Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Letter from the Front Lines
This morning I put up a post about my childhood neighborhood and how close it is to the fires. Today I got this email from a dear friend from college, with permission to “pass it around.” Like a canteen at the firebreak, I will share with you his story of confrontation with the enraged forces of nature. I’m so glad they got out of this okay (so far); my heart goes out to those less fortunate. This is like being smote by the hand of god. Personally smote. Marc, I’m so glad blessings protected you and your family, your pets and home and those of your neighbors. May those blessings come too to those who have been less fortunate. There are far too many of them.
Hi all,
I do not know the degree to which the Southern California wildfires of the past week - and expecially the past weekend - have made the global press. I imagine a fair bit, but you never know. As I suspect I may be asked to repeat our story to a couple folks - not that I am not willing to do so - I thought I would write it out. For me, it is a bit of catharis as well.
Just to let you know at the outset, it seems to be a fairly happy ending, for us at least. About as good as one could hope. As of right now - Sunday evening - there are multiple fires burning across Southern California. As of Friday night, the fires had burned about 30,000 acres. Right now, they have burned almost 300,000 acres and they show absolutely no sign of stopping - indeed they are still multiplying on multiple fronts and are stretching the efforts of some 10,000 plus firemen to the breaking point. This is our story of a couple of those acres.
For those of you have not visited us, we live on a suburban street right up
against a small hillside that is covered with grass and shrubs and which goes basically uninterupted into the national forest that makes up Los Angeles’s northern border. In terms of fire hazard, it is rated moderate by my insurance company - the hillsides burn every couple years, but tend to do so in a fairly moderate fashion. There is no significant brush fuel on any side of the house, other than the hillside across the street that the house faces -for our neighbors on the other side of the street, the hillside is their backyard, separated by an engineered creek and a walking/biking/horseriding path. When we bought the house, we actually did investigate the brushfire history and concluded that it was a reasonable risk (as did our insurance company). As some of you who talked to me about this last year may recall, there was a fairly significant fire in the upper mountains last year and it behaved exactly like that - over a period of
days, the fire meandered across some 30,000 acres - but did not burn the final
hills up to our house, which meant the fuel was still in place.
LA experiences a phenomenon in the fall called Santa Ana winds. Los Angeles is a coastal basin, surrounded by mountains. While the basin ranges from sea level to some 400 meters, the far side of mountains are much higher - 1500 meters or more, in what is called the high desert. The high desert extends all the way the the western edge of the Rocky mountains, in what is called the Great Basin. Whenever there is an atmospheric pressure differential between the coastal basin and the Great Basin, the laws of physics intervene and nature tries to create an equilibrium (high pressure air rushes in to fill lower pressure air) in a phenonemon called wind. For this reason, Palm Springs and Tehachapi are among the foremost wind energy development regions in the world - it always blows. When the pressure differential grows (generally, when the coastal region is starting to experience the beginnings of winter season conditions), the winds grow correspondingly stronger and several mountain passes funnel that power particularly effectively. When you add random gusts of wind of 60 to 120 km per hour to raging fires, the results are what you might expect.
Last Tuesday, the fire subsequently known as the Grand Prix fire (I have no idea why) began about 15 or 20 miles east of our house. These happen all the time and while is was significant (it got pretty smokey for a couple days), it was nothing outstandingly out of the ordinary. As of Saturday AM, Grand Prix began to move west more aggressively, into the northern reaches of a community some 10-12 miles to our east. At the same time, the “Old” fire (about 20 miles further east) began and immediately ripped violently though a residential community, taking out some 200 houses in an afternoon. This drew some firefighting resources away from Grand Prix, but who knows if any of this could be stopped or slowed by anything. From what i witnessed, I highly doubt it.
In the early evening, we decided to take drive out to the east, to see what was going on with Grand Prix and, frankly, to gawk at the power of nature. I had missed last year’s fires in our area and Sheryl wanted me to see them. From a fairly good distance and the safety of our car, we saw what were clearly powerful fires, strung along the mountainside. We did note that the fire was few more miles west than was generally being reported on the news reports. By 8PM or so, I would estimate they were maybe 8 miles as the crow flies from where we live, maybe a little less. That said, there is a major canyon between what we were watching and where we live and most of the mountains above us would have no significant fuel, because of the destruction from last year’s fire in the higher mountains.
At 10PM, we put Walter and Leah to bed (special treat - Sleeping Beauty was on TV) - and i stepped outside. Due to the generaly smokiness, we had been keeping the house closed with aircon on, so I immediately noticed an increase in the smokiness. We noted a very small orange glow on the mountains on the far side of the canyon, very high up (maybe 5000 feet) and at least five miles away. When we went to bed an hour later, the small orange glow had grown significantly, but still was contained on the far side of the canyon, which is a major firebreak.
Somewhere around 2AM, Sheryl and I both woke up with a bit of a headache. The doorbell rang - at 2AM you assume this is a fireman with an orderly evacuation order. It was out neighbor’s teenage daughter, telling us that the fire was in the hills across the street, they were evacuating and we should probably do the same. i walked outside, and realized that we had a reasonably immediate threat, but by the intensity of the glow, it was still a little ways off. After going back in, we started gathering those things that we would want to save (just in case), but frankly, i was still not convinced that we would be leaving all that soon.
