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As I report on the seemingly endless stream of wildfires, hurricanes, or floods experienced across the United States in recent years, I often think of the phrase, “A recipe for disaster.” It’s the sort of phrase that feels best said in a dramatic podcasting voice, but cliche as it may be, I’ve found it sums up these events much more accurately than the commonly-deployed “natural disaster.”

The term disaster itself comes from a combination of Latin words that roughly translates to “ill-starred.” This refers to the early belief that disasters were punishments from the universe or God. Over time, our understanding of disasters evolved and other explanations took root. Researchers shared the science behind natural hazards like earthquakes or tornadoes, knowledge that allowed us to track and prepare for them. We came to adopt the phrase “natural disasters” to describe particularly impactful bouts of these naturally-occurring phenomena, a term we still use today despite the fact that there is scientific consensus that humans have altered the natural world around us. 

The following stories dig into the “ingredients” of recent natural hazard-related disasters. Each piece traces back through time to unveil how policies, politics, or societal norms set the stage for the disasters they chronicle. The authors interrogate the role of fossil fuels and industry; of racism, classism, and colonialism. Ultimately, they offer an opportunity to learn from the past, and hopefully better prepare for the inevitable hazards to come. 

We Have Fires Everywhere (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine, July 2019)

The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, has been the subject of countless articles, documentaries, essays, books, and even an upcoming film feature. Much coverage of the wildfire has focused on the horrors of the evacuation process or the near-total devastation of the rural town. And while Jon Mooallem certainly spends time on both of these subjects, he also chronicles the path that led to that November day, including digging into Paradise’s previous brushes with wildfires and attempts to learn from those incidents and prepare for future fires. 

This was a perspective many other stories left out, the fact that residents and officials not only understood there was a threat but attempted to mitigate it. He presents those failed efforts against the backdrop of the broader landscape of PG&E’s infrastructure failures and the suppression-first firefighting policies, which, mixed with years of drought and warming temperatures, primed the forests surrounding Paradise to ignite in a conflagration that surpassed the idea of what a worst-case scenario could look like. 

I remember being so struck by the ending of the piece after my first time reading it — simple sentences that were particularly prescient, knowing what we’ve seen in the years since. 

Still, even before the Camp Fire, many people in Paradise and around California had started to look at the recent succession of devastating fires — the Tubbs Fire, the Thomas Fire, blazes that ate through suburban-seeming neighborhoods and took lives — and intuit that our dominion over fire might be slipping. Something was different now: Fire was winning, finding ways to outstrip our fight response, to rear up recklessly and break us down. That morning, in Paradise, there hadn’t even been time for that fight response to kick in. And the flight response was failing, too. Those who study wildfire have long argued that we need to reshuffle our relationship to it — move from reflexively trying to conquer fire to designing ways for communities to outfox and withstand it. 

Earth’s New Gilded Era (Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, October 2020) 

For years, heat waves have been among the deadliest extreme weather events in the United States, but it’s rare for extreme heat to be referred to as a disaster. There’s a growing movement to treat such sweltering stretches like we do hurricanes or wildfires, ascribing names or categories to them, to convey their seriousness. Part of the challenge in winning that battle, as Vann R. Newkirk explains in this article, is that the impacts of heat are so disparate. 

Newkirk tackled the subject after spending years on the disaster beat, including revisiting Hurricane Katrina in the deftly reported Floodlines podcast. In this story, he spans the globe to identify the throughlines of historic inequity that correlate with heat exposure. For many, heat waves mean days spent largely inside, air conditioning cranked up. It’s those who do not have that luxury — maybe their jobs require them to be exposed to the temperatures or their neighborhood and home does not have adequate cooling infrastructure — who are most impacted. 

When Americans think about climate change, they probably don’t have these kinds of consequences in mind—an uptick in stillbirths, or more Black children with asthma. Climate communication often tends toward the apocalyptic and the episodic, for good reason: Dramatic events are a good way to get apathetic people to care. But the destruction wrought by the heat gap in American neighborhoods is just as important as the high-profile cataclysms. That destruction is insidious and hard to follow because it plays out along existing lines of inequality and injustice. Comparable to its role in some chemical reactions, heat accelerates the logical outcomes of unequal human systems. In this reaction, heat is not necessarily a bomb that will suddenly vaporize civilizations. Here, its preferred pathway is decomposition, working slowly and steadily at severing bonds until two components are separate, if not equal.

The Abolitionists Born After Hurricane María (Edmy Ayala Rosado, Atmos, 2022) 

Edmy Ayala Rosado set out to write about the fifth anniversary of Hurricane María and the power of Puerto Rican people, she explains at the start of this article. Instead, she found herself having to make sense of yet another devastating storm. While 2022’s Hurricane Fiona was historic, it was in many ways not surprising, Rosado says, as Puerto Rico has weathered multiple significant disasters in the years since Maria. She includes political disasters in this list, noting throughout the piece that it’s impossible to strip politics from the impacts of these natural hazards. 

Blackouts and electrical issues certainly stemmed from the 2018 storm’s lashing winds, but they continue because of politics, Ayala Rosado argues. She chronicles the work of citizen-led grassroots groups that are tackling some of Puerto Rico’s most entrenched issues since the storm: electricity, food sovereignty, and accessing aid funding. Repeatedly, she returns to the structural and political problems that began long before Hurricane María, which were then laid bare and exacerbated by the challenging years that have followed. But she never loses faith in her community’s ability to withstand what happens next. 

Many of these efforts—although created in the darkness of one of the worst weather events in recent history—have helped local communities steer our reconstruction. They are doing it leveraging academic, historic, political, and ancestral knowledge. 

