The New Combustible Age

Chicago, where I live, is a city of striking architectural uniformity. Rows of sturdy two- and three-story flats stand at attention on countless streets. Their fronts come in different colors and have idiosyncratic decorative flourishes. But approach from behind, via the alleys, and you’ll see that they’re usually made of the same stuff: Chicago Common bricks. From that vantage, whole monochromatic blocks can look as if they’ve been designed by a single deranged architect, compulsively making the same unassuming building, over and over.

There is a reason for this. In October, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire, as it became known, killed hundreds and consumed more than seventeen thousand buildings, many of them wooden. Going by current estimates, the Los Angeles fires have destroyed more than twelve thousand buildings. In 1874, another conflagration scorched Chicago’s downtown, turning forty-seven acres to ash. The city’s stylistic unity comes, in part, from the fact that so many of its homes were constructed in the period after the fires. Those bricks, required by Chicago’s post-fire building codes, shout “Never again.”

Although Chicago’s great fire was particularly horrifying, many U.S. cities have a lingering civic memory of the time when it all burned down. San Francisco has a phoenix on its flag. So do Atlanta; Lawrence, Kansas; and Portland, Maine. Detroit’s flag features a distraught woman standing in front of a city ablaze, along with the paired mottos “Speramus Meliora” (“We hope for better things”) and “Resurget Cineribus” (“It shall rise from the ashes”).

Such was life in a wooden country. North America’s immense forests made for cheap timber, and the young United States was consequently wracked by repeated conflagrations. A year after Chicago’s 1871 fire came one in Boston. Then, eight months later, Portland, Oregon. The year 1889 alone saw devastating blazes that each burned hundreds of structures in Bakersfield, Seattle, and Spokane.

The Los Angeles fires are a nightmarish glimpse of a more combustible age. They’re hard to process because it had until recently seemed that the age of infernos was over. By the twentieth century, new technologies (light bulbs, radiators, gas heat) meant that fires didn’t start as often. Safer materials and stricter zoning meant they didn’t spread as far. More hydrants and beefed-up fire departments meant that they didn’t last as long. New York City’s worst nineteenth-century fire, in 1835, destroyed some six hundred buildings. Its most notorious twentieth-century fire, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, in 1911, took more than a hundred lives but was limited to three stories of a ten-story building. The structure still stands, now part of N.Y.U.’s campus.

Fire has been humanity’s constant companion; our bodies evolved around it, and no recorded society has lacked it. Yet the twentieth century did much to remove fire from view. A historically astonishing, though often unremarked, feature of modernity is how relatively flameproof it has been. Our ancestors once lit large pyres and worshipped fire gods. Today, it is perfectly possible to go months without seeing flames rise higher than they do on a stovetop burner. (The Angelenos who are now watching whole neighborhoods—their neighborhoods—burn down may have never before seen a single building aflame.)

Modernity’s victory wasn’t so much in extinguishing fire, however, as containing it. More than three-quarters of energy consumed today comes from burning oil, coal, or natural gas. This happens not in the open but in boilers and combustion chambers. Like a misbehaving child, fire has been sent to its room. Out of sight, it has been going about its work of wresting carbon atoms free and streaming them skyward.

Those concealed flames, we now understand, are more dangerous than the spectacular infernos that once incinerated nineteenth-century cities. Global warming has desiccated California, which was never known for its copious water supply. When you add to this decades of misguided fire-control tactics that sought to suppress all fires rather than let combustible biomass regularly burn down, you have conditions where the slightest touch can kindle a megafire. In 2018, during a dry spell, a rancher in Mendocino County used a claw hammer to drive a concrete stake into the ground. The sparks hit dry grass and set off a blaze that, in combination with another, burned more than six hundred square miles across four counties and lasted a hundred and sixty-one days.

That 2018 fire burned largely uninhabited land. The most fire-prone homes in California lie in the exurban fringe that geographers call the “wildland-urban interface.” This has long been a dangerous place to build, and scenic Malibu has been particularly vulnerable. (In the nineteen-nineties, the historian Mike Davis, fed up with the hand-wringing over protecting luxury enclaves, laid out “the case for letting Malibu burn.”) But we’re now facing wildfires so furious that they march past the city’s edge onto its grid, toward downtown.

Three years ago, after an out-of-control grass fire in Colorado rampaged through Boulder County and burned more than a thousand structures, the journalist David Wallace-Wells prophesied “the return of the urban firestorm.” Los Angeles, which has had only 0.02 inches of rain since September, is now experiencing the worst fires any U.S. city has seen in more than a hundred years. The twentieth century’s quenching of fire now looks less like a historic victory than a temporary respite. We tried to bottle fire up, but it is spilling out.

After the eighteen-seventies, Chicagoans rebuilt their city in safer materials. Los Angeles won’t be able to protect itself so easily. When fires grow large enough, as California’s drought-powered megafires have, everything becomes fuel. Better housing stock can mitigate dangers, but the underlying problem, global warming, is systemic. Fireproofing California will take more than brick. ♦