Fires

Postcard from the California fires

Dana Goodyear has been blogging on the fires for The New Yorker and has a Talk of the Town piece in this week. Excerpt:

Southern Californians don’t like to wake up to hot weather. It’s a sign of the short and eerie autumn season that’s marked by the influence of the Santa Anas—dry winds that come from the desert, dervish through the canyons, and head for the sea. People blame the Santa Anas for their headaches and their allergies....

The defiant mood of the mountains was more muted at the beach. Scotty Brown, a local real-estate agent, stood in front of his office, at the end of Malibu Road, looking up at the ruins of the castle. “That was my listing,” he said glumly. It had been on the market for seventeen million dollars. Only the guesthouse was still standing.

Smoke in the air makes for extra-beautiful sunsets. The sky purpled to the color of a mussel shell, then turned a muzzy black. The Compton sheriff’s deputies, called in to help guard blocked roads, dined on food donated by Nobu Malibu. At nine o’clock, the thermometer read ninety-one degrees. By the next night, the Canyon Fire, as it was called, had been contained, and the command center had released a number of firefighters and support crews to points south.

She then headed for the Witch Fire down south.


More by Kevin Roderick:
Standing up to Harvey Weinstein
The Media
LA Times gets a top editor with nothing but questions
LA Observed Notes: Harvey Weinstein stripped bare
LA Observed Notes: Photos of the homeless, photos that found homes
Recent Fires stories on LA Observed:
Biggest Los Angeles brush fire was actually in 1938. And more.
Biggest maybe, but not close to the worst LA brush fire
Sand Fire grows overnight to 35,000 acres
Fire evacuations in Calabasas. Channels 4 and 7 on live
Auto junk yard burns Sunday in the Valley
Bad, bad night in Middletown (video)
Shirtless man discovers TV reporters are hot, asks for a date (video)
Glendora fire still active overnight, at 1700 acres
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