Exploring the fiery breath of the Santa Ana winds, their role in shaping California’s wildfires, and their haunting imprint on the collective psyche—from literary musings to real-life chaos.

Altered like everyone by the devastation brought to people’s homes and iconic places that belong to pop culture and, hence, to people all over the world, I set to explain in the last few weeks to my relatives in Spain what I read about the Santa Ana winds, the Diablo winds, and how they can turn things dire quickly.

Then there are the articles, which show the raw impact of the fires, including aerial photos of war-zone-like neighborhoods where barely a few chimneys stand, and the rest are gone. There is also self-righteous commentary by journalists asking experts, speculating, or trying to find the most damaging angle for the editorial interests of their leaning or place of publication.

Conspiracy theorists already feed on the disaster and accommodate it to their theories —as long as the engagement is guaranteed, which will depend on the pain inflicted by the fires in places like the unincorporated town of Altadena, on the slopes of the scorched Eaton Canyon.

Meanwhile, Mexican firefighters, part of the delegation sent by their country, help extinguish hot spots above Topanga canyon. So much for the popular blame theory: if it’s bad, it comes from south of the border.

Facing a new reality

Joe Mathews, a journalist from Pasadena, wrote a chronicle walking through the foothill town a few minutes north, reflecting on the material things lost, but also the part of collective memory erased from the place:

“The higher I ascended the mountain, the more burnt-out houses I saw. Many belonged to friends. By the time I reached Loma Alta Drive, almost everything was rubble. Overwhelmed, I parked next to a little road.

“The little road’s sign read, ‘Zane Grey Terrace.’

“I laughed through the tears. What would Zane Grey say about all this?

“Zane Grey is now forgotten. But in the first half of the 20th century, he was perhaps the country’s best-selling author.”

“He produced dozens of pulpy novels about the American West. Many were about urban people’s struggles to settle in the canyons and hills of unforgiving environments. His books could be clunkily written, but Hollywood turned so many Grey stories into films that they became stock images of Western life.”

The fires aren’t unbelievable — we are (Joe Mathews, January 13, 2025)

Grey’s house, a heritage landmark in the area, burned with the rest of the canyon.

Coping with loss: stories we need to hear and read

I wanted to reread Joan Didion’s article on the Santa Ana winds from the late sixties to understand how these gusts alter a place that attracted orange growers, adventurers, and artists for the beautiful weather and the special relation of land and ocean, particularly near the areas flattened by the fire, from Malibu to the canyons of Pacific Palisades, to the hilly outskirts of Santa Monica.

But sometimes, you need somebody with the gravitas and the experience to explain what we are witnessing. Lloyd Kahn saved me from being unable to find a heartfelt piece of experiential journalism on the fires. I enjoyed his post The Fires in L.A.

As he explains, he’s a NorCal person to the bone. Still, his appreciation for LA encompasses what many people in California and beyond who feel attracted by the city wanted to say but couldn’t find the words, the time, or the skill to put it the way Lloyd did so effortlessly and with such authority.

I’m sure Angelenos will forgive him for being a NorCal guy—raised in San Francisco, educated in Stanford, settled in Marin County as a young professional, and after “dropping out,” self-building across California and settling in Bolinas north of San Francisco (while writing and reporting on it).

Disasters that seem to defy our comprehension happen more often and at an ever-bigger scale; when they do, we need the facts to realize what we’ve lost and for which reasons to learn how to create and maintain better and more resilient systems.

But we also need to know where we are at emotionally. The narrative of the collective things we endure is very important, and AI won’t fill the gap for us (and it won’t be because people aren’t trying).

The stories we tell each other matter. Places and landscapes are also made of meaning and experiences over time, of the stories and events that make a culture. Read Pedro Páramo, a short little book by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, and you’ll understand more things about Mexico’s psyche than in any brainy book (and you’ll also see where magic realism—and a few style hooks from García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—come from).

Our side of Los Angeles, too

Lloyd is more evocative about the places affected by the fire in a few paragraphs than all the content and commentary about the ongoing destruction.

