Lucy Walker Surveys Another California Fire

in California's history. You can find a link to that conversation with Lucy Walker in the show notes of this episode. In January of this year, Los Angeles suffered more devastation from out of control wildfires that destroyed the Pacific Palisades areas of Altadena and killed twenty nine people. Incredibly, the recent fires eclipsed the size and devastation of the two. I was eighteen disaster and have left all of Los

Angeles in mourning. I asked Lucy Walker to join me again to see how she's doing and to ask if anything can be done to try to prevent this part of the country from burning so predictably on a regular basis. For Walker, it's been a traumatic revisiting of recent history.

It really was such an upsetting time to be in Los Angeles, and for everyone who loves the city and who has friends involved.

of progress and do their own thing. And the bad news about that is when you try to get people together to kind of rain in their individuality and you know, for example, not have fammable plants, you know, three feet from the house, or not have gutters or something like that which are kind of low cost or no cost anti fire measures, the instinctive reaction is I don't want to be told what to do. But I think there's a deeper issue, which is that the fire issue is

really counterintuitive. I went in such a learning journey when I made the movie, and it wasn't intuitive. You know. It's so when I've watched my dear beloved friends go through this, it's so obvious that it's the fault of the firefighters, or the fault of the water or the mayor or something like that, right, the evacuation system. And yet it's really hard to take in this bigger picture

because it is a layered story. Yes, it's climate change, but it's also where we're building, and it's also how we're building, and it's just kind of a complicated picture. And you know, I've seen the same sort of things kick in with my smart friends here in Los Angeles, sort of seeing a part of the picture very clearly,

but not the whole picture. And so I really was so grateful through this that I'd had financiers and colleagues when I was making my film that actually supported me to go on this kind of hard journey of finding out the whole story because it's inconvenient and it's complicated. But now in a situation like this, this is exactly why I made the film with all the rigor and work so so hard, and our team worked so hard because I wanted, I felt a responsibility to get it right.

I felt like lives are at stake, homes are at stake, and I felt like if I didn't get it right, it would you know, I don't want to be grand and said in danger lives, but I really felt like, gosh, I just want to get the story right so that people can understand, because it isn't easy to I knew for myself when I started making the film, I had this naive I did just put out the fires and another simple idea, Oh it must be just climate change, And neither of them are quite true and understanding now

as I do when I looked at the fire in Los Angeles and all the dreadful things that have happened, if you understand what's going on, I can understand everything that's happened in this dreadful last few weeks. I can see when someone opens their mouth, I can almost tell you what they're going to say, because I know this story so well, and I think it's hopefully going to be a real resource and help to people that if

they do watch the film. I think it is hopefully clear information that really gives you a three sixty picture.

or the other. This conversation is pressing up against us, is are we going to do something a little bit differently, Because I do think that the fundamental proposition of living in the wildland urban interface in Los Angeles and perhaps more broadly in California has changed. And part of that is going to be the insurance companies, which in the short term are going to be prevented from pulling out and changing coverage and things like that. But I don't

think that's going to last very long. I don't think you can kind of force insurance companies to, you know, expose.

it seems so overwhelming and everything that we've lost. But we've lost animals, we've lost homes, all my neighborhoods.

not actually they won't be traced to the fire. But I remember, you know, to be absolutely brutal about it, but let me say that two of the people I was following in the aftermath of the Paradise fire died of causes that you wouldn't recognize connected with the fire in the year following as we kept filming heart attacks in particular stress from the stress. Absolutely, you can never kind of pin those things, right, but it did seem like a lot of people, you know, it makes absolute sense, right.

So the thing I've been really praying is that the people impacted can really try to sort of really take care of their health and really prioritize just trying to recover themselves because it's kind of a long haul.

But the Fire looked at those twin events that happened in November twenty eighteen, but it didn't come out till twenty twenty one, so I was filming a couple of years after the events and put that in the movie. But actually, you get really close with people when you film with them, so I have absolutely kept in touch. And it's a really slow journey back, and these neighborhoods

don't recover all at once. And what we're seeing now is people have to live or make that decision, and it's toxic for a very long time, and these are going to be very slow, hard decisions about building. And then it's a very slow process.

of getting very expensive and very restrictive. You have to sort of trim and do certain things to get your fire insurance. But it does give people a backup option to get insurance rather than not be insured at all. But it's increasingly true that I think in that area people are choosing to go without insurance. And of course going without insurance is a nice affordable strategy until it all goes wrong. I think some people there are individually choosing to build back in a more fire safe way.

