Resilience: Planning for a world on fire
Last week, as if 2025 wasn’t already off to enough of a dark and chaotic start, wildfires suddenly took off in the Hollywood hills and marched downslope into LA in a matter of hours. The upscale neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades is largely destroyed, right down to the waterline below the Pacific Coast Highway. The apocalyptic scenes were no doubt disturbingly familiar to Albertans who just last summer watched similar atmospheric conditions nearly level the town of Jasper, as wildfires scorched miles of forest up and down neighbouring valleys, and a third of structures at the townsite. That’s not to mention the extremely traumatic legacy of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire and subsequent evacuation, or 2023’s catastrophic wildfire season in the Northwest Territories.
The Los Angeles fires are unique. The region hasn’t seen measurable precipitation in months, leaving the ground and surrounding foliage a tinderbox should the ferocious Santa Ana winds switch on like a hair dryer and turn someone’s discarded cigarette into an inferno. Like Jasper, Fort McMurray, and Yellowknife, it is another story of human development encroaching into an area susceptible to burning, without adequate resilience planning and with often devastating outcomes. Amidst the other unsettling news to start off the year, 2024 was confirmed as the hottest year on record.
The combinations of conditions that spark serious and devastating wildfires are going to become more frequent in the coming years, and resilience planning should be up for discussion in any community with a forest in sight. After each of these major fires, exacerbating factors are immediately in plain view: Jasper’s buildings were largely (and unwisely) entirely wood by requirement. Fort McMurray and Yellowknife each only have one route in and out, a nightmare in evacuation scenarios. What little emergency water supply did exist in LA’s hillside was easily tapped into by private homeowners for various domestic uses. Adaptability and resilience tools vary by context, but if we can point to major failures before the embers of wildfires are even cold, planners and policy-makers should be able and willing to proactively prescribe treatment before all that’s left are calls to rebuild.
-Written by Robert Brooks