THE FIRES

GALLERY OF FIRE PICTURES

TOM BALDWIN, TIMES, UK - Massages, acupuncture and stress counseling are being offered to around 10,000 wildfire evacuees gathering at the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego - along with Starbucks coffee, beef empanadas and fresh Caesar salads.

There are stacks of magazines, free telephone calls to anywhere in the United States, toys for the children and entertainment provided by a live blues band. A local pizza restaurant's donation of food has been turned down because there is already too much to eat.

"The people are happy. They have everything here," said the Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, after touring the site. "Nobody does disasters better than California," agreed David Paulison, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It is all a long way from the scenes inside another stadium - the Superdome in New Orleans - two years ago when thousands sheltered from the floods of Hurricane Katrina for several days without proper food or water supplies, sanitation or government assistance. . .

The fires consuming hundreds of thousands of acres in southern California coincided with heavy rainfall this week in New Orleans which overwhelmed the drainage and pumping system and left some streets under water for the first time since Katrina.

Charmaine Marchand, the Louisiana state representative for the Lower Ninth ward in New Orleans - which was hit hardest by the hurricane - was amazed when told of the care available to displaced Californians yesterday. "Some of my constituents could certainly have done with a massage a couple of years ago," she said. . .

MIRIAM RAFTERY, BRAD BLOG - "It's like Armageddon," Jill Michaels said, after watching her home burn to the ground in the Harris fire. In the early hours of the worst fire in California history, the Michaels family received no evacuation warning and found exit routes blocked, forcing them to turn back to their home in Potrero. Now, the Michaels are among half a million evacuees who have fled four raging wildfires, the worst fire disaster in California history. Worse even than the 2003 Cedar fire, which until now held that shameful record.

San Diego County now has more refugees than New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. While reported loss of life thus far remains low, hundreds of thousands of acres have been scorched and countless people will soon return home--only to find themselves homeless.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and local officials have made media appearances claiming credit for swiftly responding to the disaster. "There is much more equipment available, more manpower is available, quicker action," Schwarzenegger said. . .

What the Governor failed to mention is that he vetoed four bills that would have increased staffing and fire resources after the Cedar Fire . . .

[One story] cited Dallas Jones, former director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and current official with California Professional Firefighters union. Jones damned Schwarzenegger for failing to provide additional fire trucks. "How many years are we since the '03 fire siege?" he asked, "and so far, nothing."

Other unfulfilled recommendations made to Schwarzenegger by his Blue Ribbon Fire Commission include replacement of aging fire helicopters, increasing staffing to assure four person crews on each state fire engine sent to major wildfires, and nighttime air drops.

A national contract fleet of heavy air tankers has fallen from 41 to 16 in the last five years, with aging aircraft deemed unsafe and grounded. The state firefighting fleet has not replaced two air tankers that crashed, the L.A. Times reported.

CNN reports that only 1,500 National Guard have been sent to assist Californians during the current wildfire crisis ­ less than 1/10 of the state's 20,000 National Guard members. Clearly having the bulk of our National Guards forces deployed to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan have hindered emergency response here at home.

Some improvements have been made since the Cedar Fire, including coordination with the military to help combat fires, but even those are inadequate. Four Marine helicopters at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station are equipped with buckets to fight San Diego's fires ­ but remain grounded because Cal Fire officials insist the choppers can't fly without state fire crew spotters on board – and there are none available. . .

Supervisor Dianne Jacob has recently expressed interest in returning to use of prisoner programs to clear brush. But her concern is too little, too late.

A former honor camp prisoner, who asked that his name not be published, recalled the importance of firebreaks in halting fires. "When a fire broke out, our first line of defense was the firebreaks that we cut. The whole back country would be checker-boarded with firebreaks on those ridges. We would use them as a trail for our trucks and take a crew out to the boonies…We would contain the fire by making that firebreak the first line of defense. . . I was never in a fire that we couldn't control, because you could always fall back to the next firebreak."

Asked why he thought officials had failed to reopen the honor camps even after the 2003 Cedar Fire, the former prisoner recalled, "It's expensive to cut those, and labor intensive. I guess it's cheaper to lock people up in cages than maintain all those camps," he added, noting that prisoners were paid 70 cents a day to cut firebreaks or $1.50 an hour when a fire was burning. "Doing away with this program has obviously been a disaster. . . You have to have a plan and work it year around," he said in a prophetic interview held before the current fires began. "

MIKE DAVIS, RADICAL URBAN THEORY - From the time of the Tapias, the owners of Rancho Malibu recognized that the region's extraordinary fire hazard was shaped, in large part, by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the annual fire winds from the north: the notorious Santa Anas, which blow primarily between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, just before the first rains. Born from high-pressure areas over the Great Basin, Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanche-like into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the winds to hurricane velocity as they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monicas. Add a spark to the thick vegetation (frequently above 40 tons per acre in the Malibu area) on such an occasion, and an uncontrollable wildfire will result.

Less well understood in the old days, of course, was the essential dependence of the Santa Monicas' chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub and live oak woodland upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriels) have given late 20th-century science vivid insights into the complex role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination. Conversely, science has established that it is accumulated growth that determines fire destructiveness. . .

The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except flee for their lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Palisades, there was official panic. County Supervisor Henry Wright, his nerves shaken by a visit to the collapsing fire lines, posted 100 patrolmen at the city limits to alert residents for evacuation. Should the "fire raging in the Malibu District get closer," he gasped, "our whole city might go." Fortunately, this apocalypse (which may have provided the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in Nathanael West's Day of the Locust) was avoided when the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided.

In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Indeed, a few months before the conflagration, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. - the nation's foremost landscape architect and designer of the California State Park system - had advocated public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain landscape between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936 and 1938, which destroyed almost 400 homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the conservationist common sense of Olmsted's proposal. The county of Los Angeles, for example, squandered an extraordinary opportunity in 1938 to acquire 17,000 acres of the bankrupt Rindge latifundium in exchange for $1,100,000 in delinquent taxes. (At a mere $64 per acre, this might have been the deal of the century.)

GOVERNING - CafiresPress reports indicate that 950,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes as a result of the California wildfires. . . It's more than the population of seven states: Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware and Montana. So, if you're from one of those states, imagine if your whole population and then some were asked to leave. Only nine cities have more than 950,000 residents. Detroit doesn't. Indianapolis, San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C. and Denver aren't even close. Only 500,000 people or so, however, are actually reported to have evacuated in California. That means that a population about the size of Cleveland or Kansas City, Missouri, has defied orders to leave.