Sunset
Sometime the best news of the day is what you don't hear.
What if a fire started in the hills above Los Angeles the day after the Palisades and Eaton fires started and while they were still raging, and you never heard about it? Did the fire really happen?
It did. Probably it can’t be important: no celebrity commented on social media and no one sought to cast blame without any evidence whatsoever. In truth, there was very little media coverage.
It started in the brush beside the Hollywood hills near a part of LA that is densely populated, with apartments, commercial buildings, museums and malls. It could easily have become another major fire we would’ve read about on the news, but it didn’t. Within 24 hours the fire was put out, after 43 acres of brush burned without destroying a single building or even a car. That is why we didn’t read about it: because it was a wonderful success. 2
It was put out because in the middle of all the other fires, a fire spotter plane saw the smoke and quickly directed other aircraft to drop on the site and bring in ground-based resources. A combination of quick thinking and the idea of mutual aid put out this fire.
About Hope
If you look at the top of this web page, you'll notice "HOPE", a menu item that takes you to a series of short articles about victories in the climate fight. This is one of those articles.
People don't have a lot of time. They are inundated with negative news about the environment. While these negative news stories can communicate the seriousness of the situation, they can also convince people to believe that things are hopeless ... and they are not. So each little, digestible bit provides a peek into one tiny little thing that has gone right.
Don't think for a minute, though, that any of these issues are simple. Usually, a whole world of physics, chemistry, policy, and actions undergirds each of these stories. We encourage you to look more deeply, to investigate the references at the end of each article, to take advantage of each little positive window into a bigger, more complex situation.
See below for some reading suggestions.
Reading
- “Sunset Fire | CAL FIRE.” Accessed February 13, 2025. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/8/sunset-fire.
- “The L.A. Fire Where Something Went Right - The New York Times.” Accessed February 13, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/magazine/la-fires-emergency-response-mutual-aid.html.