We Boricuas are showing the world a true and noble resistance to capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Though some may argue the colonial project seems to be working in Puerto Rico, we push back. We level the playing field for true sovereignty. We have turned our grief into action.

The Bear God Revisited (Emily Sekine, Orion Magazine, February 2020)

While studying geology in Japan, Emily Sekine explores the ways disasters become a part of culture. They’re woven into the stories we pass down, like the titular “Bear God,” and they can shape the way we live our daily lives, if we so choose. Sekine acknowledges the high risk of natural hazards Japanese people face on any given day, with the ground under their feet existing across four tectonic plates. But the “3.11 disaster” still remains singularly devastating, Sekine says, referring to the earthquake-triggered tsunami that also caused a nuclear accident. More than 15,000 people were killed and more than 400,000 were displaced. 

Observing the disaster from nearly a decade later, Sekine joins a preparedness workshop being offered to residents in Tago. After a brief topography lesson, participants fan out into the landscape, tasked with viewing the familiar landscapes of their neighborhood through disaster-focused eyes. What obstacles might prevent them from evacuating before the wave of a tsunami crests towards their path? What steps could they take now to prevent that from happening?

Like most of the reads on the list, Sekine’s essay draws from the benefit of hindsight, of being able to look back at a disaster and decipher what went wrong. So, I appreciated the inclusion of this meeting, of using that understanding from the past to take steps to mitigate what devastation a future earthquake might cause. 

One of the main appeals of living in and visiting the areas around Mount Fuji is the pleasure of soaking in the mineral-rich onsen, or hot spring baths. But, Tanaka-san told me, most people do not connect this experience with the ever-present threat of earthquakes and volcanoes. When people are relaxing in the onsen, he wants them to think about how these geological processes are connected. His point, as I understand it, is not to ignite fear, but to insist that people grasp the full and varied powers of the earth — the blessings as well as the dangers. 

The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 2015)

It’s impossible to talk about longform disaster writing without mentioning this piece, which brought the threat of a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest into public consciousness. When reporting in Washington once, I was even presented with a carefully stapled paper printout of the article. Residents told me it had inspired — or, perhaps, frightened — their rural community to develop its own preparedness committee.

Schulz approaches the threat that lies under some of the West’s biggest cities from multiple angles, from the scientific to the sociological. It culminates in her predicting what the earthquake might look like on a societal level, from the grid collapses to the roads destroyed, and the personal level, from the way “refrigerators will walk out of kitchens” to the various ways homes might slide off their foundations and collapse. Ultimately, Schulz questions how we’ve come to a place where we’ve researched and studied and learned so much about this risk, yet taken such little action to prepare for it. 

The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

Great American Wasteland (Lauren Stroh, Longreads, March 2022)

Writing about her native Louisiana, Lauren Stroh speaks to the reader with familiarity, as if welcoming you into the sort of exchanges you hear on a front porch or in passing at a local diner. In Cameron Parish, those conversations for the past three years have centered largely around disaster. The town experienced two hurricanes, a winter storm, flooding, and tornadoes all in a less than two-year period, all during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the deaths, destruction, and devastation, Stroh asks why. 

Why was the area so vulnerable in the first place? Why were bodies still being held in trailers months after the storms? Why was there not more aid and funding being sent to address this devastation?

While I described Stroh as welcoming to the reader, that’s not to say she approaches these conversations lightheartedly — she’s frustrated and angry, tired, and tough, and her voice is unflinching. Throughout the piece, Stroh shares snippets of her interviews, again letting the reader in to be a part of her conversations. Some of these are with officials; one with a suspect nonprofit leader. Others are with the residents who remain, the people who are navigating the maze of insurance claims and federal aid Stroh carefully lays out. It’s an analysis of how cascading disasters can bury survivors in bureaucracy, making it increasingly difficult for them to surface before the next one strikes, and the ways the same bureaucratic system can contort to let industry off the hook. 

Danny Lavergne, the director of Cameron’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, tells me it took 51 weeks for FEMA to get 201 people housed in mobile housing units after Hurricane Laura. For months they refused to place camper trailers in a flood zone before abruptly reversing that decision without reason or explanation. That’s how arbitrary bureaucracy can be. But it fucks up your life: For nine months, 201 people were homeless and waiting. They made do in loved ones’ living rooms, in their cars, in hotel rooms they had to drive in from situated far and wide across the state. People lived this way through the fall and into spring — throughout the pandemic in 2020, when at times Louisiana suffered among the highest caseloads in the United States, long before there were any vaccines. Cameron’s only hospital is still operating out of a tent with limited services. Lake Charles has no homeless shelter, and all the hotels and apartments in close vicinity were damaged or price gouged to match the demand for livable housing. In the meantime, while they waited on FEMA to coordinate temporary housing, do tell me — where exactly were these people supposed to go?

Colleen Hagerty is a journalist specializing in disaster coverage for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC News, among others. She also has a newsletter on the subject called My World’s on Fire. You can find her on Twitter @colleenhagerty.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

How rural America is failing migrants. The life lessons of soccer strategy. Moving on after the unthinkable happens. One house’s unsettling past. And a conversation between film icons. (Who doesn’t need more Nic Cage?) Welcome to our editors’ five favorite stories of the week.

