The irony here is that the emergency response to the fires themselves has been exceptional — not a single death has been reported in LA city due to fire! — but the communication with the public has been so abysmal that it’s been hard to demonstrate the effectiveness. As hurricane-force winds shuddered homes across the region, keeping everyone up late Tuesday night, Caruso was able to swoop in due to the growing sense that no one was in charge. I’m not being glib when I say that LA’s leaders demonstrated more situational awareness for the “traffic nightmare” on the first night of the World Series than they did for this real-life nightmare.

Once again this is a story about cooperation. It’s about actually locking arms. It’s the same story I write over and over about how the lack of regional goals is hampering LA’s ability to get it together for its megaevent era. It’s the same reason why we can’t work across jurisdictional lines to build housing, green our schoolyards, repair playgrounds, bury our power lines, pick up trash, plant trees, and design streets that don’t kill 300 people every year. Now, on top of all that, we must make an actual plan, as a region, to prevent this from happening again. We must come up with entirely different ways to design our neighborhoods and completely rethink where we live, and maybe, instead of evacuating next time, shelter in place. The Palisades Fire, which has destroyed the most valuable real estate in the country in an insurance market held together with toothpicks, is likely to become the costliest fire in U.S. history. And, in less than two weeks, the federal government will turn its back on our recovery. Thousands of families be displaced for months or years. But what usually happens after extraordinarily destructive urban fires is that many of the people who lose their homes don’t return. Our communities, still fragile from the pandemic, are on the edge of collapse. We have to bring them all back from the brink. We can’t leave anyone behind.