The Fire This Time

By Bryan Walsh

Correction Appended: October 25, 2007

The Santa Ana winds begin cold, gathering power and mass in the high desert between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Air pressure pushes the winds up and over the San Gabriel Mountains, westward toward the Pacific Ocean, until gravity takes hold. The air becomes compressed as it drops, growing hotter and dryer, stripping moisture from the ground, accelerating -- sometimes past 100 m.p.h. (160 km/h) -- as it squeezes through Southern California's many canyons.

The punishing gusts of the Santa Anas herald cursed weather, days and nights of devilish heat. Should a fire spark in the dry woodlands surrounding the region's cities and suburbs, the winds become a flamethrower, spreading glowing embers half a mile (800 m) or more. The Santa Anas have been midwife to the most destructive wildfires in California's history, from the Great Fire of 1889 to the 2003 disaster that blackened nearly 700,000 acres (280,000 hectares) of forest. Lifelong residents of the state know the Santa Anas and dread them. As Joan Didion has written, "The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."

This week the people of Southern California may have reached that edge. "We're in a state of shock right now," says Dr. Zab Mosenifar, director of the Cedars-Sinai Women's Guild Pulmonary Disease Institute in Los Angeles, who was preparing for an influx of smoke-inhalation victims at his hospital. "This is beyond thinking." Beginning overnight on Oct. 20, unusually fierce Santa Ana winds stoked fires that quickly burst into life throughout a dry, hot landscape. By midweek, more than 20 separate blazes formed pockets of fire running from the Mexican border north to Simi Valley outside Los Angeles. In many places, the heat and smoke were so intense that the 7,000 firefighters recruited from around the country could do little but watch. The flames consumed more than 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares), destroyed more than 2,000 houses and forced the temporary evacuation of nearly 1 million people -- the biggest mass migration in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina, and far more than were evacuated during the 2003 San Diego wildfires, previously considered California's worst.

In San Diego County, site of the worst fires, people spent a few minutes gathering some mementos before abandoning their houses ahead of the flames, seeking refuge with relatives or friends or even in Qualcomm Stadium, which went from being the home of the San Diego Chargers to a temporary shelter for more than 20,000 refugees -- stirring worrisome memories of the tens of thousands who swarmed to the Superdome in New Orleans two years ago. Hotels filled quickly, highways jammed and grocery-store shelves ran bare. Some residents learned of the danger through television coverage of the fire. The images of the flames they couldn't yet see out their windows but knew were on the march only added to an atmosphere of terror. "Everyone is running around scared," said Dr. Sanjana Chaturvedi, a San Diego resident who fled her home with her husband and two children. "No one knows what to do. There is no place to go. I have no place to go."

Often the flames moved faster than the residents. When Jay Blankenbeckler went to bed the night of Oct. 21 at his home in Rancho Bernardo, he could see smoke, but the fire still seemed far away. Upon awakening early the next morning and turning on the TV, he saw a newscaster reporting in front of a blaze -- one that was less than half a mile from Blankenbeckler's house. "It had already burned through an entire neighborhood," he says. "That's when I thought, 'This is real.'"

The Government Steps In State and federal officials did their best to quell the anxiety of refugees and of people who, at least for the time being, were still in their homes. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in full action-hero mode, traveling to the firefighters' front lines, while President George W. Bush -- chastened by Washington's dilatory response to Katrina -- declared the region a "major disaster" and promptly dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, along with Army helicopters, troops and millions of dollars in federal aid. San Diego city officials even implemented a reverse 911 system with automated warning calls going to residents, urging them to evacuate. This early and aggressive emptying of the region -- a hard-earned lesson of the 2003 fires, which left 20 people dead -- likely saved Californians' lives, if not their property. "The issue this time is not preparedness," said San Diego City Council president Scott Peters. "It's that the event is so overwhelming."

The question is, why? Fires have always been with us and are one way nature cleans house, burning off dry vegetation and opening up old ground for new growth. So why have these natural events become natural disasters? Why do there seem to be more of them, and when they do strike, why are they ever more catastrophic?

The Development Scourge Part of the reason Southern California has become such a dangerous place to live is that it's such an attractive place to live. The migration of people drawn to the West by the region's mountains, forests and proximity to the ocean has led to more and more new residents building houses on the shrinking borderlands between edge suburbs and untouched wilderness. More than 8.6 million Western homes have been built within 30 miles (50 km) of national forest since 1982; in California, where the population has more than tripled since 1950, in excess of 50% of new housing has been built in a severe-fire zone. That's risky for obvious reasons: If more people choose to live in areas threatened by fire, more people will be in harm's way when disaster finally strikes. But those houses, especially if owners fail to prioritize fire safety, are often more sensitive to fire than are untouched forests, and just a few scattered houses in the woods can amplify a wildfire. "Isolated homes surrounded by natural vegetation are probably the most dangerous combination for fires," says Jon Keeley, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geographical Survey (USGS). Beyond providing fuel for the flames, new dwellings also concentrate the single biggest cause of wildfires: us. The downed power lines, careless barbecues and abandoned campfires that frequently spark fires don't happen in the absence of people. And then there is the wicked wild card of arson. Perhaps only one person in a community of thousands has a hand in triggering a blaze, but the very presence of those thousands is what turns an otherwise messy event deadly. "The same fires happening wouldn't be anywhere near as serious without this development pattern," says Volker Radeloff, a forest ecologist at the University of Wisconsin.

Then, too, there's climate change. As occurred after Hurricane Katrina, the question of what role global warming might have played in the disaster arose before the fires had even begun to die down. While environmental scientists are careful not to blame the droughts or heat waves of any one season on climate change, the overwhelming majority of climate models point to more of these extreme conditions in the already dry Southwest as the planet warms. A study led by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., and published in Science last year found that as temperatures increased in the West, which is now 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 1 degree Celsius) warmer than it was in 1987, so did the length of the wildfire season and the size and duration of the average fire.

