Zero per cent contained. In layperson’s terms, that means “out of control and burning at will”. It’s a common designation for a wildfire – in the wild. But when a fire like this enters an urban area such as Los Angeles County, the most highly populated metropolitan area in the US, it becomes an exploding bomb, and this one has been detonating since last Tuesday.
By now, the energy release from this wind-driven, drought-fuelled firestorm turned urban conflagration is into the megatons, and the nuclear-scale destruction is there for all to see: block after block and neighbourhood after neighbourhood levelled – roughly 12,000 structures destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, 55 sq miles of city and mountain burnt, nearly 200,000 residents evacuated – so far. There is more to come.
The death toll has risen above 10 but, given the hurricane-force winds, the ignescent blizzards of flying embers, the frantic just-the-clothes-on-our backs evacuations, the gridlock, the wholesale terror, and the massive scale of this already historic event, such low fatalities are a kind of miracle.
Watching the news, as I am in Orange County, 50 miles south of the city, you might think these were the only fires burning when, in fact, they are a regional flare-up in a much larger planetary event.
We call ourselves humans, Homo sapiens (wise man), but ours is a fire-powered species, so much so that Homo flagrans – burning man – might suit us better.
Fire has been our constant, if unreliable, companion since long before we found our way out of Africa: its spritely charisma and night-cancelling, animal-intimidating power was instrumental, not only to our ancestors’ survival, but to our evolution – to us becoming us.
So integral has fire become to our daily activities, and to our identities, that we scarcely notice it any more. Almost invisibly now, its superhuman potency enables and amplifies virtually everything we do: cooking our food, heating our homes, powering our energy grids, and driving us – in our teeming billions – through the world at lethal speeds by land, sea and air.
Fire, represented by its avatars, coal, oil and gas, is our superpower, pure and simple, and we can almost be forgiven for believing that we’ve mastered it. But we glossed over a crucial detail: we aren’t the only ones being supercharged. Due to the colossal scale on which our fire-powered civilisation now operates – including 50,000 seagoing ships, 30,000 jet planes, and approaching 2bn motor vehicles, powered by 100m barrels of oil every day – we have also supercharged the atmosphere.
Our atmosphere is a weather engine, and it is energised by heat. Thanks to the historic amounts of CO2 and methane generated by emissions from the fires we ignite every day, we have empowered fire much as it has empowered us, enabling it to burn hotter, faster, longer and more broadly across any environment containing hydrocarbons (a steadily broadening menu that now includes the margins of Greenland, and which could, in our lifetimes, include Antarctica).
All that extra energy released by our combustive activities (talk about 0% containment) causes normal weather events – such as wildfires in southern California – to metastasise into full-blown catastrophes that violate natural boundaries of season, geography and historic norms. The LA fires, as shocking as their damage is to behold, and as traumatising as they are for those affected by them, are just one manifestation of the atmospheric monster that fossil fuel emissions have loosed upon the world.
It may sound cruel to say this, but you could see this fire coming a decade away, and many did. So, we need to be frank here: climate science ain’t rocket science. If you can read a calendar and a thermometer, and you have noticed how laundry dries more quickly on hot, dry, windy days, you are well on your way to being able to predict the likelihood of wildfire. I am in southern California by sheer coincidence, visiting family, but the first thing I thought when I got down here was: “It’s January, and boy, those hills look dry – dry enough to burn.”
Iwas not aware there hadn’t been rain in eight months, or that this current drought follows the hottest summer in LA’s history, but you can see it, and you can feel it: the region is a tinderbox. All of SoCal could burn as viciously as LA is burning right now, as viciously as Valparaíso, Chile and the Texas panhandle burned last spring, or Lahaina in Hawaii did in 2023, or Australia in 2020, or Paradise and Redding, California in 2018, or Santa Rosa, California in 2017, or Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016. These fires are only the beginning of a historic reckoning that starts with the question: are fossil fuels liberating us or holding us hostage? There is a clear answer to this, and it can be found in the ledgers of petroleum and automobile companies, and with the investors, banks, governments, insurance companies, lobbyists, churches and media outlets that enable them.
As I write, late on Friday night, the several major fires burning in and around Los Angeles are still spreading and multiplying at will, their containment still near 0%. More strong Santa Ana winds are expected in the coming days, and there’s no relief in sight.
The same goes for survivors’ grief and rage and PTSD, injuries that may take lifetimes to contain, thousands upon thousands of them.
John Vaillant is the author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