1. What Happened to Rezwan

Kartikay Mehrotra, Matti Gellman | ProPublica, The Kansas City Star | November 19, 2022 | 5,098 words

At the Statue of Liberty, the final line of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” reads: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” There’s no question that the Biden administration had the best intentions in evacuating Afghan allies out of the country in August 2021 when the United States turned its back on the country, 20 years into a failed war. But some of the tempest-tost of Afghanistan have found small (if any) welcome in rural America, where there is little experience in helping newcomers and immigrants to become happy, productive members of the community. In this nuanced piece jointly published by ProPublica and The Kansas City Star, reporters Kartikay Mehrotra and Matti Gellman try to unravel the bureaucratic inadequacies that failed the Kohistani family — and may have caused 14-year-old Rezwan Kohistani to take his own life. —KS

2. Life, Death, and Total Football

Rosecrans Baldwin | GQ | November 29, 2022 | 3,306 words

Like so many others in my generation, I grew up playing soccer. And like so many others in my generation who grew up playing soccer, the magic of Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff was drilled into both my head and feet: his on-ball moves, his off-ball philosophy. Team Netherlands’ totaalvoetbal (Total Football) strategy may not have reigned on the international stage past the ’70s, but its emphasis on flowing in and out of space would inform player development even in the States into the ’90s. It also came to govern the larger philosophy of Rosecrans Baldwin’s friend Lars, a man who loved soccer and coaching as fiercely as he loved his family — until he succumbed to cancer three years ago. Now, on the eve of the Dutch and U.S. men’s teams meeting in the World Cup, Baldwin unpacks Lars’ impact on his own life, and how he sought to chronicle and preserve Lars’ outlook while there was still time. This is a piece about Baldwin’s loss, of course, but it’s really a piece about how soccer changed Lars, and how Lars changed the world around him. “A friend comes into your life and shows you it’s flexible,” Baldwin writes. “A friend alters your life by appearing in a new role. The role changes, the friendship changes.” Sharing space isn’t just for the game pitch. —PR

3. Identity Crisis

Deepa Padmanaban | Fifty Two | November 25, 2022 | 4,006 words

In these times that feel constantly pierced by mass death events, we’ve seen more stories detailing the invisible and often forgotten work of emergency responders who are first to encounter the dead. In a resource-strapped country like India, it’s hard to imagine the logistics of rescue operations, and even more so what is needed to properly and humanely manage a massive number of bodies after a large-scale natural disaster. But Deepa Padmanaban lays this all out with care in this Fifty Two story. “Prioritising the living over the dead is a given,” Padmanaban writes, but she also says that more respectful handling and more swift identification of victims allows their families to move on. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami revealed the lack of forensic infrastructure in the country, and Padmanaban reports on how practices like forensic odontology, which uses dental expertise, can be a reliable way to identify victims. (Padmanaban shares that Argentinian grandmothers in the late 1970s were the first people to suggest forensics as a way to identity victims — in their case, their daughters who had been abducted by Argentina’s military junta, and their daughters’ children.) This is an interesting piece on humanitarian forensics in India and, above all, honoring the dead and offering compassionate care to those left behind. —CLR

4. ‘The More We Pulled Back The Carpet, The More We Saw’: What I Learned When I Bought a House With a Dark Past

Matt Blake | The Guardian | November 19, 2022 | 3,311 words

Lying at the intersection of real estate, horror, and murder mystery is this gripping essay by Matt Blake. Have you ever considered your house’s past? Unless you are sitting in a brand new building, other people have called your house home before you. Blake knew this, but as he states, “treated this house’s past like the junk folder in my email: you know there might be bad stuff in there, but so long as you never open it, it can’t do any harm.” Then he opened it. Uncovering a gruesome story, Blake asks fascinating questions about where we live. Does a house soak in vibes? I was amazed to learn tears and sweat glands pump out “chemosignals” other people detect, not only in the moment but after the source has gone. Miss Habersham’s house must have oozed sadness for years. Blake traces his house’s history back to the very beginning. You can imagine the lives of the people that stood on those floors before him: “When Queen Victoria died, it was inhabited by a cordwainer – a shoemaker – and his family. When the first world war broke out, a wonderfully described ‘cutter of fancy materials’ was here with his wife and three children.” Knowing what Blake learns about a later inhabitant, I may not have stayed in that house, but Blake and his daughter do. The next family to make it their home. —CW

5. Nicolas Cage and John Carpenter are Cinema’s Most Studious Eccentrics

Hannah Ongley | Document | November 28, 2022 | 3,752 words

In my house, we worship at several artistic altars, two of which are Nicolas Cage and horror movies. My husband is a devotee of the former, I of the latter. So I can’t help but feel that this conversation between Cage and horror auteur John Carpenter was made specially for us. Situated here as two of the weirdest, most talented figures in modern Hollywood — no arguments from me — the pair talk about James Dean’s “perfect” career, how to know if your child is an actor, some very discomfiting alpacas, and doing charades with Anthony Perkins. Their dialogue is a delight. Time to rewatch Halloween and Mandy. —SD

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Yxta Maya Murray | Longreads | August 2020 | 4,990 words (20 minutes)

— with thanks to Dr. Alex Pivovaroff

1.

Chaparral spreads its hard, green shine over the hills and valleys of Southern California. This tough-leafed shrub community established itself as part of the local plant landscape millions of years ago. It flourishes during the area’s rainy springs, and survives droughts by plunging its sturdy roots deep into granite bedrock, which can hold a surprising amount of water.

Chaparral also bears a reputation for fire. These plants have adapted to the types of blazes Southern California’s semi-arid landscape has historically endured, and some varieties of chaparral evolved a literally incendiary mode of survival: their seeds need to burn in order to sprout. After wildfires scorch the land, the chaparral bursts into a glossy biome, hosting fire-follower poppy blossoms that fan out over the blackened hills.

2.

Los Angeles has always lacked an adequate supply of indigenous water.

This problem brings out the worst in its settlers, who adapt to the landscape with as much scorched-earth ingenuity as does the chaparral.

3.

Los Angeles incorporated in 1850, two years after the end of the Mexican-American War. That year, government officials calculated that the city possessed a population of 1,610 white people, 70 Native people, 12 black people, and 2 Chinese people.

