Liz Weil

speaker

44 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Liz Weil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bulwark Daily · Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude · 9 Jan 2025 podcast

My biggest picture thoughts are it's heartbreaking and it's like all of the issues all at once happening in LA right now. And I wrote about this a bunch, like if you're a person who follows climate and follows wildfire in particular, Or if you're a fire scientist, you know all this is going to happen.

And it's just all the more horrifying to just like see the same movie again and worse, given that, you know, it's hotter and drier. It's barely rained in L.A. in seven months. And there's not a lot you can do once there's a windstorm and a fire burning.

So what the fire nerds called the WUI, the wildland urban interface, is like the most dangerous spot for people in California. And LA, even though it's a huge city, sort of falls into that category. So there's a lot to burn right near the city. And the Santa Ana winds, you know, a colleague of mine was sending me

images of the Santa Ana's blowing the shingles off her house and like calling it Didion weather. If you're a reader, you think of Didion when you think of the Santa Ana winds and wind is like the huge unspoken part of fire stories. Like these big fires generally don't start like on the ground from one house to another. They start with embers getting blown in the wind.

And so right now in LA, there are these huge wind storms that can carry embers I don't know how far they're blowing in L.A. right now, but for like a mile, for like a really long time. And that becomes the impossibility of fighting them is you don't know where some burning hunk of wood is going to land next and light that spot on fire.

So the Santa Anas are a huge, they're a huge part of what's going on in L.A. right now. If there wasn't a windstorm, this fire would be really different.

Yeah.

You know, so that was the first fire article I ever wrote. Basically, I had just started at ProPublica. California was burning. And they were like, write us a fire story this week. And I started talking to people. And I was so struck by people like Ting Inglesby, who had been following this for years. And this whole world that was new to me was, like, so exasperating for him.

It was like, you know, the Truman Show of fire weather. So one of the most surprising things to me about publishing that was that, like, Both sides of the political spectrum. It was like the one thing people could agree on was forest management, which is like the dorkiest thing to talk about in the world.

But basically everybody could agree we shouldn't be like letting our forests get overgrown and like turning into these huge. And so like this is a message that firefighters and wildland firefighters have been talking about forever of just like California is a Mediterranean climate. Our landscape was meant to burn and it is going to burn forever. whether we want it to or not.

So we can do that in a controlled way. We can like go into the wildland urban interface and other areas and try to like take the fuel out of there before the fire gets to it, or we can do nothing and then have these huge mega fires.

So like a few years ago, there was a big fire coming towards South Lake Tahoe and South Lake Tahoe had actually done a really good job of forest management and whatever other things happened, too. But that was part of the reason the Tahoe didn't burn.

OK, theoretically, I should qualify this. So like when that mega fire piece came out, it was like Ben Shapiro was retweeting it and Bernie Sanders. It was like everybody could say they were for it. But you're totally right on a local level when it comes to are we going to have this intentional fire, managed fire, what people call it like.

In our county, people are very, very nervous and understandably so. You have this fire burning and then the winds come up and usually it goes well, but occasionally the fire jumps and houses burn down and then people are furious and feel like, why didn't we just put this whole damn thing out?

And when you have that repeated again and again and again, you get in the situation like you were just reading those numbers about where we're not burning nearly enough. And so when the fire weather comes, when the winds are blowing, when it hasn't rained, when all of these climate change impacts are happening and all of these fires are made worse by climate change.

If we haven't been able to manage it. And so like, yes, politically, theoretically, everybody's for it. At a local level, people are very upset.

I mean, it's a huge funding problem. It's being reported, sometimes misreported this week out of Los Angeles. Firefighting is incredibly expensive. And there are several firefighting agencies in California. So there's the Forest Service, and then there's also CAL FIRE. So it's basically the federal firefighters and the state firefighters, and then there are county firefighters too. And so...

There's not enough money. There's often not enough personnel. A lot of those personnel are California inmates, which is a whole other issue that we could get into or not get into. It's an economic mess. And there are times when the federal firefighting policy and the CAL FIRE policy are not in line. And so there's just like a political mess of what exactly to do and who's the boss.

Yes. So the seasonal firefighting workforce, there's a whole host of issues there of people who don't want to just be like seasonal contract employees anyway. But yes, so the seasonal workforce is down. Also, the firefighting resources are often shared with Canada and Australia, like the big planes that come and like scoop water out of the ocean and dump them on the fire.

So right now it's summer in Australia. They don't have planes to send us. They need to be fighting their own fires. But usually it is worked in the past for like it's winter here. We can send our resources there and it's, you know, and vice versa. So part of what's happening, too, is due to the fact that it's January, those resources aren't available either.

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