Every October and November in Southern California, the Santa Anas howl, the chaparral burns, and a charred region tries to come to grips with the devilish public policy issues of building and protecting property in a land designed to periodically scorch. That debate as played out through the years in the Times' opinion section, so before another round of agonizing begins, we thought it would be useful to see what people have been saying on precisely this topic over the years.

Five months ago, John N. Maclean, author of The Thirtymile Fire, ran the numbers on SoCal brush fires, and came to grim conclusions:

Western wildfires are becoming bigger, more frequent, and more damaging. Driven by drought, global warming, a surging population, Santa Ana winds, wildland fuels built up over decades and other factors, Southern California's fire problem will grow larger, not smaller, in the coming years.

Even so, the state's 2007 fire season, while it may seem unusually intense, is average so far, based on Cal Fire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) statistics for major wildland fires under its jurisdiction. From January through mid-May, 1,495 wildland fires have burned 10,948 acres, in line with the five-year average of 1,439 fires and 12,368 acres for the same period.

For most of a century, the wildland fires of California have been the deadliest in the nation. Fire statistics record 208 fatalities among wildland firefighters in major, multiple-fatality fires across the country from 1910 to 2004. Of those, 122 fatalities, or more than half, occurred in California. Figures for civilian deaths are harder to come by, but no state has wildfire catastrophes that equal the 25 civilian deaths in the 1991 Oakland firestorm or the 23 civilian deaths in the San Diego County 2003 firestorm, at least not since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when gigantic forest fires in the Upper Midwest cost thousands of lives.

And the confrontation between people and fire is accelerating faster in Southern California than anywhere else in the nation. Of the 450,000 people estimated to have moved into previously wild areas so far this decade, about 240,000 -- more than half -- have chosen Southern California.

Two weeks before that, the editorial board warned that the Griffith Park fire "may be just a preview of the summer to come, so clear that brush."

[T]he city's emotional heart is somewhere near its geographic center -- the great park bestowed by Col. Griffith J. Griffith in 1896 and severely burned in a fire this week, serving as a near-catastrophic reminder that Southern California is embarking on an extraordinarily dangerous summer.

Last Santa Ana season, 26-year Fire Dept. veteran Larry Collins explained just how it could be that firefighters, with all their training, continue being killed by the devil winds:

Here's the thing about being overrun by fire: It is like being caught in a flash flood of flame. Winds flow through winding canyons and mountain passes like rivers, pushing forward unpredictable waves of superheated air that can sear your lungs and roast you even before the flames arrive. Especially in Southern California's extreme conditions, fire moves faster than any person can run, especially when it's roaring uphill. [...]

Firefighters try to learn from each death. Each disaster -- and each success -- leads to new training and rules about how to engage a fire. But despite what we've learned, and the constant attention to safety, 36 firefighters have been killed in California wildfires just since 1990.

The editorial board has consistently railed against insufficient brush clearance in dangerous foothills, as in this bit from November 2003:

Safety experts, however, say it's not a coincidence that counties and developers that created fire-resistant envelopes around homes fared dramatically better in the recent wildfires.

Of course, housing location and density, as well as wind speed and direction, all mattered. But in San Bernardino County, where homeowners are required to clear only 30 feet of brush around woodland homes each spring, flames tore across 150,000 acres and through more than 900 dwellings. Ventura County, which requires a 100-foot clearance, lost just 38 homes even though more than 172,000 acres burned. Not one house was lost in Los Angeles County's Stevenson Ranch, which requires fire-retardant roofs and 200-foot buffers, even though flames approached the planned community in the Santa Susana Mountains. San Diego County also requires a 100-foot buffer in fire-prone areas, but budget problems have restricted enforcement.

On that same day, the High County's Ray Ring argued that the War on Fire was even more futile than the War on Drugs:

But although we know that wildfire is for the most part natural and impossible to suppress, we seem incapable of disengaging from our war against it. We have built the world's largest firefighting force, an army of many thousands, equipped with helicopters and planes, engines and 'dozers. We've increased federal spending against wildfires sixfold since 1991 -- up to $2.3 billion this year and a planned $2.9 billion next year -- with about half that increase coming in the National Fire Plan, a behemoth that seeks not only to fight wildfires but also to reduce their fuel through thinning, pruning, raking and other "mechanical" treatments. This is touted as reform, but really it is more war, in that fire is still cast as the enemy.

If this were a Hollywood movie, it would be a sequel -- or worse, a tired franchise [...]

There are ways we could break out of this cycle. We could expect the people who live in fire zones to take responsibility for their choices, we could end a long list of subsidies that includes road extensions, fire crews, insurance rates that don't reflect the specific risk, even federally backed fire-zone mortgages. We could get more realistic with regulations on how the fire zone is built in and landscaped, instead of the piecemeal, often weak regulations we have now. And we could accept wildfires, requiring prescribed burns, allowing lightning-ignited blazes to burn themselves out, as the seasonal price of living in the West. If we don't do that, we're stuck in sequel after sequel.

The late great Hal Fishman, master of all things aviation and disaster-related, was a champion until death of L.A. County buying its own super-scooper aircraft. So was Topanga resident Tony Morris in June 2000:

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