“We’re surrounded by wildfires. Los Angeles is under siege.” With this image, Professor Giampi Sciutto describes the inferno that has engulfed the Californian city. Since Tuesday, wildfires have ravaged neighbourhoods in the hills north of Santa Monica and south of Malibu. By 10:30 am, with the news of the blaze extending to his school, a human sciences high school, irritating acrid smoke made it necessary to seal the school windows, while minute by minute the air became unbreathable for its 300 students and teachers. The school was closed on Wednesday. The flames were just three neighbourhoods away from the Santa Monica High. The sun was a red circle surrounded by a black sky, thick with smoke. It was as if all the other colours in the spectrum had disappeared,” said the physics teacher. Classes were transferred online on Thursday, but three of Sciutto’s 27 students did not show up. One has lost her home, while the other two are left without electricity. Evacuate. A terrible word repeated for hours by firefighters and police to the more than 130,000 residents who were forced to evacuate their homes, not only because of the threat of advancing fire, but also because of the smoke that is making the air hard to breathe.
The response of religious communities. Wind-whipped embers from wildfires are being blown miles away from where they started, increasing their spread. The Santa Monica Catholic Church stayed open well past midnight on Tuesday night, offering evacuees from the nearby Palisades fire a place to rest, eat a sandwich and charge their mobile phones. Many were informed at the shelter that their homes had been destroyed, along with the possibility of returning to their neighbourhoods. The parish also had to close on Wednesday afternoon after the fire brigade declared the area an “evacuation warning zone”, and the displaced residents had to leave in search of alternative accommodation. Around 90 Catholic schools in the area were closed on the orders of the fire brigade. After classes were cancelled, St. Andrew’s School in Pasadena opened its gymnasium to families overcome by smoke from the Eaton fires and in need of fresh air, snacks, coffee and other food.
Destruction and hope. The wildfires, which burnt through more than 28,000 acres, roughly the size of Disneyworld, have killed five people and burned down over 2,000 homes and other buildings in the Palisades, Malibu and the Hollywood Hills, according to the Los Angeles Times. The wildfires destroyed the Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Pacific Palisades on Wednesday, along with the adjacent Catholic school, which was reduced to a pile of ashes. The Jewish Temple and Centre in Pasadena burned for hours as the cantor risked his life to save the Torah scrolls before the fire consumed the temple. The Al-Taqwa mosque in Altadena was burned to the ground – pictures of the charred wreckage are circulating on social media. Seven Protestant churches also suffered the same fate. Professor Sciutto explained that the high winds were making the fires impossible to control, and both the Eaton’s and Palisades fires were declared 0 per cent contained. Celebrating Mass on Thursday, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Monsignor José Gomez, noted that “there are no easy answers” to this immense tragedy, “but that does not mean there are no answers.” “God is calling each of us to be the instruments through which he shows his love and compassion and care to those who are suffering”, the archbishop said: “We must be the ones who bring comfort to our neighbors in this time of disaster”, also helping them to rebuild, he added. Speaking to his 23 upset and anxious students, Professor Sciutto explained that “Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle is occurring before our very eyes, in our very lives, and is not some distant event. But in that uncertainty, we can choose to support and help each other, and that is the principle of the Santa Monica School.”
