Fire Update
Not much to joke about, but since you asked...
I want to personally thank all of you who DM’d me over the past 24 hours to ask if I’m okay, if I’m in the path of the horrific Palisades fire that’s torched over 2,000 buildings (homes, schools, businesses) and killed at least two (five if you count a nearby offshoot fire…the structural toll of all the fires combined is 5,300).
Beverly Hills may look close to Pacific Palisades on a map, but owing to the county’s expansive size, I’m a safe distance away. I did, however, go almost 24 hours without power, the longest I’ve ever spent without electricity since the 1994 quake. I’m not next-door to the fire, but I was affected by the mass-outage that left over 400,000 Westsiders without power over the past day/night.
This is not a “political” disaster, a “green city” leaving its citizens vulnerable to a simple storm. This is an uncommon disaster. Prior to Tuesday, it was widely forecast that we were about to get a windstorm of atypical magnitude. And that’s what we got. Tuesday night sitting in the blackness I was scared shitless that my trees were going to fall and level my house, with me in it. I’m assuming this is what it feels like to be in a hurricane. Except there was no rain; just THE heaviest, most merciless winds I’d ever encountered in my life. At one point I felt as though my bedroom windows were going to shatter.
It was, as I said, uncommon. Santa Ana winds are part and parcel of L.A. life. These winds were unique.
And we’d all been warned. We knew that these hideous winds were coming. Plus, we’ve had a two-year dry period following record rains from 2016 to 2022 (L.A. rain is cyclical — years of rain followed by years of dry). So we knew the wooded areas are tinderboxes right now. And yet with all the warnings, we still got the worst fire in the county’s history, one with no sign of containment.
How’d it start? We don’t know yet. There are typically four reasons a California wildfire starts: lightning strike, ineptitude (idiot decides to have a barbeque despite warnings), malice (pyro does it for kicks or LULZ), or downed power line.
We don’t yet know the cause, and there’s no sense in speculating. But it IS frustrating because we had so much advanced warning, yet the worst case scenario played out anyway.
There’s an old tale, popularized by W. Somerset Maugham but with roots in ancient times, called “Appointment in Samarra.” I’ll summarize it. A wealthy dude sends his servant to the marketplace to buy groceries. While picking out vegetables, the servant turns around to see the Grim Reaper. The Reaper lets out a terrible shriek, frightening the servant, who flees the marketplace. Upon returning to his master’s house, the servant wails, “master, master, I was at the market and ran into Death himself. He looked at me and let out the foulest of screams. I know he means to harm me. Please help!”
The master replies, “what can I do?”
The servant answers, “I must hide from the Reaper’s deadly hands. There are abandoned caves in Samarra. Few know of their existence. They are many miles away, but if I ride nonstop I know I can get there by nightfall. No one will find me there.”
Sympathetic to his servant’s situation, the master says, “You have served me well. You may take my fastest horse. Ride quickly, and get to those caves. And God be with you.”
After the servant rides off, the master starts to get pissed at losing his best servant and his fastest horse. He goes to the marketplace where Death is still hanging out, picking through produce because apparently he’s a fastidious douche. The master marches up to the Reaper and confronts him.
“What the hell, Death? Why’d you scare off my best servant?”
To which the Reaper replies, “I’m truly sorry, sir. When I saw your servant here at the marketplace, my shriek was not one of terror, but surprise. I couldn’t imagine how he could possibly be here, as I have a meeting with him tonight many miles away at some abandoned caves in Samarra.”
That’s the basic tale, but shorn of Maugham’s gratuitous dick references.
The servant, in trying to flee his fate, merely helped bring it about. In trying to escape death, he ended up blindly riding straight toward it. The story has been used over the years to illustrate how “we cannot escape our fate.”
No matter how hard L.A. tried with warnings and awareness of the windstorm, we rode right into our fate.
Mayor Bass, who’s very much a moderate when compared to other black female mayors (which is like saying shingles is better than ass-cancer. It is, to be sure, but…), was in Ghana as the crisis started. To be fair to her, it wasn’t a pleasure junket; she was there at Biden’s request representing the U.S. at the inauguration of Ghana’s new president…because of course Ghana’s our strongest ally and top exporter of AIDS and cholera (Trump’s TARIFFS will fix that!). It is kinda funny that Bass found herself being lambasted in the press for being absent during a fire as she was in a foreign land where the locals still think fire is caused by an angry goat-god who must be appeased by flinging dung at a hyrax.
Bass: “I must return to L.A. There is a massive fire.”
Ghanaian President: “You may borrow my hyrax, but the dung must come from you.”