And what we've seen as these stories have emerged from these New Los Angeles fires is there are stories that the home that was fire hardened has survived. Now that's not fool proof. My understanding is that even if you have a far hardened home, it's not sort of impossible

that it'll burn, but it's way less likely. And so I think these stories they did get through to some people in Paradise, and some people did build back in a more sort of hardened way, and they had a fire that came through already I think it was two summers ago, and they managed to put it out so it wasn't a huge, uncontrollable one, but that area is likely to burn again very soon.

to have, like an almost lab experiment. Do you agree absolutely?

In the movie, however, they did have that dream. But I think that exactly what you've described will happen in these areas in Los Angeles that I think that people are going to come together and say, how can we do it a little bit differently? And I don't think

it'll be as radical as in the movie. There's a section where Mike Davis, who's since passed away but wrote a lot about fires, and he talks in the movie about how when Los Angeles was designed, the most famous sort of town planners of Los Angeles were these guys called the Olmsted Brothers, and their vision was that these areas that were burned repeatedly, such as Malibu, but that were so beautiful that we wanted to be there, let's be there, but let's only build sort of carefree cabins

where we can let it things burn, not keep our great treasures there and not sort of disposable homes and to enjoy for as long as they might be there. But if the winds line up and the rains haven't come, just get out of the way and let nature take care of cleaning up, and then come back and build another cabin again once that's past. And of course that's

not what we've done. These areas are so beautiful. We've built these absolute palaces of homes within great artworks and so forth there, and then of course we get terribly attached. And then we've got also all this fantastic you know, shrubberry and all these quite flammable plants and other flammable stuff, and so we've kind of built up this huge problem for ourselves. But I think now there is sort of

a blank slate about how we come back. I don't expect that we'll get the carefree cabins, but I do hold out hope that there will be positive conversation about doing things a little bit differently so that we don't have our hearts broken to this extent.

is what government can provide. And yet what is that question about wanting to sort of pay into this kind of common resource and pay out, you know. And now we're dealing with insurance, it's like, well, this is a very expensive incident. And moving forward, now that we are starting to know more, are other policyholders who live in safer areas going to want to subsidize these homes in

less dangerous areas? And are insurer is going to be able to even afford to ensure homes in safer areas if they keep being exposed to these incidents in more dangerous areas. What I hope, and maybe that sounds naive of me, but what I hope is that people can be really helped through this really complicated change because it's really not intuitive, and it's really new, and we love

these areas. I mean, what a gorgeous landscape, and it is heartbreaking to think that we're not safe in this place that we think of as the most beautiful home, imaginable, full of nature and inspiration. And to sort of really fundamentally change our relationship with how we think about risk there. We're not very good at that human beings, and that's

before you add in commercial pressures like the realtors. I remember I started out my project, as I remember telling you, during the terrible months slides in Montecito and the terrible what was at the time the worst fire in California, which was the Thomas Fire around the Santa Barbara and

Ohai area. I had a shocking experience during that when I saw a realtor selling the property to a new customer who wasn't aware that the previous residents had been killed in this mud slide and this property was really where it was situated geographically because of the potential for slides in certain you know, Santa Barbara being under very steep sort of mountains that go down to the ocean, and that after a fire, these hillsides can really collapse

in quite predictable sort of places. And so this property was really very dangerous.

everyone understandably is in this. But I think that we're going to need some help, you know, so that individuals are helped who are involved and impacted to really get with this new reality that there are really dangerous places to live that unfortunately the risk is perhaps just too high now and too expensive to live in the way

that they might want to live right there. And there's also another problem but the other opposite end of the economic spectrum, which is it's not just the well resourced people who have this choice of living in this most spectacular part of Los Angeles, that's the hilly part that's very far prone. It's also true that the cheaper areas that California is building into, and not just California, you know,

looking at other states too. It's not just California, many states and Canada and Maui and other countries certainly, especially in Mediterranean countries, are really being impacted by these increasing fires. So what we're seeing is that actually affordable housing further out of town is also being built in these areas that are hilly and fire prone. This wildland urban interface.

