contrast to the Los Angeles Basin, has very few unhoused people because large sections, such as Rolling Hills, are completely gated private communities and heavily policed.

People go where they go and access the places that they can. One strategy that isn’t widely employed across much of Southern California is simply closing spaces when fire risk is at its peak. For many years, the beaches of Malibu have been battlegrounds for public access, and certain areas also get closed, such as Corral Canyon Road, which gets closed during “Red Flag” warnings. Additionally, Malibu and neighboring communities such as Calabasas and Topanga have a dedicated neighborhood arson watch group in partnership with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The group is responsible for patrolling “over 185 square miles of the Santa Monica Mountains during periods of extreme fire weather conditions.” Volunteers are trained and equipped, including with “two-way radio,” to overcome the difficulty of not having cellular telephone communication. Modern GPS devices provided another option for rapid reporting of fires during high-risk weather periods.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Fire season isn’t over, and there’s at least one more heatwave in the forecast. Whether Los Angeles will be prepared, much less neighboring counties or the tens of thousands of unhoused, to weather the next major natural disaster remains to be seen. Certainly, Los Angeles hasn’t seen a climate catastrophe quite like Hurricane Katrina, imprinted into the national memory, and even as earthquakes have reminded us of that threat, we’re only a moment away from tremendous desperation and catastrophe in even the tiniest of neighborhoods.

The late author Mike Davis wrote in his 1990 classic, City of Quartz, that “Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight.” Increasingly, the later idea that anyone will ever disinvest from the troubled landscape has become more remote. Symbolically, now, developers pushing into the outskirts of Yucaipa and Jurupa Valley in San Bernardino have proposed to even build immediately around the third oldest living plant in the world, imperiling its continued existence. We must do better to protect everyone from climate change, housed and unhoused alike, if we want California to have great resilience in the face of this dangerous new normal.

Ruth Roofless contributed to this story. Please subscribe to her at: Ruth Roofless

Link: Hollywood Bowl Cancels Show as Heat Wave Knocks Out Power

Link: County of Los Angeles Instagram Post RE: Heat Waves

Link: SoCal likely has more heat-related deaths than we realize, expert says

Link: San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department Arrest Twitter Post

Link: Inland Empire Amazon Workers United Twitter Post

Link: U.S. Green Building Council California

Link: U.S. Green Building Council California Wildfire Defense Education and Tours Program

Link: How Climate Change Impacts Homelessness

Link: Epic downgrade: Hilary was not a tropical storm when it pummeled California, experts say

Link: LA Climate Week

Link: Los Angeles Times to Host ‘Climate California Live’ on Sept. 26 in Downtown L.A.