January 8, 2025: "Los Angeles Is On Fire"

NOTE: While these entries are dated 2022, I decided to backdate the posting dates of events from 2023 onward to the same date in 2022.

January 8, 2025: The worst fires in California history roared through the Los Angeles metropolitan area. They started the day before, but the biggest damage was done on this day.

As a magazine article a few days later put it:

There’s a common misconception that beneath the asphalt, Los Angeles is a desert. It isn’t. It’s grassland. And part of the natural cycle of the grassland ecosystem is fire...

There was a huge conflagration in Malibu in 1929. Then 1930 and 1935. Then 1938 and 1943, and so on, averaging two per decade up to the current day.

There’s a reason this happens so much in Los Angeles: It is unique among American cities for the degree to which it directly abuts wild nature. Older cities grew more gradually. Around the urban core of cities like Boston, Atlanta, or St. Louis emerged suburbs, around them exurbs, and around them rural agricultural zones. Only then do you reach wild forests, mountains, or prairies.

Los Angeles grew up in a hurry. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, development occurred so rapidly that urban and suburban density extends unabated all the way up until it collides into wildlands. A long portion of the city’s perimeter is fenced in by the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains.

And, just as those mountains stop weather systems in their tracks, leading to the smog that has bedeviled the Los Angeles are for over 100 years, so, too, do they lead to the occasional wildfires.

The night before the 1992 Presidential election, Jay Leno hosted The Tonight Show, and said, "Perot is predicting a landslide. Bush wants to shake up the people. Clinton wants to light a fire under the people. They should come to L.A.: They can do all three at once!"

But January 2025 was unusual, in that it was 5 major fires at once. When it was over, large neighborhoods such as Pacific Palisades and Altadena were, essentially, gone, looking like photographs of bombed cities in World War II.

On February 1, it was announced that the fires were fully contained, though not yet put out. Over 57,000 acres had been burned, over 17,000 structures had been destroyed, and 29 deaths were attributed to the fires.

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January 8, 2025 was a Wednesday. Baseball was out of season. College football and the NFL were each between rounds of its Playoffs.

There were 8 games in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Toronto Raptors, 112-98 at Madison Square Garden.

* The Brooklyn Nets lost to the Detroit Pistons, 113-98 at the Barclays Center.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Washington Wizards, 109-103 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.

* The Portland Trail Blazers beat the New Orleans Pelicans, 119-100 at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans.

* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Oklahoma City Thunder, 129-122 at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (now the Rocket Arena) in Cleveland.

* The Indiana Pacers beat the Chicago Bulls, 129-113 at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the San Antonio Spurs, 121-105 at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

* And the Denver Nuggets beat the Los Angeles Clippers, 126-103 at the Ball Arena in Denver. So the Clippers were on the road. The Lakers were not scheduled.

There were 3 games in the NHL:

* And the Florida Panthers beat the Utah Hockey Club, 4-1 at the Prudential Center. 

* The Washington Capitals beat the Vancouver Canucks, 3-2 at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

* The Chicago Blackhawks beat the Colorado Avalanche, 3-1 at the United Center in Chicago.

* And the Florida Panthers beat the Utah Hockey Club, 4-1 at the Prudential Center.