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01/14/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 01/15/2025 10:22

In the Wake of LA Fires, What Does the US Need to Do to Prepare for Future Natural Disasters

In the Wake of LA Fires, What Does the US Need to Do to Prepare for Future Natural Disasters?

BU's Darien Alexander Williams on the reality of climate change and how we develop land moving forward

Clouds of smoke rise behind residences in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles on January 11 as the Pacific Palisades Fire advances. The California fires are already projected to be the costliest blazes in US history. Photo via AP/Jon Putman/NurPhoto

LA Wildfires

In the Wake of LA Fires, What Does the US Need to Do to Prepare for Future Natural Disasters?

BU's Darien Alexander Williams on the reality of climate change and how we develop land moving forward

January 14, 2025
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The scenes from the Los Angeles wildfires are shocking-cars abandoned on highways, entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes, gridlocked traffic as residents flee flames fueled by winds approaching 90 miles an hour in some locations.

So far, the fires have claimed at least 24 lives since the first broke out on January 7. Close to 50,000 acres of land have burned along with thousands of structures-many of them homes, schools, churches, and small businesses.

The fires are already projected to be the costliest in US history. Coming just months after Hurricane Helene caused unprecedented damage in Florida and the Appalachian Mountains, the fires have raised questions about the nation's ability to handle natural disasters made worse by climate change.

Darien Alexander Williams is an assistant professor in the macro practice department in Boston University's School of Social Work and a trained urban planner whose research touches on the intersection of climate change, disaster recovery, and environmental justice. He's studied how historically Black neighborhoods rebuild after climate disaster, how climate change impacts incarcerated populations, and most recently, how communities can draw on their Indigenous knowledge to create their own climate action plans.

Darien Alexander Williams, assistant professor in the Macro Practice Department, poses for a photo on October 30, 2023. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi for Boston University

Every year, Williams says, "it feels like there's new research that comes out about how every kind of life on this planet-as well as all of our infrastructure, from our roads to our prison systems-just isn't equipped to withstand the global rise in temperatures."

Mitigating the effects of climate change is going to take massive, systemic efforts, he says, on top of rethinking how we coexist with nature.

Wildfires, for example, are a natural part of the ecosystem. "There's no healthy world that exists without wildfires," Williams says. "They do need to happen to some degree. But do all our buildings need to burn down because of them? No-and it's on us to make sure that doesn't happen."

Williams spoke to BU Today about the LA fires, the extent to which the country is prepared to handle climate disaster, and the kinds of hard questions we have to address going forward.

Q&A

with Darien Alexander Williams

BU Today: The LA wildfires have pushed California's firefighting infrastructure to the very limit. Where would you say the US is in terms of its preparedness for climate disasters like these?

Williams: The United States is in an interesting place. It's a rich, well-resourced country, so we have quite the capacity to respond to [climate disaster] and engage in short-term and long-term mitigation efforts. There are many different management systems at the federal level, the state level, the local level, and all the way down to grassroots efforts, as well as a robust class of emergency management professionals who've done this work for a very long time. All of that is amazing. Not every country has all of these things.

However, there are fundamental things that are challenging for us to deal with in our current system. One is still having political officials flip-flop on whether they believe in climate change, if they ever believed in it at all. Another is the way we view private property and how we develop land. There's so much increasing development-in Southern California and in the US in general-at the wildland urban interface (WUI), which is the term for when developed land meets undeveloped land. I think we have this attitude of, "Humans should be able to live wherever we want," without thinking about the consequences of nature also exerting its will. Sure, you can build a really precarious estate in dry, brushy land in the hills. But, that places people at risk. So it comes down to how we allow for private property rights and how hard it can be to get a state to limit certain types of development and encourage others.

BU Today: So how can we be more thoughtful about development?

Williams: If we're talking about fire specifically, there are four tools that folks have for development-at least from my point of view as an urban planner. First, there's the fire code, which generally involves regulations to encourage measures like weed abatement, or clearing out brush that can catch on fire around properties. There's the building code, which is things like what materials are we making our buildings out of? What shapes and forms do the buildings have, and how can we promote safety there? Then there's the planning and zoning code, which is about how we're using different kinds of land. It's thinking about things like, should residential structures be allowed on a hillside famous for not just wildfires, but earthquakes and landslides? Finally, there's subdivision regulation, which deals with the numbers of parcels of land and how many houses can exist in one place. [That can have an impact on how fire spreads-or doesn't-from structure to structure.]

