Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

“This is fire sea­son in Los Ange­les,” Joan Did­ion once wrote, relat­ing how every year “the San­ta Ana winds start blow­ing down through the pass­es, and the rel­a­tive humid­i­ty drops to fig­ures like sev­en or six or three per cent, and the bougainvil­lea starts rat­tling in the dri­ve­way, and peo­ple start watch­ing the hori­zon for smoke and tun­ing in to anoth­er of those extreme local pos­si­bil­i­ties — in this instance, that of immi­nent dev­as­ta­tion.” The New York­er pub­lished this piece in 1989, when Los Ange­les’ fire sea­son was “a par­tic­u­lar­ly ear­ly and bad one,” but it’s one of many writ­ings on the same phe­nom­e­non now cir­cu­lat­ing again, with the high­ly destruc­tive Pal­isades Fire still burn­ing away.

Back in 1989, long­time Ange­lenos would have cit­ed the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid exam­ple of what mis­for­tune the San­ta Ana winds could bring. Wide­ly rec­og­nized as a byword for afflu­ence (not unlike the now vir­tu­al­ly oblit­er­at­ed Pacif­ic Pal­isades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Den­nis Hop­per, Burt Lan­cast­er, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Hux­ley — all of whose hous­es count­ed among the 484 destroyed in the con­fla­gra­tion (in which, mirac­u­lous­ly, no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air Fire and its after­math in “Design for Dis­as­ter,” a short doc­u­men­tary pro­duced by the Los Ange­les Fire Depart­ment and nar­rat­ed by William Con­rad (whose voice would still have been instant­ly rec­og­niz­able as that of Mar­shal Matt Dil­lon from the gold­en-age radio dra­ma Gun­smoke).

Los Ange­les’ repeat­ed afflic­tion by these blazes is per­haps overde­ter­mined. The fac­tors include not just the dread­ed San­ta Anas, but also the geog­ra­phy of its canyons, the dry­ness of the veg­e­ta­tion in its chap­ar­ral (not, pace Did­ion, desert) ecol­o­gy, and the inabil­i­ty of its water-deliv­ery sys­tem to meet such a sud­den and enor­mous need (which also proved fate­ful in the Pal­isades Fire). It did­n’t help that the typ­i­cal house at the time was built with “a com­bustible roof; wide, low eaves to catch sparks and fire; and a big pic­ture win­dow to let the fire inside,” nor that such dwellings were “close­ly spaced in brush-cov­ered canyons and ridges ser­viced by nar­row roads.” The Bel Air Fire brought about a wood-shin­gle roof ban and a more inten­sive brush-clear­ance pol­i­cy, but the six decades of fire sea­sons since do make one won­der what kind of mea­sures, if any, could ever sub­due these par­tic­u­lar forces of nature.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

NASA Cap­tures the World on Fire

When Steve Busce­mi Was a Fire­fight­er — and Took It Up Again After 9/11

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Man­sion That Has Appeared in Blade Run­ner, Twin Peaks & Count­less Hol­ly­wood Films

Aldous Hux­ley Explains How Man Became “the Vic­tim of His Own Tech­nol­o­gy” (1961)

Take a Dri­ve Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Ange­les with Vin­tage Through-the-Car-Win­dow Films

Behold 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Firemen’s Coats, Rich­ly Dec­o­rat­ed with Myth­i­cal Heroes & Sym­bols

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.