Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires
“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people start watching the horizon for smoke and tuning in to another of those extreme local possibilities — in this instance, that of imminent devastation.” The New Yorker published this piece in 1989, when Los Angeles’ fire season was “a particularly early and bad one,” but it’s one of many writings on the same phenomenon now circulating again, with the highly destructive Palisades Fire still burning away.
Back in 1989, longtime Angelenos would have cited the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a particularly vivid example of what misfortune the Santa Ana winds could bring. Widely recognized as a byword for affluence (not unlike the now virtually obliterated Pacific Palisades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Huxley — all of whose houses counted among the 484 destroyed in the conflagration (in which, miraculously, no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air Fire and its aftermath in “Design for Disaster,” a short documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department and narrated by William Conrad (whose voice would still have been instantly recognizable as that of Marshal Matt Dillon from the golden-age radio drama Gunsmoke).
Los Angeles’ repeated affliction by these blazes is perhaps overdetermined. The factors include not just the dreaded Santa Anas, but also the geography of its canyons, the dryness of the vegetation in its chaparral (not, pace Didion, desert) ecology, and the inability of its water-delivery system to meet such a sudden and enormous need (which also proved fateful in the Palisades Fire). It didn’t help that the typical house at the time was built with “a combustible roof; wide, low eaves to catch sparks and fire; and a big picture window to let the fire inside,” nor that such dwellings were “closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads.” The Bel Air Fire brought about a wood-shingle roof ban and a more intensive brush-clearance policy, but the six decades of fire seasons since do make one wonder what kind of measures, if any, could ever subdue these particular forces of nature.
via Boing Boing
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When Steve Buscemi Was a Firefighter — and Took It Up Again After 9/11
Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)
Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films
Behold 19th-Century Japanese Firemen’s Coats, Richly Decorated with Mythical Heroes & Symbols
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.