About one minute later, the house was blasted by a shot of wind that I can only describe as lethal. We absolutely shook and I was certain from the tremor that something solid had hit the house. Nothing had (I checked), but i accelerated my efforts. Sheryl gathered the kids from their rooms and put them on our bed while she started packing up the various odd things that I decided to save in various absent-minded trips through the house. It is amazing how your mind works - or does not work as the case may be - in that kind of situation. As I walked back and forth through the house, looking out the front window as I passed, I could see that the fire was certainly closer to our hillside.
I opened up the garage to start packing things and was greeted by Hell, in a bad mood at that. Smoke was incredibly thick, winds were whipping, embers and sparks were just flying down the street. The fire had crested the hillside and had enveloped it. Despite the thickness of the smoke, I saw big flames racing down the hillside, “racing” as in “faster than you could possibly run” were you up there. It was, without a doubt, the single most frightening moment of my life. All of this had taken maybe 5-7 minutes since the neighbor had knocked on my door. Sheryl timed racing the kids to the minivan betwen gusts of wind and embers and I threw everything in we had packed so far, including the dog. She took off - everybody in the neighborhood was similarly just racing themselves into their cars, and i went in a grabbed couple more things, ncluding Nico (our cat), who promptly escaped from the car, making me chase around for about 45 seconds (I would guess) before just saying - “well cat, you had a good 12 years - see if you’ve used up all nine of those lives”. Power went out and i had to get the garage door down, which took a few extra seconds. I think those extra activities probably contributed to the smoke inhalation cough i have been fighting since.
I got into our other car and drove out with the remaining neighbors with flame, flying embers and smoke everywhere - when i got to the main street (maybe 250 meters), four firetrucks were heading in. I had very little hope that they could do anything - it had to be too late. I don’t know how big the flames were - suffice to say, they were the biggest flames I’ve ever seen in my life close up - maybe 10 or 15 meters high. Who knows. We met up at a friends’ house and spent the rest of the night basically freaking out, but assured that we’d gotten the most important things (our lives and key papers, bascially) and hoped for the best. About two hours later, i tried to drive back up and see if I could see anything, but everything was cut off by police blockades. It was a long night.
Amazingly, our house and all the other houses in our neghborhood survived. Hundreds of homes in the region have been lost and hundreds more almost certainly will be, but those four fire trucks did what I can only describe as the impossible. In the midst of a powerful, rapacious firestorm that was creating its own whipping winds that they arrived late to, they set up a line and they held it. The sheer bravery to go INTO something like - let alone actually work there - boggles my mind, Apparently it was firefighters from the City of Anaheim - Claremont firefighters having been dispatched out to some other part of the line. Multiple neighbors across the street have singed trees and back fences in their backyards - those guys somehow put them all out. We’ll be sending them a nice contribution.
Our house smells like a nasty smoked sausage and the big gust of wind ripped off a nice chunk of our heavy roof tiles (which makes our survival even more remarkable, because that left exposed wood), but other than that we are OK. Nico survived, though looked a bit smudged. If I ever wanted my cat to be able to talk, this would be the time. One small blessing is that it will take a good ten years for the hillside to build up enough fuel to burn significantly again. There are fires in the general vicinity still, but it would take a long shot ember to nail us - the local fuel is now gone. Claremont lost 65 homes in a period of a couple hours, and we already know of two friends who lost their homes.
I don’t think we did anything wrong, except to not monitor the fires progress all night. That might have helped a bit, but frankly, this came on so fast, that even the fire marshalls (who are supposed to start evacuating people out well before the actual threat) were only showing up at the time that we were all basically running for our lives. They told us later that they too had been completely caught by surprise by how fast and how furious this particular lick of the fire moved.
This scene is repeating itself all over the region - sometimes fast and furious, sometimes slow and methodical. Multiple firelines are progressing on multiple fronts, sometimes 20 or 30 kilometers across. The Santa Ana winds are supposed to slow down in the next day or so. There are three major areas of fires and they form a triangle with points about 100 to 120 miles apart. There are probably a dozen smaller fires in between - but small is pretty relative in this case. Grand Prix and Old (who have now joined into a single massive fire whose main front is climbing into the mountain resort areas) are both suspected as being caused by arson - in other words, this was done deliberately. It sounds as if at least a thousand homes will be lost, maybe many more. Every firefighter south of San Francisco is deployed in the region and thousands more are pouring in from around the West. By all appearances, there simply cannot be enough.
In the meanwhile, everything looks and feels pretty post-apocalyptic. We have a bit to do over the next couple days, regarding insurance claims and the like (though thankfully, just for roof and smoke damage). We’ve moved for a night into a hotel that is not quite so stinky and we are thinking about retreating out of the region until things are a bit more reasonable. Not sure about that just yet.
I’ll be in touch soon
mds
