Mike Davis is being disingenuous. Where he writes:
<<<<
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.
>>>>
It is not being hysterical to point out that it is now the case that whenever a fire is reported in tinder-dry forests near habitations, then several more separate ones will occur in the next day or two. This has now happened in Sydney (twice in the last seven years), France, Spain, England -- and now California. The word "may" should have been deleted from the above paragraph. This is now a permanent feature of an over-stressed society.
Keith Hudson
At 20:55 03/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of gary satanovsky
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 3:47 PM
To: Triumph of Content List
Subject: Mike Davis: The Perfect Fire
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 C2003 Mike Davis
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
