Char Miller: Pomona College Professor of Environmental Analysis on the wildfires raging in LA

LA officials say the destruction caused by the deadly wildfires is "massive", "unimaginable" and unprecedented. 

Firefighters are a long way off containing the largest Palisades blaze, with 86% of it thought to be burning out of control. 

The death toll remains at 24, while another 23 people are still missing. 

Char Miller —a Professor of Environmental Analysis at LA's Pomona College— told Tim Beveridge the firestorm has been unrelenting. 

He says while they're used to fires in California, this one is different, and it feels like they're constantly under siege. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
Los Angeles is bracing for a nude high winds as
three wildfires continue to burn. Firefighters are a long way
off containing the latest Palisades blaze, with eighty six percent
of it thought to be burning out of control. The
death toll remains at twenty four, with a further twenty
three still missing. And joining me is professor of Environmental
analysis and History at Pomona College in California. Char Miller,

(00:39):
Good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Good morning. How are you all.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm good, well, how are you doing? It seems like there's.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
No end to it as yea, there it feels like
we're under a siege, which in the case is true.
Even though we're used to fire all the time. This
one seems a little different.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Feels like there's no end to the winds.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah, we You know, we've got a new pulsive wind
energy flowing across the southern California moutons, and that kicks
up both fire and to my mind, even more dangerously,
all of that debris and dust and grit that fell
from the first wave of fires is still around and
it is being tossed up into the air.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
You have said, I think that it was entirely foreseeable,
but was it preventable.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Foreseeable yes, preventable No, As firefighters around the world, no,
especially in the Mediterranean zone, when you get winds of
sixty seventy miles an hour, you're an observer. Effectively, you
can't get aerial up into the skies to help. And
given the topography in southern California, very steep slopes of
upwards of eighty percent, you have to have aeriel because

(01:52):
much of the fighting takes place above, not on the
ground itself. They were hampered for twenty four to thirty
six hours. They've done miracles, but you can't stop a
hurricane driven fire.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Not preventable, then could they have missed out of the effects.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, that's a tough question. A lot of debate is
swirling around whether there was enough water available. The issue
actually isn't whether water was available, it was the problem
was water pressure, and those are two distinct things. In
a really important way. They were flushing so much water
onto the lower elevations of the Palisades, for example, that

(02:32):
you couldn't draw water to the upper levels of that
steep sloped residential area, and you know, you can only
do what you can do. And given that it was
burning roughly three hundred American yards a minute, that can't
be stopped.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Can we mitigate the stuff when we do the rebuild
in terms of urban design? Is there any role that
that can play?

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Oh? God, yes. Unfortunately, both the governor of California and
the mayor of Los Angeles have just announced that they're
cutting environmental regulations, not enhancing them, so that they can
get rebuilt. And I understand the emotional impulse totally makes
sense to me. I understand the political optics that too
makes sense. But the dilemma is when you do that,
you then don't enact changes in the building code, because

(03:25):
the whole point is you ignore those codes to get
people back into their homes. And from the homeowner's point
of view, they'll celebrate this because they want their homes,
their nests back. From a larger policy point of view,
what they're doing is basically building back to burn.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Gosh, look, we got to see more fires. Let this
in the future, aren't we if there's anything left to burn?
Because these conditions, are they one offs? Or can we
say them as regular events.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Now, now these are regular events. Climate change is implicated
in both the wind speed and the intensity of these
fires and their frequency. As Australia knows, as South Africa knows,
as Chile knows, and the Med Zone knows, this is
our reality. And the fires have been growing. In fact,

(04:13):
if you look at the state's largest fires, four of
the eight were burning at the exact same time in
twenty twenty. Something like thirteen of the largest twenty have
been burning since twenty seventeen. That's a pattern.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
It's pretty dramatic, isn't it. Hey, char I really thank
you for your time this morning. That it's Charmeler. He's
an environmental analysis professor at Pomona College in California.

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