Imagine San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park burned down … but, like … over thirty times over.
The Palisades and Eaton fires currently raging in Los Angeles County have completely claimed at least 24 lives and burned over 37,000 acres. None of these fires are completely contained… or even close to it; the Eaton Fire, the smaller of the two blazes at around 14,000 acres, is only 34% contained, while the Palisades Fire, which will likely find itself among the state’s deadliest blazes when put out, is just 17% contained at over 21,000 acres in size.
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Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of structures have been burned down in Los Angeles County due to the recent fires. More structures will require significant repairs or be deemed unsavable … and require demolition.
The scale of the damage is quite hard to quantify in a world increasingly dominated by misinformation, hyperbolic estimates, and grandiosity at the expense of reality. Context — moreover: comparable connections — is more important than ever to properly gauge our ever-changing world amid the climate crisis.
Using public data and the most up-to-date statistics published on the fires by CalFire, here’s how the cataclysm caused by the Palisades and Eaton fires would look like, if those damages were transposed onto San Francisco.
The whole city would be wiped off the map. At 49 square miles, San Francisco is about 30,000 acres in size, making it among the smallest and most dense urban metros in the nation; the acreage burned by the Palisades and Eaton fires have efficiently burned more area than occupied by San Francisco — in fact, you could combine SF’s acreage with that of the City of Berkeley and still come out short in the acreage consumed by the Palisades and Eaton fires.
You could put about 35 Golden Gate Parks inside the scorched area. At just over 1,000 acres, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the urban greenspace is among the largest city parks along the West Coast … but is completely dwarfed by the collective size of LA’s ongoing wildfires.
Imagine the Castro …without any homes or storefronts. While estimates remain somewhat gauzy, city officials estimate some 12,000 homes and businesses have been lost due to the Palisades and Eaton fires; San Francisoc’s Castro neighborhood has roughly the same number of houses under its zip codes.
Every resident in the Inner Sunset and Outer Sunset would need to find housing elsewhere. The two largest fires currently burning in Los Angeles have displaced over 100,000 people from their homes in the affected area; the Outer and Inner Sunset neighborhoods currently account for some 103,000 residents.
Feature image: Courtesy of Bloomberg
