Disasters Are Exactly the Time for Urban Planning

Molly Peterson
8 min readJan 23, 2025

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That first Tuesday in January, well south of the fires, wind put out just about every third streetlight on Figueroa in northeast LA. Nobody could decide whether lights mattered, what rules to follow or not. I shouldn’t have been out, but I had just gotten back and needed food and water in case we needed to evacuate. The red and white gates at the Metro train crossing didn’t drop, by the Smart and Final. That’s a long crossing in good times; with the wind trying to lift my car, it felt everlasting. A sports car behind me roared around and over the tracks, bringing the Metro to a jerky halt. Nobody likes to wait. The rest of us kept doing that, longer.

The wind connects us in Los Angeles.

The flames moved over the dry land so quickly. Two hundred acres in 12 minutes, eaten by the Eaton fire. Multiple simultaneous ignitions that Tuesday. Showers of embers like rockets sideways, hairdryer winds hitting handfuls of lit cigarettes. The opposite of a lottery ticket.

via Instagram/Stuart Palley

Beyond the flames, and the ash, and the chemicals they carry, the mementos. In Glassell, John Rabe found a scrap of burned tar paper, a piece of roof. In an Eagle Rock backyard, a piece of a book as large as a hand. Someone lost another book about festivals in Tunisia to the fire; Eve Troeh found a page of that, burned to an oval on a sunny stroll in Pasadena. These are fragments of trauma, she said. A family snapshot blew, pristine, down that way: a man in a red shirt with a square jaw, a woman looking down at a baby whose mouth is open, in annoyance or exhaustion. I hope they find their way home.

In Highland Park, I woke up to a campfire smell at 4 AM; in dreams, I had turned it into marshmallows with my niece. I wasn’t ready for just how much ash could get under a poorly sealed doorway so quickly. No orange glow above Poppy Peak, just a menacing swirl of wind, so I went out to the garage for the air filter, and blocked up the doorways with rolled up towels, just like I told people to do for the New York Times. That night, I brought ash into bed, noticed too late. Later I would sweep it up in the backyard, pieces so big no air monitor could track them, fat white shreds like the soap-snow at the Grove. (You’re not supposed to do that.) It’s still falling. It’s like Mardi Gras glitter, if glitter was infused with toxic chemicals. We’re told not to wash it away.

In January 2025, real-time data showed spiking lead, chlorine, and bromine in Pico Rivera.

The ash marks us, just like flood waters did almost twenty years ago.

I lived and worked in New Orleans after Katrina. I went there from Los Angeles in October 2005, as people were questioning the city’s right to exist. One of the first things I did was go see what had happened to a place I already loved. We’d say that, to go see. What we meant was to bear witness.

Mid-City friends, displaced under evacuation order, no water in the house, were back; we’d pile into their Subaru and go to Gentilly, to Lakeview, to the 9th, to the East. We drove on West End Boulevard past football fields of debris. We did this more than once. We read the x-codes on houses, and counted the loss of life and pets, and we’d pass other people just back doing the same thing, nodding to friends. A solidarity grew in our sorrow. We rode home, stunned and reverent. We cured our silence slowly in bars.

A flooded house, with an x-code on it, from when searchers went into areas after Katrina and checked for casualties and damage. In front is a statue of the Virgin Mary. It’s a sunny day.
New Orleans, 2005.

The waterline then; the fire line now. Behind it has been immediate and indelible pain, and beyond it lies care and the ripple effects of the damage. In New Orleans waters rose in some neighborhoods and not others. Not like our fires, taking so many houses and leaving scattered survivors with an indiscernible logic. But these disasters are shared tragedies; the actor Wendell Pierce, a Pontchartrain Park man, is right to see them together.

We called it “the storm” like we are calling this “the fires.” The chaos they bring is bigger than any proper name.

Like Katrina, these wildfires will fundamentally shift how we think about how we live in the same place together. We are living into a changing climate, onto a more extreme, whiplashed, now-drying landscape.

We’ve been here before. It helps to say the hard parts out loud now.

A flooded picture from Katrina, 2005. A burned scrap from the Eaton Fire, 2025.

New Orleans had fears of toxic soup; eventually, scientists decided the city hadn’t been made much dirtier than it was before the flood, small consolation. In Los Angeles wind has spread chemicals, lead and chlorine. Our air is already dirty.