The city soon became a magnet for farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs, many of whom made their fortunes by supplying California Gold Rush miners up north with beef, sugar, flour, and mining equipment.

In order to distribute the waters of the flowing Río Porciúncula — now known as the Los Angeles River — to the agricultural lands to the west, Spanish settlers outfitted the river with a zanja madre, a “mother trench.” Women and Indigenous servants would carry water from the river to households in clay pots called ollas.

These efforts did not do enough to quench the ever-growing thirst of Southern California.

4.

In 1836, Don Rafael Guirado, one of Los Angeles’s most powerful citizens and the future father-in-law of Governor John Downey, determined that the water level in the Río Porciúncula’s zanjas had ebbed too low. He instructed the local council to gather a group of deputies to arrest all “drunken Indians” and compel them to work on the mother trench, whose waters were fouled with debris as well as bacteria and viruses. Overseers commanded that the slaves increase the water output of the zanja system through unspecified measures. No records detailing these people’s sufferings survive.

In late 1862 and early 1863, smallpox tore through Los Angeles’s Native and Mexican communities. The epidemic spread when victims washed in the polluted water in the zanjas. At least 200 people died.

5.

In 1866, jurors in Los Angeles acquitted a French immigrant named Armand Michel Josef Lachenais of the murder of a fellow countryman named Henry Delaval, with whom he’d argued about the internal workings of the French Benevolent Society. Lachenais later also murdered a Native vineyard worker, Pablo Moreno, but the California Supreme Court tossed his conviction because his indictment had been based on the testimony of Native witnesses. Local gossips whispered that Lachenais also slaughtered his wife, Doña María, but prosecutors never brought charges against him for this crime.

Still, Lachenais went too far when, in 1870, he quarreled with his neighbor, a 53-year-old Pennsylvanian and industrious capitalist named Jacob Bell, over the withdrawal of water from a zanja installed on their lands’ border. After the two men traded angry words, Lachenais grabbed his gun and mounted his horse. He then stalked Bell and shot him two or three times, killing him. Lachenais was arrested and secured in the local calaboose, but a vigilance committee descended upon the jail and tore Lachenais out of his cell. This armed mob — at least 200 men strong, and whose leaders included a Methodist preacher — hauled Lachenais to a corral on New High Street. A Samaritan leapt on top of a wooden box and attempted to preach against a lynching, but the vigilantes kicked the box from under him only to use it to prop Lachenais beneath the corral. The men strung a rope around Lachenais’s throat and removed the box. They watched as Lachenais strangled to death.

6.

In 1898, hot winds aggravated a prevailing drought that scoured the 48-year-old city of Los Angeles. Sugar beet crops shattered. Grain yields perished. Conditions grew so extreme that, a year later, Methodist ministers in Los Angeles “invoke[d] the god of storms” and asked the heavens “why he ha[d] withheld rain from the thirsting fields of Southern California.”

Severe drought conditions persisted off and on in Los Angeles for the next six years. The dryness did not discourage newcomers. In 1900, Los Angeles’s population grew faster than that of any of the larger cities in the United States.

In 1902, Southern California’s booming sugar beet industry braced to supply 165,000,000 pounds of sugar to the Pacific Coast states. But the drought threatened the harvest. Factories built new irrigation systems and sank artesian wells. Nevertheless, water demands continued to outstrip supply.

In 1902 and then again in 1904, cattle began to die.

The drought which has continued through Southern California for more than three months just at the season when under normal conditions there is the most plentiful supply of water, is becoming a serious matter to ranchers and particularly to owners of livestock . . . . No rain has fallen here since October 1. (The San Francisco Call, January 12, 1904)

7.

In 1904, the same year that the newspapers reported livestock losses, onetime Los Angeles Mayor Fred Eaton began to wrest water rights from Owens Valley landowners through a series of dark deals. Though Owens Valley sat 250 miles away from L.A., Eaton had discerned that the Owens River could be funneled down easily to his city on account of the Valley’s 4,000-foot elevation over the desert. He traveled through the area, visiting farmers and ranchers, and soon began negotiating prices and terms. Eaton was accompanied by his friend and co-conspirator J.B. Lippincott, the supervising engineer of all Pacific coast irrigation projects administered under Teddy Roosevelt’s Reclamation Act. Lippincott, who acted as a double agent during these tours, led Owens Valley men to believe that Eaton acquired their sun-seared properties for Reclamation purposes, rather than as part of Eaton’s plot to steal their water for L.A. For nearly a year, Eaton managed to keep his plans secret even though his machinations were supported by famous oligarchs like Harrison Gray Otis, the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and transportation tycoon Moses H. Sherman.

Eventually, though, the word got out.

Los Angeles Plots Destruction, Would Take Owens River, Lay Lands Waste, Ruin People, Homes and Communities, a small Owens Valley newspaper headline declared in 1905, prompting widespread community protests.

Eaton was a stubborn man, and he continued fighting for his vision of an Edenic Los Angeles despite the outrage. A designer named William Mulholland would fulfill his vision, overseeing the construction of the new, huge aqueduct that would divert the Owens River to the city and prove the Valley newsmongers right.

8.

William Mulholland was a well-built and laconic Irishman who had arrived in Los Angeles by way of Pittsburgh in 1877. He began his career as an energetic ditch-digger and gold prospector. Soon enough, he rose through the Los Angeles City Water Company’s ranks to become superintendent, overseeing the workings of the zanjas, and became head of the Department of Water and Power when the city took over the water system. When he began building the aqueduct in 1907, he was 52 and possessed no formal engineering education.

