Fires

New Yorker on L.A. burning

Staff writer Susan Orlean has been in Los Angeles some of the summer and offers a blog entry on The New Yorker website about the week of fires. Excerpt:

All the blessings and plagues exist side by side in Los Angeles. The twinkling ocean, the looming mountains, the spill of desert, the bounty of vegetation, and the creased and verdant hills are hereā€”and so are the floods and the mudslides and the earthquakes and the wildfires. Southern California seems constantly pitched back and forth between heaven and hell. This week, hell won out.

She sends readers to a reprise of John McPhee's great 1988 series titled "Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains." Read that to understand much about the physical and social topography of Southern California, and to see why some writers became writers in the first place.


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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