Those are the four main ways, but this is a complex challenge that engages a lot of systems. There are unintended consequences that can arise: if you take fire code, for example, you might have a situation where [a homeowner] is really on top of clearing out all the brush from around their home-but then they're destroying the ecosystem in order to mitigate fire. We might have to completely rethink the entire system if we want more than incremental changes [to how we build and live]. We're going to have to tweak the fire code. We're going to have to tell some people that they can't build in some places. We're going to have to encourage using different kinds of materials if they are building somewhere. And we're going to have to encourage building in completely different places altogether.

BU Today: Climate change is often painted as a left-wing versus right-wing issue. How do we depoliticize the issue and get folks to understand that it's everyone's problem?

Williams: I might remix your terminology: these are actually deeply political struggles. And when I say political, I mean dealing with collective questions about what we do with our resources. It's unfortunate that it's considered a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans, especially because both parties are failing to step up in the ways the science is telling us we need to. I'm part of a school of thought that is deeply invested in politicizing this by getting everyone to understand that their livelihoods-and their children's livelihoods-are deeply connected to events that might be happening very far away. And there are a few systems that we have to dismantle, or at the very least reimagine, if we're going to make it out of this.

BU Today: What systems are you referring to?

Williams: For one, corporate donations in politics. It's a socially acceptable and legalized form of [bribery]. The US would call that corruption in other countries. We also need to find new ways to think about property ownership and what it means to own land versus stewarding land and what you still owe to a community even if you have the deed to a square of land.

There are also questions that something as simple-seeming as mitigating wildfire risk require us to engage with, that kind of strike at the core of what it means to be a US citizen. Like, did any of us need to be here to begin with? That gets you further back in history to colonialism and the fact that our colonial settlements were a departure from people living in harmony with nature's cycles for centuries. I know of firefighting organizations adopting Indigenous burning practices [to introduce controlled burns in certain environments]. So we already have people reaching back into the past to rethink things in a fundamental way.

Lastly, we need to come up with new systems of care for each other. Even if we stopped our emissions right now, we've already deeply damaged our climate. When something like [these wildfires] happens, the fact that some people can hire private firefighters to come and protect their parcel of land should be a cause for alarm for how we're distributing resources. That we have elected officials saying that any aid the federal government [gives California] should be conditional on certain changes being made is really concerning. That's going to have a real impact on communities. And very predictably, we know that the people who are going to have the hardest time recovering from this disaster are the same people that have the hardest time recovering from everything in our society: poor people, Black people, undocumented people, the disabled, the elderly, and people of color in general.

BU Today: What other kinds of infrastructure or changes do we need to implement as a country?

Williams: I think if we had more widespread and robust mass public-transit infrastructure, it would get a lot of other balls rolling. That could help us understand how to break our connection to fossil fuels and increase access to opportunities for people who are low income but can't afford cars.

Finally, it's widely known that California uses incarcerated firefighters for their wildfire response. It's unjust that we use incarcerated labor in this country at all, let alone for disasters. It's pretty crazy that someone can be in that situation, risking their lives and doing highly skilled work, just to get paid mere dollars a day-especially when private firefighters can get paid thousands a day. What does it mean to be paid that little, and what kind of opportunities exist for these people after they're not incarcerated anymore? The whole practice operates in a murky area of consent and coercion. That's the kind of thing we could reimagine right now. We could abolish it; we could have them be highly paid for their labor. We could fix it today.

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  • Alene Bouranova

    Writer/Editor Twitter Profile

    Alene Bouranova is a Pacific Northwest native and a BU alum (COM'16). After earning a BS in journalism, she spent four years at Boston magazine writing, copyediting, and managing production for all publications. These days, she covers campus happenings, current events, and more for BU Today. Fun fact: she's still using her Terrier card from 2013. When she's not writing about campus, she's trying to lose her Terrier card so BU will give her a new one. She lives in Cambridge with her plants. Profile

    Alene Bouranova can be reached at [email protected]

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