‘The very worst things we could imagine’: a
terrifying documentary on US wildfires
‘One thing that really astounded me was that people
stay and fight. People don’t run’ ... Bring Your Own Brigade.
In Bring Your Own Brigade, British film-maker Lucy
Walker takes us back to the California tragedies of 2018 and a crisis that
continues to rage on
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Wed 4 Aug
2021 15.21 BST
“In the
Christian imagination,” says Lucy Walker’s voiceover, “hell is fire pits, it’s
being burned alive. These are the very worst things we could imagine. When we
came up with the idea of hell, it was fire that we imagined and that’s what
we’re creating for ourselves.”
Walker is
our guide into a modern Dante’s Inferno in her excruciatingly timely film Bring
Your Own Brigade, which examines a world on fire by focusing on the savage
blazes that tore through the California cities of Malibu and Paradise in
November 2018.
The
two-hour documentary scoops up dramatic video footage from motorists racing for
their lives between rivers of fire. A four-way intersection becomes blocked
with traffic as the heat intensifies. One woman trapped inside a car filled
with orange glow is heard wailing: “I don’t wanna die here. I don’t wanna die.”
There are
haunting 911 phone calls from residents and first responder radio traffic. A
woman says she can’t get out of her home because all the doors are on fire: “It’s
burning me!” And there are moving scenes of survivors of picking through
charred debris, hoping to salvage keepsakes that preserve the memories of loved
ones.
But there
is also hope and humanity in the form of Brad Weldon, a Paradise resident who,
having lost multiple homes before, chased away the flames with hoses and
buckets and luck. He recalls: “It’s like fighting an elephant with a piece of
spaghetti.”
Weldon’s is
one of the few homes in Paradise left standing. Inside, about 20 displaced
neighbours are given refuge and his 90-year-old mother reclines on a sofa
consuming marijuana. She says: “Being blind, I thought they had all left me,
and then Brad came in and told me that ‘I’m sorry Mom, we’re fighting a
firestorm’. I told him, ‘I want you always to remember, the angels are always
with you ... flap those wings, keep that fire away.’”
Walker uses
such encounters to give the story an emotional heart and challenge her own
assumptions. Speaking via Zoom from New York, the British film-maker says: “One
thing that really astounded me was that people stay and fight. People don’t
run.
“You can
hear me in the film having a panic attack when the fire is over the hill; I
mean, not anywhere near but it’s really frightening. For people that actually
stay, you can’t believe it because it just seems so counterintuitive that you
could possibly not run as hard as you can away.”
She adds:
“Who am I to judge people staying and defending their homes, even if I don’t
have the personal courage to do it? It seems very unwise to me and yet perhaps
it is possible to do that if you’re very prepared, and we look at the people
who did manage to successfully defend their homes and they were incredibly well
prepared. There are some amazing stories there.”
Walker’s
obsession with wildfires began after she moved to California in 2008 and wanted
to know: why is the hillside on fire? It was not something that she used to see
in London. She had thought fire was a medieval problem – 1666 and all that –
rather than a modern one.
So she
“embedded” with the fire department in Malibu, riding and filming with
firefighters (“the access was key”), which put her in the right place at the
right time on 8 November 2018. There were four major fires in California that
day, including the one in Paradise that left 85 people dead.
Paradise
and Malibu were at opposite ends of the state geographically and opposite ends
of the spectrum economically and politically. The average home price in
Paradise was about $200,000; in Malibu it was more than $2m. Like the
coronavirus, fire does in fact discriminate on the basis of class. The film’s
title is a reference to the wealthy elite who can afford to hire their own
private firefighting force.
Walker
observes: “As these extreme disasters become more and more common, what we’re
going to see is that rich people can afford to protect themselves. That’s what
we’re seeing in every aspect of life. As we get mega wealthy people protecting
themselves and no longer trusting the community safety net in any domain, they
can afford to have their own private safety net.”
Paradise
and Malibu have been ravaged many times before and since, but catastrophic
wildfires are increasing in number and severity around the world. A blaze in
Oregon has scorched more than 646 sq miles since being sparked by lightning on
6 July in the Fremont-Winema national forest.
Walker
explores the reasons behind this “global fire crisis”. A product of the climate
crisis? Yes, but it’s more complicated than that.
“I’d gone
into making this film thinking it was just about climate change: we’d had the
world’s biggest fires and world’s hottest summers in recent years and that kind
of correlation seemed to me a causation. I made that error of assuming that was
the story. There were other things that I’d heard about, too, but it seemed
pretty trivial compared to climate change as a driving factor.
“It was a
real surprise to me, quite humbling, to understand actually that it was more of
a performance enhancer and wasn’t actually the whole story and there was a
really important piece that completely hadn’t been reported. I couldn’t believe
it because much of the fire story has been very well reported and other pieces
of it just aren’t understood even by the people that live right there.”
The matrix
of factors includes the logging industry, regional planning, building codes,
insurance companies, lack of funding for fire departments and short-term
thinking by communities and homeowners lulled by their heavenly surroundings
into believing that hell will not come again. Walker attends a town council
meeting where committee members vote against steps – such as gutters or 5ft of
defensible space – that could enhance fire prevention.
She says:
“These areas are not like Europe. There’s a pattern of wetting and drying and,
in the dry season, you can’t ever stop ignitions from happening. Fires are
inevitable in these landscapes and the more you try to put out the small ones,
the more you’re going to be storing up a big one that you can’t fight.
“Housing
pressure is pushing people more and more into what we call the wildland urban
interface. There is no accountability from the people that are developing these
areas to explain to residents the risks that they’re facing. How shocking it is
to residents to realise that these areas that don’t look like they’re flammable
– lovely green lawns and suburban type streets – could burn and could kill as
many people as those types of fires are killing people right now.”
There has
also been a failure to heed ancient wisdom. The film features indigenous people
who say “Fire has always been our friend” but whose lessons are too often lost.
Walker, who lives in Los Angeles, explains: “It turned out that I was just one
in a long line of Europeans who’d come and made this arrogant and dumb and
ignorant sort of assumption that we could just put these fires out, surely, and
that that would be a good thing.
“Actually
there’s a bigger and wiser view that the Native Americans had that fire is not
the enemy and fire is a tool that we really need actually to live safely in
these landscapes. That was really part of the amazing sort of revelation of
this film for me.”
Bring Your
Own Brigade is out in US cinemas on 6 August and will be on Paramount+ on 20
August with a UK date to be announced
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