Wind is a climate wild card. Not unusual, I’m not saying that. Not for December and January. Still, it seems an ever-sharpening blade. While Scripps scientists have projected fewer Santa Anas in the future, weaker around the fall and spring edges, winds that persist could be drier and still intense. The worst kind. There is uncertainty, they say; we don’t know yet. So it’s a complicated truth.

But some truths are felt, about the growing hazards of people on this climate-changed soil. Even if they still shock us, we know them in our bones. The smoke, fastest growing pollution in the west, uncontrolled by our best air law. The extremes meeting extremes, parched but thick vegetation after a time of wet. The fireworks. The utilities. The systems that must sound alarms in time and push water up hills and let people out of narrow canyons.

There’s an adage that I learned from an incident commander: “At ten miles per hour, I’m a firefighter. At 30 miles per hour, I’m an observer.”… Another incident commander told me that at 60 miles per hour, you’re a wind sock.

— Char Miller, Pomona historian

I’ve never seen anything like this; it’s like battling a hurricane, but instead of water it is flames.

— Fire Captain Jerry Puga, who lost his home in Altadena

We are beginning to know what went wrong. Evacuation notices could have saved lives in Altadena. What would have saved the houses?

What the firefighters have told us, told me since the 2008 Sayre fire, is that we are the preparation for the hazard and the causes of it and the responses to it. The infrastructure of our defense isn’t entirely imposed on us. Many of the choices that count are made in public. Some we make for ourselves. We are drawing lines in an active battle.

We have to live with fire.

A man in a yellow jumpsuit wearing protective gear lights a fire in a pile of dry brush.
In Trinity County, California, in April 2019, community firefighters burned brush.

Louisiana’s boot is no longer a boot, tattered by land loss and sea level rise and storms. In California our fire adaptation strategies are raggedy and uneven, better in some places than others.

We are part of what comes next, and so is the changing climate. And few in charge are saying those words. Not the governor, who left it out when he streamlined environmental red tape, who barely mentioned it on Meet the Press. Not the mayor, nor her appointee. This, too, feels like Katrina.

People are ready to get started now. If your property burned down and you want to rebuild it exactly as it was before, then you shouldn’t have to go through an elaborate, time-consuming permitting process.

— Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass [emphasis added]

This is not an urban planning exercise…If we engage in urban planning we’ll have to wait 15 years.

— Los Angeles Chief Recovery Officer Steve Soboroff

A mayor covered with ash and glory: galvanizing in New York in 2001. A mayor calling into WWL-AM, pleading and crying and angry: the avatar of our feelings, re-elected in New Orleans in 2005. A mayor in a jetway at LAX, just touched down, silent in 2025.

What filled that silence are the voices of volunteers. Too many clothes, but so many people. If the city burning is LA’s image of itself, alongside it now please see the YMCA, tumbling over with movement and hope, offering showers and parking and day passes and childcare for people who are looking for homes. My neighbors, selling paintings of unknown landmarks of Los Angeles to raise donations, mourning not just homes but also the gathering spots like Fox’s in Altadena. They tell me Californians are developing an idea about how to take care of each other, not just as an investment in their own security. It’s a ripple of hope for more resilience and a rejection of extinction.

We still have time to fail each other. But we still have time to try not to.

That night I drove out into the darkness, as long flames were already upon houses in the Palisades and in Altadena, I felt the words of a Tulane law professor named Oliver Houck, who wrote in 2006 about those dark days after the storm.

[D]riving back into the city, it looks like Hiroshima. There are no streetlights. We stop at a stop sign. The other guy is already stopped. I wave him forward. Then, it’s my turn. Another guy waves me forward. It’s the new drill. We are actually looking at each other, through the windshields, making eye contact, giving way. Maybe this is the end. But, maybe this is the beginning.

Don’t you know, this is exactly when to talk about urban planning? People rich and poor were vulnerable on our landscape. This is exactly when to talk about climate change. The fires aren’t repeating Katrina, but they might well rhyme. This is exactly when to talk straight about disaster. Because another one is coming.

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Molly Peterson
Molly Peterson

Written by Molly Peterson

I'm an LA-based writer, reporting on climate, environment and health issues. My work is in public media outlets, NYT, The Guardian, and Public Health Watch.

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