Ecology of fear : Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster

507 Pages·2000·8.11 MB·English

by  Davis

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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster
2. How Eden Lost Its Garden
3. The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
4. Our Secret Kansas
5. Maneaters of the Sierra Madre
6. The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles
7. Beyond Blade Runner
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Mike Davis
Copyright
for my kids, Jack and Roisin
“No place on Earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than
Southern California.”
Los Angeles Times, 1934
1
THE DIALECTIC OF ORDINARY DISASTER
Once or twice each decade, Hawaii sends Los Angeles a big, wet kiss. Sweeping
far south of its usual path, the westerly jet stream hijacks warm water-laden air
from the Hawaiian archipelago and hurls it toward the Southern California coast.
This “Kona” storm system—dubbed the “Pineapple Express” by television
weather reporters—often carries several cubic kilometers of water, or the
equivalent of half of Los Angeles’s annual precipitation. And when the
billowing, dark turbulence of the storm front collides with the high mountain
wall surrounding the Los Angeles Basin, it sometimes produces rainfall of a
ferocity unrivaled anywhere on earth, even in the tropical monsoon belts.1
The two-week-long Kona storm of January 1995 differed little from the
classic pattern, except perhaps in the unusual intensity of rainfall in the South
Bay area—forcing the evacuation of lowlying neighborhoods in Long Beach,
Carson, Torrance, and Hawaiian Gardens—and in Santa Barbara County where
10 inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Otherwise, the scenes were those of ordinary,
familiar disaster: Power was cut off to tens of thousands of homes. Sinkholes
mysteriously appeared in front yards. Waterspouts danced across Santa Monica
Bay. Several children and pet animals were sucked into the deadly vortices of
the flood channels. Reckless motorists were drowned at flooded intersections.
Lifeguards had to rescue shoppers in downtown Laguna Beach. Million-dollar
homes tobogganed off their hill-slope perches or were buried under giant
landslides.2
January 1995 storm (Long Beach)
1. APOCALYPSE THEME PARK
[Southern California], often to its own surprise, has developed a style of urbanization that not
only amplifies natural hazards but reactivates dormant hazards and creates hazards where none
existed.
Wesley Marx, Acts of God, Acts of Man (1977)

What was exceptional was not the storm itself (a “20-year event,” according to
meteorologists), but the way in which it was instantly assimilated to other recent
disasters as a malevolent omen. As a Los Angeles Times columnist put it,
“There’s no question that [we are] caught in the middle of something strange …
maybe God, as the biblical sorts preach, is mad at us for making all those dirty
movies.”3 Divine wrath or not, there is widespread popular apprehension that the
former Land of Sunshine is “reinventing” itself, to use a fashionable gerund, as a
Book of the Apocalypse theme park. First the natives rioted, then nature. In
fewer than three years, the megalopolis endured three of the ten most costly
national disasters since the Civil War.4
The destructive February 1992, January 1993, and January 1995 floods ($500
million in damage) were mere brackets around the April 1992 insurrection ($1
billion), the October–November 1993 firestorms ($1 billion), and the January
1994 earthquake ($42 billion). When damage accounting was finally completed
in 1997, the Northridge earthquake emerged as the costliest natural disaster in
American history, more destructive, according to a Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) spokesperson, “than the combined impacts of the
Midwest floods, Hurricane Andrew, the Loma Prieta earthquake and South
Carolina’s Hurricane Hugo.”5
From Ventura to Laguna, nearly two million Southern Californians were
directly touched by disaster-related death, injury, or damage to their homes and
businesses. The Northridge earthquake alone, according to the California
Seismic Safety Commission, “affected the lives of more people than any
previous natural disaster in the United States.”6 Cataclysm has become virtually
routine. As Peter King, the Los Angeles Times’s analyst of California trends,
wryly noted after the 1995 storms, “A sort of disaster fatigue has set in.
Politicians have run out of fresh, Churchillian sound bites for the rubble
walkthroughs.… Even victims sometimes seem to be going through the motions,
dutifully struggling to reduce the sum of their misery to a pithy sentence or
two.”7
For some unlucky souls, disaster has been a relentless, Job-like ordeal. Los
Angeles firefighter Scott Miller, for example, was shot in the face during the
1992 riots while riding in his fire truck. He spent months in the hospital and was
dismissed from the fire department due to disability. Two years later, his
Granada Hills home was wrecked in the Northridge earthquake. Then, in early
1996, his new four-bedroom home in the Ventura County suburb of Newberry
Park was destroyed by fire.8
This virtually biblical conjugation of disaster, which coincided with the
worst regional recession in 50 years, is unique in American history, and it has
purchased thousands of one-way tickets to Seattle, Portland, and Santa Fe. After
a century of population influx, 529,000 residents, mostly middle-class, fled the
Los Angeles metropolitan region in the years 1993 and 1994 alone. Partly as a
result of this exodus, the median household income in Los Angeles County fell
by an astonishing 20 percent (from $36,000 to $29,000) between 1989 and
1995.9 Middle-class apprehensions about the angry, abandoned underclasses are
now only exceeded by anxieties about blind thrust faults and hundred-year
floods. Meanwhile, Caltech seismologists warn that the Pacific Rim is only
beginning its long overdue rock and roll: the Kobe catastrophe may be a 3-D
preview of Los Angeles 2000. And waiting in the wings are the plague squirrels
and killer bees.
BIBLICAL DISASTERS?
It is still unclear, moreover, whether this vicious circle of disaster is
coincidental or eschatological. Could this be merely what statisticians wave
away as the “Joseph effect” of fractal geometry: “the common clustering of
catastrophe”?10 Could these be the Last Days, as prefigured so often in the genre
of Los Angeles disaster fiction and film (from Day of the Locust to Volcano)? Or
is nature in Southern California simply waking up after a long nap? Whatever
the case, millions of Angelenos have become genuinely terrified of their
environment.
The $42 billion earthquake