Fighting and Feeding The Flames Even when we try to be smart about fires, we often just make things worse. For more than a century, the U.S. Forest Service -- the federal agency responsible for combating wildfires -- has pursued a policy of stamping out blazes wherever they occur and doing so all the more aggressively as population grows in the endangered regions. For those accustomed to living in urban areas, that makes sense -- the job of a city fire department is to stop blazes before they damage property. But that's not how things work in the great Western forests. Paradoxically, trying to put out every minor blaze may raise the risk for the occasional megafire since the forests are not permitted to do their important work of occasionally clearing out accumulated vegetation. This is a little like letting newspapers pile up in your kitchen: If a fire occurs, the place is primed to blow. "These larger and more severe wildfires are an unintended consequence of a suppression policy that doesn't work," says Richard Minnich, a wildfire ecologist at the University of California at Riverside. "If anything, suppression actually endangers society."

The situation was worsened by a relatively wet winter in 2004-05, which let trees and scrub grow densely, followed by extremely dry weather since, which turned the vegetation to still more fuel. In fact, this past year has seen the worst drought in Los Angeles' recorded history. Adding to the tinder were those Santa Ana winds, which strike regularly in the autumn but rarely with the power of the past week. "They usually come in small, medium and large," says Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "These were Godzilla winds."

A Losing Battle As more houses are dispersed through the fire zone -- whether summer cabins or new McMansions -- both firefighters and budgets are stretched ever more thinly. Last year the Forest Service spent a record $2.5 billion fighting wildfires that burned 9.9 million acres (4 million hectares), another record. Even though California has boosted spending on firefighting since the catastrophic blazes of 2003 -- the state set aside $850 million for this year -- when a megafire like this one strikes, officers on the ground quickly hit the limits of what they can do. "You're putting people between the unstoppable force of a wildfire and the immovable object of a home," says Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. "That's as unsafe a position as you can be in as a firefighter."

A frightening possibility is that the October wildfires may be only the start -- not just of future fires in future seasons but of more to come this year. The Santa Ana winds have just begun and typically peak in the winter. What's more, there is not likely to be much relief from drought conditions. The National Weather Service predicts a La Nina pattern this winter, which occurs when sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are cooler than usual. La Nina usually translates to dryer and hotter weather in the American South.

The long-term forecast isn't any better. Few scientists expect dry areas like the Southwest to do anything but grow dryer still. The past several years have been among the dryest on record in the West, leaving the Colorado River -- which supplies water to 30 million people -- at its lowest level in 85 years of measurements. If the mountain snowpack that stores much of the water used by the West were to melt because of higher temperatures, all the reservoirs in the world might not be enough to keep the region wet. Even if the effects of climate change turn out to be milder than feared, the same population growth that puts people in the way of fires also strains the scarce water supplies needed to fight them. In San Diego County, home to one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S., water use has risen by about 34% since 1995. "We've set ourselves up for this," says JPL's Patzert. "We've been handing out building permits without considering the requirements for water."

The Outlook Does all this mean that the only way to stop the cycle of catastrophic forest fires is to change the way Americans live in the West? Probably -- but the transition will be painful. Population growth in the affected areas has implicitly been supported by federal policies that protect private homes even if they're built in risky areas. This, in turn, has caused the Forest Service -- which is supposed to perform a range of wilderness functions -- to become largely a firefighting agency, devoting nearly half its budget to that one job. That has caught the eye of Congress, which wants spending to be brought under control. The loss in recent years of several firefighters who died protecting homes has further caused Washington to rethink its policies. "So much development in California has followed the pioneering spirit," says Keeley of the USGS. "But we're reaching critical limits in growth, and people have to realize that they will lose certain freedoms if they want to be safe."

Wisconsin's Radeloff says those who choose to build homes in fire zones are "gambling with high stakes -- and right now many of them are losing." One answer might be to make clear to those who choose to build in the highest-risk areas that they are effectively on their own -- a message the insurance industry, which has grown reluctant to protect exposed properties, is communicating to Western home-owners. But while it's easy to see that logic -- and to point fingers at the very victims of the fires -- this week it's impossible not to focus more on the terror and worry of those whose homes are at risk, like Lee Hamilton. By the time the 60-year-old San Diego radio personality woke to a reverse-911 call early on the morning of Oct. 22, embers were already raining over his house. Hamilton barely had time to save his 93-year-old mother and a suitcase full of insurance papers before fleeing. "When I pulled out of my driveway, my mind-set was, I was saying good-bye to all my memories," he says. "I thought the whole neighborhood was going to be leveled." When he returned the next morning, fewer than half the homes in his area had survived -- including his own. But the sheer scale of the destruction in the city Hamilton has called home for 22 years has left him wondering how San Diego will go on. "I'm mostly numb. I really felt we were losing everything."

Of course, nature rarely abides apocalypse. By the time the flames finally begin to go out, the charred forests will be on their way to rebirth. "The plants will put in new growth soon," says David Weise, a project leader with the Forest Service's Forest Fire Laboratory in Riverside, Calif. "The forest is amazingly resilient."

So are people. After the devastating wildfires of 2003, 1993 and 1970, Californians rebuilt and returned to the scorched hills in ever greater numbers. No doubt they will do so again after the wildfires of 2007. But the larger question is, should they?

--With reporting by Carolyn Sayre/New York, Matt Kettmann/Santa Barbara and Jill Underwood and Gary Warth/San Diego

The original version of this article misstated the name of the San Diego reporter as Matt Warth. His name is Gary Warth.