mahiwaga

In Southern California, autumn does not bring the changing of the leaves, nor the bluster of the cold. Rather, it brings fire and ash, as the Santa Ana winds dry out all the brush, leaving behind powder-keg conditions. All it takes is a stray spark, or the mindless malice of an arsonist, and literally all hell breaks loose.

The weather forecasters had been dreading the winds already last week. A huge high pressure system was sitting above the Great Basin, pumping hot, dry air outward, accelerating as it funnels through the canyons and passes. Hurricane force winds gusted up to 100 mph, faster than anything I can remember in a long time in Southern California. (There were days twenty years ago when I was a kid, where I remember gusts of wind being so strong that they brought me to my knees.)

I was only a matter of time, really.

The harbinger of the fire storms of the fall were the falling ashes. My sister thought it would be fun to dig up all the weeds in my parents’ yard, and she convinced me and my brother to help her out. As we dug and scraped and hacked and tore, flakes of something white fluttered through the air. Burnt newsprint. We worried that it was somewhere close. (There was that year when one of our neighbors thought it would be a good idea to stick newspaper in their fireplace as the winds blew, and maybe six houses got torched just two blocks from where we lived.) That was when we discovered it was Malibu that was burning down.

The class war is alive and well, folks. Various fora and bulletin boards spouted alternating messages of support and indifference. Quite a few people expressed contempt for the Hollywood bigwigs whose house were going up in flames. Malibu is surely getting far more media attention than Agua Dulce, or Silverado Canyon, much less Rice Canyon.

The pall of smoke still hadn’t obliterated the sun. Me and my sister headed down to S.D., and caught site of the Santa Ana Mountains glowing eerily orange with fire. This particular fire was the work of sick arsonist fuckers. We barreled through a cloud of thick smoke settling down on the I-5, leaving a stench that followed us all the way down to coast.

The next dawn was greeted with disaster. No fewer than six fires were burning in San Diego County simultaneously. The Harris Fire, starting near the border at Tecate, had already killed someone, and severely injured several others, and it was burning westward completely unabated. 0% contained, they said. The Witch Creek Fire jumped across the I-15 and merged with the San Pasqual fire, and headed west towards the sea, burning through Rancho Bernardo, and destroying homes in Escondido and Poway. At this point Solana Beach and Del Mar are being evacuated, and some believe that only the Pacific is going to be able to stop the flames.

A fire sprung up in Fallbrook, and also ended up jumping the I-15. Fires burned near San Marcos. Another fire sprung up in Descanso.

The unpredictable winds have caused things to spread lighting quick.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be in a Code Triage. Like most things in medicine, it’s much more boring in real life than on TV. One of the hospitals in the burn zone evacuated their patients, sending a few our way. Adminstrators paced the hallways worriedly, trying to figure out how many people they could cram into the unused rooms and offices, in case worse came to worst. There were fleeting thoughts of sending some of us down into the Emergency Department to help with triage, but other hospitals seemed to be absorbing much of the chaos. They were trying to save us for last—for the worst cases, the sickest patients. That’s what we get for being a quaternary care center, and one of the only burn intensive care units within a 500 mile radius.

But while the property damage has been appalling, so far, lives have been spared. A few fire fighters are recovering in our wards, some in critical condition, and an unfortunate soul died trying to futilely protect his house from the on-rushing flames with nothing but a garden hose. Most of the people coming in were suffering from respiratory problems—people with chronic lung diseases being aggravated by the smoke and ash. Or people with other chronic illnesses who were being taken care of at home, except home is now nothing but a memory, some ash in the wind, and some rubble left lying on the charred earth.

The fire storms of 2003 come to mind again. Those days, it seemed like anarchy had finally taken hold in Southern California. Every thing was ablaze. It was snowing ash. The transit workers and the grocery store workers were on strike. It was a wonder that the martial law wasn’t declared.

You would think that we would learn from the past.

But the cycle of destruction followed by renewal has always held sway in Southern California. The life cycle of one of the few indigenous plants in So Cal, the chapparal, relies on fire to allow new plants to germinate. Even before we had electrical wires and arsonists, autumn has always been marked by fire, when the Tongva were the only ones who lived in these green coasts in between the ocean and the desert, long before any white people came. The site that became Los Angeles already had a smog problem even back then because of the infamous inversion layer. The Tongva called it Yang-na, the place of smoke.

Still, for some reason, rich people have this thing with building their houses in places where they really shouldn’t be building their houses. I mean, think about Malibu. If your house doesn’t burn down, it’s probably going to slide into the ocean once we get any rain. The fires char all the vegetation, and the cliffs are vulnerable to erosion. And so the cycle goes on: fire, deadly mudslide, rebuild and renew.

Like Sisyphus rolling up that goddamn stone up that hill, only to watch it fall down again.

The biggest tragedy, though, are the folks who really aren’t all that rich. The ones following the American Dream. Looking for that 3 bedroom, 2 bath pie-in-the-sky out in suburban hell. It’s beats living in a closet that you’re paying $3,000/month for, even if you’re commute time is tripled.

And despite having lived here for three years, despite seeing that even conservatives are human beings, and not these automatons deployed by Fox News to destroy democracy, it’s still hard to be completely sympathetic.

