Picture it. Chicago, 1871, the windy night of Sunday, October 8th.. A little old lady named Catherine O’Leary was milking her cow. In the process of servicing the beast, the cow kicked over a lit oil lantern. Chicago at the time was a booming Midwest town largely of disorganized wooden shanties; soon a fire was roaring through the city and in short order “17,000 were structures destroyed, and more than 100,000 residents left homeless.” The previous summer of 1871 had been one of the driest on record in the area – sound familiar? Substitute the winsome figure of an Earth suffering from climate change, or perhaps the bedraggled image of a roustabout homeless arsonist, with the Irish visage of Catherine O’Leary and you have the makings of a clear narrative parallel. Causation and explanation rarely are about more than an individual pariah or a blanket assertion.
Shortly the udderly oversimplified tale of the single causative cow went the way of crying over spilled milk. Instead, the real multiple causes of widespread urban fires led to new housing standards and building materials more akin to the Three Little Pigs, the latterly and safest of which built his house out of brick. But we have to fireproof our minds in some ways too in the face of cultural hysteria. To apply our best practices academically, it behooves us in these times of blanket climate anxiety, with narratives of collective human blame acting in place of that notorious skittish cow, to look behind simple explanations that fan the flames of existential concerns.
Into the Weeds, Into the Deets
Chicago’s 1871 urban fire followed on the heels of many throughout history, in renowned cities like Paris and London and Rome, and set about to efforts to avert future catastrophes. And so we find ourselves today with the urban fires in Los Angeles, preceded by huge and similar blazes in Oakland, California way, way, back in 1991. In both climates moisture was followed by drought and, like a disinterested pupil as a long lecture unfurls, many signs of life dried right out.
With ecology rather than emotions in tow, let’s have a perusal at some expert perspective on the LA fires. To be sure, hurricane force winds and an inexplicably dry reservoir left to contractors to maintain, though they seemed to have tarried, are factors – but most of all the blanket term climate change is evoked as the cause of the calamity.
Jack Cohen, an ecologist from Missoula, Montana, author of thirty books on fire prevention, summarizes what he sees as the fallen womb of assuming that urban fires are the same as forest fires. “When you study the destruction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, note what didn’t burn: unconsumed tree canopies adjacent to totally destroyed homes. The sequence of destruction is commonly assumed to occur in some kind of organized spreading flame front—a tsunami of super-heated gases—but it doesn’t happen that way.” In reality, houses, abandoned after evacuation orders, set one another alight like birthday cake sparklers. And, ironically, like conifers in an actual forest (remembering that LA is of a hilly grassland setting rather than a boreal forest). “In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on. Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.” Like gossip spreading in the hall of a community centre, or paranoia in a social media forum, the hottest fuel of an urban fire is in the houses.
In recent decades, affluent aesthetics reduced an acceptance of concrete as a desirable building material; “defenses lapsed” despite warning signs that urban fires were by no means history. “The 1991 Tunnel fire in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills marked the start of the modern era of urban fires, destroying 2,843 homes.” That was over three decades ago, long before climate change was the go-to culprit. Treating urban fire risks need not be about fixing the planet, in other words. Historian Stephen Pyne concludes that “we don’t have to solve climate change in order to solve our community wildfire risk problem” because, in truth, managing fires in tight urban settings has less to do with the fire itself than to the places it goes. Whereas no one can overcome a mountain ablaze with dry timber, any of us can, and perhaps have, stamped out or otherwise contended with a blaze in a carpet or kitchen. And on the domestic front, keeping dry areas moist, even if they consist of dead material, protects them from fire. The good news, then, is that we are far more able to prevent urban fires than immense woodland infernos, the likes of which are more common in rural Canada. Yet, Cohen steps in to reminds us that we have to overcome myths about fire that prevail even in urban settings. “The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, he said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.”
Those embers flying through the sky in the forest (firebrands in forest fire lingo) find a buffet of burnable trees and woody debris. Yet in an urban setting the raw material of the fire is less dense and girthy. While conifer trees alight candle like twinkle-toed Tinkerbells and possess raw power when aflame, in urban settings the more sinewy manner of shrub and tree growth gives a more nuanced outcome to a given neighbourhood. It’s the houses and their rooves that make the sparks that spread the flames. So, a fire is not an unalterable force if managed properly in an urban setting.
References
AG Staff. (2017). ‘Are Australian Eucalypts to Blame for California’s Wildfires’. Australian Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2024/11/takayna-tarkine/
ABC News (Australia). (2025). ‘Scientists say Fire-Loving Tasmanian Blue Gums Not To Blame For LA Fires’. MSN.com Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-au/science/ecology/scientists-say-fire-loving-tasmanian-blue-gums-not-to-blame-for-la-fires/ar-BB1rd3XG
Curwen, T. (2025). ‘Inconvenient Truths About the Fires Burning in Los Angeles From Two Experts’. Yahoo. Retrieved from https://www.yahoo.com/news/inconvenient-truths-fires-burning-los-110032208.html
Emery, T. (2024). ‘Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow Was Not to Blame’. Herald News, for Lincoln and Logan County. Retrieved from https://newherald.news/mrs-olearys-cow-was-not-to-blame-p26491-103.htm#gsc.tab=0
Hamilton, M. (2025). ‘State to Probe Why Palisades Reservoir Was Offline, Empty, When Firestorm Exploded.’ LA Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline
St. George, Z. (2016). ‘The Burning Question in the East Bay Hills: Eucalyptus is Flammable Compared to What?’ Bay Nature. Retrieved from https://baynature.org/article/burning-question-east-bay-hills-eucalyptus-flammable-compared/