See the LA Times' Patt Morrison's version
of 'California Dreamin' - we're crazy for living here but we do -
Just Another Day In Our
Postcard Paradise @
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-patt28oct28235636,1,1050775.story;
where the next thing to
happen will be rains that lead to mudslides and homes sliding downhill. She says, cheerfully, of course we have four seasons in
California: Fire, Flood, Drought and Quake. The surprise in her piece was that the
new budget cuts California fire insurance by $50 million, and taxpayers in
'Flame Belts' will be making up the difference. Hidden tax increase? She talks about 'fire ecology' and
refers to Mike Davis' book, from which this interview
derives:
Playing with Fire
@ http://www.msnbc.com/news/987172.asp?0cv=CB30
Interview with "Mike
Davis, a professor of history at the University of San Diego at Irvine. His
1998 book, "The Ecology of Fear" (Metropolitan Books), argued that a
conflicted desire to experience nature, while skirting the dangers nature
brings, had pushed southern Californians into inhabitable firebox canyons and
hillsides, parched places just waiting to ignite. The book caused controversy
at the time of its publication-many thought the author was saying Californians
had no one to blame but themselves for the fires that hurt them so much. Davis
argued that his position was more complicated, but at a glance his book was
clearly spoiling for a fight. Its chapter on fires is called, "The case for
letting Malibu burn."
You've been talking about fires in southern
California for a long time. But did you ever expect something this
big?
The truth is,
everybody's been expecting it-this is why the governor [Gray Davis] asked for
a state of emergency [in the southern California mountain forest last April].
People obviously may not have foreseen that you'd get a fire complex of such
breadth, running from Mexico to the Ventura County line. But everybody's known
for years that the bark disease that's killing
the forest is just a firestorm waiting
to happen.
But is this the type of fire you've talked
about in the past, where in a way it's Californians' fault that they're losing
their homes?
Oh yeah, I mean it's
terrible to have to say this, because some people will interpret it as
blaming the
victim. It's not the homeowners.
It's the developers, it's the county
supervisors who get most of their
campaign
funds from the developers, it's
the absence of any sort of regional planning or hazard
zoning that's allowed tens of
thousands of homes to be built since the '93
fires.
Why were people allowed to build these
houses in such fire-prone spots?
The
way this works is that developers and landowners lay siege to regional
planning departments and over time almost everything they want to build gets
built. The really crucial instance here are the county governments.
L.A. county government is the
biggest local government in the United States and the
least democratic. It has five supervisors for 10 million people. The regional
planning commission controls the permission to build in open space and open
new developing frontiers of land. And even when you have protest or even
occasionally the political will to resist this, over time the landowners and
developers chip away [at it].
Can you give an example of
that?
In the front range of
the San Gabriel mountains which border L.A., there's been a staggering number
of really high-end neighborhoods created, usually after long histories of
resistance by other people in the area. Then you have just the poor, ordinary
southern Californians who now can't find affordable housing within 40 miles of
the ocean. And increasingly they're moving into areas of high fire hazard. The
irony is that this occurred in the early '90s at exactly the point when all
the fire science textbooks, all the stuff that's taught to professional
firefighters and vegetation managers, embraced the new
orthodoxy that yes, this is a fire ecology... and that
the only way to really manage the hazard of firestorms is to burn-frequently
on a small scale. But the by time that became the orthodoxy of fire management
it became almost impossible.
Because there have been so many houses
built.
There's too much
housing, there's too much real estate value. You set a controlled burn,
there's always the danger of escape. It produces a lot of pollution-people in
Riverside and San Bernadino County had the worst smog problem in the country
already. So everybody agreed that that's the correct management strategy, but
it's politically impossible to implement.
I can speak to one area reaping the
consequences of poor planning and large population needs, as a former resident
in the late 80s. One of the reasons San Diego County allowed so much
development without seriously considering alternatives to sprawl was the
combination of Prop 13 and the inability to pass school bonds. Some time ago, San Diego removed
itself from the state school bond system, resentful that Sacramento so far
away could make local property decisions. The downside was that with so many
retired seniors and so few residents with children of school age (avg. 25%
then) they never could pass school bonds for new construction. So they added a surcharge to the price
of new homes to finance school construction, which meant you had a source of
income, but you had to keep feeding it by allowing more development, as the
schools kept getting more crowded.
To make matters worse, the local school district did not escrow those
fees, and allowed them to disappear into the general fund, which was good for
buying textbooks, but left them with nothing to purchase expensive land. Sometimes in the "land of milk and
honey" there has been a lot of small town thinking and myopic reasoning even
as the population swelled and after the hazards become
known.
It was very sad last evening to learn of
the local volunteer firefighters who all
lost their homes in Julian while they were fighting fires in the
area. One firefighter died, not a
resident. They were paying
tribute to his life lost trying to save their homes. This is a very sad situation, where so
many people are in harm's way, and lives have been lost. Something needs to be done now to
correct the problem before it happens again, which it will. Perhaps California will once again be
the bellwether state and become a problem-solving example. -
KWC
