The Fire, The Fury & The Footprint

• Mark Cromer
• April 4, 2025
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

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An NPG Forum Paper
by Mark Cromer
April 2025

Abstract: Naturally occurring events such as wild fires and hurricanes can turn into horrific calamities when they slam into cities and towns to consume human lives and wreck ever larger scales of destruction, filling the news cycles with heartbreaking accounts of loss, harrowing reports from survivors and the heroic actions of emergency crews. Yet the national discourse in the aftermath of these cyclic and accelerating natural events remains stuck in a pattern focused primarily on rebuilding in the same places and in the same manner. Precious little emphasis has been placed on how a changing climate with growing human population densities have all intersected with these cataclysms. The California wildfires that exploded across Los Angeles and San Diego counties at the dawn of 2025 offer a tragically fresh chance to reexamine the role that human population is playing in these disasters and what can be done to mitigate its impacts.

They still call it ‘fire season’ for reasons of sheer simplicity.

It’s a tidy two-word term that public officials and emergency responders have used for generations to hopefully catch the attention of California residents and remind them of the terrible danger that can come from a campfire or an offroad vehicle to a bottle rocket or a wayward flicked cigarette.

Thirty years ago, it was a cautionary advisory that would be rolled out in June and was usually retired by October, as autumn arrived and the fall rains came. Today, fire season in California runs two-thirds of the year, spanning eight months from May through December, according to the state’s preeminent firefighting agency, Cal Fire.

That all may soon change effectively to a yearround perpetual alert, considering that the most devastating wildfires in the state’s history exploded across the Southern California hillsides in January, unleashing monstrous infernos during the dead of winter that devoured dozens of lives and more than 16,000 structures while scorching nearly 60,000 acres and annihilating wildlife habitat already buckling under the weight of the human interface.

The sheer scale of the destruction evoked grim comparisons to the horrific aftermath of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, with comedian and former late night host Jay Leno appearing in a state of shock as he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that his neighborhood in Pacific Palisades “Looks like Hiroshima or just some horrible thing. It’s an entire city wiped out.”

While it is still called ‘fire season,’ at least for now, the state’s official warning label for the wildfire threat may as well be updated to ‘Hell Alert’ for purposes of accuracy-in-outcome and to better focus the public’s attention and its discourse on the risks that must be considered as rebuilding gets underway.

Ash was still drifting lazily down from the sky like scorched snowflakes fluttering onto the smoldering carcasses of neighborhoods that had risen from the great building sprees of Post-War America as talk of rebuilding began. The mid-Twentieth Century development boom that saw housing tracts spread across the foothills in Los Angeles County and along the coastline of the state’s Pacific shore was once again in play, with an eye on recreating the past.

Even when the original neighborhoods were built, the very real risks were well known to builders, whether they were planning a custom home or a housing tract… Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.

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