Southern California Fires, 2009

By any reasonable standard today’s big news story is the fires in Southern California. The fires threaten homes, lives, and property. Two firefighters have already lost their lives fighting the blaze:

The giant fire in Angeles National Forest continued its slow-motion rampage through the mountains Sunday, causing the deaths of two firefighters as it bore down on the semirural community of Acton and threatened to overrun Mt. Wilson.

The two firefighters were killed when they drove off the side of a treacherous road in the Mt. Gleason area, south of Acton, around 2:30 p.m., said Los Angeles County Deputy Fire Chief Mike Bryant. They were later identified as Arnaldo Quinones, 35, of Palmdale and Tedmund Hall, 47, of San Bernardino County.

“This accident is tragic,” Bryant said, choking up as he spoke Sunday evening. “This is a very difficult time for L.A. County Fire Department and the men and women that serve day in, day out.”

The fire had churned through more than 42,500 acres of chaparral and forest, from the edge of metropolitan Los Angeles up to pine-clad ridges and down toward the Mojave desert. More than 12,500 homes were threatened and 6,600 were under mandatory evacuation orders Sunday night. Eighteen residences have been destroyed, fire officials said, mostly in the Big Tujunga Canyon area.

The fire was 5% contained, officials said, and at least temporarily eased off the foothill communities from La Cañada Flintridge to Altadena.

As usual my wife’s nephew is fighting the blaze and will be working around the clock until it’s contained. He’s a captain and highly experienced but as you can imagine we’re always concerned when these huge fires break out. They’re wild, unpredictable, and dangerous. I can’t imagine the courage it takes to fight them.

Brush fires are a fact of life in Southern California. Although some big fires in the recent past have had human agency, the topography and climate make fires inevitable. Add to that the enormous population of the region and that homes have been built in places where homes just shouldn’t have been built and you have the makings of the sort of disasters the firefighters are trying to prevent.