Mike Davis on fires

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

reposted from LA alternative media network
Tomgram: Mike Davis on the Great California Fire

I try my best to be on top of the news, but no one could claim that with a
staff of one (myself) I was exactly a news-breaker. Today, however, Mike
Davis offers an on-the-spot report from the epicenter of Southern
California's conflagrations, San Diego where he lives. He considers a series
of fires -- some within sight -- that may yet add up to the Great California
Fire of all history and that, in his area, are, for reasons he explains,
largely following the geographical boundaries of the recall vote. For those
of you who have never read his book Ecology of Fear, this is the moment.
Among many other subjects, including the literary destruction of Los
Angeles, he offers in his splendid way necessary background to California's
fires and exactly how and why they devastate as they do. Tom


The Perfect Fire
By Mike Davis

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

.. Copyright C2003 Mike Davis