Worst fire season: 1936

A Look Back At Hot Winds

I just heard our friends Senators Boxer and Reid trying to articulate something about "Global Warming" (i.e. Bush) caused this year's extensive seasonal fires, I am serious.

Barbara Boxer, clearly trying to remember talking points, mumbled something which contained, "half our equipment...is...Iraq." You could tell she didn't even no what she was talking about. Perhaps, we should bomb the forest. Also, it is her state that is on fire - her area of responsibility.

Since no one really pays any serious attention to these caricatures, I won't bother with them. You learn, growing up in NYC, to never argue with the insane - it is dangerous in subtle ways.

In addition, I hear there is talk of arson, which I suspected immediately regarding the locations of the fires. A terrorist with a matchbook can do more damage than any stealth bomber in Iraq. The Japanese knew that and worked on their fire causing balloons, which actually reached the U.S.

When I lived in Simi Valley, I was introduced to the "fire season" in Southern California. Indeed, I recall a post card for sale: LA's Four Seasons: Earthquake, Riot, Mid Slide, Fire. The drawings were pretty clever.

If you prevent the fires from burning, when they do burn, and they will, the fires will be worse as there will be more fuel. There is a lose-lose scenario to living in the LA outback.

After the fires clear out the brush, this is when mud slide season starts as there is nothing left to hold onto the soil. Wait three months - you will hear horror stories about how Bush (or is it the lack of bush) caused mud slides in these areas.

I was also introduced to the notion that insurance is a major factor in human stupidity. This must be so, because no normal person would build on a brush covered hill in a desert. It is almost as absurd as living below sea level or in a town one foot above the Mississippi. There is a good reason for the principal of caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. You can't stop people from being stupid by saving them over and over from their own folly.

It must have been 1987 or 1988 that I had to find a new way to home in Simi Valley as the 101 was closed. Closing the 101 Freeway is akin to closing the Hudson River. The rim fire on the hills, I have to admit, was beautiful against the night sky. A few years later, massive fires took swaths of Orange County, especially the Laguna area.

The Santa Ana winds are something to behold. A pilot friend told me he once came over the mountains toward LA and the winds, as they descended, drove his plane headlong toward the ground. He had heard about this, so properly reacted and dove with the wind toward the ground. To fight the wind is like fighting a rip tide. Don't fight it. The plane soon encountered the compressed air near the ground and was fine.

If you try to drive to Vegas through a the Santa Ana's, you will learn about sandblasting the unfortunate way - your car will be brutally pitted. Other than these problems, the winds are fascinating.

Anyway, the condition of fire and wind is nothing new; what is new is the number of in move into the hills and build wood houses. In the 1990s builders learned of Vermont roofing slate, so that helps going forward, but many homes have WOOD SHINGLE for roofing material!

Regarding the fires, from a recent Reuters artice:

"...It's a natural phenomenon, just part of Mother Nature's way of cleaning out the forest," California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Daniel Berlant said. "Sometimes we hear, 'This is the worst fire season ever.' But its really an ongoing thing."

If there was a "worst fire season" in the last century or so, Berlant said, it would probably be 1936 -- when flames swept across more than 1,250 square miles (3,235 square km) of California, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island.

Three years earlier, in 1933, 29 men died battling a blaze in the city's landmark Griffith Park -- which was scarred by a wildfire again this month. The 1933 fire was the deadliest in the city's history.

Iconic Los Angeles crime writer Raymond Chandler published "Red Wind," his short story about the Santa Anas, in 1938. The following year, West, possibly inspired by a fire in the Hollywood Hills, came out with "The Day of the Locust" -- with a main character who works obsessively on a painting titled "The Burning of Los Angeles."

In 1970, 10 people were killed and some 400 houses destroyed when a 20-mile (32 km) wall of fire burned over a mountain ridge toward the town of Malibu and the sea.

Those issues and the fact that California is in the grip of a severe drought, part of a cycle that experts say can last for decades, according to a Reuter's story, have prompted Los Angeles officials to eye 2007 warily.