Original OPE! LA wildfires newsletter post.
Welcome to OPE!, the newsletter by writer and music journalist Brady Gerber. This is where I share the top music industry news of the week, my favorite (and new-to-me) songs and links, and various musings on life. All typos are intentional.
Well, hello there. How are you?
So, yes. The wildfires.
This is a surreal newsletter to write. I won’t pretend what I’m writing is unique or notable compared to all the stories we’re seeing on the news. I’m OK right now. I’m lucky that I could drive to a relative’s place many miles south of the evacuation zones, from which I’m writing this newsletter, and where we’re waiting and seeing until the strong winds finally calm down, hopefully by the end of this week. A lot of people were not lucky. Today, I’m just trying to process the past week for myself. I don’t have a neat “this is what this all means” thesis. I have no desire to come up with one.
If you read last week’s newsletter (new subscribers, hello), it was published in the early stages of what we can now call the worst wildfire in Los Angeles history. By Tuesday evening, when I finished writing the newsletter, the growing Palisades fire had already destroyed an acquaintance’s home where my roommate and I had dinner just a few months ago. It seemed like everyone I knew had a friend or two who lost their homes. In my journal that evening, I wrote about the fire as a surreal and tragic yet far-away incident, a testament to how large and sprawling Los Angeles is and the general lack of unity among most Angelenos outside of tragedies or when the Dodgers play well. I live in central LA; the Palisades might as well be in a different state.
By the time I pressed “send” on the newsletter Wednesday morning, the Palisades fire had worsened, and at a rate quicker than expected. The new Eaton fire to the east had become a serious threat. All the winds across LA, which by the previous evening were the strongest I had seen since moving here, were growing stronger. I could not remember the last time it rained. The worst-case scenarios that we were warned about were happening. Instead of one major fire to the west, we were surrounded by multiple fires. I woke up to heavy smoke that I could taste in my room coming in from the Eaton fire, its smoke blocking my typical bedroom view of north Los Angeles, from Fairfax into the Hollywood Hills. My older building doesn’t have the best-sealed windows, but I heard reports from newer and nicer apartments nearby that were full of residents tasting ash in their rooms. I don’t smoke, but it felt like what I imagine smoking 20 cigarettes within an hour would feel like. I could not see any flames, yet the density of the smoke traveling this many miles to my neighborhood was disturbing. It was an ugly view.
I tried to work. I tried to stay busy. I spent more time than expected checking fire updates on Watch Duty, an app I had never heard of before but was now checking more often than my email. (Thank you to all the developers and volunteers who run and maintain that app.) I texted all my LA friends to check in on them while responding to calls and texts from family and friends confirming my safety. I did some pacing. I tried and failed to nap; I ended up not sleeping much the night before. It was a similar feeling I had while living in NYC in March 2020 and seeing all the increasingly concerning sick reports happening throughout the city. It’s like seeing a faraway tidal wave forming … and realizing the wave was heading in my direction.
I was in a daze—a weirdly isolating daze. A few weeks ago, I committed to staying off all social media except to promote this newsletter. As much as I wanted to check in with all my friends and acquaintances, I had no desire to log on. I did not wish to see any images of destruction just over the hill. I did not want to engage with all the viral news stories and images, many of which I later learned were AI-generated and spreading misinformation regarding the fires and the city’s response. Contrary to what strangers on TikTok and Instagram say, the Hollywood sign did not burn down.
A quick detour to my soapbox. There are, of course, a lot of valid criticisms of Los Angeles and California. I’m curious and preemptively angry and frustrated with all the information that we will learn in the next few weeks about how these fires were started and everything the city and state did wrong. In a brief scan of my usual news outlets by the end of the morning, it became clear that Wednesday had become a field day for all the mediocre bloggers pretending to be journalists whose entire personality is “own the libs,” who saw the reports of civilians losing their homes and going out of their way to say, “But the looting.” I will have plenty of time to field questions like this in the next few weeks from family who mean well and family who don’t mean well. The clutch-my-pearls content mill must churn on, as they say. And this kind of reporting can be done well and should be done; I enjoyed Matt Stieb’s quick interview with Char Miller to talk about the history of wildfires across LA County, everything the city did wrong and are doing wrong, and how LA and its citizens can do better going forward, including actively not building real estate deep into fire zones. And yes, the reports of looting were not great—and not what I was most concerned about.
In these early moments, I had no desire to entertain anyone sharing news of these fires with glee, as if the lifelong Angelenos who lost their homes—homes that many of these Angelenos were only able to afford because they were passed down within their family for generations and who were not rich celebrities who could escape to their second or third home—had it coming. There’s a difference between those who lost a lot and those who lost everything. This past week, the latter outgrew the former. To these too-online hacks, all Angelenos are the same. I would say “fuck those people” but that would imply these people matter.
