AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu

Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear| Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (five,921 words)

"Homes, of course, volition ascend hither in the thousands. Many a tiptop volition have its castle."

—John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925)

Late August to early on October is the infernal flavour in Los Angeles. Downtown is unremarkably shrouded in acrid yellow smog while rut waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.

Beyond the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles's Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families abscond to the burn down escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies' foreheads with water while older children, optics stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless immature men—some with formidable jail-fabricated biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amongst hundreds of acres of molten cobblestone and physical in that location is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.

Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue heaven is clear plenty to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Isle, nearly fifty miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the "mainland," the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect 24-hour interval.

Needless to say, the existential differences between the tenement district and the gilded coast are enormous at any time. But late summer is the beginning of the wildfire season in Southern California, and that'due south when Westlake and Malibu suffer a mutual lot: catastrophic fire.

According to previous estimates, Westlake (including adjacent parts of Downtown) has the highest urban fire incidence in the nation: one of its ii burn stations was inundated by an incredible 20,000 emergency calls in 1993. Some tenements and apartment-hotels accept continuous fire histories dating dorsum to their structure in the early twentieth century. The notorious Hotel St. George, for instance, experienced fatal blazes in 1912, 1952, and 1983. Moreover, almost all of the deadly tenement fires in Los Angeles since 1945 accept occurred within a 1-mile radius of the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa, Downtown.

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire upper-case letter of North America and, possibly, the world. Burn down here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated past landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, past a large fire (i 1000 acres plus) every ii and a half years, and the entire surface surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least one time a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the ocean. Since 1970 five such holocausts take destroyed more than 1 k luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in belongings damage. Some unhappy homeowners accept been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many equally eight times since 1930.

At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea.

In other words, stand at the oral cavity of Malibu Canyon or slumber in the Hotel St. George for any length of time and you eventually will confront the flames. It is a statistical certainty. Ironically, the richest and poorest landscapes in Southern California are comparable in the frequency with which they experience incendiary disaster. This was emphasized tragically in 1993 when a May conflagration at a Westlake tenement that killed three mothers and seven children was followed in belatedly October by 21 wildfires culminating on November 2nd in the peachy firestorm that forced the evacuation of most of Malibu.

But the two species of conflagration are inverse images of each other. Dedicated in 1993 past the largest ground forces of firefighters in American history, wealthy Malibu homeowners benefited besides from an boggling range of insurance, land apply, and disaster relief subsidies. Even so, as most experts will readily concede, periodic firestorms of this magnitude are inevitable equally long as residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas.

On the other mitt, most of the 119 fatalities from tenement fires in the Westlake and Downtown areas might have been prevented had slumlords been held to fifty-fifty minimal standards of building prophylactic. If enormous resource have been allocated, quixotically, to fight irresistible forces of nature on the Malibu declension, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-fabricated and remediable fire crunch of the inner city.

* * *

From the commencement fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. In Ii Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1826 and seeing a vast blaze forth the declension of José Tapia's Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite—or, as we shall see, more likely considering of—the Castilian prohibition of the Chumash and Tong-va Indian practise of annually called-for the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century. During the slap-up land boom of the late 1880s, the entire latifundio was sold at $x per acre to the Boston Brahmin millionaire Frederick Rindge. In his memoirs, Rindge described his unceasing battles confronting squatters, rustlers, and, above all, recurrent wildfire. The keen fire of 1903, which raced from Calabasas to the body of water in a few hours, incinerated Rindge's dream ranch in Malibu Canyon and forced him to motion to Los Angeles, where he died in 1905.

From the fourth dimension of the Tapias, the owners of Rancho Malibu had recognized that the region's extraordinary fire hazard was shaped, in large role, by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the annual "fire winds" from the north: the notorious Santa Anas, which blow primarily between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, just earlier the starting time rains. Built-in from high-pressure areas over the Great Bowl and Colorado Plateau, the Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanche-similar into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the Santa Anas to hurricane velocity equally they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monica Mountains. Add a spark to the dense, dry vegetation on such an occasion and the hillsides will explode in uncontrollable wildfire: "The speed and heat of the burn down is then intense that firefighters can only attempt to prevent lateral spread of the fire while waiting for the winds to abate or the fuel to diminish."

