Fronteiring
When the media paused to step back and write a big picture story on the California Wildfires
Thousands of Homes Still in Danger as Fires Continue to Burn - New York Times that swept through the San Diego (see Dim Sum Diaries) and Los Angeles back country they were preoccupied with Katrina comparisons. Which they soon discovered weren't particularly apt. They concluded Orange county was not New Orleans and moved on to other things. A few straggled long enough to reach the conclusion that unlike a hurricane you can fight fire. You can even fight fire with fire. Fires are curious things. Playing around with one newspaper's interactive graphic. I realized again that, in the wild, a fire tends to be a line, a moving feeding line, not a mass. The lines sweep down out out of the hills towards the ocean, a Westering of sorts. Westering is a notion I picked up when I read Steinbeck's the Red Pony in eighth grade. That was the last time in my educational history I was ever invited to take an AP class. Sometimes I am reminded that some of us didn't get to California by traveling west. Yes, I reply (at such times), I think; though, that the principle at play may be the same, but point taken. This works whether you live in Malibu or on Malibu rd. in Silver Spring.
I was under an incompletely formed impression that there were mitigating steps one could take to protect ones property from fire. I was a little suprised that so many homes burned. As it happens the Washington Post has dropped two articles into tomorrows outlook section on this. I had the idea it was largely a matter of clearing brush from the fire breaks which I assumed were around all homes and developments in Southern California. It's not that simple, but the critical issue still turns on whose responsibility, what mitigating steps that may, are
In the Line of Fire. Both articles indicate that that most involved in the issue believe the answer lies in having costs and basic preparation moved to property owners, from local state and federal fire fighting operations. Steve Pyne in
Blazes on the New Frontier references an Australian model, one of education emphasizing knowledge and preparedness. A more informal version of this seems to have largely worked until the last few rounds of suburban expansion. Higher insurance rates followed homeowners into the higher risk hills The calamity curve | csmonitor.com. But density of housing tracts made individual action pointless. Too many people, too fast to absorb the necessary caretaker ethos. One that builders did not pick up for them.
What level of risk assessment is sensible also enters into this. Protecting against 75 mph Santa Ana winds like a catagory 5 hurricane hitting a coastal city ; a once every 50 to 100 years occurrence, may not be a cost effective level of care. Certainly development builders looking at an entire additional streets worth of property they have to buy for what they build, and high cost roofing materials may think so. Homeowner's associations that maintain these firebreaks as well. How effective are current measures? Does the evidence show that, where these practices held diligently, homes and property escaped unnecessary loss? Pyne's article suggests that what we are going through is analogous to urban environments in the late 19th century. Urban areas of timber framed dwellings burned down in city wide conflagrations in Boston, New York, and Chicago. They were rebuilt in brick and stone, And rebuilt to a code. Evolving code across the progressive era for the tenements; building and block. With each event - like the Triangle shirt company fire - practices changed, became tighter. Fire doors and the pneumatic devices that pulled them closed, labeled exit paths, sprinklers. Cities were not going to stop building multi-story buildings in dense proximity. Neither are we now going to stop building suburbs into the hills and woodlands. The question is one of regulation and practice.
This in turn brings the question to our place in things. A sidebar accompanying these articles refers to the Wildlife Urban Interface, which seems to be often abbreviated as the iZone. In the first formulation it carries strong connotations of concern for the health of the wildlife zone, plants and critters. It may bring up the tension between a land scape that flourishes under natural annual burn through or decannaul fire storms when this is surpressed to protect built environments. Woodlands management: fuel buildup vs natural clearing.
Spoken of as the iZone it seems more a mute reference to a boundary between us and nature. A reminder that we are not really in nature, but are essentially outside of nature, against nature. Does man create (need to create) an artificial environment amidst nature to live in? At best we live in an uneasy balance with nature and perhaps always in struggle with it. Enormous amounts of our energy are directed towards keeping the flow of nutrition coming from agriculture and animal husbandry. In so much of the world it is only one or two harvests from failure. Whose nature is nature. It's an ownership issue. Is it our right, is it our necessity to subjugate the land to live well? Is the last word on nature our nature which will give all else its final form? I'll end here with the first couple of lines from that His Name Is Alive song. Come to me: the fire is coming for us here
you chased us through the house
bless this day and
guide us back
pray your prayer
don't look in back
who is it you're shooting at?
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