Living with fire

The house has the look of an abandoned military outpost after an artillery bombardment. It stands in the San Jacinto Mountains south of Banning on a thumb-like knoll overlooking dun-colored hills marked by blackened skeletons of chaparral

and manzanita.

The roof has vanished. The remaining circular walls, broken by vacant windows, wear a camouflage of striped burn marks. On a narrow concrete walkway around the house are the melted remains of a fire hose, crumpled like a shed snake skin.

The homeowner was away last Oct. 26 when the Esperanza fire unexpectedly flashed over and around the house, a weekend retreat, killing five U.S. Forest Service firefighters sent to protect it. The ruins are a mute symbol of a fact of life in the fire-prone West: Burn an uninhabited hill and it’s a natural event. Put people in front of the flames and it’s a potential tragedy.

Visiting that site this month, I was reminded of the relentless invasion of recent decades, when Americans by the hundreds of thousands built homes in watersheds, forests, alluvial fans and brushy wastelands -- what’s called the “wildland-urban interface.” But “Old California” sites, the hills and valleys settled long ago, are hardly immune. Just six months after the Esperanza fire, spectacular blazes in the Hollywood Hills, Griffith Park and on Santa Catalina Island filled TV screens while hundreds of firefighters mobilized and hundreds of residents fled.

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.

Those numbers may also feed another category in which California leads the nation: arson. The larger the population, the more likely someone in the group will fit the profile of a fire setter. The Rattlesnake fire of 1953 in the Mendocino National Forest, which killed 15 firefighters, was started by the son of a Forest Service engineer who lighted it as a “job fire” to make work for himself. The Inaja fire in San Diego Canyon, which killed 11 firefighters in 1956, was started by an Indian boy who got a “mad, crazy idea” to throw a match in the grass to see if it would burn. Raymond Lee Oyler now awaits trial on five counts of murder and 22 other arson-related charges for a series of fires in 2006, including the Esperanza fire.

Average temperatures are expected to rise 1 to 2.3 degrees across the region in the next several decades, and then rise further at a rate dependent on levels of greenhouse gases. Drought is already taking hold, and the boom at the wildland-urban interface isn’t slowing down. What, then, is to be done?

The key to fighting fire in Southern California is cooperation among federal, state and local fire suppression organizations. While Cal Fire remains the biggest, best-funded state agency in the nation, it has been stretched by longer fire seasons, a rash of retirements and a gradual 20-year cutback in the number of engines and crews. Training and recruitment have been ramped up in the wake of Firestorm 2003, which resulted in a comprehensive review, with a long list of recommended actions, by the governor’s office.

But funding hasn’t been forthcoming to add all the trucks and other infrastructure required, and problems can outpace solutions. The Forest Service, for example, has begun to question whether it should protect structures at all, spurred in part by the fatal consequences of the Esperanza fire. If the agency withdraws from the “interface” and only defends forests, the consequences for Cal Fire could be overwhelming. As one firefighter said at a recent state meeting in Yucaipa: “There’s no way to fight fire in Southern California without protecting structures.”

Still, the best firefighters working together can’t win them all. Civilian attitudes have to change. Allstate Insurance has announced that it will no longer write new homeowner policies for Southern California, and other companies have raised their rates, but it’s hard to see a disincentive effect, especially in the interface areas. To find the burned-out house where the Esperanza firefighters died, just follow fresh real estate signs advertising plots marked out on ground cleared by the fire.

There are “firewise” ways to protect homes -- fire-resistant building materials, “defensible space” around homes, exit as well as entrance roads into developments. Doing all of that, and more, is part of the cost of facing the fact of fire.

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Griffith Park this month, he remarked several times that fire had “destroyed” park sites once used as backdrops for “Terminator” movies in which he starred. The governor should know better. A fire can destroy homes and lives, but the Griffith Park fire scorched about 800 acres of brush; a couple of years of regrowth will make it ready once again for movie crews -- and eventually again for fire.

Living in Southern California means living with fire, and not just for those on the dun-colored front lines. Fire is unpredictable, deadly dangerous -- and it’s getting worse.