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.
