When Modeling Replaces Accountability: A Critique of the LA Times’ Vision of “Fire Resilience”

The LA Times’ profile of a RAND researcher envisioning a “fire-resilient” Pacific Palisades reads less like journalism and more like a case study in how wildfire responsibility is quietly laundered through optimism, technology, and abstraction.

The article frames the destruction of the Palisades as a “complex problem” best addressed through computer simulations and future-oriented design fantasies. What it avoids is far simpler—and far more uncomfortable: the fires were not a mystery, and their severity was not inevitable.

Homes burned homes.
Density amplified loss.
State-owned land ignited first.
And agencies failed to contain known risks before the fire arrived.

None of that complexity requires a computer model to understand.

 

Risk Did Not “Arrive.” It Was Manufactured.

The article leans heavily on the idea that “learning to live with risk” is simply part of living in California, as if wildfire exposure were a force of nature rather than the product of decades of land-use decisions, deregulation, and growth incentives.

Wildfire risk was not inherited. It was zoned, permitted, densified, insured, and normalized. To frame this as a universal condition of human settlement—rather than a policy choice with identifiable authors—is not neutral. It erases responsibility while preparing the public to accept ever-greater private burdens in the name of “resilience.”

 

Techno-Utopias Don’t Fix Political Failures

Concrete homes, autonomous hoses, sensor networks, fire shelters, community brigades—these ideas are presented as visionary, but they function as a distraction.

They answer the wrong question.

The problem is not that communities lack imagination or data. The problem is that institutions failed to do the unglamorous work of prevention, land-use restraint, and public infrastructure investment before the fire.  You don’t need advanced simulations to know that tightly packed homes ignite each other faster than intact landscapes. That experiment has already been run—most recently, in January 2025.

Replacing accountability with technology does not create resilience. It creates a market.

 

History Is Being Misused to Avoid the Present

The article closes with a tidy historical analogy: 19th-century cities burned, society got fed up, and modern fire protection solved the problem.

But this is a selective retelling. Cities didn’t stop burning because of optimism or clever modeling. They stopped burning because governments imposed limits, invested in shared infrastructure, and enforced rules that constrained private development for the public good.

Today’s wildfire crisis exists precisely because those lessons are being undone—while officials insist that the solution lies in individual behavior, private retrofits such as Zone 0, and speculative future systems.

Calling wildfire an “external threat” obscures the reality that many of the most catastrophic fires now originate on publicly managed land and race through landscapes reshaped by policy, not nature.

 

What the Article Leaves Out Matters

Absent from the piece are the most consequential forces shaping wildfire outcomes today:

This omission is not accidental. It is editorial.  “Both sides” framing, when the evidence is asymmetric, doesn’t inform readers—it protects institutions from scrutiny.

 

Sanity check: You Can’t Model Your Way Out of a Moral Failure

“Cities shouldn’t burn down,” the reporter writes. It’s meant to sound self-evident.

So shouldn’t the truth?

If California is truly “fed up enough to do something,” it should start by telling an honest story about what actually burned, why it burned, and who benefited from the policies that made it possible.

Fire resilience is not a software problem. It’s a governance problem. And no amount of simulation will fix that—until accountability is put back into the model.