“The weather was warmer. The water was warmer. The girls were friendlier. Things were more relaxed, as they are the farther south you get — anywhere, for that matter — I figure Santa Cruz is about 10% LA, Santa Barbara 75% LA.”

The Fires in L.A., Lloyd Kahn (Live From California, January 13, 2025)

Perhaps Lloyd’s knowledge and appreciation for Los Angeles and Angelenos, an affair that, as he explains, is a lifetime one, help him find a way to express some meaningful grief; those of us who see it from the relative distance of the San Francisco Bay Area can’t help but have the benefit of perspective, which also brings impotence and fatalism.

That’s why personal takes like Lloyd’s, reminding us of the meaning of the places lost and his memories there, are the important non-tangible pieces of the patchwork of reality that we need to keep. Guy Debord coined the word psychogeography to name the intermingling of places and their meaning for people over time.

This reminds me of My Own Private Idaho, the title of the indie movie. Because of pop culture, we all have our own private Los Angeles, no matter our origins. We’ve been to LA several times in the last few years, and more so now that we live in California. We’ve visited friends and projects to produce videos from San Luis Obispo all the way to San Diego and beyond.

We’ve tried to stay in and around Santa Monica each time we’ve visited Los Angeles. Walking along the beach toward Malibu and going up the tranquil roads of Pacific Palisades and Brentwood early in the morning was a treat. From there, one can see the verdant canyons, the city, and the ocean. Hard to beat in the morning. I know Santa Monica is beyond costly, and there’s a reason people stay for decades in their rent-controlled apartments there.

LA state of mind

We talk about all the friends and people we know there and in Greater Los Angeles—because the event is traumatic even when you see it at night from a few miles away. When in the area, we always tried to notice some of the iconic landmarks and the random things that make a place, and we were introduced to some places we associate with the collective unconscious. Many of them are gone.

Back to Lloyd, as always, in his post about the fires, he manages to be clear-cut, direct, and honest while remaining positive and on the upside side of reality and things. Instead of feeding on despair, he finds a way to explain an uplifting—but not sugarcoated—raw story.

Like everyone, I’ve been reading so many strange accounts of what’s happening in LA, especially in and around the iconic Pacific Palisades and outskirts, but also in Altadena, a tucked-away neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley north of Pasadena.

Los Angeles constitutes a landscape that pop culture has also made ours to the point of caring personally about it, the way we care about buildings and places designed as heritage (we all cared about Notre Dame’s feat despite our beliefs and concern for Gothic architecture, having read Victor Hugo and watched the Disney movie or not).

But this blaze differed from many other urban fires: an inferno fanned by 40-70 miles an hour pummeling winds on a canyon slope won’t respect “defensible space” and less flammable structures. It will just burn like ignited powder. Back to chaos theory, the events of Tuesday night in Pacific Palisades were a conflagration of worst-case scenarios.

It may be a cause of bad faith to explain that the structures burned on these flammable zones where gusts were hurricane-grade strong for hours could have been spared, especially once the fire found its own path with no escape trail to follow other than the populated downward slope all the way to the ocean.

Santa Anas

When it comes to the Santa Ana winds state of mind, there’s always Joan Didion to remind us that it’s not us; it’s a state of mind that is as much a part of Los Angeles as good noir books and movies, The Dude from The Big Lebowski, or Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight, a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.”

Beginning of The Santa Anas, Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969

The Santa Anas are recurrent and seem to be a part of the culture of Angelenos. But why were they so destructive this time, in combination with fire? In part, vegetation was especially dry around the LA neighborhoods, which were most exposed to wildlife canyons where winds are especially virulent as they come from the east. Higher temperatures and reduced precipitation can increase the damage.

But perhaps we should be talking more about the so-called butterfly effect, the concept from chaos theory suggesting that small changes in a system lead to unpredictable outcomes over time.

Shit happens. Or, explained by Forrest Gump (1994) as he runs across America and meets a man in the bumper sticker business in an eternal quest for slogans, just when Forrest steps into a pile of feces.

