Desastres

Antipode 273, 1995, pp. 221-241 ISSN 0066 4812

LOS ANGELES AFTER THE STORM: THE DIALECTIC OF ORDINARY DISASTER
Mike Davis"
Once or twice each decade, Hawaii sends Los Angeles a big, wet kiss. Sweeping far south of its usual path, the westerly jetstream hijacks waterladen tropical air from the Hawaiian archipelago and hurls it toward the Southern California coast. This "Kona" storm system -dubbed the "Pineapple Express" by television weather reporters - often cames several cubic kilometers of water, or the equivalent of half of Los Angeles's annual precipitation. And when the billowing, dark turbulence of the storm-front collides with the high mountain wall surrounding the Los Angeles Basin, it sometimes produces rainfall of a ferocity that is unrivaled anywhere on earth, even inthe tropical monsoon belts.' The two-week-long Kona storm of January 1995 differed little from the classic pattern, except perhaps in the unusual intensity of rainfall in the South Bay area, forcing the evacuation of low-lying neighborhoods in Long Beach, Carson, Torrance and Hawaiian Gardens. Otherwise, the scenes were those of an ordinary, familiar disaster: Power was cut off to tens ofthousands of homes. Sinkholes mysteriously appeared in frontyards. Pet animals and several children were sucked into the deadly vortices of the flood channels. Reckless motorists were drowned in flooded intersections. Lifeguards had to rescue shoppers in downtown Laguna Beach. Million-dollar homes tobogganed off their hill-slope perches.

* Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating theFuture in Los Angeles (Vintage 1991). He is currently completing a new book, Ecology of Fear (Knopf, forthcoming) on Los
Angeles' continuing ordeal of recession, not, flood, fire and earthquake. He teaches environmental history at the University of Southern California and the Claremont Graduate School.

0 1995 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main Street,Cambridge, MA 02142, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF UK.

222 MIKE DAVIS

Apocalypse Themepark
What was exceptional was not the storm itself (a “20-year event” according to meteorologists),but the way in which it was instantly assimiliated to other recent disasters as a malevolent omen. There is growing popular apprehension that the former Land of Sunshine is reinventing itself (touse a fashionable gerund) as a Book of the Apocalypse themepark. First the natives rioted, then Nature. In less than three years, the megalopolis has endured three of the ten most costly domestic disasters since the Civil War. The fierce February 1992, January 1993 and January and March 1995 floods (app. $400 million damage) were mere brackets around the April 1992 insurrection ($1 billion), theOctober-November 1993 firestorms ($1 billion), and the January 1994 earthquake ($20 billion). (See Table 1.) From Ventura to Laguna, and all stops in between, at least one million Southern Californians have been directly touched by disaster-related death, injury, or damage to their homes and businesses. This virtually biblical conjugation of disaster is unique in American history, and it haspurchased thousands of one-way tickets to Seattle, Portland and Santa Fe. After a century of population influx, there is now a net exodus out of Southern California. Middle-class apprehensions about the angry, abandoned underclasses are only exceeded by anxieties about blind thrust faults and hundred-year floods. Meanwhile, Caltech seismologistswarn that the Pacific Rim is only beginning its longoverdue rock and roll: Kobe may be a 3-D postcard of Los Angeles 2000. And waiting in the wings are the locusts and killer bees. It is unclear, moreover, whether this vicious circle of disaster is coincidental or eschatological.Could this be merely what nonlinear statisticians wave away as the ”Joseph effect” of fractal geometry: ”the common clustering of catastrophe”? Or are these the Last Days, as...