http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1028-01.htm
Published on Tuesday,
October 28, 2003 by TomDispatch.com
http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/
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 © 2003
Mike Davis
Tomdispatch.com is
researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt,
a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over
post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world
and ourselves.
© 2003 TomDispatch.com
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