William Mulholland hired a crew of 5,000 men who spent the next five years working with hand shovels, mules, and dynamite to raise the 230-mile system, which became the world’s largest water-supply project at the time. They finished the aqueduct on time and below cost. When Mulholland unveiled the marvel at a ceremony in Sylmar in 1913, he looked up at the Owens river coursing down through the San Fernando Valley and said to the crowd, “There it is, take it.”

Still, the business of large-scale water diversion would not be that simple. Owens Valley farmers and ranchers, who found their lands destroyed by the withdrawal of the river, rebelled. They dynamited a section of the aqueduct in May 1924. Then, that August, renegades kidnapped and prepared to lynch one of Mulholland’s accomplices, Leicester Hall, an attorney and the treasurer of the Owens River Canal Company. Hall saved his own life by making the Freemason’s distress signal, which was recognized by a fellow Freemason in the murderous throng.

Mulholland was not deterred. With the success of the aqueduct, he began to dream bigger and more dangerously. He decided that the aqueduct was an incomplete solution for the needs of Los Angeles, and began scouting locations for the construction of a dam, in case a drought ever outpaced Owens water. He settled on San Francisquito Canyon, a federally held tract that hollows the Sierra Pelona Mountains. The canyon, which can be reached from Los Angeles in under an hour by car, is formed mostly out of solid sandstone, red siltstone, shale, and conglomerate stone. However, a decade earlier, work crews tunneling through the area had discovered that the canyon was layered through with schist in its northeastern section. And, in a 1911 report, Mulholland and Lipincott wrote that the schist might be unstable.

Mulholland nevertheless ignored the troubling condition of the area and proceeded to build in the canyon. The St. Francis Dam became operational in 1926.

It began to develop fissures and leaks within a year.

9.

On the morning of March 12, 1928, the dam held more than 12 billion gallons of water. That day, Mulholland visited the site with Tony Harnischfeger, the dam keeper. Harnischfeger showed Mulholland several muddy outflows in the dam’s western edge. Mulholland studied the cracking for an hour and a half before telling Harnischfeger to report back to him three times a day about the embankment’s condition.

Mulholland then stepped back into his chauffeur-driven Marmon sedan and returned to Los Angeles, where they had lunch at about 2 p.m.

About 10 hours later, around midnight, the dam burst open and emptied entirely into the canyon. No one who witnessed the breach survived. The flood killed Harnischfeger instantly, as well as his son, Coder, and Harnischfeger’s girlfriend, Leona Johnson. The water hurled toward a power plant called Powerhouse Number 2, where it drowned laborers and teachers. It continued to crash into the Santa Clara River Valley. It blasted into a Southern California Edison construction camp, killing 84 people, before emptying debris and bodies into the Pacific Ocean, 54 miles from the source point. Historians estimate a death toll between 400 and 600.

At the coroner’s inquest, investigators asked Mulholland why he did not react to the seepage Harnischfeger had shown him on the morning of the catastrophe.

“The only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead,” Mulholland said.

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10.

Between 2011 and 2014, a Cal State Northridge graduate student in archaeology named Ann Stansell compiled the names of the victims of the St. Francis Dam’s collapse.

Some of the names are: Luz Alvarado, Jesus Alvarez, Clinton Anderson, and Georgie Basolo.

And: Maria DeJesus Carrillo, Hipolito Cerna, Homer Coe, Walter Colburn, Marguerite Cowden, and Rosarita Erratchuo.

And: Señora Figueroa, Lorenzo Florez, Mrs. Forrester, John Harold Frame, Elizabeth “Tootsie” Garcia, Charles Glenn, John Earl Gold, Richard Gottardi, and Esther Luna.

And: Jose Martinez, Paul Massetti, Vidae Louise Mathews, Charles Edgar McCarty, Teviarro Monorez, Roy Morrow, and Francisco Ochoa.

11.

In the 1920s, agriculture spread across L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Farmers cultivated oranges, lemons, walnuts, tomatoes, grapes, beets, barley, corn, and lima beans. Many of the laborers who coaxed the fruit from the land were Mexican men and women, working for white landowners. The Latino laborers were ill-paid and -sheltered. But in the 1930s, they found competition in the drought refugees who had fled the Oklahoma and Arkansas dust bowls to seek work in L.A.

These refugees, while white, were perhaps even less welcome than the Latino workers, whom L.A. chieftains regarded as lazy and shiftless demi-humans, “bovine and tractable”; that is, they did not object too vocally to being housed in miserable shacks on overseers’ properties.

The influx of Dust Bowl migrants became so overwhelming that L.A. County Supervisors recommended that they be counted as they crossed over the state line. Herbert C. Legg, Chairman of the County Board of Commissioners, assured the public that the government did not pursue this surveillance in order to intimidate refugees or facilitate their arrest, but rather to ensure that they received sufficient care.

The Federal Government has assumed responsibility for drought relief and it is important to our State that such drought relief follow sufferers when they leave drought areas, he said, in 1936.

Chairman Legg either lied when he said this, or did not know what he was talking about.

A housing boom had started in L.A. in the 1920s, and small single-family homes began to sprout on the chaparral-blooming hillsides. Black people, Latinos, Asians, Slavs, Jews, and Italians were barred from living in certain neighborhoods. But a respectable class of Anglos with ready cash were allowed to colonize the valleys, which they did with enthusiasm, jubilantly planting small farms and decorating their homes with the flowers that sprouted around them. During Christmastime, these new minor land barons would adorn their hearths with the poisonous leaves and red berries of the native toyon plant, otherwise known as “hollywood.” This potentially dangerous practice grew so popular that the state outlawed toyon’s harvesting on public land.

