November 5, 1913, was a day of considerable celebration in Los Angeles. More than 30,000 residents rushed into the San Fernando Valley to witness, live, the arrival of water from the east of the Sierra Nevada. The city inaugurated the aqueduct that would bring water from the Owens River, following a 230-kilometer journey dug by 100,000 men through canyons and desert. The crowd acclaimed William Mulholland, the man behind this technological feat. Today, Mulholland Drive, the legendary avenue named after the engineer, is cut by flames.

The subsequent decades showed the cost of this diversion of nature. Owens Lake dried up, releasing toxic dust. No vegetation opposes the winds anymore. But thanks to water, Los Angeles became a metropolis as vast as Belgium, at the forefront of car culture, hedonism, cinematic dreams, and politically, of the conservative revolution. Before Ronald Reagan, president of the United States from 1981 to 1989, tax opponent Howard Jarvis spearheaded the taxpayer revolt in 1978 against public spending and government roles – a philosophy for which California is paying the price today.

Los Angeles believed in progress. Today, it has a front-row seat for a dystopian vision of the future, described a thousand times by Hollywood. The Palisades Fire, which broke out on January 7 with winds as violent as a hurricane, followed by another fire and several others, has turned part of the city into a "war zone," as President Joe Biden said. The war has casualties – 24, according to the provisional toll on Monday, January 13 – and displaced people, over 100,000 of them. There are drives for refugees, improvised volunteer food trucks in the streets, and an operational HQ. Police cars, National Guard vehicles, fire trucks and electric company vans are massed along the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. Canada has sent planes and Mexico firefighters. Unable to overcome the fires, California, which would be the fifth-largest economy in the world if it were a country, has had to accept help from its neighbors.

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