'You don’t get used to seeing these wildfires': former LA Times Food Editor reflects on LA Wildfires

Now a ‘proud Waterfordian’, Russ Parsons lived in Los Angeles for nearly 30 years while working as the Los Angeles Times Food Editor and spoke to the Waterford News & Star about the experience of watching from abroad his former hometown be engulfed by terrible wildfires.

“We have three and possibly four friends who lost everything. One of them was a very, very dear friend and former colleague who had 10 minutes to evacuate. He lost everything.

“When you think about that – getting 10 minutes not only to decide what are the most important things in your life but to get them together and then to get out to save your life. You are running for your life with a freight train of a fire roaring down behind you. It's just appalling. 

“You don’t get used to seeing these wildfires, but I have memories of watching the glow of the fires coming over the mountains. The thing that really got me about this incident was the descriptions of the winds. That brought it all back.

“We think that we get good winds [in Waterford] where it might be 45 or 50 kilometres per hour,” he said, explaining that due to the topology of Los Angeles, against the Pacific Ocean and backed against a “wall of mountains”, it creates a perfect storm for extremely strong winds. There were reports of winds as strong as 100 miles an hour, more than 160kph: "It sounds like a freight train going over your house.

“On the other side of the mountains are deserts, and there are just very small cracks in those mountains, which mean that when you get the right combination of high pressure over the desert and low pressure over the basin; you can't even imagine how strong the winds are.” 

In the low humidity conditions in Los Angeles, with winds capable of tearing apart the roofs of houses and blowing embers miles across the fire lines, “there is a level of constant tension” and fear of wildfires breaking out, Russ said.

“The fires move so quickly, [...] they can be so devastating and they're so random. You know, there'll be blocks of houses that are destroyed, and in the middle of it there will be one house survived for no reason.”

During his time living in LA, the food writer and author explained that wildfires had become a part of life in the city. 

“It had become almost normal in the same way that earthquakes became almost normal. It took me about a year of living in Waterford before I could put a glass object straight onto my bookshelves because you could never do that in Los Angeles. They even have this type of blue tack called Earthquake Tack to fasten things down in case of an earthquake. It's just one of those things that you adapt to and you live with. But the tension is always there.

"We lived through many, many wildfires, we lived through many earthquakes, we lived through riots! We ran the gambit - and this brings it all right back. When you see the pictures of the smoke on the horizon with the sky turning black or a smoky red.

“We were fortunate that we could never afford to live someplace like Malibu, which burned so regularly,” Mr Parsons said, but despite living more than 10 miles from Malibu, he and his wife would have ash from the wildfires collecting on the roof of their car.

It’s a different experience living in Waterford where there is less risk from such natural disasters but, after five years in the Déise, the tension he felt about the threats from wildfires and earthquakes is being replaced by fears for his home country.

“With the combination of the political situation in the US - the inauguration and the future administration coming in - and the wildfires; all of the Americans that I know here are experiencing anxiety in a way that they normally don't.”