(Saturday afternoon, 11/15/08) Being a second-generation native Californian, I tend to take our local disasters in stride. Local’s joke that we really do have seasons out here in So Cal, they’re just not the traditional winter, spring, summer, & fall outsiders are used to. Our seasons are more like flood & mudslide season, riot season, fire season, and earthquake season. (I left off “drought,” but that’s more like a year-round thing every few years).
Trouble is, in the last few years fire season keeps getting longer.
I just flew back from a wet, chilly, but fall-foliage beautiful two days in Nashville on Thursday night. During the last half of my non-stop Southwest flight home the “Tea Fire” in Montecito ignited, spread, and burned several dorms and other buildings in my wife’s Alma Matre, Westmont College. I teased my son-in-law that he needed to keep I couldn’t leave the state for two days without Barb’s college burning down. Fortunately, injuries and loss of life was minimal, but hundreds of gorgeous acres and scores of expensive mansions were lost, along with the Tea Garden well known among Westmont students.
Fortunately, the winds died down on Friday, but when I got up this morning and saw the Santa Ana winds gusting through our Los Alamitos neighborhood, I knew the fires would be back today. Before we even turned the TV on for the non-stop coverage I told Barb to expect at least 4 new fires and 500 homes destroyed. Sadly, it appears that I may have underestimated.
Most of our natural disasters aren’t really that widespread in their devasation. This week’s fires, for example, will probably devastate less than a hundredth of 1% the homes in Southern California. That’s still hundreds of homes and millions of dollars, but most of us aren’t severely impacted.
The smoke and pollution will be felt by millions, lots of patios and cars will need to be washed off sometime early next week, but life essentially goes on.
Fire season is brought on by the infamous “Santana” winds, often mistakenly called “Santa Anas.” The word is probably a contraction of vientos de Satan, Spanish for “winds of Satan.” These are hot, dry offshore winds that descend from the Great Basin through the Mojave desert down into Southern California, primarily in spring and summer. While the threat of fire is generally greater in the fall, with recent dry winters fire season has extended to include spring and, now, late fall as well.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
—Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
Ultimately, additional restrictions will be imposed on construction and additional clearance and greenbelt requirements imposed in fire prone areas. Our wildfire challenges are actually easier to manage and less widespread than California’s earthquake risks.
To most Californians, our natural disasters are less ominous than those in so many other regions of the nation or the world. Most of us regard them as one trade off for 360 days of temperate sunshine a year and the many other benefits of living in a dynamic, diverse land of opportunity.
While our thoughts and prayers and help will be going out to our neighbors in these days of loss, while it’s annoying to curtain outdoor activity and deal with the smoke and ash, most Californians still consider this our Golden land of opportunity, and really wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
(photos from L.A. Times’ Gallery
SoCalRealEstateNews 