Mike Davis: the perfect fire (fwd)

From: Maria Tillmanns (mtillman@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 28 2003 - 06:49:40 PST


Sunday noon: 26 Oct.

rough: needs edit/ 975 words

mike davis

THE PERFECT FIRE

Sunday morning in San Diego. The sun is an eerie orange orb,
like the eye of a hideous jack-o-latern. The fire on 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 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 panic is creeping into the on-the-spot
television reports from scores of chaotic fire scenes.

A dozen deaths have already been reported in San Bernardino and
San Diego counties, and nearly 500 homes have been destroyed.
More than 30,000 suburbanites have been evacuated, 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 momentos. We’re all waiting to
flee. There is no containment, and infernal fire weather is
predicted to last for at least two more days.

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

Just before Halloween, the pressure differential between the Great
Basin and Southern California begins to generate the infamous
Santa Ana winds. 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 of 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 has now been
dessicated for months.

Meanwhile in the local mountains, an epic drought, which may be
an expression of global warming, opened the way to a bark beatle
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."
They predicted that Arrowhead and other famous mountain resorts
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 chapparel-covered hillsides in neighboring
counties. As always during Hollyween 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 spectre 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 chapparel. This is now textbook policy, but the
suburbanization of the fire ecology 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, higly 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 firebelts.
Each new homeowner, moreover, expects heroic levels of
protection from underfunded county and state fire agencies.

Fire, as a result, is politically paradoxical. 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-dollar homes and the ashpile.

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, Vista, Ramona, Eucaplytus Hills, Scripps Ranch,
and so on) recapitulates geographic patterns of heaviest voter
support for the recall.

The fires also cruely illuminate the new governor's essential
dilemna: 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.

>Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 19:18:15 -0800 (PST)
>From: "John McNab" <johnamcnab@yahoo.com>
>Subject: Re: the perfect fire

3 more issues -
1. National Guard troops, who normally supplement, are in Iraq.
2. Naval Training Center had 8,800 beds and the capacity to serve over
150,000 meals per day. The ideal crisis center, it went under the
bulldozers for developer greed.
3. Redevelopment. Fire fighting services are cut while the City of San
Diego feverishly expands redevelopment districts. Which mean 80% of new
property taxes from these areas go to developers instead of basic city and
county services. Like policemen, firemen and school teachers.

$2 billion statewide are purportedly lost this way. NTC is a redevelopment
area and every time a new high rise in dowtown SD is built, &800,000 of
property taxes are generated that go into developer pockets each year.

John



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