City of Angels
Fires are moving before the wild and urban divide and we are not prepared to handle these
On 31st August 1897, Thomas Edison patented what he called a Kinetoscope. Today, we call it the film projector.
Every theatre in New York had to license it from him and he determined the appropriate content for the projector. Edison became the de facto censor board for the United States of America. He felt that films should not be longer than 30 minutes and refused to grant permission for films that were any longer. More than a decade later, a gentleman named, William Fuchs wanted to produce longer movies. He felt his creative freedoms were being curtailed.
Also, across the Atlantic, in the UK, full-length feature films were being received well by audiences.
He decided to defy the edict issued by the Edison company and produce and release longer format movies. Edison sent out cops and hired men to stop these shows from playing.
It reached a point where even production was often being disrupted in the name of enforcing patents. He would have the local police harass the producers and halt the production.
New York was the centre of all culture in America. The Broadway was based out of New York and some of the best acting talent was also to be found in the city. Despite that, sick and tired of Edison, the producers decided to move as far away from Edison as possible.
They wanted to be as far away from New York as possible and simultaneously, have the option to escape the grasp of the law in case Edison mobilized the cops and his goons stopped by.
William Fuchs, later known as William Fox whose company was called the Fox Film Corporation along with Adolf Zukor who had founded Paramount Pictures left to settle in a city by the Mexican border. Founded in 1781 by the Pueblos and called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. In 1900, it had a population of 100,000 people. They would soon be joined by four brothers Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack whose last names happened to be Warner.
In some ways, Los Angeles became what it is today because of Edison.
Today the city is home to over 3.8 million people and it is BURNING.
Last year I read Fire Weather by John Vaillant. In the book, he talks about a new kind of phenomenon, fires that occur at the Wild-Urban-Interface.
Incidentally, Benjamin Franklin set up the first fire company in Philadelphia in 1736 called the Union Fire Company. It was common for fires to break out at homes. He advocated for a small tax on the residents so that the fire company was available at all times to all people since fire often does not just burn one house. He was instrumental in turning firefighting into a social good that every government offers to its citizens.
Wildfires are very different from Urban fires. Wildfires start, develop and grow uniquely. Wildfire embers can cross a mile-wide river since they create their own weather. This is what makes a wildfire impossible to control. Urban fires are different because of their fuel source. The biggest issue with urban fires is that every house is full of explosive fuel squeezed incredibly close to one another.
Increasingly, we are seeing Wild-Urban-Interface fires (WUI). These have the potency of a wildfire combined with the fuel of modern living. As evidenced in LA, these are harder to control and subdue.
To make matters worse, those trained to handle wildfires are not trained to deal with urban fires and very easily get themselves killed because they were not mindful of where the kitchen might be located, for instance. Those trained to handle urban fires would never anticipate the speed with which wildfires can move and the kinds of techniques used to control them.
We cannot fight fires in the WUI.
“The fire is alive. Watch it move. It flickers. It dances on the wind. It changes with every
breath (blow softly on it). Fire is alive. It is born. It grows. And it dies. But fire is special.
It can live again and again.” - Janeen Grohsmeyer
But the bigger point is that it is our obsession with fire; the small combustions in billions of engines across the world, the furnaces to make steel and cement, the heat of mixing chemicals to make everything from plastics to even the food that you eat, which has brought this upon us.
It is appropriate to quote the Gospel of Matthew here; Live by the sword, die by the sword.