It’s quite possible that my adrenal glands have finally given up. The wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage of the wild fires has worn me down. I don’t remember being this wired since the destruction of the WTC or maybe not even since the L.A. riots.

Part of it is probably the acrid stench of smoke. The smell of burning probably activates nerves that hook right into your primitive brain. For some reason, I start thinking about the last scenes of the movie “Bambi”.

The thing about fire is that it’s a case of “hurry up and wait,” which is a phenomenon that is, I suppose, well known by fire fighters and police and paramedics, and it is also how we tend to practice medicine in the United States. On certain rotations, I find my job consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Eventually, you stop caring, I think. The adrenal glands can only pump out so much adrenaline.

I’m tired of the mainstream media. The local broadcasters aren’t very good to begin with, and their constant polemicizing and politicizing of the fires was making me nauseated. I got most of my updates via catdirt and SD Dialed In. Maybe Gil Scott Heron didn’t get the whole picture. The Revolution may not be televised, but maybe it will be blogged. Or even Twittered.

But things seem to be winding down. The high pressure system that was driving the Santa Ana winds is migrating away, and the marine layer is supposed to re-establish itself. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t made any difference in the weather yet—it’s still hot and dry as hell—but the smoke isn’t nearly as bad as it was. The fires have retreated from the urban interface, although they are still actually raging off in the rural hinterlands. The Witch Creek Fire is only 20% contained, although almost all of the flames are on the eastern front of the burn area. The nearby Poomacho Fire is only 10% contained. The Harris Fire, near the Mexican border, is also minimally contained, at 10%, although it doesn’t look like it’s threatening Chula Vista and vicinity any longer. (The CAL FIRE site has status reports available.)

It strikes me that the Witch Creek Fire alone has burned more land area than all of the fires in the other six counties (L.A., O.C., San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and Santa Barbara) combined, and I can’t help wonder what the hell is up with that? It isn’t like there should be a huge variation in the amount of dry brush between S.D. County and the others. (Or is there?) And we’ve all been affected by the drought.

Why is that even after the disastrous Cedar Fire (which the Witch Creek Fire has already eclipsed tremendously), San Diego County still doesn’t have enough fire fighters and equipment to protect its citizens?

It looks like The New York Times is asking this very same question. And sadly, some of the answers seem to be deadly obvious. Miriam Raftery describes how victims of the fires are blaming the officials. In particular, Governor Schwarzenegger had vetoed a bill that would’ve hired more fire fighters and purchased more equipment, and he had disregarded all the recommendations of the commission that had reviewed the Cedar Fire. And the County Supervisors appear to have turned a blind eye to large-scale developments in highly combustible regions, exacerbating the problem. Kathy Christie Hernandez puts it more bluntly: No new taxes equals no new firemen.

While it’s going to take a while to reach containment, much less actually extinguishment (optimistic estimates are containment in more than a week, as November rolls in), the real pain is going to be the rebuilding. The number of homes destroyed is simply appalling and boggles the mind. Over a thousand structures burned. It’s like the hand of God just went off and obliterated a small town. Already, the scammers have moved in to bilk the people, the insurance companies (i.e., the people, since it’s our insurance premiums their paying with), and the federal government (i.e., the people, since it’s our tax money.) I don’t think we have a good picture of the devastation yet. It’s going to be awful. I mean, where are all these people going to live while their houses are being rebuilt?

For me, the idiocy of the entire conservative philosophy is starkly manifest here. I don’t think it’s an accident that the more liberal L.A. County has managed to avoid the massive destruction of property that is happening down here in S.D. County.

Sometimes the only answer is effective government. I’m not just talking about evacuation plans and such. I’m talking about prevention. I’m talking about preparedness. As much as the politicians down here are patting themselves on the back, they really had neither, and I wonder what it’s going to take for the people down here to accept the fact that they way they’re running things (or more accurately, not running things) is simply unsustainable.