Communities Offer the Match for Millennial Fire

The day was so dry, people were pulling over to brush the dust from their windshields. There was the impulse to rub your thumb and forefinger together, just to feel your fingertips snag. Wind parched the bermuda grass and rattled the eucalyptus. The air had that gritty clarity it always gets when something is going to burn somewhere.

And in fact, the burning had started: La Canada, Arcadia, Ojai, Trabuco Canyon. For a while, fire updates were outnumbering traffic reports on KFWB. Acreage, number of engines, number of homes threatened, use of the word “wind-whipped”--the scene was what you expect every year in this land of unstoppable developments and inevitable brush fires. Less easily explained was the choice of this particular wind-whipped moment to amp things up by hawking fire hazards for charity.

If you didn’t see them on the news or read about about them in the paper, you probably noticed them in a suburb near you--hundreds of gaudy, “safe-and-sane” fireworks booths. Fireworks outside the Wal-Mart, outside the Sears store, off the Pomona Freeway. Fireworks to benefit some good cause, for one holiday week only, except that this holiday wasn’t the Fourth of July.

Fireworks with the capacity to do even more terrifying things now than they did last summer to brittle lawn ivy, crispy shingles, crackling Christmas trees discarded onto curbs. So why, in a bone-dry December, was this fresh risk being loosed upon us? Interestingly, even those who condoned this week’s sale of pyrotechnics seemed at a loss for words.

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“I have mixed feelings,” the treasurer of the Montebello Lion’s Club was confiding as the group’s booth opened this week. “I know how much good can be done with the money they bring in. On the other hand, I grew up here. And my son’s a fireman.”

“Everybody’s concerned,” the past president agreed. “You take dry weather, you add alcohol to that, add the year 2000 and--sheesh! You got an explosive situation.” As he spoke, a woman with chapped lips bought a sack of Screaming Willies for her 3-year-old, confessing her own mixed feelings: “You see other people with ‘em, and you think, why not?”

Over the hill in the city of Industry, the Workman High School football coach was manning a booth for the benefit of his players. “Win-Win-Win Millennium 2000 Fireworks Assortment! A Winner at Every Location!” the signs read, in carnival hues. The word “winner” was obscured by a big “No Smoking” sign. “Hey, I gotta buy 40 football helmets by next year. A hundred bucks apiece,” the coach sighed.

“Four thousand dollars, and the school district only gave us two thousand for the whole program. Sure, you’re always concerned about the fire hazard, but as long as people are smart. . . . “

He fell silent. Together, we pictured the intelligence quotient of your basic New Year’s Eve reveler at midnight.

“Of course,” he conceded, “good luck with that.”

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In 1998, lobbyists for the fireworks industry shepherded a bill through the California Legislature giving cities and counties the option to authorize fireworks sales for the week before New Year’s Day (as they already can for the week leading up to the Fourth of July). It was for one year only and Sacramento was in the midst of an El Nino deluge--another one-year-only thing, but people in downpours have a hard time remembering dry spells. The bill was signed by Gov. Pete Wilson and sponsored by then-Assemblyman Gary Miller, a Republican developer from Diamond Bar.

“A big concern was what people were going to do for the millennium,” Miller told me this week. “There was concern about people using illegal fireworks, and in coming up with a viable alternative.” Why? Had fireworks become a huge issue for New Year’s Eve? He replied that legal fireworks were also an alternative to firing guns.

Really? “Look, this bill passed with almost unanimous consent,” he said. “I don’t remember anyone ever calling in to complain.” Did he solicit input from firefighters, who are complaining now? “They have a state association that’s capable of following these things.”

But what if he’s courted disaster? “My bill didn’t mandate anything. It simply empowered communities. I mean what ever happened to the concept of local control? Every time you turn around, some politician is taking away our liberties!”

So it went. It could have been noted that this situation actually adds a “liberty” where none had been called for. But that would have missed the point. Vices aren’t rational. They are about risk mixed with pleasure--the cigarette in the canyon, the mudslide-prone mansion with the glorious view of the ocean. The impulse to play, now as ever, with fire.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.