[lbo-talk] Mike Davis: The Perfect Firestorm

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Oct 29 18:22:23 PST 2003


URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17066

Mike Davis, tomdispatch.com

October 28, 2003

Viewed on October 29, 2003

Sunday morning in San Diego. The sun is an eerie orange orb. The fire

on the flank of Otay Mountain, which straddles the Mexican border,

generates a huge whitish-grey mushroom plume. 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 40-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) fire 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 yet.

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 1000 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

California 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 three

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 percent 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 anxiety 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.'

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© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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