Chapter 09

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” I recall James Taylor singing over and over on the news radio station between updates on the 1978 Mandeville and Kanan fires, both of which started on October 23 of that year and could be seen burning toward each other, systematically wiping out large parts of Malibu and Pacific Palisades, from an upstairs window of my house in Brentwood. It was said that the Kanan fire was burning on a twenty-mile front and had already jumped the Pacific Coast Highway at Trancas Canyon. The stand in the Mandeville fire, it was said, would be made at Sunset Boulevard. I stood at the window and watched a house on a hill above Sunset implode, its oxygen sucked out by the force of the fire.

Some thirty-four thousand acres of Los Angeles County burned that week in 1978. More than eighty thousand acres had burned in 1968. Close to a hundred and thirty thousand acres had burned in 1970. Seventy-four-some thousand had burned in 1975, sixty-some thousand would burn in 1979. Forty-six thousand would burn in 1980, forty-five thousand in 1982. In the hills behind Malibu, where the moist air off the Pacific makes the brush grow fast, it takes about twelve years before a burn is ready to burn again. Inland, where the manzanita and sumac and chamise that make up the native brush in Southern California grow more slowly (the wild mustard that turns the hills a translucent yellow after rain is not native but exotic, introduced in the 1920s in an effort to reseed burns), regrowth takes from fifteen to twenty years. Since 1919, when the county began keeping records of its fires, some areas have “burned eight times.

In other words there is nothing unusual about fires in Los Angeles, which is after all a desert city with only two distinct seasons, one beginning in January and lasting three or four months during which storms come in from the northern Pacific and it rains (often an inch every two or three hours, sometimes and in some places an inch a minute) and one lasting eight or nine months during which it burns, or gets ready to burn. Most years it is September or October before the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes and the relative humidity drops to figures like 7 or 6 or 3 percent and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway and people start watching the horizon for smoke and tuning in to another of those extreme local possibilities, in this case that of imminent devastation. What was unusual in 1989, after two years of drought and a third year of less than average rainfall, was that it was ready to burn while the June fogs still lay on the coastline. On the first of May that year, months earlier than ever before, the California Department of Forestry had declared the start of fire season and begun hiring extras crews. By the last week in June there had already been more than two thousand brush and forest fires in California. Three hundred and twenty of them were burning that week alone.

One morning early that summer I drove out the San Bernardino Freeway to the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, which was responsible not only for coordinating fire fighting and reseeding operations throughout the county but for sending, under the California Master Mutual Aid agreement, both equipment and strike teams to fires around the state. Los Angeles County sent strike teams to fight the 116,000-acre Wheeler fire in Ventura County in 1985. (The logistics of these big fires are essentially military. Within twelve hours of the first reports on the Wheeler fire, which eventually burned for two weeks and involved three thousand fire fighters flown in from around the country, a camp had materialized, equipped with kitchen, sanitation, transportation and medical facilities, a communications network, a “situation trailer”, a “what if” trailer for long-range contingency planning, and a “pool coordinator”, to get off-duty crews to and from the houses of residents who had offered the use of their swimming pools. “We simply superimposed a city on top of the incident,” a camp spokesman said at the time.) Los Angeles County sent strike teams to fight the 100,000-acre Las Pilitas fire in San Luis Obispo County the same year. It sent specially trained people to act as “overhead” on, or to run, the crews of military personnel brought in from all over the United States to fight the Yellowstone fires in 1988.

On the June morning in 1989 when I visited the headquarters building in East Los Angeles, it was already generally agreed that, as one of the men to whom I spoke put it, “we pretty much know we’re going to see some fires this year”, with no probable break until January or February. (There is usually some November rain in Los Angeles, often enough to allow crews to gain control of a fire already burning, but only rarely does November rain put enough moisture into the brush to offset the Santa Ana winds that blow until the end of December.) There had been unusually early Santa Ana conditions, a week of temperatures over one hundred. The measurable moisture in the brush, a measurement the Fire Department calls the “fuel stick”, was in some areas already down to single digits. The daily “burn index”, which rates the probability of fire on a scale running from 0 to 200, was that morning showing figures of 45 for the Los Angeles basin, 41 for what is called the “high country”, 125 for the Antelope Valley, and, for the Santa Clarita Valley, 192.

Anyone who has spent fire season in Los Angeles knows some of its special language—knows, for example, the difference between a fire that has been “controlled” and a fire that has so far been merely “contained” (a “contained” fire has been surrounded, usually by a trench half as wide as the brush is high, but is still burning out of control within this line and may well jump it), knows the difference between “full” and “partial” control (“partial” control means, if the wind changes, no control at all), knows about “backfiring” and about “making the stand” and about the difference between a Red Flag Alert (there will probably be a fire today) and a Red Flag Warning (there will probably be a Red Flag Alert within three days).

Still, “burn index” was new to me, and one of the headquarters foresters, Paul Rippens, tried that morning to explain it. “Let’s take the Antelope Valley, up around Palmdale, Lancaster,” he said. “For today, temperature’s going to be ninety-six, humidity’s going to be seventeen percent, wind speed’s going to be fifteen miles per hour, and the fuel stick is six, which is getting pretty low.”

“Six burns very well,” another forester, John Haggenmiller, said. “If the fuel stick’s up around twelve, it’s pretty hard to get it to burn. That’s the range that you have. Anything under six and it’s ready to burn very well.”

