January, 2025
Nearly for the past month, I have watched the news of the California fires from wintery England. I have not wanted to add my voice to the many rightfully and caringly expressing horror and sympathy because I am just one far away person, and I have not felt it would do much good in a time of crisis. At the same time, my heart has been whispering to the people of California, “I’m sorry. I know.”
Today, I read a post by the lovely Juan Reynoso and felt compelled to share my own fire story and hopes from the heart of a planner and future-focuser.
In October 1991, my house burned down, along with around 3,000 others. Little moments of that day can flick through my memory like a slideshow. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I was at home doing math homework. My mom called to ask if I smelled smoke, and indeed I did. I looked out the window, and a huge column of smoke covered the sun, turning the world red. My mom told me to turn on the sprinklers, then the phone line cut out. She called back, but I couldn’t hear her. I watched fire race down a grassy hillside faster than I could ever run. The smoke looked like it was coming from up the street.
I looked at the sprinklers and their 100 dials, gave up, jumped on my bike, grabbed my dog, and headed downhill away from the fire. It was clear to me even then that fire can kill you, and it was coming. My parents were coming back up the hill, and we went back to the house together. If they’d left my bike where I dropped it, it would have been fine.
Over the next 45 minutes, we watered the house with a hose and watched the water evaporate in minutes. I grabbed my mom’s jewelry; she grabbed stale cereal. My father grabbed suitcases, and didn’t think to put anything in them. No fire fighters came. No one told us to get out. Eventually, we began to leave. Ash and embers were falling from the sky and I was screaming at my parents to go. I would say I didn’t cry, but I know I did because a photographer took a picture of me. I screamed at her, too, but I wound up on the front of the newspaper, clinging to my mom. I wanted to live.
In the end, we dug through the ashes, put our lives together in a different way, and lived on. I am grateful for that life, and the lives of my friends and neighbors, and mourn those who passed. That fire had its blessings relative to others. It was a raging inferno of a firestorm, but it started and spread mainly during the day. People were awake and able to escape. By the next day, it was mostly gone. It didn’t rage for weeks. It didn’t destroy business districts. It was smaller than others have since been.
Since then, California has continued to catch fire with increasing frequency and ferocity. Again, the sky has turned red over my home. The air has filled with smoke, and I’ve fled the toxic air, but fortunately not the flames.
Again, California is on fire, and there is tragedy, with all the individual pain and loss and uncertainty and devastation that that brings. I am sorry, I understand. I am very alert to the smell of smoke, but I am well now. It was also a long time ago. I am sharing my story not because I am personally in need of sympathy or attention, but because stories are a way we learn and understand.
Many years after the fire that burned down my home, I became an urban planner, driven by by a desire to create sustainable cities. To help people create cities integrated with nature, cities that acknowledge that we rely on nature for our existence, and we are ultimately not in control of nature. It has always been my hope that we can work with nature with a mutual gains approach.
Similar to what Juan said in his post, I hope we can globally strengthen our adaptation to new climate realities. I hope we can respond to crisis and summon the courage to look at the long term, to look at what is not working with our cities and our ways of life, and to make meaningful and impactful changes. I hope that we can design our cities, businesses and lives to live in balance with natural systems. I hope that we can come out of crisis with new models, and with the (admittedly very painful and inconvenient and sometimes poorly supported by our systems that govern change and development in cities, which were put in place in a different time) realization that we may need to do things differently than we have done.