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Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, littoral sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of enquiry (peculiarly at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) take given late-twentieth-century scientific discipline bright insights into the circuitous and ultimately beneficial office of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California'south various pyrophytic flora. Enquiry has too established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating burn down destructiveness. Every bit Richard Minnich, the world authorization on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: "Fuel, not ignitions, causes burn down. You tin send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never exist arrested."

A fundamental revelation was the nonlinear human relationship betwixt the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that "the probability for an intense fast running burn down increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of historic period." Indeed, half-century-onetime chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn down with 50 times more intensity than xx-year-one-time chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a bang-up Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three meg barrels of burning oil at a temperature of two,000 degrees.

"Full burn suppression," the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur tin transform the chemical construction of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation but makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.

For a generation afterward Rindge'due south death, his widow, May, struggled to keep the family Shangri-la isolated and intact in the face up of state attempts to push a highway through the rancho. Like one of the iron-fisted heroines played by Barbara Stanwyck, the and so-called Queen of the Malibu airtight the ranch roads in 1917, strung barbed wire forth the perimeter, and posted armed debate-riders with orders to "shoot to impale." In i episode during the 1920s, Rindge cowboys provoked a tense confrontation with deputy sheriffs later on driving abroad a road survey crew at gunpoint. Hysterical newspaper headlines warned of "Civil War in Peaceful Southern California!"

But the force per unit area during the 1920s nail to open the coastal range to speculative subdivision was unrelenting. In the hyperbole of the era, occupation of the mountains became Los Angeles's manifest destiny. "The day for the white invasion of the Santa Monicas has come," declared existent estate clear-sighted John Russell McCarthy in a booklet published by the Los Angeles Times in 1925. In apprehension of this country rush, the county sheriff had been absorbing every vagrant in sight and putting them to piece of work on chain gangs building roads through the rugged canyons just due south of Rancho Malibu. (Radical critics at the time denounced this system equally "deliberate real-estate graft" meant simply to heighten land values in mountain districts "which the population of this urban center does not even know exists.")

Widow Rindge, in whatever event, would non be allowed to stand in the style of "the march of adventuring Caucasians," equally McCarthy put it. Later on one of the most protracted legal battles in California history, the court granted the state correct-of-way through Rancho Malibu. Opened to traffic in 1928, the Pacific Declension Highway gave delighted Angelenos their first view of the magnificent Malibu coast and introduced a potent new source of ignition—the car—into the inflammable landscape.

The indefatigable May Rindge continued to fight the road builders and developers in the courts, but in the cease the costs of litigation forced her to lease choice parts of Malibu beachfront to a movie colony that included Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Dolores Del Rio, and Barbara Stanwyck herself. The colony's unexpected housewarming was a lightning-swift wildfire that destroyed 13 new homes in late Oct 1929. Exactly a yr later, walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area accidently ignited another bonfire, which chop-chop grew into 1 of the greatest conflagrations in Malibu history.

*The 1930 Decker Canyon burn down was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a vehement Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could practise piddling except save their own lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Pacific Palisades, there was official panic. County Supervisor Wright, his fretfulness shaken by a visit to the collapsing fire lines, posted a hundred patrolmen at the Los Angeles city limits to warning residents for evacuation. Should the "fire raging in the Malibu Commune get closer," he gasped, "our whole urban center might go." Ultimately, this apocalypse (which may accept given Nathanael West the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in his novel Twenty-four hour period of the Locust) was avoided—no thanks to man initiative—when the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided.

In retrospect, the 1930 burn should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to farther development. Only a few months earlier the disaster, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—the nation'southward foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system—had come up out in favor of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the about scenic beach and mountain areas between Topanga and Betoken Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Coulee, public officials stubbornly overlooked the wisdom of Olmsted'due south proposal for a great public domain in the Santa Monicas. The canton of Los Angeles, for case, squandered an extraordinary opportunity in 1938 to acquire 17,000 acres of the broke Rindge estate in exchange for $i.1 one thousand thousand in delinquent taxes. At a mere $64 per acre, it would have been the deal of the century.

A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral aggregating simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.

Instead, in Dec 1940, an impecunious and heartbroken May Rindge was forced to put her entire empire on the auction cake. Potential buyers were advised to make "an early on selection" of "bounding main-front lots, sites for villas, hotels, golf clubs, estates, beach and yacht clubs, income and business concern lots, minor summer home places, ranchitos, 100–640-acre ranchos, and acreage for further subdivision." The disconsolate Queen of the Malibu died two months after.

