Under the Santa Anas

On Monday, 6 January, the National Weather Service warned Los Angeles residents of high Santa Ana winds. The Santa Anas stir in the deserts of Southern California, rush up over the mountain ranges that separate the high, dry inland regions from the coast, and then surge, hot and blustering down towards the ocean. They often come in autumn but can strike at any time, drying out the air and cloaking the city in a shroud of brown dust.

Often the Santa Anas pass without incident if not without notice. In the right conditions, though, they can be catastrophic. LA is an artificially lush environment, as densely packed with plant life as it is with people. There are the natives – scrubland plants and small trees collectively referred to as chaparral, including yarrow, manzanita, yucca – and the interlopers, such as the eucalyptus, pepper and palm trees brought to the area by its colonisers. There is pink bougainvillea, purple sage and sprawling rosemary. In the spring, there are small orange poppies along the roadside, alone or in bunches, and huge Matilija poppies that resemble fried eggs, their white petals flayed open around bright yellow stamens.

All this beauty is tinder. The Santa Anas that arrived on 7 January blew into LA at 85 miles per hour, across bone-dry hills and brown canyons, into a city whose rainy season should have begun in December. Los Angeles has recorded barely one-tenth of an inch of rain since last May. The winds whipped up fires on both sides of the city, to the west in the coastal neighbourhoods of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu and to the east in Pasadena and Altadena, at the southern edge of Angeles National Forest. By 9 January, 29,000 acres of Los Angeles had burned, twice the area of Manhattan. The figure is now more than 37,000 acres.

There seemed to be no time at all between the high-wind warnings and total destruction. Last Tuesday morning I taught my first class of the winter term. After about an hour, a student abruptly left the room; I later learned he had received an automated text message ordering him to evacuate his home. Driving back to my own house, I could see a large plume of smoke rising from the west in the rearview mirror, but that in itself wasn’t exceptional: wildfires are common in LA and the winds were high. I hoped it wouldn’t get much worse.

That night, I bundled my children into my bedroom and threw a mattress for myself onto the floor. My eight-year-old daughter asked if I was worried about a tree falling on the house. ‘No,’ I lied, ‘I’m worried that we’ll lose power and your nightlight will go off.’ The winds shook the shutters open and I hurried to secure them. With the kids asleep I looked at the news on my phone. There was a fire in Eaton Canyon, above Altadena. ‘Seeing there’s a fire near you,’ I texted a friend, ‘You OK? Want to come here?’ ‘We’re at a hotel,’ she said, ‘Brought passports and nothing else.’ I texted another friend: ‘Seeing the fire in Altadena, thinking of you.’ ‘Evacuated,’ came the reply. ‘Praying.’

By morning, the second friend’s house was gone, along with the coffee shop where I last saw her. The other friend’s house was fine but surrounded by ruin, each long city block a tunnel of ash and twisted metal. Her youngest son’s preschool had disappeared.

By 8 January the air in my neighbourhood was acrid and thick, the sky pasted over by clouds the colour of pencil lead. The sun rose behind them, huge and red and grim. I dragged air purifiers out of the closet and set them up. My daughter burrowed under a blanket. My son, nearly four, sulked when I told him there would be no school that day. My ex-husband and I agreed that he would take the children south to his brother’s in San Diego, where the air was still clean. I wore a KN95 mask to take out the trash then lay down on my bed, glued to Watch Duty, an app that shows where the fires are and which direction the winds are blowing. It tells people to evacuate before the officials do.

Christopher Isherwood called Los Angeles ‘perhaps the ugliest city on earth’. People from New York, like me, are meant to loathe it. But to me it is the most beautiful city in the world. It is a city of working people and it feels like one. Apart from a few sealed-off enclaves such as Bel Air or Hidden Valley, even the toniest areas of LA have a large share of middle-class or low-income residents, although the rising cost of living and the unhinged real estate market are driving more and more people beyond the city limits. Ben Affleck evacuated his home in Pacific Palisades on Wednesday but so did the retirees, surfers and young families living in Palisades Bowl, a mobile home community, where units cost $1200 a month. The Bowl was obliterated.

Mike Davis warned in Ecology of Fear (1998) that ‘megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts.’ Joan Didion, in Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1969), wrote that ‘Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse’, a fitting accompaniment to ‘the quality of life in Los Angeles … its impermanence, its unreliability’. Octavia Butler, born in Pasadena in 1947, in her 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, describes enormous wildfires erupting in Los Angeles on 1 February 2025, the fatal byproduct of climate change and government corruption.

‘Apocalypse’ means revelation, and we feel there must be something to see here, some disclosure in the nightmare. Last year the mayor, Karen Bass, increased the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget by $125.9 million (roughly 7 per cent) while proposing a $23 million cut to the Fire Department. The mayor’s office has pushed back on this accounting, claiming that the LAFD’s operating funds have actually increased, but last month the fire chief, Kristin Crowley, declared that the budget cuts have ‘severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for and respond to large-scale emergencies’. In last November’s election, a majority of California voters declined to outlaw forced labour among incarcerated people, who make up around 30 per cent of California’s firefighters and are paid between $5.80 and $10.24 per day. At least eight hundred of them are now up against LA’s infernos. What the state will not pay to provide it will extract through coercion.

But if we need the language of apocalypse we also need a language that holds the ordinary life of our city. In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, the architect and urban planner John Chase describes LA as a city that follows no design or aesthetic ambition but insolently unspools from the desires of its people. LA has no Haussmann or Frederick Law Olmsted; it has Angelenos, and in the ‘mad and wonderful’ architecture of the city, with its stucco box houses alongside its faux Swiss chalets, its Tudor cottages, bungalows, faded pink apartment complexes and ancient auto repair shops, glittering strip malls and shabby hotels, there is a romantic stubbornness, at once dogged and extravagant, tender and brash. While the LAPD threatens to arrest non-existent looters and to charge anyone who remains in an evacuation zone with a misdemeanour, community organisers, activists and ordinary residents have sprung into action, setting up donation centres at churches, workers’ halls, schools, restaurants and music venues. This is a generous place. A staunch place.

‘Finally good news,’ the comedian Sammy Obeid tweeted on X. ‘Biden just approved an $8 billion package to fight the wildfires in California … Oh wait that was for Israel to fight hospitals, sorry.’ On Thursday, while LA burned, presidents gathered in Washington, DC, for the funeral of Jimmy Carter. It was a convivial affair. Sitting in a church pew behind the waxy Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Donald Trump grinned at each other and cracked wise, like two stoned schoolboys.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a four-year-old girl asked her mother why it was snowing. The ash landed on her hair and turned their black car white. A fawn stumbled out of the smoke, and a horse ran back into it to nudge two other horses onward, faster. The Reel Inn, a seafood shack nestled against the Pacific Coast Highway, was reduced to charred wood and dirt. ‘If anyone needs temporary storage,’ an Instagram post said, ‘please DM Caveman Vintage Music.’ A man and his son, who had cerebral palsy, died while waiting for an ambulance. The remains of Victor Shaw, aged 66, were found in Altadena, in the house he shared with his sister. He was still clutching a hose.