“Man, you just ran through a big pile of dog shit!”
“It happens,” Forrest replies.
“What, shit?”
“Sometimes.”

The eight-month drought in Southern California and the way the Santa Ana winds played this time was devastating not only for their strength but also because the random combination of events (mountains, valleys, and cloud formations can alter moisture and also the duration, speed, and direction of winds) targeted difficult-to-access urban areas which dry vegetation combusted like the chaparral around them.

Firefighting amid 40-70 mph gusts

We have heard much about the Santa Ana winds lately and how they cascade over the Sierra Mountains and coastal ranges’ canyons. As the air is compressed, they get warmer and drier, picking up speed. The Diablo winds have also been blowing in the Bay Area, but rain in the last months reduced the risk.

According to Joan Didion, when they build up and blow mercilessly, they get on the nerves of people (and their pets, with their instinctual sixth sense to notice eminent environmental events). And, when it hasn’t rained for eight months, as it has happened in Southern California, the Santa Anas act as a dangerous torch next to a landscape bound to combust. And when this happens, most people, including representatives and media, highlight the faults of the last defense resort: firefighters.

Los Angeles firefighters, and California firefighters in general (CAL FIRE), are better trained and funded than any other equivalent body (I’m not making this up). However, local infrastructure and the way firefighting works today were not prepared for the scale and velocity with which many worst-case scenario types of events colluded.

Take the Pacific Palisades: the combination of low moisture, hurricane-level winds, and fire advance happened in sloppy, difficult-to-access places where the transition from wildlands to lush neighborhoods (with great vegetation and livability) was so seamless that entire residential culs-de-sac became fire traps in a matter of hours.

Well-trained firefighters (like the ones from Los Angeles) herd virulent fires into wildlands and away from structures using many strategies, but the conditions in Palisades were too dire to avoid the damage. When winds blow 50 or 60 miles an hour, aerial mitigation can’t be used (hydroplanes and helicopters couldn’t fly during the devastating night of Tuesday).

Diablo winds and the 1991 Oakland Fire

Originating in the high desert regions of Nevada and Utah during high-pressure events, the winds are a macro scale demonstration of the venturi effect: the winds find their scape and reduce their pressure by augmenting their speeds towards the Pacific Ocean.

But the Santa Anas aren’t the only strong winds bound to flow in the direction of coastal California from the Great Basin, especially during the colder months from the fall to early spring, when strong high-pressures originate systems between the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains look for a way out, releasing a constant wind flow in a clockwise direction.

The Diablo winds are the San Francisco Bay Area’s equivalent of the Santa Ana winds in Greater Los Angeles, and they have been blowing hard over the last few days. However, there is a notable difference this time: Northern California received significant rainfall last fall, leaving the ground with a healthier amount of moisture for this time of year.

This wasn’t the case in October 1991, when dry and hot northeast winds blowing from the direction of Mount Diablo east of the Bay Area peeked up speed across the East Bay and created the Oakland Hills firestorm, killing 25 people, injuring 150, and scorching 1,520 acres (620 hectares) of a tricky hilly terrain amid forested wildlands and sparse single-family-home wealthy suburbs. The fire destroyed 2,843 single homes and 437 apartment buildings, and the aggregated cost reached $1.5 billion.

By comparison, the current LA area fires, especially those at Palisades and Eaton, dwarf the destruction caused by any urban wildfire in the Bay Area or Southern California amplified by either de Diablo or the Santa Ana winds, respectively. As of January 13, 2025, 12,000 buildings and homes were damaged or totally destroyed across 40,000 acres (over 16,000 hectares), or 62.5 square miles (162 square kilometers), a bigger area than San Francisco and almost three times the surface of Manhattan.

The economic loss is expected to be the costliest in California and American history. Estimates have already climbed to between $135 billion and $150 billion, and they are expected to climb further.

Redefining “defensible spaces”?

