"There's been fires nearly every year since I came here”
What Steven asked Sean Cameron, author of the Rex & Eddie mystery novels, and tech content writer
Sean Cameron is a writer from Medway who is most famous for his Rex & Eddie Mystery series and now resides in Los Angeles. Steven caught up with him via Zoom to discuss the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, what took Sean from Medway to LA, and what he has been up to out there.
With the wildfires going on in Los Angeles, are you currently safe?
I'm really safe. I am four miles away from the evacuation zone, which might not sound much, but there's literally evacuation centres between me and the fire. People are being sent there. I look out the windows, I can't see the black cloud most days. I’ve got the air filters on, and I feel I'm just watching it on the news like the rest of England is.
How hot is it in California at the moment?
I know how Fahrenheit feels, and I know how Celsius feels, but I don't know how to compare the two, or how to translate it still after 15 years. But it's been 65 Fahrenheit, which I think is 23 Celsius (it’s 18C), I'm not sure. It's warm. It's not boiling hot. The trouble with the fires is not so much the heat. It's the dryness.
What does that mean?
I moved here in 2010, and the drought is here. After five years, you think ‘Is it ever not in drought?’ It will be out of drought for six to nine months sometimes. Then it's in a drought again.
How serious is the water shortage?
It's not much. Water sometimes falls from the sky, but it's not dependable, and a lot of it goes down the storm drains into the ocean to stop floods. You don't notice it because there's golf courses everywhere and people look after their yard. Some people like to have front gardens that are more native species. But overall, Europeans just tried to build a Europe on Southern California and then wonder why it didn't work out. Your water's fine, you can wash your car. There's been no kind of hosepipe ban similar to growing up in England. Though they have made lawn watering schedules in the past to stop people watering their lawns every day. People are using running water, and the rest is sort of politics. I know it comes from Northern California, it comes from the Colorado River, but it's essentially a lot of water imported. It doesn't fall from the sky, you don't have problems with achieving drinking water for your home, but the trees are thirsty.
California is a state in America, but in terms of scale, is it more like England than Kent?
Yeah, California is 70ish million people. For comparison, this is similar to being in Medway and hearing reports of a fire in London. I'm four miles from one fire, I'm 20 miles from another fire, but the thing is, the fires happen, it's a wildfire. The wildfires happen where there is wild. That's in the foothills and in the hills. Then there's a huge amount of flat land, the LA basin and the valley are both very flat. It's weird to be in a city where there's mountains cutting through the middle. Those mountains are the vulnerable areas.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Local Authority to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.