“So you correlate all that, you get an Antelope Valley burn index today of one twenty-five, the adjective for which is ‘high’,” Paul Rippens continued. “The adjectives we use are ‘low’, ‘moderate’, ‘high’, ‘very high’, and ‘extreme’. One twenty-five is ‘high’. High probability of fire. We had a hundred-plus-acre fire out there yesterday, about a four-hour fire. Divide the burn index by ten and you get the average flame length. So a burn index of one twenty-five is going to give you a twelve-and-a-half-foot flame length out there. If you’ve got a good fire burning, flame length has a lot to do with it.”

“There’s a possibility of a grass fire going through and not doing much damage at all,” John Haggenmiller said. “Other cases, where the fuel has been allowed to build up—say you had a bug kill or a die-back, a lot of decadent fuel—you’re going to get a flame length of thirty, forty feet. And it gets up into the crown of a tree and the whole thing goes down. That does a lot of damage.”

Among the men to whom I spoke that morning there was a certain grudging admiration for what they called “the big hitters”, the major fires, the ones people remember. “I’d say about ninety-five percent of our fires, we’re able to hold down to under five acres,” I was told by Captain Garry Oversby, who did community relations and education for the Fire Department. “It’s the ones when we have extreme Santa Ana conditions, extreme weather—they get started, all we can do is try to hold the thing in check until the weather lays down a little bit for us. Times like that, we revert to what we call a defensive attack. Just basically go right along the edges of that fire until we can get a break. Reach a natural barrier. Or sometimes we make a stand several miles in advance of the fire—construct a line there, and then maybe set a backfire. Which will burn back toward the main fire and take out the vegetation, rob the main fire of its fuel.”

They spoke of the way a true big hitter “moved”, of the way it “pushed”, of the way it could “spot”, or throw embers and firebrands, a mile ahead of itself, rendering any kind of conventional firebreak useless; of the way a big hitter, once it got moving, would “outrun anybody”. “You get the right weather conditions in Malibu, it’s almost impossible to stop it,” Paul Rippens said. He was talking about the fires that typically start somewhere in the brush off the Ventura Freeway and then burn twenty miles to the sea, the fires that roar over a ridge in a matter of seconds and make national news because they tend to take out, just before they hit the beach along Malibu, houses that belong to well-known people. Taking out houses is what the men at headquarters mean when they talk about “the urban interface”.

“We can dump all our resources out there,” Paul Rippens said, and he shrugged.

“You can pick up the flanks and channel it,” John Haggenmiller said, “but until the wind stops or you run out of fuel, you can’t do much else.”

“You get into Malibu,” Paul Rippens said, “you’re looking at what we call two-story brush.”

“You know the wind,” John Haggenmiller said. “You’re not going to change that phenomenon.”

“You can dump everything you’ve got on that fire,” Paul Rippens said. “It’s still going to go to what we call the big blue break.”

It occurred to me then that it had been eleven years since the October night in 1978 when I listened to James Taylor singing “Fire and Rain” between reports on how the Kanan fire had jumped the Pacific Coast Highway to go to the big blue break. On the twelve-year-average fire cycle that regulates life in Malibu, the Kanan burn, which happened to include a beach on which my husband and daughter and I had lived from 1971 until June of 1978, was coming due again. “Beautiful country burn again,” I wrote in my notebook, a line from a Robinson Jeffers poem I remember at some point during every fire season, and I got up to leave.

A week or so later 3,700 acres burned in the hills west of the Antelope Valley. The flames reached sixty feet. The wind was gusting at forty miles an hour. There were 250 fire fighters on the ground, and they evacuated 1,500 residents, one of whom returned to find her house gone but managed to recover, according to the Los Angeles Times, “an undamaged American flag and a porcelain Nativity set handmade by her mother”. A week after this Antelope Valley fire, 1,500 acres burned in the Puente Hills, above Whittier. The temperatures that day were in the high nineties, and the flames were as high as fifty feet. There were more than 970 fire fighters on the line. Two hundred and fifty families were evacuated. They took with them what people always take out of fires, mainly snapshots, mementos small enough to put in the car. “We won’t have a stitch of clothing, but at least we’ll have these,” a woman about to leave the Puente Hills told the Times as she packed the snapshots into the trunk of her car.

People who live with fires think a great deal about what will happen “when”, as the phrase goes in the instruction leaflets, “the fire comes”. These leaflets, which are stuck up on refrigerator doors all over Los Angeles County, never say “if”. When the fire comes there will be no water pressure. The roof one watered all the night before will go dry in seconds. Plastic trash cans must be filled with water and wet gunny-sacks kept at hand, for smothering the sparks that blow ahead of the fire. The garden hoses must be connected and left where they can be seen. The cars must be placed in the garage, headed out. Whatever one wants most to save must be placed in the cars. The lights must be left on, so that the house can be seen in the smoke. I remember my daughter’s Malibu kindergarten sending home on the first day of the fall semester a detailed contingency plan, with alternative sites where, depending on the direction of the wind when the fire came, the children would be taken to wait for their parents. The last-ditch site was the naval air station at Point Mugu, twenty miles up the coast.

“Dry winds and dust, hair full of knots,” our Malibu child wrote when asked, in the fourth grade, for an “autumn” poem. “Gardens are dead, animals not fed. . . . People mumble as leaves crumble, fire ashes tumble.” The rhythm here is not one that many people outside Los Angeles seem to hear. In the New York Times this morning I read a piece in which the way people in Los Angeles “persist” in living with fire was described as “denial”. “Denial” is a word from a different lyric altogether. This will have been only the second fire season over twenty-five years during which I did not have a house somewhere in Los Angeles County, and the second during which I did not keep the snapshots in a box near the door, ready to go when the fire comes.

— 1989