The rich and famous of Southern California have always loved living in isolated spots with gorgeous mountain views, and it has always been a bad idea

 We'll be coming back to this excellent story from the LA Times on the history of catastrophic fires in the region and how we keep ignoring the lessons we ought to be learning from them.

‘Built to burn.’ L.A. let hillside homes multiply without learning from past mistakes by Jenny Jarvie

On a hot, dry November morning in 1961, flames from a trash pile on brushland north of Mulholland Drive were picked up by Santa Ana winds and swept across the canyons of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest enclaves.

The apocalyptic scenes that played out — of Hollywood celebrities fleeing and clambering onto their roofs — captured the world’s attention like no urban conflagration in history. Actor Kim Novak and Richard Nixon, then a former vice president who moved to L.A. to practice law, wielded garden hoses to soak their wooden roof shingles. Actor Fred MacMurray enlisted studio workers from the set of “My Three Sons” to evacuate his family and help firefighters cut down brush around his Brentwood home.

When the blaze reached the mansions of Bel-Air, thermal heat lifted burning shingles high into the air and 50-mph winds hurled them more than a mile over to Brentwood. By nightfall, the Bel-Air fire had destroyed 484 homes, including those of actor Burt Lancaster, comedian Joe E. Brown and Nobel laureate chemist Willard Libby. 

After firefighters extinguished the flames, socialite and actor Zsa Zsa Gabor, wearing white kitten heels and a string of pearls as she clutched a shovel, dug through the rubble of her Bellagio Place home for a safe with jewels. The Bel-Air fire became known as the “the big one,” the event that forced everyone in Los Angeles to reckon with the dangers fire posed to their coveted hillsides. In response, L.A. officials ushered in new fire safety measures, investing in more firefighting helicopters, new fire stations and a new reservoir. They also outlawed untreated wood shingles in high-fire-risk areas and initiated a brush clearance program to create defensible space around homes. But they did not stop building on fire-prone ridges and canyons. And there was no major push to radically rethink how they built. Over the next half a century, new housing tracts filled the wildland interface. And a succession of larger and more deadly fires swept through the region. But all the safety improvements prompted by the Bel-Air and subsequent fires could not outpace the escalating threat from new development and climate change. The massive blazes that engulfed Los Angeles hillsides communities Jan. 7, destroying 16,000 structures and killing at least 29 people in and around Pacific Palisades and Altadena, have prompted a new reckoning on how so many L.A. homes came to be built on land so vulnerable to fire and how, or whether, they should be rebuilt. It’s a crossroads the region has found itself at before when the power of fire left us reeling. “California is built to burn — it’s not unique in that — but it’s built to burn on a large scale and explosively at times,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian and professor emeritus at Arizona State University. “You can live in that landscape, but how you choose to live will affect whether that fire is something that just passes through like a big thunderstorm, or whether it is something that destroys whatever you’ve got.”