The Los Angeles Fires and DSA

The Eaton Fire rips through Altadena, California. Image: AP

Growing up in Pasadena, the Santa Ana winds are as familiar as Craftsman bungalows. They happen annually, and every few years they pick up enough to do some damage. More than once I’ve seen gusts topple trees, power lines, and city infrastructure. Usually, they amount to nothing more than a story one shares with a friend; recalling the violently swaying branches  or the bright blue blast that rockets from a nearby transformer. This time was different.

We know that climate change has made weather more extreme. Between 2022 and 2024, Los Angeles experienced extraordinary amounts of rain, in some cases for weeks in a row without pause. For the last 8 months, however, we have received less than an inch of rainfall. When you combine excess rain and growing brush, followed by eight months of drought and a sudden 100mph weather event, you have the recipe for a climate catastrophe.

The Palisades Fire started at 10:30 AM on January 7th. By noon the next day, it had already reached over 11,000 acres. For context: that means it was expanding by about seven football fields per minute. The Eaton Fire, which started above Altadena on January 7th at 6:18 PM, had grown to 10,800 acres by 10AM  the next morning. These are also just two of ten notable fires we’ve had this month.

DSA-LA’s response

As evacuation warnings started, members of DSA-LA quickly set up an emergency response message group. We included members of our steering committee, regional branch organizers, leaders of our mutual aid committee, and any who wanted to help. Our members were balancing this as we were getting real time updates about our friends and family needing to evacuate, with some having to evacuate themselves.

Our first project was creating an evolving  list of resources and information. The situation across the county was developing very rapidly, so this list would be updated many times a day.

As this resource was being created, we started a rapid-response network with our elected democratic socialists, or our “Socialists in Office (SIOs)” and their staff members. Our chapter has already established a Socialists in Office Committee, which made this task much easier. These elected officials were providing constituents with real-time updates and coordinating evacuations, relief, and evacuation centers. They also established locations where residents could relocate to get clean air.

DSA’s staff and National Political Committee worked with our chapter to send mass communications out to members along with a volunteer sign-up form to identify those who were ready and able to help. Working with our regional branches, we divided the respondents up by location and  routed  them each day to volunteer sites  in their area. These included offices of our local electeds and sites like the Pasadena Community Job Center that were accepting and distributing food and donations, as well as facilitating community cleanups. Sites like this were popping up all over LA county.

DSA-LA members volunteering at LA City Council District 14’s field office to distribute and sort donations. Members were routed to sites across the county.

The community

The response from Angelenos to this disaster has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Thousands of people have shown up every day to do everything from house evacuees, sort donations, raise money, foster displaced pets, clean up debris, and care for their community in any way imaginable. Volunteers were compiling lists of Gofundmes for victims. Our shelters were taking in hundreds of animals, big and small.  It didn’t take long for these sites to become so overcrowded with people willing to help, that volunteers started to be turned away. One of our own members involved in the emergency response was volunteering nonstop, even as they learned of their family’s home being lost in Altadena. For every tear I’ve cried for a loved one who’s lost their house or apartment and belongings, I’ve cried thinking about how proud I am of this place and its people.

The state

Our system of disaster response was not designed for the scale of these events. The most effective form of firefighting at scale, air support, was impossible during high winds. Our reservoirs, with the exception of one, were full and functional, but the extreme demand caused water pressure to drastically diminish. Typically, 3-4 fire engines are used to put out one structure fire. We now know almost 18,000 structures have been destroyed. Even discounting the fires burning in our mountains, that would require at least 54,000 fire engines deployed at once. Firefighters were even pouring into California from other states and countries to assist in this effort.

That doesn’t mean, however, that our government should be completely excused from what happened before and after these tragedies started. Our current system is an unfortunate reflection of the power dynamic that exists in this country. For too long, private utilities, fossil-fuel companies, and the billionaire class have purchased legislators and laws that allow their profit-seeking to take precedence over our safety and health. Over the years, Los Angeles and California have made strides away from this type of governance, in no small part due to workers coming together to make that happen.

What our government has done in response to these fires has also been fraught. Fire chiefs didn’t prepare like they had in previous years. A significant portion of the labor used to fight fires is also, shamefully, forced from those who are incarcerated. The city of LA’s mayor was out of the country as this all began (though she flew back quickly). County evacuation notifications came far too late for residents, if at all. The county even mistakenly notified millions of people multiple times that they needed to evacuate or boil their water when they didn’t. There was also little information about best practices to protect our health outside after the smoke dissipated (if a fire just ripped through a bunch of houses and businesses near you, wear your mask outside for at least a couple weeks afterward).

We’re allowed to be, and should be, upset at everything our government has done and will do wrong. We should be careful, however, about using distrustful language against our state that flirts with the libertarian and destructive sentiments of the reactionary right. We must always see these lies for what they are. They are attempts to turn sectors of the working class on each other, while distracting us from the real causes of this disaster.

Republicans, right-wing personalities, and oligarchs, particularly Donald Trump and Elon Musk, wasted no time in blaming this disaster on Los Angeles and California. They used their usual, hateful rhetoric to denounce diversity and equity initiatives, Democrats, and an electorate that is too “woke.” Billionaire developer and closet-Republican Rick Caruso, who’s mayoral run in 2022 also went up in flames, used the opportunity to attack mayor Karen Bass in a thinly-veiled attempt to relaunch his political career. He also hired private firefighters, using our water to protect his shopping center in the Palisades. If you want a sense of how important capital is to these people, Caruso decided that saving his open air mall was more important than saving his own daughter’s home, which was destroyed in the Palisades fire.

The policies that DSA-LA’s electeds have begun to propose in response to the fires (an eviction moratorium and rent freeze in response to landlord price gouging) has been evidence for why the state, and gaining democratic control of it, is so important. The recovery effort in the aftermath of these fires is going to take years. What would we want as socialists in the recovery?

This question will be taken up in Part 2 of this article in the February California Red.