Fighting Fire With Fire

The Washington Post looks at the fires in southern California, what caused them and what helped mitigate them in places. Frankly, they blame the history of fighting fires as one of the prime causes of the extensive damage that fires are causing these days.

As much as they blame Santa Ana "devil winds" and record dryness, ecologists, climate researchers and firefighters say that the towering, uncontrollable conflagrations of the past week gorged themselves on huge stocks of natural fuel that were the result of a decades-old policy of fighting every blaze in sight, including small blazes that, left alone, would have burned themselves out.

Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, acknowledged the paradox of the consensus he was about to state: "We fight too many fires."

But the drama of the past week also produced evidence of a man-made solution. Some houses that strictly adhered to fire-preventive building and landscaping rules survived the inferno, while nearby structures that paid less attention to those regulations went up in flames.

In northern San Diego County, residents of five newly built subdivisions expected to return to find heaps of ashes where their homes once stood. Maps and video showed that the Witch fire, the most destructive of all, had passed right through their neighborhoods.

"We were kind of in mourning," said Margi Schmidt, a resident.

Yet not one house burned. And the reason turned out to be less heroic then prosaic.

"I went and thanked a firefighter on my way back in here," Schmidt said, "and he said, 'It really wasn't that much work because you guys did the right things with your landscaping.' "

The terrain and vegetation in southern California should be the same as it is in northern Mexico: grass and chaparral should be pretty much all there is. But the insistence on fighting every fire has allowed decades of tinder dry vegetation to accumulate. Coupled with introduced trees like palms that literally explode in fires, the results are becoming more catastrophic with each event. New developments that adhere rigidly to fire control standards are proving that humans can find ways to cope with the arid environment. But it is going to take quite a bit of time - and money - to unravel the mess that years of firefighting has made.