No controlled burns, no thinning out the forest—THAT’S when the fires are catastrophic—the canyons of Los Angeles
The high crime, the tragedy
Jan 14, 2025
∙ Paid
(This is Part-7; for Part-8, go here; for Part-6, go here)
Everyone knows about CONTROLLED BURNS. That’s how you keep fires from spreading in heavily forested areas. By burning, you create “empty channels”—large spaces where fires won’t spread. Fire breaks.
Well, Los Angeles has a whole bunch of these areas. CANYONS.
Here we go. Buckle up.
…they [California as a whole, but primarily in the south] need to burn 4 to 11 million acres every year just to keep the forest in check because there’s so much growing every year. They [California] only burned 36,000 acres last year. And five years ago, four and a half years ago, Gavin Newsom, he had all this fanfare with this press conference where he pledged to burn a million acres every year. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. That’d be great. They’re only burning 36,000. Here we are five years later. They still can’t get their act together. And you wonder… and people are wondering, oh why is there so much fuel it’s because they’re not doing the work…
And Malibu in particular is Fire Alley… So this series of canyons from Santa Clarita through Malibu Canyon out into the ocean is where those Santa Ana winds get channeled. So that’s the outflow boundary. And so you go back every 25 years, since the beginning of time, you will see articles about Malibu burning to the ground in one of these fires…
That’s from podcast host Isaac Simpson and guest and documentary film-maker Gabriel Kirkpatrick-Mann (link to podcast via
’s substack post, here).
Newsom promised he’d deal with this. He didn’t. Neither did previous Governors.
See, big parts of LA ARE canyons. Mandeville, Benedict, Coldwater, Topanga, Tuna, Beverly Glen, etc. There are streets and homes all over the canyons.
And then in certain places, like the famous elite Bel Air, there are three canyons. I once lived in a tiny one-room annex next to a house at the top northern end of Bel Air:
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