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writing for godot

The Fire This Time -- Vicious, Unparalleled Blasts of Flame

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Written by Zepp Jamieson   
Friday, 27 July 2018 16:12

 

 

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 27th 2018

 

Back in 1990, I lived right on the border of Santa Barbara and the future city of Goleta. It was June 27, a time of year when the marine layer prevailed, producing night and morning low cloud, and daily highs in the low seventies (20-25C), humid but comfortable.

Sundowner winds—the hot, dry adiabatic flow off the mountains—were considered a late summer and early fall phenomenon. But this particular time, the winds were blowing fiercely, up to 60 mph with temperatures around 110. From my office, I had been keeping an anxious eye on the mountains. A fire had flared up in the county dump and fire companies were on it. As evening approached, the smoke plume vanished, and the air outside the office turned cool and moist. I heaved a sigh of relief. We had dodged a bullet.

It was a little after 6, quitting time, so I hopped in my SUV and drove the mile and a half home. I pulled in to the apartment complex, and stepped out into a blast furnace. The winds, fitful and very local, hadn’t let up there. I saw several of my neighbors standing around talking, clearly looking worried. I went over to see what was going on.

“Ed’s taping the fire,” one of them explained.

“The dump fire? It’s out.” It seemed a strange thing for Ed to do. The plume never did get very large and was white, about as harmless as a fire in sundowner wind could possibly be.

“Not that,” my neighbor replied, “THAT.” he pointed over my shoulder.

A huge column of black and gray smoke towered behind me, visibly growing and changing. Worse, it was coming right at us.

“Why aren’t you guys packing?” I asked, preparing to dash back and start loading my vehicle. “It’s going to hit us!”

My neighbor explained between us and the fire was a three lane main road, a six lane highway, a two-lane frontage road, and the spacious lawns of Saint Vincent’s Academy. We had a huge fire break.

The wind screamed, superheated and wild, and the first embers flew overhead. The fire was miles away, and burned debris was right over our heads. “I’m packing.”

A little over an hour later, the fire had reached us, burning brush behind the complex. The entire neighborhood was destroyed before it got dark. We were saved only became firefighters took a stand in front of our place, protecting a pool-supply place that threated to throw clouds of chlorine into the major development behind us if it caught fire. We were collateral rescue—not that we weren’t grateful, mind you.

The fire killed one, and destroyed some 600 structures, burning 6,000 acres in a little over two hours.

It seemed a big deal at the time. It was the second most destructive fire in California history in terms of property damage and cost.

It seems quaint now. Just a little flare up, really, a match strike. Never mind the screaming wind, the heat, the strange hieroglyphics left on the lawn of Saint Vincent’s by fire tornadoes. Never mind the flaming debris twisting and hissing and spinning through the air, flying cats from hell. Compared to the fires to come, it was just overcooked brownies.

The Oakland Hills fire happened a few months later, and outside of Santa Barbara, the Painted Cave fire faded from memory.

Firefighters and forest managers and others involved in coping with wildfires were noticing a worrying trend: fires were getting bigger, more frequent, more destructive. To the layman, it wasn’t so evident because there was a lot of ‘noise’ in the trend. California still had ‘good’ fire years and ‘bad’ fire years, depending on the winter rains, the summer heat, and pure, dumb luck. But the trend was there, and it was promising a hellscape of fires to come.

Welcome to hell.

The Painted Cave fire is considered the eleventh worst in California history, and nine of ten have happened since then, eight of them this century. Some of the worst have happened in just the past two years: the Tubbs fire complex in the North Bay which killed 43 people and destroyed some 6,000 homes, and the Thomas fire, which burned from Filmore to Santa Barbara, 400,000 acres and which caused 23 deaths in the subsequent mudslides in Montecito.

And it was those two conflagrations that brought that which was discussed quietly amongst fire fighters out into the public discourse.

Tubbs was horrific, sparked in the middle of the night and roaring down on sleeping people. The smoke killed some before they even knew anything was wrong. The fire screamed and howled and reminded firefighters of the recent fires around Clear Lake, which also were extreme in their behavior, even though the weather conditions weren’t extreme. Yes, the winds were bad when the fire began, but the fire continued to behave like a blowtorch even after the winds let up and humidity rose.

The Thomas Fire, the largest in recorded history, was even more puzzling. It kept making runs in unexpected directions, flaring and jumping from ridge to ridge. Deniers shrugged and compared it to the Matilija Fire of 1932 which burned 220,000 acres. The Matilija fire started in June and eventually went out on its own in October when rains came, burning in suggest and nearly unapproachable terrain in what’s now the Sespe Wilderness. Or, they argued, there was the Santiago Canyon fire! It burned 308,000 acres or so! It burned in just two weeks in late September of that year!

Of course, in 1889 there were no fire retardant bombers, no smoke jumpers, no fire engines, only primitive pumps, no radio, no satellite, none of the tools needed to fight wildfires. The ubiquitous tool used by firefighters, the McCloud shovel, hadn’t been invented yet.

The Thomas fire burned 280,000 acres, despite nearly 9,000 firefighters, six air bombers, dozens of helicopters, and over 800 fire engines. For much of the time the fire burned, conditions were cool and relatively windless in most areas. The fire should not have been the monster it was.

Above all, it was December, two months into California’s rainy season. It was the first big fire in December in the state’s history.

And now we have a monster burning in Redding, 75 miles from the Oregon border. Fire conditions are extreme this time—temperatures above 110, single-digit humidity, and fitful and variable winds, and we’re seeing fire behavior that exceeds even the extraordinary ferocity of Tubbs or Thomas. The Carr Fire has featured pyrocumulus clouds reaching 45,000 feet, a mesocyclonic beast slowly rotating, in essence a fire hurricane. A fire ‘tornado’ some 50 feet wide was spotted in the suburbs of Redding. Wood burns like it was magnesium. There are already two firefighters dead and three injured, and unknown numbers of civilian casualties. It’s frightening that the agencies have not provided updates on the size and location of the fire in nearly 24 hours; they’ve either been too busy, or the scene has been too chaotic to determine such statistics, or both. The images from the fire are terrifying.

Some argue that poor forest management has led to overloading of fuels, and that’s definitely a factor. (It wasn’t a factor in either Tubbs or Thomas, both of which were mostly brush and chaparral and suburbs, with negligible forest growth).

But mostly, it’s climate change. Vegetation is very dry, and dying from thirst and insect infestation. Even areas that normally see six months without rain and temperatures often over 100 are terribly stressed as the hot, dry weather continues without any real surcease.

Even if humanity addressed climate change right this moment and somehow stopped the buildup of greenhouse gases, the damage for the next two decades is already forgone, and fires in the west will only get worse and worse.

Until there is nothing left to burn.

 

-- 
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