City leaders welcomed this kind of moneyed and house-proud white person, who would buy a parcel and work in one of L.A.’s many new utility companies and other industries — Southern California Edison, for example, or the proliferating studios of Hollywood. But the Okies repelled the Southland’s elite. News outlets such as the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine called them relief chiselers, while other periodicals called them white trash, marginal people, and irresponsible wandering hordes. Vigilantes would assault their meeting places and encampments. And in 1936, the same year that Legg gave his assurances that he only monitored migrants to ensure their safety, L.A. police chief James Edgar Davis dispatched patrolmen to meet drought refugees at the California-Arizona border and force them back to where they came from.

Ever hear of the border patrol on the California line? Police from Los Angeles — stopped you bastards, turned you back. Says, if you can’t buy no real estate we don’t want you. (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)

12.

Due to the explosive advances in nuclear science in the 1950s, the problems of drought, flood, atrocity, and inequality would intensify in California.

Simi Valley, a Ventura County community that is now famous as the location of the East County Courthouse, which hosted the failed 1992 Rodney King prosecution of four LAPD officers, is also the home of one of the nation’s first commercial nuclear power plants. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) housed North American Aviation’s (NAA) Rocketdyne division as well as Atomics International, a developer of nuclear reactors. SSFL was built on Simi Hills, a low mountain ridge south of the Valley. It began operations in 1947 and was closed by its current primary owner, Boeing, in 2006.

NAA scientists used the laboratory to test reactors and rocket engines, and to manufacture plutonium fuel. In the 1950s, lab employees — often people in their early 20s hired as manual laborers and security personnel — helped physicists and engineers test the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE).

The SRE was a nuclear reactor that would go critical (that is, become capable of providing power) if fed with massive quantities of uranium, as well as tetralin and sodium coolants. Excitement abounded across Southern California when the SRE began delivering a small amount of electricity to Moorpark, a nearby city in Ventura County, in 1957.

In January 1959, however, some of the lab operators noticed a sticky black substance in the reactor, a probable leaking of tetralin that the facility’s higher-ups ordered to be cleaned off. The tetralin, however, continued leaking, gumming up the SRE and failing to cool the sodium. Around July 12, the sodium penetrated into the uranium fuel elements, creating huge quantities of blazing-hot radioactive gases. In other words: the SRE experienced a partial core meltdown, to which lab engineers responded by shutting down the reactor on July 13, only to continue operating it on and off until July 26. The engineers dealt with the gases by expelling them into the atmosphere for weeks.

Forty-eight days after the accident, the Atomic Energy Commission and Atomics International issued a press statement that described the incident in confusing jargon and relied heavily on the passive voice — “a parted fuel element was observed” — and misled the public about the danger they were in. The fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions. No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred.

It has been estimated that the July 1959 incident expelled 240 times the amount of radioactivity as Three Mile Island.

Despite the magnitude of this catastrophe, the lab continued to operate and was the site of further disasters. In 1964, and then again in 1969, reactors designed to power U.S. space missions experienced damage to 80 percent and about 30 percent of their fuel, respectively. No one informed the public about these accidents, either.

As of this year, the site remains brimming with radioactive contamination despite the fact that in 2007, NASA, Boeing, and the Department of Energy (DOE) signed a Consent Order for Corrective Action with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, which mandated a cleanup by 2017. This deadline has now obviously passed, and the area remains the subject of much community concern and speculation.

In August 2018, residents urged members of Simi Valley City Council to forbid the city from using groundwater as drinking water. If groundwater were so employed, it could not only imperil Simi Valley’s tonier bedroom communities, but also create specific dangers for people who cannot afford bottled water. Such folks include Simi Valley’s small but at-risk homeless population, who must scramble for resources and yet are targeted as irresponsible wandering hordes by the city’s Proactive Cleanup of Homeless Encampments Program. The Council embarked upon a study to evaluate the safety of funneling groundwater into public facilities and private residences, but put this project on hold when confronted with community dissent.

One of the supplicants, Jessica Geselle, a 39-year-old mother of two, said that she had been diagnosed with thyroid and uterine cancer that she believed was caused by her exposure to Santa Susana pollutants.

I’m here tonight to beg of you not to put groundwater in our homes … (and) keep our future generations safe, she said.

13.

In 2010 and 2011, the DOE began interviewing former employees of the Santa Susana lab in order to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. Federal procedure requires such a statement to be filed before a contaminated area may receive the “remediation” that residents of Simi Valley and the nearby San Fernando Valley continue to await.

Some of the employees the DOE talked to mentioned throwing radioactive or contaminated material into a “sodium burn pit” between the 1950s and the 1970s, and dumping radioactive materials into the ocean. Some of them discussed how much they had enjoyed their jobs, which had kept them busy and on the go. A number of workers described fires and accidents at the lab. Others reported that many of their former project managers, shift managers, and co-workers had died of cancer.

One respondent, who is known in the report as Interviewee #258, explained that he had been part of the Rocketdyne police force, where he worked as a patrolman and a sergeant. Interviewee #258 said he had mostly been assigned to gate-guard duty, but that he also worked in the Rocketdyne fire department when they needed the extra help.

Interviewee #258 explained that his superiors never cautioned him about any personal exposure to radioactive materials. He did, however, remember that there had been a pond of water in SSFL’s Area II, which was not adjacent to any test stands. Fish lived in that pond, he said. He recounted how the fish looked strange, even grotesque.

Interviewee #258 also said that he had once seen a brushfire in Area IV, which once held the SRE.

No buildings were burned but a lot of trees, brush, shrubbery and weeds were destroyed. I don’t recall the exact cause of the fire but it occurred during very hot weather and it took all day to extinguish.

14.

