Inferno

Supervisors in Riverside and San Bernardino counties scrambled on Tuesday to protect their mountain communities from fire and its aftermath. As the San Bernardino County board dealt with the effects of recent blazes near Lake Arrowhead -- denuded hillsides prone to mudslides -- their colleagues to the south voted to take steps to protect Idyllwild from devastating wildfires.

With rising temperatures and Santa Ana winds stoking fires throughout Southern California, the question is on the minds of many in Laguna Beach: Can it happen again? This weekend's weather is eerily similar to conditions 10 years ago when flames ravaged the local scenic canyons and hills, destroying 265 homes in Laguna Beach and 82 more just north of the city, in Emerald Bay and El Morro. "It is not a question of if" fire will revisit Laguna Beach," said Fire Chief Ken MacLeod.

The fires that raked through the Inland Empire on Saturday evoked memories in Laguna Beach, where 10 years ago this week a wildfire sparked by an arsonist destroyed hundreds of homes. With the fire danger extreme across Southern California, the question on the minds of many in Laguna Beach is: Can it happen again?

As the death toll from a deadly subway inferno in South Korea's third-largest city climbed Tuesday to more than 120, investigators questioned how a blaze started by a disturbed arsonist could have killed so many people so quickly. The subway trains in the city of Taegu had no sprinklers, and fixtures were made of flammable material. Doors slammed shut soon after the fire erupted, and emergency lights quickly failed.

It seems like the setup for a joke with a sagging punch line: Two surfers get together in a bar and, having nothing better to do, decide to illustrate and rewrite Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy." Which, in fact, they did--undaunted that they were about to wrestle with a pillar upon which the European literary tradition has been built, as any freshman Western Civ student will tell you.

Standing next to the barbed-wire fence that separates his country from Iraq, Ali Muhanna ponders the possibility that Saddam Hussein will again try to set this nation's oil facilities ablaze. "He's drowning, he's dying. Maybe he will try to do anything he can," said Muhanna, a supervisor at Kuwait Oil Co. "I hope he doesn't try to do anything foolish like that. He should just go off and die alone."

It is a mark of our culture's self-imposed poverty that, these days, the classics are seldom taught and hardly read. Every now and again, a superstar translator manages to break through to the bestseller lists, as Seamus Heaney did two years ago with his stunning "Beowulf" or as the late Ted Hughes once did in Britain with his wonderful Ovid.

Texas firefighting experts said Monday that they expect to have a deadly Castaic oil-rig fire controlled today, three days after an underground explosion ignited the inferno, killing one man and critically injuring another. Officials identified the victim of Saturday's blast as 43-year-old Joe Currington of Bakersfield, a veteran oilfield worker who was married and had three children.

The fire on High Road was an angry monster. It ripped through the roof of the wood-frame house, shattered windows and wrecked everything in its path, its hot breath searing walls black. The fire sprang to life about 2 a.m. in the living room, near a Christmas tree. In minutes, flames filled the room, then roared along the hallways, blowtorch-hot, eating into beams and timbers. Thick smoke billowed up the stairs, into the rooms, under the beds.