What Los Angeles has endured over the past week is something different. The Palisades and Eaton fires, fed by record-dry chaparral and propelled by hurricane-force winds, raced out of the mountains and into neighborhoods below.
These disasters, Cohen wrote this week, "need to be defined as a structure ignition and community fire spread problem, not an extreme wildfire problem." This was not the wildland-urban interface of the Sierra Nevada, but entire neighborhoods of densely packed houses on gridded streets.
To survey the devastation so far-12,000 structures destroyed, 24 dead-is to feel torn between the past and future of the American city. The century of technology and expertise deployed to eliminate the great urban fires that once leveled Chicago and San Francisco has been outpaced by the speed of a changing climate.
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