Opinion | The Best Time to Fireproof Los Angeles Was Yesterday

From the sky, it looked like a firebombing — nearly every structure in parts of Altadena burning at once and much of Pacific Palisades aflame overnight, a neighborhood of more than 20,000 leveled to its foundations and dusted with the ash of all that had stood before.Ash from homes and schools and churches, palm trees and chaparral, stuffed animals and onesies.

More residue was suspended in the sky, where the sun rose Wednesday a spectacular blood orange, and through the alveoli of lungs throughout Los Angeles, where schools were closed by fear of toxic air.On the ground, what remained resembled ruins; the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben compared the devastation to the catacombs of Pompeii.Three-quarters of a century ago, the poet Czeslaw Milosz famously described a man laying flat below machine-gun fire in the streets of a city ravaged by World War II and marveling over the surreal fact that, pummeled by bombs, “the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine.” The whole of civilization, he felt, was humbled by the incongruity.

The closest America has gotten may be these fires — with the Palisades, that postcard fantasy of an eternal affluent Pleasantville, now a pulverized expanse of lifeless gray.Much of Malibu burned again, too, blown through by winds as high as 100 miles per hour as decisively as a house of sand.Can a city lose an entire neighborhood now and simply shuffle on, dragging the local memory like a ghost limb? This urban firestorm burned larger than Central Park, and the neighborhood it destroyed was home to so many endowed with social media reach that the disaster looked, on certain feeds, like a ghastly Map of the Stars’ Homes.

The rampage of flames was, though incomprehensible to those watching from afar, also predictable enough that nearly everyone got out alive.But nearly everything left behind looks lost.And who was to blame? No one says “act of God,” anymore — to indulge in talk of forces so l...