The Perfect Fire

By Mike Davis

Tomdispatch.com

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/

Sunday morning in San Diego. The sun is an eerie orange orb, like the
eye of a hideous jack-o-lantern. The fire on the flank of Otay Mountain,
which straddles the Mexican border, generates a huge whitish-grey
mushroom plume. It is a rather sublime sight, like Vesuvius in
eruption. Meanwhile the black sky rains ash from incinerated national
forests and dream homes.

It may be the fire of the century in Southern California. By brunch on
Sunday eight separate fires were raging out of control, and the two
largest had merged into a single forty-mile-long red wall. The
megalopolis’s emergency resources have been stretched to the
breaking point and California’s National Guard reinforcements are
10,000 miles away in Iraq. Panic is creeping into the on-the-spot
television reports from scores of chaotic fire scenes.

Fourteen deaths have already been reported in San Bernardino and
San Diego counties, and nearly 1000 homes have been destroyed.
More than 100,000 suburbanites have been evacuated, triple as many
as during the great Arizona fire of 2002 or the Canberra (Australia)
holocaust last January. Tens of thousands of others have their cars
packed with family pets and mementos. We’re all waiting to flee. There
is no containment, and infernal fire weather is predicted to last through
Tuesday.

It is, of course, the right time of the year for the end of the world.

Just before Halloween, the pressure differential between the Colorado
Plateau and Southern California begins to generate the infamous
Santa Ana winds. A spark in their path becomes a blowtorch.

Exactly a decade ago, between Oct. 26 and Nov. 7, firestorms fanned by
Santa Anas destroyed more than a thousand homes in Pasadena,
Malibu, and Laguna Beach. In the last century, nearly half the great
Southern California fires have occurred in October.

This time climate, ecology, and stupid urbanization have conspired to
create the ingredients for one of the most perfect firestorms in history.
Experts have seen it coming for months.

First of all, there is an extraordinary supply of perfectly cured,
tinder-dry
fuel. The weather year, 2001-02, was the driest in the history of
Southern California. Here in San Diego we had only 3 inches of rain.
(The average is about 11 inches). Then last winter it rained just hard
enough to sprout dense thickets of new underbrush (a.k.a. fire starter),
all of which have now been desiccated for months.

Meanwhile in the local mountains, an epic drought, which may be an
expression of global warming, opened the way to a bark beetle
infestation which has already killed or is killing 90% of Southern
California’s pine forests. Last month, scientists grimly told members of
Congress at a special hearing at Lake Arrowhead that "it is too late to
save the San Bernardino National Forest." Arrowhead and other
famous mountain resorts, they predicted, would soon "look like any
treeless suburb of Los Angeles."

These dead forests represent an almost apocalyptic hazard to more
than 100,000 mountain and foothill residents, many of whom depend
on a single, narrow road for their fire escape. Earlier this year, San
Bernardino county officials, despairing of the ability to evacuate all
their
mountain hamlets by highway, proposed a bizarre last-ditch plan to
huddle residents on boats in the middle of Arrowhead and Big Bear
lakes.

Now the San Bernardinos are an inferno, along with tens of thousand
acres of chaparral-covered hillsides in neighboring counties. As
always during Halloween fire seasons, there is hysteria about arson.
Invisible hands may have purposely ignited several of the current
firestorms. Indeed, in Santa Ana weather like this, one maniac on a
motorcycle with a cigarette lighter can burn down half the world.

This is a specter against which grand inquisitors and wars against
terrorism are powerless to protect us. Moreover, many fire scientists
dismiss "ignition" — whether natural, accidental, or deliberate — as a
relatively trivial factor in their equations. They study wildfire as an
inevitable result of the accumulation of fuel mass. Given fuel, "fire
happens."

The best preventive measure, of course, is to return to the
native-Californian practice of regular, small-scale burning of old brush
and chaparral. This is now textbook policy, but the suburbanization of
the fire terrain makes it almost impossible to implement it on any
adequate scale. Homeowners despise the temporary pollution of
"controlled burns" and local officials fear the legal consequences of
escaped fires.

As a result, huge plantations of old, highly flammable brush
accumulate along the peripheries and in the interstices of new,
sprawled-out suburbs. Since the devastating 1993 fires, tens of
thousands of new homes have pushed their way into the furthest
recesses of Southern California’s coastal and inland fire-belts. Each
new homeowner, moreover, expects heroic levels of protection from
underfunded county and state fire agencies.

Fire, as a result, is politically ironic. Right now, as I watch San Diego’s
wealthiest new suburb, Scripps Ranch, in flames, I recall the
Schwarzenegger fund-raising parties hosted there a few weeks ago.
This was an epicenter of the recent recall and gilded voices roared to
the skies against the oppression of an out-of-control public sector.
Now Arnold’s wealthy supporters are screaming for fire engines, and
"big government" is the only thing standing between their $3 million
homes and the ash pile.

Halloween fires, of course, burn shacks as well as mansions, but
Republicans tend to disproportionately concentrate themselves in the
wrong altitudes and ecologies. Indeed it is striking to what extent the
current fire map (Rancho Cucamonga, north Fontana, La Verne, Simi
Valley, Vista, Ramona, Eucalyptus Hills, Scripps Ranch, and so on)
recapitulates geographic patterns of heaviest voter support for the
recall.

The fires also cruelly illuminate the new governor’s essential dilemma:
how to service simultaneous middle-class demands for reduced
spending and more public services. The white-flight gated suburbs
insist on impossible standards of fire protection, but refuse to pay
either higher insurance premiums (fire insurance in California is
"cross-subsidized" by all homeowners) or higher property taxes. Even a
Hollywood superhero will have difficulty squaring that circle.

Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most
recently, Dead Cities: and Other Tales