During the 2d Earth War—severe drought years on the Due west Coast—hundreds of firewatchers were sent into the Southern California mountains to guard confronting rumored Axis saboteurs. A few months after the watchers were withdrawn, 150 Malibu homes were incinerated in another November fire. Yet this new disaster failed to discourage a postwar migration of artists, printers, volume-dealers, poets, screenwriters, and architects (including Olmsted himself)—many of very modest means, some seeking to escape the scrutiny of McCarthyism—who envisaged Malibu every bit Carmel southward. In an engaging memoir of this period, UCLA librarian Lawrence Clark Powell described a genial fashion of life devoted to Mozart and beachcombing.

He also provided a classic business relationship of the onslaught of the terrible firestorm of Christmas week 1956, which, burning its way to the sea, retraced the path of the 1930 bonfire.

The current of air was nevertheless savage when we went to bed at 10, the heaven swept clear, aglitter with stars, Anacapa flashed its alert light. The cypresses, pines and eucalyptuses were noisier than the surf. Cats' fur threw sparks when stroked. We slept in spite of the sinister atmosphere.

I woke abruptly at four to come across "a fierce glow in the sky.… God, the whole face of the mount was burning, in a long line just below the summit, and moving toward us on the wind. Fearfulness stale my rima oris. I knew doom when I saw it."

A Wood Service analysis of this disaster, which killed one person and destroyed one hundred homes, stressed the impossible challenge of combating such erratic and untamable natural forces.

Malibu fires combine about known elements of vehement, erratic and farthermost fire behavior: fire whirls, extreme rates of spread, sudden changes in speed and direction of burn spread, flashovers of unburned gases complicated by intense estrus and bulletproof fume held close to the footing.

Indeed the conflagration, which coincided with a waxing of Cold War anxieties, had unexpected political repercussions. "If the government could not defeat wildfires in the Santa Monicas," critics asked, "how would it deal with possible nuclear holocausts?" Accordingly the Eisenhower assistants acknowledged the Malibu blaze equally "the offset major fire disaster of national scope," and Congress—more concerned with the credibility of a vast civil defense force establishment than with the tragedy of local homeowners—debated how to provide "consummate fire prevention and protection in Southern California." (Large Malibu fires, moreover, would later on be used by researchers to model the behavior of nuclear firestorms.)

Co-ordinate to fire historian Stephen Pyne, the Malibu bonfire also marked the transition from the traditional forest burn trouble to a "new burn down regime" characterized by the "lethal mixture of homeowners and brush." This bogus borderland of chaparral and suburb magnified the natural fire danger while creating new perils for firefighters who now had to defend thousands of private structures as well equally battle the fire front itself. "Whereas it was oft remarked that chaparral, especially that composed largely of chamise, is a fire-climax community, it is now joked that the same is true of the Southern California mount suburb."

Ultimately the 1956 fire—followed by two blazes, one calendar month apart, in 1958–59 that severely burned eight firefighters and destroyed another hundred homes—proved the beginning of the end for bohemian Malibu. A perverse law of the new fire regime was that fire now stimulated both development and upwardly social succession. Past declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims revenue enhancement relief equally well as preferential low-involvement loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and fifty-fifty more sectional scale as land utilise regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to adjust burn down "victims." As a result, renters and minor homeowners were displaced from areas like Wide Beach, Paradise Cove, and Point Dume past wealthy pyrophiles encouraged past artificially cheap burn down insurance, socialized disaster relief, and an expansive public commitment to "defend Malibu."

By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offer blaze victims revenue enhancement relief as well every bit preferential depression-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs.

In the absence of fire-hazard zoning of the sort that Olmsted had earlier advocated, the merely constraint on development was the express supply of water for firefighting and domestic consumption. The completion of a torso water line, connecting Malibu to Metropolitan Water District reservoirs, was the signal for a new land rush. The canton'southward Regional Planning Commission promptly endorsed developers' wildest fantasies by authorizing a staggering 1,400 percent expansion of the Malibu population over the next generation: from 7,983 residents in 1960 to a projected 117,000 in 1980. Although the California coastal acts of 1972 and 1976, under the populist slogan "Don't Lock Up the Beach!" eventually slowed this existent estate juggernaut (besides equally squelching such nightmarish proposals as a Corral Canyon nuclear power establish and an eight-lane motorway through Malibu Canyon), the urbanization of the Malibu coast—Los Angeles'due south "backyard Big Sur"—was a fait accompli.

