The Sunny Climate of Fear in L.A.

It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere, a dog was barking.

In a sultry corner of the San Fernando Valley, a place where the mercury had been known to creep to 111 degrees, a newspaperman was writing a weather story.

Harris had been in the news racket a long time. He’d written many weather stories, but he had a bad feeling about this one. One of the hottest Augusts on record had just passed and it felt like Phoenix. Now, suddenly, it felt like Houston. TV weathermen were tossing around words like sticky and steamy, wild and wacky. Harris sensed something more ominous.

One day that week Harris could smell a brush fire even as he felt raindrops. Another day, birds flew crazily in the tropical gusts as if choreographed by Hitchcock. The sky darkened, snapped with lightning, growled with malevolence.

Weathercasters talked about a high pressure area, and everybody seemed as stressed as the Newport-Inglewood fault. Even inside the air-conditioned newsroom, the weather taunted. A message from electronics flashed on the screen: “record often--computers don’t like lightning.”

Harris pressed the record button, wondering why he bothered. He’d been reading Mike Davis’ new book, “Ecology of Fear.” Was L.A. really that scary? Would this be The Weather Story to End All Weather Stories?

*

Mike Davis is scarier than Stephen King, scarier than Wes Craven, scarier than Linda Tripp. Harris had read Davis’ 1990 book “City of Quartz” and shivered at the unforgiving way Davis laid out the social history of the so-called City of Angels. Davis was already L.A.’s intellectual prince of darkness when the MacArthur Foundation gave him one of its “genius” grants. Now with “Ecology of Fear” in the bookstores, Davis is considered L.A.’s genius Cassandra, our most esteemed prophet of gloom and doom.

Some chapters of “Ecology of Fear” already had been published as articles. Much of the book, Harris knew, was devoted to the many imagined treatments of L.A.’s destruction, by quakes, volcanoes, space aliens, whatever.

But more urgently, Davis was forcefully arguing a point that had been made before: that Los Angeles is a crime against nature and we’ll all pay for it, big time. The way Davis tells it, the Northridge earthquake was just a hiccup compared to the “killer pulse” that seismologists say is overdue.

Davis is less interested in L.A.’s geologic faults than its human ones, like the early lies told by civic boosters. In 1934, the year after the Long Beach earthquake, he notes, The Times declared: “No place on Earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California.”

Thousands of dwellings were built in places prime for disaster--flood plains, crumbly hillsides, brushy wildfire zones, the edge of the open ocean. In a chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis explains how public resources are poured into resisting a natural burn cycle and protecting million-dollar estates. Meanwhile, scores of low-income immigrants have died in the tenement firetraps west of downtown.

Quakes, slides, fire, flood--Harris had covered them all. He’d never covered a tornado, however, and yet here was a chapter titled “Our Secret Kansas.”

Here Davis tells of a media cover-up--of how, on a wet weekend in late January 1918, a twister struck Pasadena, of how churchgoers rushed outside. They see “overturned cars, toppled trees, exploded garages, and roofless homes. In the middle distance, a sinister funnel cloud leisurely vacuums its way through a residential neighborhood.” Much damage was caused but, miraculously, it caused no deaths.

Pasadena city fathers, Davis notes, marketed their town to tornado-weary Midwesterners, and so they promptly labeled it a “freak windstorm.”

Davis continues: “The Los Angeles press meanwhile clamped a tight lid on reports of the Pasadena twister. The next day--Sunday, 27 January--was Southern California’s annual ‘brag day’ (timed to coincide with blizzards in the East), when both the Times and its Hearst rival, the Examiner, published nationally circulated ‘Come to California’ editions. Obviously, they were not eager to advertise tornadoes or other blemishes on the fact of Los Angeles’s reputation for perfect weather. As a result, many Southern Californians remained unaware of the spectacular damage in Pasadena.”

The media, Davis suggests, is still in denial, preferring to use the term “freak winds” when twisters strike. Although more than 75 destructive tornadoes struck the southern coastal counties this century, he says, “new twisters are still termed ‘bizarre’ or ‘extremely rare.’ ”

Harris grimaced, trying to remember if he had written about “freak winds.” Was he part of the cover-up?

Davis continues: “Our cultural immune system, adapted to dealing with earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, autonomically rejects the equally inevitable probability of tornadoes and occasional hurricanes . . . ‘It just doesn’t happen here’ could be the Golden State’s motto.”

A bolt of lightning split the night the way secessionists want to split the Valley from Los Angeles. Harris stared out the window and the clouds stared back with menace.

A message flashed on his screen: “lightning strikes again--pls record often.”

*

Harris hit the record button. He remembered how, earlier that day, he’d spoken to a USC geophysicist, an expert on paleoclimatology. Harris wondered whether the heat wave of August and early September was a harbinger of more climatic misery

Steven Lund said there’s no question the world has been getting warmer since about 1850, and most scientists agree the production of “greenhouse gasses” is now part of the reason. “It’s not unlikely that next year it could be as hot or hotter because of the trend.” Even so, Lund added, the August heat may have been scientifically insignificant: “You can argue that it’s simply statistics: Some August had to be hottest.”

Ah, statistics. Harris remembered something else. He’d called the LAPD to check out a news report claiming that L.A.’s homicide rate surged during the heat wave. Seemed to make sense. Raymond Chandler wrote how the Santa Ana winds could make even the meekest housewife look at her husband with thoughts of homicide. And Harris knew that hothouses like Miami, Washington and New Orleans are more murderous than L.A.

But actually, the murder rate was lower in August. Det. John Aparicio said the city has been averaging 1.9 homicides per day this year; in August, the total was 32.

Harris looked outside, wondering if a killer tornado might make up the difference. Then he checked the stats in Davis’ footnotes. Since 1900, the south coastal counties had been hit by 77 twisters resulting in 188 persons injured--100 of whom were hurt in 1927 in National City south of San Diego. Maybe Southern California is just lucky, but apparently our tornadoes aren’t homicidal.

The clouds suddenly didn’t look so ominous. Then Harris had another thought.

Just what is “earthquake weather,” anyway?

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.