Bass cut $17.6 million from the LAFD budget last year, so I don’t expect this to go away as a problem for her, especially as, unlike Beverly Hills, Palisades and Malibu are blue areas that Democrats would prefer not to anger.
Meanwhile on X, Musk attempted to show video of the fiery devastation, but MAGA can only be relied upon to be one thing — retarded. Musk’s MAGA followers inundated the comments with conspiracy claims…it was DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS! It’s BIDEN trying to GRAB REAL ESTATE like in MAUI! It’s the ZIONISTS! It’s the DEEP STATE!
And my favorite, “the fact that officials were WARNING that this could happen means they CAUSED it to happen!”
That’s a standard MAGA claim about all catastrophes. Anyone who predicts it, caused it. MAGAs literally seek to penalize intelligent prognostication. If you’re a meteorologist who tries to save lives by warning people of an incoming windstorm, that’s PROOF you CAUSED the storm, for how else could you have known it was coming?
To retards, being able to foresee events does indeed seem like magic. When you can’t understand the connection between nose picking and nose bleeding, you’re not gonna be able to comprehend weather forecasting.
Christ I hate these people. Musk’s welcome to them.
To me, the most unsettling moment of the past two days occurred Wednesday morning. I’d been up all night, no electricity, no computer, conserving my cellphone battery for the flashlight. I couldn’t write and I can’t drink — I’m currently in a sober period — so the damnable night seemed unending. My elderly neighbor spent the entire night in his car to stay warm with the heater.
Even though blackouts in West L.A. happen at best every other year (i.e., it’s uncommon, like that hellish windstorm), I do have a pathological fear of pooping in pitch blackness. It just seems so damn creepy, wiping in the dark (my favorite Springsteen song). So because I have the ability to foresee events and plan ahead — you know, that thing MAGAs see as evidence of criminality — I’ve always kept a bunch of large candles in my main bathroom, just…in…case.
And it turns out I hadn’t been scared “shitless” after all. So Tuesday night I went on a candlelight date with my own ass.
I sure do live the life.
BTW, days before leaving office Biden mandated the phasing out of natural gas-powered water heaters in favor of electric. Nice to know that in future blackouts hot water will also be unavailable. I guess Trump could reverse that policy, but he’s far more concerned with annexing Greenland.
By Wednesday morning it became clear that the food in my fridge would have to be thrown out (I had no idea how long the blackout would last, and even though the food had already been warmed and rendered inedible, you gotta toss it before it starts to stink, or your task will be much more difficult indeed).
Having eyes that are not the best even in strong light, I couldn’t start the job of emptying the fridge until there was enough natural light to assist me. But the darkness of dawn never lifted. Even by noon, the smoke and ash cover made it seem like 5am. Looking out my window, I could see the dark clouds dissipating over the coast. But inland, it was permanent nightfall.
Very disconcerting.
By 2pm much of the cover had burned off, and I bade farewell to the $41 in perishables I’d purchased only a day earlier. $41 in perfectly fine food, gone. I’m not comparing my plight to that of the thousands who lost their homes, but the reason I keep my head above water as a banned author is that I scrimp and save every penny, and it bugs me to no end when I get dinged by something that’s not my fault.
If you’ve enjoyed this first-hand account from the disaster zone, please consider buying me a beer! If I can reclaim that $41, I’ll be a happy Dave indeed.
And you’d have my gratitude (BTW, if Paypal’s more your thing, my email there is countercontempt@gmail.com).
Thank you for being not just readers, but friends.
"I was scared shitless that my trees were going to fall and level my house, with me in it. I’m assuming this is what it feels like to be in a hurricane." That's about it. My parents' house was taken out by trees, not flooding, in Katrina. Glad you made it through.
Glad to hear you are okay Dave. I looked at the map, and felt comfortable knowing your place wasn't in the current path, but with wicked winds, one never knows for sure.
This is certainly a horrific set of circumstances, a conflagration of all things bad, all at once, creating a nearly impossible task of defeating it. I do wonder about the eventual political fall-out.
Between (based on what I've read and heard) the cancelled home owner's fire coverage for insurance because of California price caps, the failure to mitigate the fuel of dead grass, brush, and trees, the defunding and DEI'ing of the fire department, the absent mayor, the problems with the water: pressure and availability, and the long standing issues with California policies that reportedly, have always made this an inevitability, PLUS, the fact the many important, wealthy, well known people have lost their homes... Does anything happen, or change, because of all of this!?
Moreover- Seriously, how many more problems does The Golden State NEED, before the residents have had enough already? It appears to be an industry leader in institutional, systemic, and inherent problems that NEVER get solved, and only ever get worse! (all while everything gets more and more expensive at the same time)
Because if this isn't an impetus for some real change out there... well, I just don't know what happens then.
Cheers!