Pacific Palisades fire from a flight leaving LAX. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

There’s nothing so terrifying as a nightmare come to life. The Santa Ana winds have haunted the dreams of southern Angelinos for decades. Like the Chinooks of the Rockies and the Mistrals of the Rhone Valley, these winds play on the mind. They tell you they’re coming for you. They whisper the dangers they bring with them. Van Gogh believed the mistral inflamed his madness. Another kind of madness seems to be inflicting LA, the madness of boundless consumption.

Some listen to the warnings of the wind. Some don’t. Those who listen are driven mad by those who don’t. In the chaparrals of southern California, the warning of the Santa Anas has always been: fire. Fires that race down hillsides and canyons faster than any Tesla can drive. Fires that leap roads, highways, malls. Fires that ride on the wind.

This is not new. The Santa Ana winds come with the territory–that territory being the desert basins behind the coastal mountains and canyons. They are katabatic winds that rush downhill, dry and fierce, as they pour through the Cajon, San Gorgonio, and Soledad passes. Geography makes them. Climate change and a rapacious real estate industry that has remained deaf to their message have turned them into killers.

Historically, the Santa Anas (ponder the resonance of that name in our time of mass xenophobia) are autumn winds, warm winds that carry the dust of the Mojave. Now, Santa Anas can erupt any time of year. That’s climate change, for you. Yet a threat that is omnipresent often seems somehow less ominous, making it more likely to catch you off guard.

Even so, LA wasn’t entirely taken by surprise this week. They had two days to get ready. The Santa Anas create the conditions for catastrophic fires on their own. They are fire-making weather events that dry out already parched landscapes, lowering the humidity and raising the temperature as they blow through.

On November 13, 50-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds whipped up a bonfire started by college students into an inferno that spread across neighborhoods in Montecito and Santa Barbara. The Tea Fire burned for three days, destroying 210 homes. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described the charred landscape as “looking like Hell.”

The next day, the still-roaring winds, gusting to 80—mph, supercharged a fire in the Santa Clarita Valley that ravaged the town of Sylmar. The Sayre fire burned for a week and destroyed more than 600 buildings, including 480 mobile homes.

We don’t know how this week’s fires originated—cigarette, campfire, truck spark, downed power line, or arson. But the Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica, and San Gabriel Mountains were already primed to burn. Chapparal is born in fire and thrives in it. In their natural state, the chappal landscapes of southern California experience low-intensity fires once every 20 to 50 years.

After a couple of relatively wet years, the southern California coast has now flipped back into drought conditions. It hasn’t experienced any measurable rainfall in eight months. Climate change has made southern California drier, increasing the frequency and intensity of the region’s natural fire regime. Even fully functioning fire hydrants will never replace the amount of moisture climate change has stolen from the ecosystem.

They talk about the “urban-wildland” interface. In So Cal, that interface is under relentless siege as new luxury homes, condos, and “mixed-use” buildings creep inexorably up the hillsides and canyons, undeterred by the rugged geography, faultlines, or flammability. The boundaries between the natural and the manufactured have been shredded, both on the ground and in the atmosphere. The buffer zones are gone and now nothing is standing between you and the wind.

Yes, you were warned. But no number of red flags could really fortify you for what was coming; no amount of preparation at this late stage could save you from hundred-mile-per-hour winds from a hurricane of fire.

Even palaces burn.

Pacific Palisades fire. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

You don’t have to be versed in Mike Davis’s The Ecology of Fear to understand that the people who always pay the........

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