Santa Ana Winds and the New Normal

There are plenty of people lining up to lay blame for the thousands of buildings destroyed during the recent firestorms, fueled by Santa Ana winds. The incoming president blames the governor who is supposedly more interested in saving Sacramento river smelt than anything else, resulting—so it is claimed—in water shortages in Southern California. Wait, what?

Others blame the mayor of Los Angeles, who was attending a state funeral in Africa when things turned for the worse. Then there are other critics who blame the LA Fire Department for a slow response time, or LAPD for telling people to get out of their cars on Sunset Blvd., later to have their BMWs and Teslas bulldozed to clear space for fire rigs. Why didn’t they leave key fobs in the car? Let’s blame the bulldozer driver instead.

Having lived in Southern California nearly all my life, this was hardly my first encounter with Santa Ana winds. They come pretty much every year, usually during the fall and winter months, usually with heightened temperatures and clear skies. When fire erupts, however, it’s a different story. The winds push the flames, usually in the more mountainous areas where people have built homes right up against the brush which has evolved to burn every few years. Carbon returns to the soil, and seeds germinate when it starts to rain.

This year, two things have made the situation exceptionally dangerous and left Southern Californians even more vulnerable to wildfires during a Santa Ana episode. First, there has been almost no rain since the spring. There was some drizzle before the holidays, barely measurable in backyard rain gauges. Second, the winds were even stronger than usual. The winds blew for two days straight at 60 mph-plus, with gusts much faster than that. It can be windy in the Santa Ana season; this was plain old crazy-windy.

As a result, wildfires did break out, as they often do, but this was not limited to the hillsides. The stronger-than-usual winds pushed embers into relatively flatland areas normally too far to be affected by burning brush. We’re talking embers that traveled for miles, landing in places like the flatter areas of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, seemingly safe distances from where fires normally burn.

Once the embers got into these neighborhoods, the fire skipped from house to house, business to business, resulting in devastation that longtime SoCal residents have never seen before. There are thousands of buildings destroyed from Pacific Palisades, all the way up Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. There are thousands of homes and businesses burned to the ground in Altadena, known for its craftsman bungalows, tree-lined streets, and its racial/ethnic diversity. This is not where fires are supposed to go, but in this exceptionally dry period with exceptionally strong Santa Anas, that’s exactly what happened.

As a result, fire and emergency services did the very best they could under especially harsh conditions. On top of all else, the winds were so severe that water-dropping aircraft were also unable to assist in the first day of the fire. Things have fortunately changed in the several days since. A fire in the heart of the Hollywood Hills got extinguished in hours; another grass fire in Calabasas was similarly stopped with the help of helicopters dropping H2O.

LA Mayor Karen Bass is not going to hold on to the end of a firehose. Claiming that smelt survival has been prioritized in California is laughable, but some believe it to be true because they see it on their social media feeds. Still others think that SoCal would be better protected if we went back to firemen who are white, not the recent LAFD that has tried to diversify its ranks as California has become more diverse. That viewpoint has apparently been propagated across Fox News, though we in this area have been glued to fire coverage. We are terrified.

It used to be that Santa Ana conditions would be a hassle for those of us not living in the hills. Lots of leaves (it’s fall-winter, after all), the house would shake and rattle if the wind gusted at night, and patio furniture would fly into the corner of the yard. This is worse. The winds were about as fierce as they have ever been, and it wasn’t just the gusts. This was consistent over several days, with more apparently to come.

Moreover, this is no longer just a threat to wealthier people living where (probably) they shouldn’t be. The embers from fires can get you from a distance, and the fire can spread, house to house, not from brush to overhanging eaves.

You see, this is what climate change does. Extreme weather events happen with more frequency and intensity. This is the new normal.

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