Fahrenheit 2017
The Thomas Fire burning in the hills above Foothill Road, as seen from Ashwood Drive in Ventura. Photo: John Brant. Lucas Zucker picked me up at LAX around midnight on January 11. I opened the back door and tossed my bag on some picket signs and clipboards and grabbed a box off the front passenger seat that had once been full of N95 respirator masks.
By the time I landed, the fire had burned for 39 days, destroyed 1,063 structures and damaged 280 more; over 100,000 people had to at one point or another evacuate; the brushfire would go down as the largest in state history. A rainstorm that bore down just as the fire receded sent a river of boulders and debris through Montecito, damaging 460 homes, destroying 73 more, and leaving 20 bodies dead in the mud.
I’d heard about the fire in my hometown while on a business trip in Bangkok. When I messaged Lucas, one of my closest friends, he reported bluntly: “This shit is fucking terrifying.” When I called my mother, to tell her I wanted to come and stay until the crisis was over, she told me her home was already full. In her trailer in a retirement community on the east side of Ventura, she harbored my grandmother, my sister, her fiancé, (along with his mother, father and a friend who happened to be partying with them when the fire broke out), five of my nieces and nephews, and my aunt and uncle. There were also three dogs and two cats.
The pictures of the fire were otherworldly. Palm trees burst into flames, mountains engulfed and reduced to smoldering embers. Firefighters have a word for what was happening in the hills, where every last blade of grass was eradicated by fire: moonscaping.
Southern California is defined by its disasters: devastating earthquakes, years-long droughts followed by torrential storms, Santa Ana winds and wildfire. But many people in Ventura lack the resources or political clout to absorb the impact of a disaster like the Thomas Fire. This is not Bel Air or Santa Monica. And while the scenic foothills and beach-front communities are havens for the wealthy—from Patagonia’s Yvonne Chouinard to David Murdock, the $2.6 billion-valued real estate titan tied to the Dole Fruit company—by-and-large, the valleys and alluvial plains are a confluence of first- and second-generation Latino immigrants, migrant farmers, oil field roughnecks and other cross-sections of the working class. This is a place referred to by some locals as Ventucky, or Bakersfield-by-the-Sea.
In typical American fashion, this broad social geography isn’t fully reflected in the political landscape, contributing to a sort of myopia among local politicians regarding the needs of the most vulnerable members of the community. This became plain as the county’s emergency plan went into effect in the early days of the fire. Within 24-hours, it was obvious that the most basic and essential prophylactic measures had not been taken into consideration. As a result, the effects of the fire weren’t felt equally. Certain communities—Spanish-speaking immigrants, agricultural workers, were especially affected. As Lucas put it, “Nothing reveals ugly truth like disaster.”
As smoke filled the air, people rushed to stores to buy the N95 masks. Regular dust masks or handkerchiefs were useless against the thick plumes of smoke and ash. Within days local emergency rooms were filling with patients with breathing problems. Ventura County, which is situated on the edge of the fire-prone chaparral and has been in the most prolonged and severe drought in the entire state, was unprepared, only launching public mask distributions about a week into the fire.
As a grassroots organizer, Lucas had been working with others through the fire to figure out whose needs had been neglected, and what could be done to help them. Amid the chaos, he found one constant truth: “The hillside homeowners will rebuild—no matter how bad an idea it might be—they’ve got insurance, FEMA, benefit concerts. The immigrant families in the flatlands below who cleaned their houses and trimmed their gardens, they’re excluded from federal aid and disaster unemployment. The farmworkers out in the fields have no choice but to work all day breathing in that cancerous smoke.”
