Getty Fire breaks out; Smoke visible along freeway
By Caroline Ashford · Reporting from Richmond, Virginia ·
On Wednesday afternoon, as Southern California baked under a heat dome exceeding 100 degrees, the Sepulveda Pass did what it has done with terrifying regularity: it caught fire.
The Peril of Living in a Tinderbox
On Wednesday afternoon, as Southern California baked under a heat dome exceeding 100 degrees, the Sepulveda Pass did what it has done with terrifying regularity: it caught fire. According to ABC7 Los Angeles, a brush fire erupted near the Getty Center just after 4:00 p.m., quickly consuming 25 acres of hillside. By the time the Los Angeles Fire Department managed to halt its forward progress, the evacuation warnings had rippled through Brentwood, forcing Mount Saint Mary’s University to shelter its students and the Getty Center to shutter its doors.
We have been here before. The 2019 Getty Fire, which scorched 745 acres and destroyed homes, was a warning that went unheeded. The 2020 California wildfire season, which saw millions of acres vanish into ash, was a systemic indictment of our inability to manage the urban-wildland interface. Yet, here we are again, treating a predictable environmental reality as a recurring emergency. We are not victims of bad luck; we are victims of a refusal to acknowledge that when you build high-culture institutions and dense housing in a landscape designed by nature to burn, you are merely renting space from the inevitable.
The Architecture of Denial
The Getty Center’s spokesperson offered the standard, soothing refrain: "The collections and art are safe." It is a sentiment that prioritizes the preservation of the past while ignoring the precariousness of the present. The Los Angeles Times reports that while the Getty Villa remained open, the Center itself had to close to ensure LAFD access. This is the modern Californian tragedy: we build cathedrals to human achievement in places that require constant, expensive, and dangerous intervention just to keep them from becoming fuel.
This brings to mind the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Just as that disaster revealed the folly of ignoring the tectonic reality of the Bay, our current obsession with maintaining the status quo in the Sepulveda Pass ignores the fundamental volatility of the terrain. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was not merely a seismic event; it was a reckoning with the hubris of building a city atop a fault line without the necessary humility. We are repeating that mistake in the hills of Los Angeles. We treat these fires as isolated incidents to be managed by water-dropping helicopters, rather than as the predictable outcome of a long-term pattern of development that defies the geography of the American West.
A Reckoning with the Landscape
The strongest argument for our current path is that these institutions—the Getty, our universities, our homes—are the bedrock of our regional identity, and that we have the technology to defend them. But this is a hollow defense. Technology is not a substitute for prudence. When we rely on the LAFD to perform miracles every time the mercury climbs, we aren't practicing stewardship; we are gambling with the lives of first responders and the stability of our communities.
The 2020 August Complex fire showed us the sheer scale of what happens when we lose control of the landscape. We cannot continue to treat the Sepulveda Pass as a permanent, static location for our most precious assets. If we are to pass anything on to our children, it must be a culture that respects the limits of its environment rather than one that insists on conquering it through sheer force of will. We must stop building in the path of the flame and start admitting that some places were never meant to be permanent. Until we accept that the geography of Southern California is not a backdrop for our institutions but a participant in their survival, we will continue to watch our history burn.