The tragedy of the LA wildfires and their destructive hell has been a horror story waiting to happen.
Buildings that are vulnerable and adjacent to other buildings that are vulnerable mean that whole districts lost all their residences.
The outcome was always possible and the combination of wind conditions, the growth of vegetation and trees providing fuel and other factors, possibly political or even enemy action created a domino collapse effect that was ever possible. Climatic conditions created the “perfect storm” of probabilities.
A builder creates a beautiful wooden house that costs less and then sells it for a great price. So the builder keeps making these houses and soon there is a street of wooden houses. Then a block, a district, a city. The motivations and enabling of cost cutting building has resulted in casualties in the London Grenfell disaster that killed 72 people was a concrete block with combustible cladding that was used because it was less expensive, looked modern and builders saved millions cladding many such towers in the UK. Cost saving probably allowed regulatory compliance without losses being incurred.
“This foam insulation around window jambs acted as a conduit into the rainscreen cavity, which was faced with 150 mm-thick (5.9-inch) combustible polyisocyanurate rigid board insulation and clad in aluminium composite cladding panels, which included a 2 mm (0.079-inch) highly combustible polyethylene filler to bond each panel face together.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
The economics of the created potential for this catastrophe in LA were also based in the motivations of capitalism. The rebuilding will of course be forced to regulate fire retardants in a state that is well known for enforcement of building permit restrictions and red tape. The conditions that existed fifty years ago did not take into account that other motivations of capital, namely the continuous expansion of pollution from burning oil would result in the record hot summers and dry winters at the end of an El Nino event.
It was a predictable disaster waiting to happen. And far worse has been predicted in climate models.
It is not my contention that “capitalism is wrong”. It is not. But it has resulted in patterns of human behaviour that triggered catastrophe on a scale not dissimilar to that a massive bombing campaign (or even a nuclear weapon) would cause.
And politicians play the blame game. It does not undo the fact that we are set on a course of far greater catastrophes that even capitalism can not save us from. LA will be rebuilt, but better planning and fire safety will be top of mind. Capitalist urges tempered by regulation will mean that such projects will only be carried out by well funded conglomerates who can afford the red tape that politicians will need to tie around the regulations.
Is that a bad thing? It is what usually happens, except in Saudi Arabia with its planned Neom city in the desert – where the excesses of capitalistic accumulations are so extreme that vision exceeds actual needs. Maybe a similar scale of planning and architectural innovation will make the New Palisades a champion of civic design.
The next period of economic expansionism demands it. It will be out of reach of the celebrity classes and become a billionaires’ playground.