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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Michael Surely you have heard in the news about the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles in January. What you might not know is that we were on vacation there just three days before. We had rented a place in Venice Beach over New Year's and were doing our typical L.A. activities, like dining out, biking along the beach to Santa Monica, and I got to surf. After the waves at Manhattan Beach were too high for me one day, we drove up to just before Malibu to Will Rogers Park, and I paddled out at the pier and caught a few waves. We had no idea that just three days later, the entire area, including my surf beach, would burn down!
And, a few days earlier, on an extremely sunny, almost hot day (in January), we had set out on a hiking trail that led up into the hills through Corral Canyon near Malibu. We marveled at the area, which consisted only of burnt bushes, as a wildfire had raged there several months before.
The red fire retardant that the fire department had sprayed over the area with airplanes to control the flames was still sticking to the withered and scorched plants along the trail. It was an eerie scenario, and we said to ourselves, "No wonder a fire spreads explosively here; those dried-out bushes burn like tinder!" And we had no idea that three days later, just a few hills away, it would actually catch fire, and catastrophically so!
This time, the wildfires destroyed entire towns, like Palisades and vast residential areas along the coast. Even the beach houses along the Pacific Coast Highway now lie in ruins. Wildfires in California are notoriously not uncommon, but the reason it turned into a century catastrophe this time, leaving tens of thousands homeless and transforming the area into a lunar landscape for decades, is the misguided policies of the county. For decades, forestry management was neglected, and funding for the local fire department was cut. Now, tens of thousands of affected people are left uprooted without homes and will have to deal with insurance and insane bureaucratic requirements for rebuilding for years, before they can live there again.
We are certainly glad that we escaped unscathed ahead of time. As part of the sudden evacuation measures, the Pacific Coast Highway, where we were already stuck in traffic during normal times, turned into a death trap, and many people simply abandoned their cars and fled on foot. Television news later reported how bulldozers had pushed the abandoned vehicles off the highway to make room. That would have been a mess for us, my dear!
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