The Woolsey fire ignited in Simi Valley on November 8, 2018, at 2:24 p.m. According to news reports, the fire began at the Santa Susana Lab, possibly because of a malfunction at Southern California Edison’s Chatsworth substation, which is located on site. The fire appears to have originated within 1,000 feet of the SRE’s partial meltdown.

The surrounding scrub-filled areas were parched as a result of a drought California had endured since December 27, 2011, and which would not end until March 5, 2019. Some experts describe the period of heat and dryness from 2012 to 2014 as the worst California has seen in 1,200 years.

The flames spread quickly to the surrounding weeds and brush.

Santa Susana once possessed a crack firefighting force alongside its police unit, but this team seems to have either dwindled to a skeleton crew or been more thoroughly dismantled; the status of the firefighting troop remains unclear as Boeing did not answer reporters’ questions in the aftermath of the fire. Moreover, no one who witnessed the fire’s outbreak has come forward to describe what happened, perhaps due to the pressures of lawsuits that have been filed against the aircraft manufacturer as well as Edison.

The fire burned freely through the contamination. On the very day the fire broke out, about 400 firefighters had been called away to battle another blaze, the Hill fire, which ran amok 15 miles to the west. The response to Woolsey saw a long delay. When the Los Angeles County Fire Department was finally deployed, there were problems — the Department sent strike teams to Agoura Hills instead of Simi Hills, and at the lab site, there was no or little water, and poor cellphone reception. Eventually, these limitations impelled the firefighters to move their base of operations to a Ventura County fire station.

For the next few days, strong Santa Ana winds drove the fire into Bell Canyon, the Santa Monica Mountains, Oak Park, and finally Malibu. It burned 96,949 acres and destroyed 1,643 structures. It forced more than 295,000 people to flee from their homes and communities. The Woolsey fire killed three people (that we so far know of): Alfred De Ciutiis, Anthony Noubar Baklayan, and Shoushan Baklayan.

15.

The Santa Susana Field Laboratory is located on a brush- and weed-covered 2,668-acre parcel in Simi Hills. In the 1940s, North American Aviation believed it was an excellent choice for the siting of a nuclear power plant on account of its remoteness from populated areas. According to the most recent estimate, Simi Valley now houses approximately 125,613 people.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), the lab site is contaminated with trichloroethylene, as well as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and perchlorate. Further, according to the BAS, “[a] $40 million, multi-year radiation survey by the Environmental Protection Agency found hundreds of Santa Susana locations contaminated with radionuclides, including strontium 90, cesium 137, and plutonium 239.”

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On the Boeing web page, Boeing explains that, after the Woolsey fire, a study conducted by an independent and State-certified laboratory detected no man-made radionuclides.

In December 2018, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control issued a statement indicating that the Woolsey fire did not poison the folks of Simi Valley, Ventura, or Los Angeles.

No radiation or hazardous materials from SSFL were detected in communities following the Woolsey Fire.

16.

Some people do not believe these reports. One prominent critic is Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hirsch complains that the California studies were taken after the fire, when any and all blighted smoke would have already disappeared. He also asserts that the Department of Toxic Substances Control did not test their air, ash, and soil samples for radioactivity at all. He wonders how inspectors found no contamination when Santa Susana had long been known as a contaminated site.

17.

When wildfires rage over radioactive lands, weeds and brush present some of the greatest dangers. Radioactive isotopes sink into groundwater, which is then tapped by groundcover. When fire spreads to these plants, they may discharge the radiation into the air as they burn.

18.

The Santa Susana Lab was built and its toxic remnants have languished amid the chaparral-covered Simi Hills, less than an hour away from the location of the long-gone deadly zanjas, of Lachenais’ forgotten lynching, and of the hushed rooms where Fred Eaton and William Mulholland plotted out the water wars.

Chaparral is a fire-responder. In the spring following the Woolsey fire, poppies peeked out from its biome. The plant’s hard, green, waxy leaves have begun to grow again in Simi Valley’s defiled and blackened lands. Its deep roots still plunge into rock and search out the invisible groundwater, the way they always have.

Wildflowers were not the only thing to follow the Woolsey fire. So did mudslides, caused by the burnt earth’s erosion and record-breaking storms that soaked Los Angeles in December 2018. The resulting torrents proved particularly threatening to people living in the fragile tents that compose the homeless encampments scattered across L.A. County.

Santa Ana winds often fan the flames and allow blazes to rage across Southern California in the fall, before the winter rains. After the mudslides carve the hills, the remaining bare soil resembles a desolate moonscape. Cold-weather downpours course through the valleys, absorbing the pollution and toxins that have collected in the earth.

The hazards created by Santa Susana became especially dire after the Woolsey fire, as the blaze charred pipes and treatment systems that had been designed to corral contaminated rainwater before it coursed down the hill. Boeing records reveal that in the three months following the December rains, chemicals and radioactive materials poured from the site at levels that exceeded state safety standards. In November 2019, NBC4 reported that while Boeing would ordinarily have had to pay as much as $154,250 in fines for these violations, the penalty was cut to $28,000 to recognize Boeing’s lack of fault for a natural disaster.

19.

It seems that Southern California is an inhospitable place for most living things except for chaparral because it is hot, it is sere, its rains won’t fall, and if they do, the storms come in the form of Biblical deluges that arrive complete with plague. It’s also said around these parts that the region’s fires and floods do not discriminate. But these observations are not perfectly accurate. Poor and middle class people as well as people of color are at greater risk from the dangers caused by the river, the drought, the dam, the floods, the lab, the poisons, and the greed that grows in this beautiful place.

