The Fire This Time
NASA satellite view of So Cal Fire
Well, it's our annual inferno season in Southern California. It comes regularly between draught, flood, earthquake and riot seasons. For the last four days the fire has grown without the help of any wind. Now the wind, the Devil's Wind, is pouring out of the desert and being funneled and concentrated through the Cajon Pass. It is a disaster. Tens of thousands of homes are in peril. People are being given mandatory evacuation notices. (Since last year, the law has changed and mandatory no longer means you have to go. The police and fire folks got really tired of yelling, begging and arresting homeowners who valued their property more than their lives.)
As I write this, I'm sitting in my second floor office and looking north at an "end of the world" kind of sky. Clouds of smoke, white to gray to black, pump higher and higher and spread westward towards the ocean. Of course, we can smell the smoke. This literally brings the fire to us in the form of smells with fine particulate matter. The winds carry trees, homes, memories and hopes in ashes.
Every year this happens somewhere in our area. Topanga Canyon burns every couple of years. The next victim is usually Malibu. Then Santa Clarita Valley and Big Tujunga burn.
Every year we act surprised. Every year the experts tell us one of two things: If it has rained a lot (pretty rare) they say, "Well, the rains caused an unusual amount of brush growth." If it has been dry then they explain, "The brush was dry making the hills a veritable tinderbox." Now, they have come to a new and useful explanation. "We've been too good at our jobs and the chaparral has gone 40 or 60 years without natures fiery pruning."
We react to fire as we do to rain. When it rains here, no one slows down on the freeways or tries to compensate at all for the change in the index of maximum adhesion. So, we crash. Here in Sunny Southern California, we just refuse to recognize reality--wet, dry or on fire. In some ways this is commendable in our nature. There are no real lessons here. Every place we can live comes with its own perils--war, tornado, hurricane. We just hang on, rebuild and try to tough it out. We can weep and cry, but we should not be surprised--either at events or our own resiliency.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
It is really hard for all Southern California people to experience such natural disasters. Imagine the crops, farms and other properties that they’ve lost because of fire, flood or hurricane – surely, fast cash isn’t enough to put up all the damages they have and regain back all the things they have lost as well as their capital and assets. But I still believe we should not lose hope since there is still GOD who will always hear are weeping and prayers so he will surely gives us hope. Trials will make us stronger, we just need to learn how to fight “stonewall” infront of us.