The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts , across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.
Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.
The fires were, at their worst, unfightable . But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time…