A landscape born to burn

The mountains were a vast sheet of flame.

Wind-driven fires consumed a swath of Southern California more than 100 miles long and at least 10 miles wide, while another blaze near the Mexican border burned for two days.

It was late September 1889.

“The fire is still unsubdued and burnt all night, with apparently more vigor than ever, for the huge shafts of flames could be seen mounting to the sky,” said a short dispatch in the Los Angeles Times.

“Forest fires have been raging near Ensenada and today a strong wind carried the flames onto the city,” said another article. “The fire is nearly up to the woolen mills and all of San Carlos is in flames.”

The union of wind and flame is an old one in Southern California. We are defined by are our natural disasters, and the most constant of these is Santa Ana-driven wildfire.

It is spectacle and destruction: orange flames galloping along ridgelines, canyons glowing in an eerily beautiful red, and stricken homeowners digging through the ashes.

The images are iconic, each set bearing a name branded in the collective memory. Bel-Air. Laguna. Malibu. Cedar. They span the decades and the length of Southern California, from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Now we have another set of images from last week’s days of wind and fire that spread over 500,000 acres and devoured more than 1,700 homes. In Malibu, a faux castle burned. On Pacific Coast Highway, young men ran to safety with their most prized possessions, their surfboards. The ruins of a San Diego subdivision lay in neat rows behind clipped lawns and hedges. Firefighters huddled under their silvery shelters on a flaming hillside in Orange County.

Authorities ordered one of the largest evacuations in state history while national TV coverage blared catchphrases such as “California burning.”

Not for the first time -- nor surely for the last -- we learned that armies of firefighters and thumping fleets of water-dropping helicopters are no match for 50-mph, desert-dry gusts spitting embers across one of the most flammable landscapes on Earth.

When we finally started to get the upper hand, it was because nature let us. The winds died down.

The very things that draw people to Southern California -- the weather, the dramatic landscapes and the interlacing of city and wilderness -- make the region a perennial theater of flame.

Within a half-hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles, we can be in the wild, trekking up chaparral-cloaked slopes. Our daily dog walks take us over dirt trails zigzagging through canyons.

Coyotes from Griffith Park, one of the wildest urban parks in the country, scamper across our lawns. Our backyards bleed into national forests: the Angeles, the Cleveland and the San Bernardino.

But the brushy forests of manzanita, chamise and other chaparral that hug canyon crevices and the nearly vertical slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains were designed by nature to burn.

Perhaps more than any other fires, chaparral blazes deserve the label “wildfire.” Chaparral explodes in flames that can shoot as high as a 20-story building. The burning shrubs crackle and sizzle like French fries in boiling fat.

A chaparral fire twists and turns and shifts. It rides 50-mph Santa Ana winds like a hungry cheetah racing after its prey. It will wipe a shrub-coated ridge top clean in a few furious minutes, leaving only black earth and rings of white ash.

The plants produce volatile oils that help them retain moisture but that evaporate when the weather turns hot. The escaping gases form a cloud above the shrubs that explodes when touched by flame. The leaves of chamise are needle-like and easily sparked.

Many types of chaparral shrubs don’t drop their dead branches. In a typical year, winter rains produce a flush of growth, followed by a six-month dry season, producing yet more fuel.

And every fall, for at least a few days, Santa Ana winds speed down the mountains, wringing moisture from the air like a furnace blast.

It is a perfect recipe for combustion.

We know that. But we deny it, pushing relentlessly into the wild with subdivisions crawling up the hillsides and into the canyons.

We think our firefighters -- some of the best in the world -- will protect us. The water-dropping helicopters will save our homes. We will get an insurance payment and rebuild, bigger and better.

But growth is outstripping our firefighting forces. When the winds hurl glowing embers across the land, we are facing an unstoppable force of nature.

It is one that has long visited us. Layers of charcoal deposited in marine sediment off the Santa Barbara coast indicate that wind-driven wildfires have raged across the region for centuries.

One of last week’s blazes was in Orange County’s Santiago Canyon, which also burned in 1889.

“The fire originated in Santiago Canon, in a sheepherder’s camp, and as the wind was blowing a perfect gale from off the desert, the mountains were soon red with the angry flames,” the Riverside Daily Press and Tribune reported. “Citizens in the entire valley are thoroughly aroused, and all are doing all they can to protect their property.”

For all their fierce power, the latest fires were neither the largest nor the most destructive in Southern California history.

The October 2003 wildfires burned more than twice as many buildings and more acres. Judging from accounts of the 1889 fires, they too were bigger.

That we have had two huge firestorms in the last four years is probably the result of the parched winters that preceded them.

But when it rains a lot, fire officials also worry. The shrubs grow thicker.

As long as chaparral doesn’t burn too often, it quickly recovers from the flames.

Shrubs re-sprout. The smoke causes long-dormant seeds to germinate, giving birth to a riot of wildflowers that won’t be seen again until after the next wave of flames.

“This is an extraordinary story of adaptation to fire,” says Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and chaparral expert. With an air of wonder, he adds that no other place in the world has as great a variety of native plant species dependent on fire.

People should also do some adapting, Keeley suggests.

We need to think of wildfire as Floridians think of hurricanes or Kansans think of tornadoes, he says. We need to recognize it as an inescapable fact of nature.

The frequency of wildfires in Southern California has increased along with population because most of the blazes result from human activity.

The suspected causes of last week’s fires were downed power lines, arson and construction welding. The huge Zaca fire that burned for much of the summer in chaparral in the Los Padres National Forest northeast of Santa Barbara was caused by workers repairing a pipeline.

There are least 100 times more wildfire ignitions in Southern California now than in 1900, Keeley says.

Most of the fires are quickly smothered. But sooner or later, a few escape with the Santa Ana winds and grow into monsters.

Every year, people add more fuel to the landscape.

To a wildfire, a house is simply another thing to burn.

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bettina.boxall@latimes.com