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People living in Los Angeles have become accustomed to the wildfires that have frequently broken out in the region, but very few of them rival the ones that continue to rage there after the Pacific Palisades was consumed earlier this week. Joe Rogan cited those blazes as one of the reasons he decided to move out of the city on his podcast last year, and he correctly outlined the confluence of factors that sparked the dire situation that’s still unfolding.
Most people who reside in Southern California would tell you the climate is one of the major perks, but there are tradeoffs that come with living in an arid environment where a rainstorm is considered a fairly notable weather event.
That reality is manifested in the wildfires that have become an inevitable downside of the SoCal existence, and yet another tragic scene unfolded on Tuesday when a massive blaze was sparked in the Pacific Palisades in conjunction with the severe winds that had descended upon the region and subsequently caused the flames to spread to other parts of the area (including Pasadena and the Hollywood Hills).
The five separate fires have consumed more than 25,000 acres, destroyed at least 2,000 buildings, claimed the lives of five people, and forced another 130,000 to evacuate the impacted areas as first responders work around the clock attempting to mitigate the damage.
There’s not much that could have been done to prevent the scary situation from unfolding in the first place, as it was essentially the product of a perfect storm of environmental factors—and one that experts knew had the potential to unfold at some point.
Last July, Joe Rogan devoted a segment of his podcast to discussing the reasons he decided to relocate from Los Angeles to Texas while citing the natural disasters he felt had the potential to rear their ugly head in the blink of an eye, saying, “I felt like it could fall apart at any moment.”
Rogan noted fires forced him to evacuate his home on three separate occasions and then cited a conversation he had with a member of the Los Angeles Fire Department concerning the potential for a large-scale disaster like the one we’ve witnessed this week, saying:
“I was talking to this guy and he was telling me, ‘Dude, one day, there’s gonna be the right wind and the fire’s gonna start in the right place and it’s gonna burn through L.A. all the way to the ocean and there’s not a f—king thing we can do about it.’”
That basically describes what unfolded in the Palisades, as the Santa Ana winds pushed the fires toward the Pacific until they had nowhere else to go after reaching the water.
We’ve thankfully avoided a scenario where the same fate has befallen even more highly-populated parts of metro Los Angeles, but it’s safe to assume officials are going to be reevaluating what needs to be done to prevent that from unfolding based on what’s transpired this week.