What happens when wildland fire reaches the city?
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When they got news of the fires in Los Angeles last week, Herb Wilson and his wife cut their vacation short, booked an early flight home. Except home wasn't there anymore. Can you tell me about what you found at your house when you came back? Well, when we got back, the house was...

I mean, it's pretty much burnt to the ground. Herb Wilson lives in Altadena. That is where KQED's Beth LaBerge met up with him. She's the other voice you heard there. Wilson's house was one of an estimated 12,000 structures damaged or destroyed in the fires. We're just looking down the block at all the devastation and all the houses on the block are gone.

with the exception of one. Altadena is in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of downtown. It's a suburb, and it feels like one. I've been here 20 years, and I love it here. I mean, I love the people.

It's a quiet neighborhood. If you want to get excitement or something, you just have to drive five, six miles away. But up here, this is a family neighborhood. In those 20 years that Wilson has lived in Altadena, wildfires in California have changed. They are bigger, more destructive, a year-round threat. And like we've seen over the past week, sometimes several strike simultaneously. Firefighters couldn't save every neighborhood. Wilson said that's been hard to accept.

So that's some of the disappointment and anger with my wife because she thinks they just let it go. And I told her, you know, you got a city burning and sometimes they have to make decisions and they can only do so much. Michelle Steinberg at the National Fire Protection Association says these fires are just too fast. California has some of the largest numbers and best trained firefighters probably in the world.

Even with that, there simply are not enough people and resources to attack all these fires simultaneously and to deal with the fact that the wind is pushing them that fast. That is the reality. And the fires aren't just moving fast, they are moving far. Jamie Woolner lives in a part of Altadena near its border with Pasadena.

Far enough from the wild lands at the French, he thought. I never imagined that the fire would get all the way over there. So even as I'm sleeping and I'm listening to the evacuation loudspeaker blaring, I'm like, oh, they're being overly, overly cautious here. But I was dead wrong when I woke up.

He's talking here with member station KCRW in Los Angeles.

I'm lucky that I didn't just burn up alive. Wollner co-owns a restaurant in Altadena, Pizza of Venice. He said he drove up to see if it was still standing. It was kind of a horrific sight. The Masonic Lodge across the street was totally on fire. All the homes behind the restaurant were totally on fire. And the restaurant was just starting to catch fire.

He thought about using a hose, trying to fight the fire, but this fire was just too powerful. I helped put out a fire next to my grandparents house during the Woolsey fire in Malibu. And the level of danger here just seemed orders of magnitude higher. Like I just, I knew I couldn't do anything about it. So I just had to leave.

Consider this, wildfire carved into greater Los Angeles last week in a way no one has seen before. That may force changes to how the city prepares and to how its residents live. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelley.

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It's Consider This from NPR. Wildfire is the word we tend to use when we talk about what Los Angeles has been dealing with the past week. But Lori Moore Merrill, the U.S. Fire Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, she used a different word when she spoke to NPR this morning. These are conflagrations. These are not wildland fires with trees burning. These are structure-to-structure fire spread.

Conflagrations. Well, they may have started at the suburban fringe. They did not stay there. Stephen Pine is a fire historian and an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. I asked him how a wildland fire differs from an urban fire. Basically, what we're seeing is you begin getting houses ignited. Most of the houses on the fringes will ignite by embers.

And if there are high winds, if it's the middle of the night, if there are too many, it can quickly overwhelm the capabilities to suppress those fires. And then you get a transition into an urban conflagration. It's eerie to look at many of the photos and see how much of the vegetation is.

And the houses are vaporized. You're talking about some of the photos we've seen where the house is just a smoking ruin, but there's a perfectly green bush sitting beside it. Yeah, next to it. So these are not being propagated by the vegetation. Yeah. But it is essentially the energy released by the combustible house that is carrying the fire to the next one. So...

Everything in a city we build, so we can in principle control all of that. Yeah, there would seem to be some advantages to trying to control a fire in the city. The urban infrastructure, there are fire hydrants. It's curious because during the settlement period, the U.S., our cities, our major cities burned about as often as the surrounding countryside because they were made of the same materials. There were lots of ignitions around. Open fire was used everywhere.

But we broke that cycle in the early 20th century, I think San Francisco, 1906 after the earthquake. And then we really didn't have urban conflagrations until across the bay in 1991 when Oakland burned. And that sort of inaugurated a new era of

And I look at it, it's like watching polio return. I mean, we solved this problem. We understood what it took to prevent cities from burning, building codes, fire codes, material standards, all of those things. And now...

Now it's coming back. So let's apply all this to a city like, for example, L.A. What should we do to prepare? You can certainly harden houses against the kind of ember storms. I think the issue is going to be what we've got decades, if not a century, of building without this kind of problem in mind. And we're not going to be able to retrofit all of it immediately.

And so I think the big question is how do you rebuild? And the instinct is always to build back as quickly as possible, probably as much like it was as possible so people don't feel as dislocated. But if you do that, then you're just recreating the same problem. That's fascinating. We've just heard from California Governor Gavin Newsom weighing in along those lines saying we are going to try to make it as easy as possible for people to rebuild. Well –

Of course. I mean, what's he going to say? But if you really are interested in solving the longer term problem, the way you control fire is by controlling the landscape. And that doesn't mean you nuke it. It doesn't mean you clear cut it. It doesn't mean you pave it. It means you organize that landscape in ways that allow you to survive fire.

So if you were rebuilding L.A., how would you do that? Well, I can give you suggestions how I would do it, and I can guarantee that nobody's going to accept them. You're talking about a lot of people, and you're telling them they're going to have to change where and how they live. And in some ways, you know, you can model fire as a contagion.

So how would you deal, say, with COVID or the flu? Well, you wear masks to prevent aerial transmission. That's like hardening houses against embers. And then you clear your vegetation around the house a short amount. Well, that's social distancing. And then you have to get the whole group to do it. Otherwise, your neighbor's house is going to irradiate yours, even if you've done all the work.

So this is suddenly it's looking very complicated. You're heading me toward a final question, which is just the long view on this. I know you've thought about fire for a long time. You were a wildland firefighter yourself back in the 60s and 70s, right? Yep. Well, fire is not just a chemical process. It's also a relationship. You know, fire has been our constant companion as a species. So in that sense, I'm optimistic. But right now we've made our best friend our worst enemy.

And that is going to require a lot of change in thinking and understanding. And I want to believe we can do it. I've got grandkids, and I want a future for them. But I have to say the record has not been all that hopeful. Fire historian Steve Pine is emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Thank you. Well, thank you.

This episode was produced by Connor Donovan. Additional reporting by Lauren Sommer. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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