California

Matt Welch | 1.10.2025 2:56 PM

Let us first stipulate that Los Angeles city and county, as well as the entire Golden State, could have had the best governance in the history of human affairs, yet still there would have been property-destroying fires in Southern California this week.

When the National Weather Service issues a rare "Particularly Dangerous Situation" (PDS) fire warning for the counties south of the Tehachapis, as it did Monday afternoon, things just burn. The December 9, 2024, PDS warning preceded the Franklin Fire, which consumed 4,000 acres and destroyed 20 buildings around Malibu. A November 5 alert anticipated the next day's Mountain Fire in Ventura County, torching 20,000 acres and 240 structures. Similar wrath followed the only two other PDS designations before this week, in October 2020 (Blue Ridge and Silverado fires, in Orange County) and later that December (the Bond fire, also in the O.C.).

From the Chumash to Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion to Mike Davis, residents of this Biblical basin have always understood the formula: Hurricane-level Santa Ana winds extremely dry air/vegetation = brush fires. The question isn't if, it's how bad.

That's where government comes in. The entities tasked by charter to protect life and property, to organize collective action in the face of community-wide challenges, should be prepared at a foundational level for the catastrophes that have cyclically and even predictably beset this mountain-ringed land since humans first started comingling with the........

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