For the past week, I’ve had a 20-year-old Bad Religion song running through my head, for reasons which are probably obvious:
When the hills of Los Angeles are burnin’
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burnin’
Though that song’s burning is metaphorical, right now, the fires in Los Angeles are horribly literal. The Guardian has a collection of devastating images that really show the enormity of the loss.
Residents have had to flee these fires, at times with a great deal of urgency. At one point, gridlock on Sunset Boulevard led to folks abandoning their cars on the roadway. As a result, the fire department eventually had to bulldoze vehicles out of the way.
A KTLA reporter spoke with a resident, who said:
“If you leave your car on Palisades Drive, leave the key in there so a guy like me can move your cars…so that these fire trucks can get up there.”
The reporter then asked for the man’s name, and he replied “My name is Steve Guttenberg”. He may have been working at the direction of the Stonecutters.1
Footnotes:
The relevant video is archived here. ↩︎