These are the same guys who balk at paying taxes, who scoff at developmental regulations, who spit at the environment. And yet, without taxes, fire departments can’t meet the needs of the community. Without regulations, you end up with a house that is in harm’s way, that ends up burning down every four years. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in California, Mother Nature is still boss, no matter how hard we try to ignore it. You flaut the limitations of the environment at your peril.

I don’t know. Is L.A. not burning to the ground only because of topologic fortune? Because most of L.A. is on flat land, and it’s protected by moutains on the west and the north? Or is it because the freeways and the roads were designed by sane people who realized that sometimes you have to think about infrastructure, and whether this piece of land can actually support what is going on on top of it. Even if we can only drive about 17 mph during rush hour, at least we aren’t doomed when a car crashes and closes down all five lanes on one side. You can always exit the freeway and take various surface streets. In L.A., there are usually at least four different ways to get anywhere. (Except if you’re one of the damned who live on the Westside.)

San Diego is not like San Francisco. While San Diego does have undulating mesas, and canyons intersperesed everywhere, it doesn’t have a huge freaking body of water that limits the number of routes you can reasonably build without bankrupting your constituency. I mean, it’s probably not ideal that the only reasonable way to get from the East Bay to the City is via the Bay Bridge. When a tanker truck blows up, it’s all over. You’ll have traffic jams all the way to Sacramento, easy. But it would require taxing the denizens of the Bay Area to death to build something like the Southern Crossing. And San Franciscans have very finally said “no” to building more freeways. What can you do?

But in San Diego, the infrastructural paucity seems entirely the fault of the developers and the politicians. There are bottlenecks galore in their non-sensical freeway system. There are many areas where you have to use the freeway to get from here-to-there. There simply aren’t any alternatives. While the core city is somewhat intuitively built in a grid-like pattern, everything else looks like a five year old picked up a crayon and starting scrawling on a piece of paper, and some city planner decides to use that piece of paper as the basis of the infrastructure.

Worse yet, the insane infrastructure makes it even harder for the already thinly-stretched fire department to actually get to where they need to go.

And hence, we have disaster.

Maybe one of these days, the conservative throw-backs will finally be put in a museum where they belong, and San Diego might actually have a chance at becoming a world-class city, instead of losing rank to some God-forsaken place in Texas like San Antonio. But I certainly ain’t gonna hold my breath. If people continue the idiocy of doing exactly the same things over-and-over again, but expecting different results, well, they might just get exactly what they deserve.

Kevin Drum is incredulous about Joan Didion’s description of the Santa Ana winds. While it is probably a little over the top, there is a change in the atmosphere when those blasts of moisture-stripping wind barrel through the canyons and passes, howling and shrieking, and making your house shudder every once in a while.

Even though I grew up in Southern California, the traditional portrayal of the seasons holds sway even in my memory. Until I was 23, I had never seen the leaves turn color in fall, and yet I always expected them. I had never lived in a place where it snowed until I was in my 20s, either, and yet I always waited expectantly for it as winter made its way through the calendar. I’d wait like Linus, always disappointed about the Great Pumpkin not coming.

So the Santa Anas always had an otherworldly association with them. Who thinks of summer in late October? Of 85°F to 90°F highs?

It’s the cry of the wind that’s really eerie sometimes. There is something about it that disquiets the mind. And the dryness can leave your skin tingling.

But it has always been the fires that have been truly frightening. As I sit here in this urban oasis, tens of thousands of acres burn to the south of me and to the north of me, and hundreds of homes have been ravaged.

The smell of smoke upon the air has always made me think of autumn in So Cal.

The fires jump across canyons and across 15-lane freeways, with ease. The drought-stricken terrain literally explodes, and the fires race through almost a fast as lightning. It devours houses like some kind of angry, red/orange, wild animal.

(I still wonder if there is any way at all to prevent this. It can’t be mere coincidence that the Witch Creek Fire has taken some of the same paths that the Cedar Fire in 2003 took. Are developers not required to consider fire danger when they build?)

The big problem with Southern California in general is hop-skotch development. Even in dense areas like L.A., islands of wilderness lie in between developments. Think of the Griffith Park fire just a few months ago, within sight of Downtown L.A. Some of this is decreed by topography: it’s just impractical to build on steep mountainsides sometimes. But sometimes it’s also just poor planning.

Part of what is making the Witch Creek Fire so devastating is that it is blazing through tracts of mostly undeveloped land, interspersed with huge houses. All the roads leading through that area are two lanes wide, again partly decreed by topography, but also probably another symptom of poor planning. Despite the density in places like Escondido and the Tri-City area on the coast, there is that huge swath of land between Sorrento Valley and Encinitas, Rancho Bernardo and Escondido. Ironically, maybe that area would’ve fared better if it was fully developed, instead of harboring dessicated brush just waiting to be ignited.

It seems counter-intuitive, maybe. Maybe you would think that sprawl would be easier to defend, since everything is spread apart. But if the structures you’re trying to defend are spread apart, your fire fighting crews will have to spread apart as well. And the gaps in your defenses can be deadly.

New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Each of these densely populated urban centers have had their eponymous fires, practically obliterating them entirely. But with buildings relying more on concrete and steel than on wood now a days, when was the last time a huge American city burned to the ground?

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