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Some excepts from a book called "The Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis".
"Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus), ever two and a half years, ans the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over this century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestome consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea" (97-98).
"In other words, stand at the mouth of Malibu Canyon or sleep in the Hotel St. George for any length of time and you eventually will face the flames. IT is a statistical certainty. Ironically, the richest and the poorest landscapes in Southern California are comparable in the frequency with which they experience incendiary disaster. This was emphasized tragically in 1993 when a May conflagration at a Westlake tenement killed three mothers and seven childen was folloewd in late October by 21 wildfires culimnating on 2 November in the great firestorm that forced the evacuation of most of Malibu.
But the two species of conflagrations are inverse images of each other. Defendied in 1993 by the largest army of firefigthers in American history, wealthy Malibu residents benefitted as well as from an extaordinary range of insurance, landsue, and disaster relief subsidies. . . . Most of the other 1991 fatalities from the tenement fires in the Westlake and Downtown areas might have been prevented had slumlords been held to even minimal standards of building safety. If enormours resources have been allocated, quixoitcally, to fight irrestible forces of nature on the Malibu coast, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-mand and remediable fire crisis of the inner city" (99).
This book goes more into the environmental diaster LA has been.
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