Let's face it, we've been lucky

Let's face it, we've been lucky

by Garrison Frost

This seems exactly like the kind of statement that will spur the gods of irony to punish me, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway: the South Bay has had some mighty good luck over the years when it comes to natural and unnatural disasters. As we learned again this week, other parts of Southern California can get pummeled, but the South Bay nearly always misses the brunt.

Of course I’m not asking for anything to happen to the South Bay. That’s the last thing I want. I’m just noting that we’ve been pretty darn lucky over the years. A little too lucky maybe. So lucky that we might easily start thinking it has something to do with how good looking we are, or how rich we are, or how clever we are.

No, it's really just been luck. Given the ass-kicking that Malibu gets every other year, we probably should have had at least one big disaster by now.

Watching all the fires this week, I couldn’t help but think of all the eucalyptus in Manhattan Beach’s tree section. If Malibu can go up like a candle every five years, there’s no real reason for Manhattan Beach to get off so easy. And what about Palos Verdes? Some of the neighborhood that were completely flattened this week were no more rural than P.V.? And yet the brushers of the peninsula get promptly stomped and never grow into the massive house-eating conflagrations they would be in Topanga or San Diego.

So maybe we can chalk our lack of infernos to good firefighters, but what about earthquakes? The 1994 Northridge quake hardly left a dent on the South Bay, compared to what it did in other parts of greater Los Angeles. A few cracks here, some liquefaction there. Urban strife? The great riots of 1992 got into Hawthorne and Lawndale but were really never felt in the South Bay. Sure, for some reason they closed the beaches, but that’s not quite the same thing as an angry mob pouring through the streets.

I remember the last time Malibu burned. One of our local celebrity photographers took pictures from the Manhattan Beach pier, showing the lights of the fires juxtaposed with the sunset. Now that’s distance.

I'm told that where the South Bay is particularly vulnerable is its risk for tsunamis. But given our history, we should probably expect the big wave to take out Venice, Santa Monica and Malibu. That same day, people will be surfing at El Porto, oblivious.

Well, I won’t hex it any more by talking about it. But I will encourage my fellow South Bayans to say thanks under their breaths for our collective good fortune. Maybe that will keep it going.

(Oct. 26, 2007)