The people are agitating for change. In September 2018, 20 sign-hoisting residents of Simi Valley and nearby Chatsworth gathered on Valley Circle Boulevard to call for the cleanup of Santa Susana; they were supported by the honks of commuters. In October of that year, 30 activists of the Simi and San Fernando Valleys held an action in front of Governor Newsom’s L.A. office, calling for the site’s remediation. And in July 2019, 200 protesters gathered at Simi Valley’s Rancho Tapo Community Park to paint commemorative rocks that would serve as a memorial to the SSFL’s workers; this event drew attention because Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, who live close to the site, attended.

In September 2019, then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry visited Santa Susana. He took a fact-finding tour around the portion of the land that the Department of Energy has been ordered to remediate. When asked about his objectives, Perry didn’t make any specific plans, or raise anyone’s hopes with promises. He said, instead, that he didn’t want to get into the details, but just understand the history of the site. Yet, this gesture did presage some small progress: In May 2020, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the DOE agreed to demolish ten buildings in Area IV of the SSFL, so as to guard against the spread of toxins and radionuclides that may occur during the next wildfire and storm cycle.

Still, this is a far cry from complete remediation. “The surrounding communities have waited a long time for decisive action,” Governor Newsom said, at the news of the DOE’s decision. “Today’s order represents a new and important chapter toward the full cleanup.”

20.

In 2019, climate scientists reported that the fire season in California, which had formerly been concentrated in the fall months, is now expected to extend into the winter. So, from now on, people will be on high alert from the deepest heat of the summer to the chill bright months. This constant vigilance leaves locals with a sense of unease; of grief. History assures us that terror and disparity have always sat side-by-side in Southern California, even if such marvels feel unprecedented. Flight from superfires, poisonous air, tainted water, and now other contagions, has become our way of life.

* * *

Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor at Loyola Law School. Her novel, Art Is Everything, is forthcoming in February, and her book of short fiction, The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could, is out now.

* * *

Editor: Ben Huberman
Factchecker: Nina Zweig

In the summer of 2018, 12 members of a Thai junior football team and their coach were successfully rescued from a cave in which they’d become trapped when heavy rains caused sudden flooding. The rescue options ranged from unrealistic to torturous to deadly to mad. At Maclean’s, Shannon Gormley tells the story of the rescue divers who chose “mad” — and succeeded.

Dr. Harry believes the risks of sedating the children beat the risks of not sedating the children. The lead divers believe the same, and the Thais believe the experts know best. The children cannot dive; the children will panic; the children will drown their rescuers and themselves. That is why Dr. Harry is going to do this: inject 12 kids with a sedative so powerful it will knock them out cold.

Ketamine: a horse tranquilizer, an operating-room drug, a soon-to-be cave-rescue pharmaceutical product in its early testing stages on rock-entombed human minors.

If only it were so simple. The children’s drugs will need to be topped up with half-doses along the way. Dr. Harry cannot dive every child out himself, but the divers are not medical doctors. Dr. Harry must give a dozen cave hobbyists and small-business owners a crash course in do-it-yourself anaesthesiology.

If anyone dies—and many divers think they will be lucky to save two or three of the kids—Dr. Harry will bear much of the burden. He is not licensed to practice medicine in Thailand, let alone teach other foreigners to practice. Though Thailand and Australia have offered some assurance that he won’t suffer legal consequences for his young patients’ probable deaths, a conscience and a name are not so easily protected.

Cave divers are solitary creatures, Dr. Harry will later say to the cameras he normally avoids. And as he instructs laymen how to sedate a bunch of boys in the dark before dragging them through a flooded, stalactite-strewn tunnel, Dr. Harry is very alone.

He thinks the drugs might help some children survive. He’s going to try, anyway. That’s the plan. But you never know.

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Just across the Gulf of Naples from Pompeii, the Campi Flegrei volcano — a caldera that stretches as wide as 15km across — threatens some 700,000 people living within its red zone. As Helen Gordon shows in her 1843 Magazine story on the volcanologists tasked with predicting an eruption, managing a natural disaster in a dense metro area like Naples is going to be daunting, and made even more complicated by the skepticism of many residents and the region’s aging infrastructure. Scientists like Francesco Bianco, the director of the Vesuvius Observatory, are caught in an impossible dilemma: if they sound too alarmist, people could end up not heeding their warnings; but if they stay too laissez-faire, thousands might perish.

For Bianco and the observatory staff, one of the greatest challenges will be deciding when to trigger the final red alert. There are currently no set criteria for deciding this. (Kilburn’s model may explain crust failure but even that does not guarantee an eruption.) “A lot still involves considerable amounts of expert judgment. What have you seen before?” Donovan explained. Because major eruptions are relatively rare, it can take a lifetime to build up that knowledge. The United States Geological Survey, for example, is currently facing the retirement of a tranche of experienced volcanologists and must consider how best to preserve their expertise.

The stakes are incredibly high. In the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy in 2009 (a low-probability event with high stakes, much like an eruption), more than 300 people died. Some of the victims’ families claim that reassuring statements by the then-deputy head of the Civil Protection Department fatally prompted their relatives to stay indoors when the quake struck. At the other extreme, volcanology is still haunted by the example of the 1976 Guadeloupe eruptive crisis, when 72,000 people were evacuated for between three and nine months at huge economic and personal cost. A major eruption never occurred.

When the Campi Flegrei red alert is finally triggered, the heads of the emergency services and the scientific and technical advisers will meet at the CPD’s headquarters in Rome. Here, a belt-and-braces approach to safety is observed: there is plenty of gleaming modern technology but also a crucifix on the wall and, in the small vestibule, a richly painted gold icon. “We have calculated that 72 hours is the minimum amount of time we need to complete the evacuation,” David Fabi from the emergency management office told me when I visited. This breaks down as 12 hours for organization, 48 hours for exfiltration and an extra 12-hour security margin. It will require a mammoth feat of logistics.

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