I get on my soapbox briefly because 1) this is my friendly warning to anyone I’m about to talk to in the next few weeks or months that, though of course you have the right to feel how you feel, I don’t have the energy to debate Los Angeles fire or water policies or politics with anyone who doesn’t live in Los Angeles or California. And 2) at this point throughout last Wednesday, all these feelings were rushing in and out and in again throughout my mind … because all this danger was so close to me, but not immediate. Again, LA is a strange sprawl; what looks like a neighboring community is still several dozens of miles away. I was stuck in this weird twilight zone of worry, in which I had all this time to think about how I was going to talk about these fires in the next few weeks instead of worrying about my physical safety. I was close enough to be a part of history and to be its witness but far away enough to pontificate one’s circumstance.
Then Wednesday evening came.
I was about to cook dinner. I went into my bedroom to grab my phone and respond to another friend’s text when outside my window, I noticed a flickering, orange-like light up in the hills. At first, I thought it was some kind of spotlight. The light was too large. It conveyed such a strange color that it could not come from any residential home. I kept looking. The spotlight’s shape started to morph, like a blob. It started to move. It started to move in different directions, like a child pulling apart some Play-Doh. Gushes of orange suddenly shot out from the center. Each gush expanded the size of the blob, which was now moving downhill. Quite quickly, too. It was getting larger and moving quicker.
It then hit me. I was seeing flames. I was seeing a wildfire. I was seeing a new wildfire. And it was just a handful of miles north of me.
I went numb for a few seconds. It felt like four hours.
This fire would soon be dubbed the Sunset fire. I would later learn that thankfully, this was a smaller fire compared to Palisades and Eaton, and the response would be swift thanks to the strongest winds finally calming down for a moment.
At this moment, in my room, I was not thinking of the size of this fire compared to Palisades and Eaton. I was thinking, “Fuck, a fire.” A small wildfire that you can see with your own eyes is still a wildfire. I had never seen one with my own eyes.
Time to leave.
Luckily I had already packed an emergency bag (if you’re curious, I based my packing on this list), so I had time to pack a second and smaller bookbag full of “nice to have” items, including the laptop where I’m able to write this newsletter. My roommate and I coordinated and confirmed our destination. We decided to drive separately south so that we each had our cars for future potential emergencies. We said goodbye, for now.
Traffic is usually bad in my area. We live within walking distance of a few popular museums and main street arteries, so there’s plenty of tourist foot traffic along with the usual LA blocks of stuck vehicles. For the first few miles, it felt like especially bad gridlock. Worse than usual. We were already too late to leave, I thought. Did everyone also see the Sunset fire and have the same thought to leave early to beat the traffic? (I would find out later that yes, this is what happened.) We were stuck. I was fielding more and more texts and calls, each more frantic than the last now with the new Sunset Fire officially hitting the news. Notifications from Watch Duty were not encouraging. We decided to avoid the freeways. What normally would have been an hour’s drive turned into two hours of snaking in and out of LA’s surface streets, which thankfully were not as congested once we got south of Jefferson Blvd.
A nervous drive turned into a nervously quiet drive. The streets were dead. Perhaps this was typical of a late Wednesday evening. It still adding to the sense that something was off. After an hour, we made it so far south that we couldn’t see the flames or any signs of bright orange light. We drove past streets blocked off by police. We drove past ambulances speeding into the opposite direction. We saw longer-than-usual lines at most gas stations. We saw taco trucks still open, even busy. We drove past a few car accidents. There was an especially bad one involving two cybertrucks with one’s windshield completely gone and one of the passengers still sitting in the car in a daze. Of all nights, this was not the night to require non-fire assistance from police who were already trying to help evacuate people. My route took past SpaceX’s massive headquarters in Torrance—an unexpected and absurd sight that made me laughed.
I drove past more accidents. I drove through more empty streets. And I kept driving. And driving. And driving. And driving. And driving. And driving. And driving. And driving. And driving …
… and I think that is enough to share for now. The rest of this week was spent down south, keeping track of Watch Duty, and taking it day by day. We’re encouraged by the current forecast as of this writing, which indicates that the winds will finally die down by the end of the week. I’ve been able to continue working from down here. Pending any horrific updates, next week’s newsletter should return to relative “normal” programming. We’ll see.
Thank you to everyone who reached out to check on me and anyone else in Los Angeles. Your “hey, just checking to make sure you’re OK” texts mean more than you may think. Even as someone who’s very lucky to (as of now) not be displaced and unrooted, I’m still wrapping my head around how the next few months will look and how quickly everything could fall apart. And again, I’m one of the lucky ones.
With love and all the other good things,
-b
Original OPE! logo by Claire Kuang. Words and cartoons by yours truly. Animations made using FlipaClip and EZGIF. My views don’t reflect my clients or the publications and brands I work with. All typos are intentional. Here’s my website and LinkedIn.