I couldn’t stay away from the window the other night. The gold full moon was so ethereal, so bizarre, it reminded me of the kind of moon you read about in fairy tales.
Yesterday, the sun looked like a giant grapefruit. By dusk, it had added that coral-orange shade to a sky so colorful it resembled the contents of one of the bottles you see filled with different levels of sand…the rainbow kind available in curio shops all over the southwest. Right, those.
At first, I didn’t think these sights had anything to do with one another. Then I smelled the air and read the paper.
It was happening again.
Every fall, the Santa Ana winds bring with them an uncomfortable heat—inducing an Indian summer that nips at days getting dark by four p.m., while the rest of the country prepares for Thanksgiving and Christmas wearing scarves and heavy coats.
Every September and October, or October and November, fires follow the winds, searing through the dryer parts of California.
The mountains and hills, and the valley in between them have gorse, brush and weeds parched enough to ignite when aided by even the tiniest spark.
Whether by a stray gust or arson, that spark inevitably appears.
And every year around this time, hundred, if not thousands, of people lose their homes—some their lives—to the explosive fires borne from those winds.
It breaks my heart. The flames consume these peoples’ personal spaces, the proof of their memories and everything they own.
The LA County air looks and smells so smoky it’s almost as if there were a giant city-wide BBQ . Like the weird light peaking behind forbidden doors in Little Nemo or Harry Potter films, the day seems to have adopted a sickly yellow tinge.
The Los Angeles Times dedicated most of its Sunday edition front page to these fires. The print headline read “Driven by Wind, Catastrophe Sweeps Across Three Counties.” Through its gallery, the online version presents an array of photos depicting still shots of the brilliant red, orange hues of flames devouring everything in their path.
If this, like the mudslides that will certainly come after the rains that will certainly follow these fires, is a predictable disaster, why is it still legal to build houses in those areas? Or, short of that, why is constructing homes with ultra flammable material still so common? While people are not to blame for wanting their houses to look a certain way, the developers, could stand to quell their greed or at least tap into some hindsight by noticing that houses using stucco and tile are more resistant to flame, and since fire comes every year, exposing people (those living there, those fighting the fires and those covering them for news outlets) to needless tragedy and danger is inexcusable.
