![]() At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. The temperature is 85☏ (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast-where hyperbole meets the surf-basks in altogether different weather. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree. Shirtless young men-some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs-monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.Īcross the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district-Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem-are intolerable ovens. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925) “Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. Send us feedback about these examples.This story was funded by our members. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tinderbox.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Joseph Wilson, ajc, 25 June 2023 But, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, rising temperatures can turn already fire-prone forests into tinderboxes. 2023 In addition to turning the terrain into a tinderbox, drought is complicating the firefighters' ability to work: some of Catalonia’s reservoirs have been ruled unusable for water-dumping aircraft due to their lack of their low levels of water. Katherine Rosman, New York Times, 12 Apr. 2023 After decades of university battles over tinderbox issues of students’ rights, speech codes and how best to grapple with unpopular speakers and ideas, proponents of free speech are lauding Ms. Carolyn Kormann, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2023 Lahaina was dry enough to burn, in part, because agriculture and development turned it into a tinderbox. Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 Aug. 2023 Investigators do know, however, one factor that made the fires so deadly: invasive grass that had transformed the island into a giant tinderbox. 2022 Our once-wetland haven has been transformed into a vulnerable tinderbox. Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times, 2 Sep. was always hotter than most previous summer months and occasionally total hell. 2023 But even before global warming turned California into a heat-domed tinderbox where fire tornadoes exist, September in L.A. Diana Leonard, Anchorage Daily News, 14 Aug. Recent Examples on the Web Texas has become a tinderbox because of weeks of extreme heat, with little relief in sight.
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