The LA fires have brought a term to the forefront of modern firefighting: the concept of “defensible spaces,” a way of preserving quality of life and aesthetics in house lots and communities while at the same time creating defenses that allow fire control to isolate urban areas from the adjacent wilderness.

Defensible spaces rely on techniques like removing everything flammable within five feet of houses and outbuildings and enclosing elements like crawlspaces and roof vents to prevent flying embers from igniting from underneath or within, respectively. Native, drought-tolerant landscaping adapted to a particular place and climate also plays a role.

Data backs these measures: during the 2022 Oak fire in Mariposa County, California, homes compliant with defensible spaces were six times more likely to survive.

The best practices associated with defensible spaces are simple and help fire control when wildfires evolve at defensible speeds: experts aren’t sure that modern firefighting as we know it could fend off blasts like the ones around the Palisades and Altadena canyons when gusts were blowing at 50 to 70 miles per hour. What to do in such situations, which are bound to increase in the coming decades?

As many people are calling into question the ability to rebuild in fire-prone areas, disaster experts remind the public that fire-prone areas are increasing their scope. Strategies as defensible areas aren’t a California-only concept: Oregon, New Mexico, and Colorado all have passed measures to help homeowners fire-proof their properties. As fires across Canada, Hawaii, New York, and Tennessee in the last few years have shown, it’s not an isolated problem.

The way we build

I’ve followed the coverage of the LA fires and found useful information. There’s one thing missing in the public debate around fires in North America, which I find interesting. It’s not only about the relentless advancement of suburbia and lush neighborhoods into the wilderness, the lack of controlled fires around urban areas when entire regions experience drought, or the effective policing of electrical infrastructure during heatwaves or strong gusts: besides fire-proofing homes with the best practices highlighted around the concept of “defensible spaces,” homes themselves can be built to withstand wildfires much better.

Coming from Mediterranean Europe, where brick-and-mortar construction is pervasive (as are California-like wildfires due to the similarities in climate, orography, and weather events), I can’t help but notice the dramatic difference between areas attacked by a firestorm in North America and places destroyed by fire in Europe.

In the US, where timber framing is king, only masonry chimneys stay standing and recognizable after a fire, whereas in Europe, properties are also destroyed, and many roofs collapse, but structures remain.

Our family visited New England a few months back, and, among our activities, we visited the centuries-old farmhouse that Kirsten’s family on her mother’s side inhabited in New Hampshire after the Depression hit them. We visited and respectfully knocked on the door (explaining why), and the current owner was kind enough to talk to us. He couldn’t invite us in because he was working on entirely overhauling the house’s interior after a major fire had damaged the property and destroyed the roof.

After suffering the cataclysmic 1666 Great Fire, London, which was essentially a city made of wood, was rebuilt mostly in stone, brick, and mortar. Other cities made of wood, like medieval Moscow, were permanently damaged after experiencing similar fires during the Napoleonic Wars. Most places adapted their building vernacular.

Houses that survive destructive fires

Back to our visit to rural New Hampshire. Here’s the thing: the house’s bones (its thick brick structure) were intact, as charming as it was in the eighteenth century. Brick and mortar, stone, concrete, and even strawbale are better structural materials against fire than the pervasive, cheap timber framing used on most American buildings, residential and commercial.

I’m not kidding with strawbale. We interviewed Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper at their property outside San Luis Obispo and saw in person how the landscape regenerates after a big fire. Haggard, architect and professor at Cal Poly, is one of the world’s experts in natural building and strawbale construction.

Haggard explained to us how incredibly fire-resistant strawbale is compared to other materials. When a wildfire destroyed their property in 1994, the only building segments that remained intact were built with strawbale.

He explained that strawbale has a two-hour fire rating when clad in earthen plasters.

It’s somehow incredible that in the age of AI and reusable space rockets, builders, companies, and governments haven’t found innovative ways to update codes to future challenges not only with never-ending, useless measures but with techniques that ensure houses don’t burn and, if they do so, burn less.

There are many ways to look at the future. Fatalism isn’t a word that suits the US West.