A State In Flames

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In the small Southern California community of Valley Center, 35 miles north of San Diego, a 20-year-old woman was horribly burned when she paused to rescue a cat. In Lake View Hills Estates, 25 miles to the south, a couple and their grown son perished as they raced in their car for the safety of a nearby reservoir. The body of one of their neighbors was found inside his charred RV, along with the remains of his four Irish wolfhounds. In Wynola, 40 miles northeast of San Diego, a fire fighter trying to save a house died when a freak turn of wind blew the fire in his direction; the colleague who tried to save him sustained burns over 20% of his body. Some people were luckier. A couple in Lake View Hills Estates rode out the fire by diving into their swimming pool as the windows of their house exploded around them.

And then, suddenly, after more than a week of rage and destruction, it was all but over. Fog and cold rolled in from the ocean to quench the flames, leaving behind a dusting of snowflakes at the higher elevations and smoking rubble where houses used to be.

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Already the fires of October are being called one of the worst natural disasters in California history. And yet, despite their ferocity, the infernos that enveloped more than 750,000 acres, killed 20 people and destroyed nearly 3,000 houses were in many ways disasters foretold, the tragic but predictable consequences of the push of people and dwellings into forests and brushlands designed by nature to burn.

Wildfires, notes Duke University fire ecologist Norm Christensen, have been erupting in the canyons and foothills of the coastal mountains for thousands of years. The recipe to produce them is as simple as it is effective. Take a tract of pine and fir trees or shrubby chaparral. Let it stand for several decades. Then wait for the winter rains to stop so the tinder can dry. At that point, a spark is all it takes to start a conflagration.

In Southern California, fall is the time of maximum danger. That's when hot, dry winds — the infamous Santa Anas — barrel out of the desert, driving small blazes (set in this case by a lost hunter and suspected arsonists) to savage frenzy. Making matters worse this time was the one-two punch of a multiyear drought (which weakened millions of trees) and a massive bark-beetle infestation (which killed off many of them). The Federal Government had just denied the state's request for more funding to remove dead trees when the fires hit. In a matter of days, 14,000 fire fighters found themselves arrayed along a chaotic front, often watching helplessly as flames engulfed houses and leaped across freeways.

Fires that occur in the zone where suburban sprawl abuts rugged wild lands are known as intermix fires, and they are a fire fighter's nightmare. Vastly complicating the ability to protect property and lives are nonnatural hazards like narrow, twisting roads that dead-end in blind canyons or houses with cedar-shake roofs and logs stacked beside the kitchen door.

A quarter-century ago, when the influx into the hinterlands was in its early stages, state and county officials might have taken steps to curtail construction in areas where the threat of fire was highest. It's too late to zone against developments that are in place, but the danger can still be mitigated. Adopting and enforcing more stringent building and landscaping codes, say fire experts, is critical. California's Ventura County, for example, now requires 100ft. buffer zones between homes and surrounding wild lands. If a property owner doesn't comply, the county can order the work done and bill the owner.

It's also important, says Frank Beall, a professor of environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, to educate the people who choose to live in fire country. Fortunately, many of the amenities that homeowners like to install — green lawns, brick patios, swimming pools and gravel walkways — make serviceable firebreaks. Although building a pool or a patio takes time, there are other things homeowners can do in the hours before a blaze approaches. The simplest precautions, such as filling gutters with water and plugging up air vents, can sometimes make the difference between a house that survives and one that burns to the ground.

Intermix fires are not just a California phenomenon. In recent years they have flared from Florida to Alaska, from Maine to Montana, and as development increases, so does the number of people at risk. For wildfires, experts emphasize, are inevitable. They are nature's way of keeping fuel loads within ecologically tolerable bounds, which means that attempts to suppress them will eventually backfire. Indeed, says Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at the University of California at Riverside, it is the long history of wildfire suppression in the U.S. that has allowed fuel loads in so many areas to build to unprecedented levels.