And we saw for example during COVID, where a lot of people were moving further out of the cities into places with more space, they were almost all moving into these areas that are very fire prone. So you've kind of got more rich people living in these spectacular areas that are fire prone, and you've also got a lot

of people who are much less wealthy. For example, Paradise communities or some of the communities that are much further out of Los Angeles where a lot of the more affordable homes are being built, and developers are building huge amounts of homes there because there's a lot of people that want homes in California. But unfortunately that development is into exactly the areas that might be affordable now but aren't going to be ensurable and are really prone to

burning soon. So I really hope that we can get our heads around this, because unfortunately the fires are not.

Here's the Thing. After the most recent twenty twenty five fires devastated huge parts of Greater Los Angeles, I was curious how individual communities had been impacted. I asked Lucy Walker if she's noticed they shared sense of grief among residents across LA.

those caught up in it. So many people affected, so many people know, so many people affected. It's absolutely overwhelming.

see it. But just from following X and radio traffic and looking at the winds, and I just knew what I was looking at, and my firefighter friends just this horrifying feeling of knowing what we were in for and watching an unfold. But there was this moment that night when I looked out of my window and it was orange and I smelled smoke, and the wind was knocking

you flat if you walked outside your door. And I found myself for the first time in that position of thinking, oh grief, I'm going to have to figure out what I need to take. And I am in the opposite. If there was an area in Los Angeles that would

be the lowest fire risk, that's where I live. And I'm a good you know, four or five miles from the hills here, and yet even here because these sort of ember driven windstorm type events, you know, once those embers get going and those kinds of winds, you know, there's kind of no stopping it. And I was sort of paranoid and traumatized to sort of be afraid of thinking.

I didn't really think it would get this far, because if it got this far, you know, it'd been sort of the whole city would have been at risk, but to actually have to go through for the first time, for myself that situation, and I think most people in Los Angeles had that experience, was like, oh God, could it get here? And how many people do I know? And so many people have friends living with them now who are helping people. So many people have stepped into

that role. And that's obviously what's beautiful about these disasters, and that my prayer is that there are gifts in this for people. And I did film people not just during the fires and the immediate horrific aftermath, but on the long term for the next couple of years following, and have kept following up with them even since filming.

And the beautiful thing of course humans being resilient. You know, our movie ends with the wedding of two people who would not have come together had it not been for their fire. And so I hope that there will be gifts in this, even for the people that at this point just feel so overwhelmed with the grief of what they've lost.

impulse is to point fingers sooner. And what I've observed is that the firefighters and especially are very good at being incredibly accountable and responsible, and even when it's tough to sort of realize mistakes were made and to discuss failings, they do it unflinchingly, and they do it because their own lives are at stake.

no matter what you do. When the European the first European boat sailed up to the coast of Los Angeles, and it's kind of how I opened my movie. It was on fire. They called it the Bay of Smoke because it was a fire. Now, there weren't any electric companies here when the Europeans first sales out. Obviously that would have been a lightning strike probably right.

And the other thing that I observed, which is kind of hard to get your brain around, but true, is that it's a disaster and things are going to go wrong, and that might be a water reservoir, or it might be an evacuation system. It might be a bad call that in retrospect turned out to be not the right one, but was made under juress by a firefighter who had to just go one way or the other in the moment and has to make decisions that in our jobs, you know, I'm not faced with those kind of life

and death decisions in the course of my work. Right, So it's a disaster, and things will sometimes go awry even when they're pretty well set up. And ironically, they had a really robust evacuation plan that they'd worked on and rehearsed that you kind of if the fire hadn't come through and killed eighty six people, you would have textbooks and they'd point at paradise and say they were well prepared. But things go wrong. That's actually the nature

of accidents and disasters. And so I sort of had this bigger picture where, yes, there's going to be failings, Yes we definitely need to learn from them, but we also perhaps need to face into the very challenging reality.

like Venice now. I don't think we can do it the same way anymore. And I do think that this could be the moment which when my film came out in twenty twenty one, I don't think we were there yet, but I think this episode has been so hallacious. I'm really glad for you for having the vision to have this conversation four years ago and then to revisit it now.

And I think more people may be actually looking for this kind of information and conversation, and it may be time to have a conversation that we really don't want to have. And I get it, but I think that we will be better off the sooner that we can get our heads around it.