All the same, even as they were opening the floodgates to destructive overdevelopment, county and state officials were also turning downwards every opportunity to aggrandize public beach frontage (a miserable 22 percentage of the total in 1969). Nor did they show whatever interest in creating a public land trust in the mountains, which were at present entirely nether private buying, right downwards to the streambeds. Consequently, about of Malibu remained as inaccessible to the full general public as it had been in the Rindge era. (For people of color, moreover, it was absolutely off-limits.) Equally historians of the coastal access battle put it: "The seven meg people inside an hour'southward drive of Malibu got Beach Boys music and surfer movies, but the twenty m residents kept the beach."

Returning for a final expect, UCLA librarian Powell bitterly decried the aristocratization of his honey coast:

In a feverish buying and selling of land, the coast has go utterly transformed and unrecognizable. Each succeeding house, bigger and grander, takes the view of its neighbors in a kind of unbridled competition.… Once lost, paradise can never exist regained.… Developers accept bulldozed the Santa Monicas across recovery.

The Malibu nouveaux riches built higher and college in the mountain chamise with scant regard for the inevitable fiery consequences. The side by side firestorm, in late September 1970, coupled perfect fire atmospheric condition (drought conditions, 100-degree estrus, iii per centum humidity, and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana current of air) with a bumper crop of flammable woods-frame houses. According to firefighters, the popular cedar milkshake roofs "popped like popcorn" as a 20-mile wall of flames roared across the ridgeline of the Santa Monicas toward the ocean. With the asphalt on the Pacific Declension Highway ablaze and all escape routes cut off, terrified residents of the famed Malibu Colony took refuge in the nearby lagoon. Firebrands barbarous similar hellish rain on the beach, and day became dark under the gigantic smoke pall. Coalescing with another blaze in the San Fernando Valley, this greatest of twentieth-century Malibu firestorms ultimately took 10 lives and charred 403 homes, including a ranch owned by and then-governor Ronald Reagan.

Furious property owners—ignorant of the truthful residuum of power between fire suppression and chaparral environmental—denounced local government for failing to save their homes and demanded new, expensive technological "fixes" for Malibu's wildfire problems. "Elected officials, acutely sensitive to Malibu'southward national prominence in political fund-raising, were quick to oblige. A celebrated example occurred in the tardily 1970s when the Malibu Colony was being pounded past the heaviest surf in a quarter-century. Larry Hagman, Dallas's J. R. Ewing, is reported to have told Jerry Dark-brown, the governor of California: "Jerry, practice something. Goddammit, we're in real problem. Go your ass downwardly hither!" In brusque gild, Malibu was alleged a disaster area and National Guardsmen were helping sandbag Hagman's—and sometimes Chocolate-brown date Linda Ronstadt's—homes.

Meanwhile, developers—racing to stay ahead of proposed "tiresome growth" littoral legislation—redoubled their subdivision efforts. The subsequent boom only provided more fuel for the 3 successive "Halloween" fires that consumed homes in October 1978, 1982, and 1985. The start two blazes both began in Agoura and roughly followed the route of the 1956 fire through Trancas Coulee, while the third repeated the itinerary of the 1930 Decker Canyon conflagration.

The 1978 fire, which consumed one thousand thousand-dollar homes in the Broad Beach expanse (where Powell had lived in the more than humble 1950s), as well ready a new speed record: the fire crossed xiii miles of very rugged terrain in less than two hours (the 1970 fire had taken twice the time). One eyewitness described how the rampaging burn front end "turned thousands of wild rabbits into balls of flaming fur that darted insanely about, only to start new fires at the spots where they barbarous." The surviving beasts—domestic pets and wild animals alike—"mingled in chaos with human being evacuees along the beach at Bespeak Dume while oblivious surfers rode the waves." Traumatized Malibu residents, as well battered by disastrous floods and landslides in 1978 and 1980, could be forgiven for imagining that nature was getting angrier at them."

* * *

A Brief Postscript:

When most of united states build or buy a abode, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is burn down. Fire that revisits the littoral mountains several times a decade. In the past sixty years, x of these frequent events have turned into all-consuming firestorms. The latest conflagration, the Woolsey Burn, has incinerated 1,500 homes and killed at least three people. It started in dry grasslands simply due south of Simi Valley, the site of the notorious trial of Rodney King's assailants, then crossed a expressway to ignite dense coastal sage vegetation on the northern flank of the Santa Monica Mountains. The range's deep canyons, perfectly aligned with the seasonal Santa Ana Winds, over again as bellows, accelerating the fire's rush to the coast where it burned beach homes. The large number of residences lost attests not only to the ferocity of the conflagration but as well to the amount of new structure since the 1993 firestorm.

Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills? Considering of a perverse fact: subsequently every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can't be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed. Thus the recently incorporated City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles responded to the 1993 disaster with aggressive regulations about brush clearance and fire-resistant roof materials. Creating 'defensible infinite' became the new mantra, and it was soon echoed across California in the aftermath of other slap-up fires, such as those that swept San Diego County in 2003 and 2007, burning 4,500 homes and killing 30 people. Then instead of a long-overdue debate about the wisdom of rebuilding and the need to preclude further construction in areas of extreme natural fire danger, public attention was diverted into a discussion of the all-time methods for clearing vegetation (rototillers or goats?) and making homes fire-resistant. And if edge suburbs and backcountry subdivisions, in fact, could be fire-proofed, then why not add more than? Since 1993. almost half of California's new homes have been congenital in fire take a chance areas. Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, 'however it burns.' In the terminal eighteen months 20,000 homes and perchance a one,000 lives have been lost in one super-fire after another.

When about of us build or buy a abode, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is burn.

Such fires are both old and new. Two different causalities are involved. First vegetation and topography, annually orchestrated by our dry hurricanes, ascertain persistent fire patterns and frequencies. Without human intervention, however, lots of pocket-size fires ignited by late summer lightning create an intricate patchwork of vegetation of unlike ages and combustibility. The one-hundred-thousand-acre firestorms that we now experience annually did occur occasionally in the aftermath of epic droughts, merely in a 'natural' burn regime they were rare. Fire prevention in the twentieth century, withal, nurtured large areas of chaparral and forest into old historic period, creating perfect atmospheric condition for great fires. Only as long as so many California towns were surrounded past citrus groves and agricultural country, fire even in its new, larger incarnation was usually stopped before it encountered housing. Today our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mount view lots and big trees has created burn down hazards that were once unimaginable.

Climate alter, meanwhile, is coming to California in the course of drought and farthermost summertime oestrus, along with episodes of tape torrential rain. Although scientists argue whether or not median annual precipitation averaged over decades will really reject, more than of it volition fall as pelting non as snow, a serious concern given that our water system depends on the Sierra snowpack to shop and attune the release of the water that irrigates cities and agribusiness. Moreover, rainfall is no longer an accurate predictor of burn down adventure. The wintertime of 2016-17 was the wettest in the history of Northern California, and spring brought the nigh glorious wildflower display in generations. Just July was torrid and coastal temperatures, commonly in the 70s, broke 100°F for a week. The greenery of spring was punctually baked into a bumper crop of brown fire-starter. When the winds began to blow in October, first Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and so Montecito, but s of Santa Barbara, caught fire. Three thousand homes were lost and several dozen people, mostly elderly and unaware of the approaching menace, died. But nature in California saves one last act and when the heavens opened up on Montecito'southward bare burnt hills in January another 25 people disappeared in the fast-moving debris flows. This same encore awaits Malibu and the Sierra foothills over the next few months.

Finally, a word or ii about Malibu and Paradise. The two cities share three common characteristics: both are very white (the Black population of Malibu is one.5%; Paradise, 0.1%), relatively geriatric (double the state's median percent of over-65s), and inhabit notorious fire corridors.

Indeed the Paradise area plays in the same elite fire league equally Malibu with six massive blazes since 1950, including back-to-back fires in the summer of 2008 that necessitated evacuations that gridlocked Paradise'due south roads ─ the shape of chaos to come up. But otherwise the cities are avatars of two completely different Californias. Home values in Paradise are one-half of the state'south median and a tenth of Malibu'south ─ making it one of the last affordable places in the state. Household income in Paradise is $thirteen,000 below the state median; Malibu's $60,000 above. Paradise likewise has a unique stardom: near xx percent of its under-65 population is enumerated past the last Census as disabled. This boggling proportion of elderly, ill and disabled people undoubtedly contributed to the huge, comfortless death toll. Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire: those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who tin't afford to live anywhere else.

***

Excerpted from Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disasterpast Mike Davis. ©1998 Mike Davis Published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. Excerpted with permission.