On Fire

Dana Goodyear’s article about the loss of her home during the California wildfires earlier this year reminded me of when my family watched the 1991 Oakland Hills fire from our living room (“Fire Season,” September 29th). I designed five new houses for families that lost their homes then, and now I’m working on one for a friend in Malibu. Thirty-four years ago, I was disappointed that the code for the replacement homes I planned required only a modest uptick in fire resistance. I find myself feeling the same way today.

Not long ago, I saw a new wood-frame house going up in the Palisades. When will we stop allowing the construction of combustible wooden boxes in combustible landscapes? Future-oriented public policies are in order: the preventable loss of thousands of structures threatens the stability of the insurance system, diverts public funding and attention from other important issues, and causes great suffering and even death. Fire-resistant materials like metal, concrete, masonry, and tile are common—let’s encourage people to use them.

Kirk E. Peterson
Oakland, Calif.

Goodyear’s description of the despair over useless fire hydrants alludes to a fundamental issue when it comes to controlling urban conflagrations: water management. Building codes certainly need to be updated so that houses themselves are less flammable, but water should also be regulated in order to prevent rather than just fight fires. As much as eighty per cent of the water California manages, according to the state, is allocated to agriculture, which makes up less than five per cent of the economy. A much larger fraction of this resource should be earmarked for municipalities to create hydrated green infrastructure. It is important to recognize the dry climate and to use drought-tolerant plants, but within urban environments let’s not try to replicate the native wildlands that have evolved with fires. Cities are human ecologies, and people need spaces that are livable, green, and flame-resilient.

Saxon Holt
Novato, Calif.

Margaret, the woman with elegant shoes but no house whom Goodyear mentions, is a friend of mine. I, too, live in the burn zone; after the evacuation, I was relieved to reach Margaret by phone. I listened to her harrowing account of escape, and I want to assure Goodyear and her readers that Margaret is now safe, and housed.

Margaret preceded me as the art director of our college’s literary journal, which was modelled on this magazine, and went on to work at a prestigious publishing house in New York. As a student, Margaret would’ve been thrilled to be mentioned in The New Yorker, if not exactly in this way. (Recently, she and I had a long laugh about the irony of her fiery path to inclusion in its pages.) I hope that she can be fully acknowledged here, as the cultured and poetic human being she is.

Margaret said much the same as Goodyear about the wildfires, emphasizing that what was lost goes deeper than buildings and objects, and she wanted survivors to remember the importance of rebuilding not only structures but community. She told me that, in the days after the fires, she was embraced by people at the evacuation site who had lost everything. In that moment, her neighbors acknowledged that they all shared the predicament that Margaret had weathered for years. I also hope it’s possible to re-create this type of community, one that so generously accepted an unusual woman with an uncertain address.

Sarah Lejeune
Topanga, Calif.

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