Everything on Fire

So California is on fire right now. And there's smoke between the trees and houses, right down here on the ground. Had to spend the day indoors because the smoke is so thick.

My brother sold his house in a rural area early this year and moved to a new house back in our home town. The house he sold burned down in the Valley Fire yesterday. That fire went from nothing to 50,000 acres in about 10 hours and continues to burn and grow. Some or most of Middletown burned down, though information is sketchy since the disaster is still ongoing. It was a cute little town, in the mountains north of Napa Valley on the way to Clear Lake. Its oaks and grasses there, very hot and dry for most of the year. My brother used to live close to that. I am glad he doesn't live there anymore. It would have been terrible to try and rescue 5 children and a ill wife and two dogs on a single road so blocked up that people were abandoning their cars and doubling up to move away from the flames. Those abandoned cars will be burnt husks now, much like their homes. He moved and saved their lives.

Easterners smirk about this kind of regional annual tragedy (because Easterners are a55H01es), and they just don't understand how we feel about it on this side of the continent. We are a bit clueless about why they build expensive homes in the path of hurricanes, and who pays for that.

Fires don't burn the same places every single year. In the old days lightning used to burn up the underbrush in the forest every 2-3 years, before the brush grew tall enough to reach the tree tops and cause a Crown Fire, which is what we're having now. Crown Fires burn really hot, really fast, and destroy forests. They happen because the lightning fires aren't allowed to burn out naturally. We put them out as soon as we spot them. This has filled the forests with unnatural amounts of undergrowth, which is normally controlled by lightning fires. The cleared ground grows food for deer, which the local indians hunted. They learned through experience to clear sections of the forest by hand, and burn the piles and spread the ashes, which provided the nutrients to get more grass and more deer. Until 1921, the forest service was doing this too, but public policy changed and the "no tolerance" approach to forest fires have created the current annual tragedy.

Also, stupidity. It is dumb to allow trees all over your house. Nice for shade, but terrible in fires. I say this with trees hanging all over the house, but the roof and siding are both fireproof. The deck, however, will burn along with the fence. When the next fire comes up here we'll see those destroyed, most likely. But the house will probably survive.

Until more aggressive and frequent forest clearing happens, fires like this will keep happening. That is expensive, and there really are people who insist that clearing the brush is everybody else's problem, not theirs. People can be really stupid. This is why Darwin Awards get cheered.