The Fire This Time

Mike Davis's book The Ecology of Fear contains a splendid chapter about the cycle of fire in the sprawl of greater Los Angeles's mountainside and canyon suburbs. Now, while the latest installment of Southern California's history of October infernos unfolds, Davis writes what could be a coda to that chapter:

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."

Already the papers are screaming "arson!" "In San Bernardino, witnesses told authorities that they had seen two men start the Old Fire on Saturday," writes Jim Herron Zamora in the San Francisco Chronicle. Eight of the other nine fires are assumed to be arson until it can be proved otherwise.

But the fact of the matter is that tinder-dry chapparal plus Santa Ana winds equals fire. In The Ecology of Fear, Davis quotes brushfire expert Richard Minnich as saying, "Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested." And in the essay linked here, Davis adds, [M]any 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."

This amazing satellite photograph shows the extent of the Southern California wildfires. It also shows the effect of California's developer-happy land management policies. The California fires are thick and vigorous, finding plenty of fuel that has accumulated over decades. South of the Mexican border, though, it is another story. The Santa Ana winds are fanning fires there, too, but on a scale that is an order of magnitude smaller. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Southern California did this to itself.

(Mike Davis article via Bill Humphries)