City workers and celebrities, teachers and tycoons talk about what they lost in the Los Angeles fires — and how they’ll rebuild.
The Santa Ana winds come from the eastern deserts, picking up speed as they descend from Nevada toward the San Gabriel Mountains before turning toward the sea, where they reach Santa Monica, the Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. Indigenous inhabitants of this region lit fires to lessen its natural fuel load. Experts often say that, in landscapes like this, a fire put out is a fire put off. But prescribed burning around Malibu had since been impeded by colonization and the establishment of permanent and lavish homes where, as the author Mike Davis put it, “hyperbole meets the coast.”