following the Reagan principle, if there were no trees there would be no forest fires.
mysteryman wrote:My sister has lost her house, but her and the kids are ok.
I grew up in Ramona, and have been paying close attention to that area.
Having served on the fire lines in the past, I can feel for the firefighters and the civilians that are helping out.
So far, the fire seems to be following the path of the Cedar fire, but there are many more homes there now then there were.
My brother in law is a San Diego firefighter,and he has told me that at one point there was only one firetruck to cover the whole city of SD, everyone else was out on the fire line.
Fortunately, the people of southern Ca are a tough bunch, and will get thru this without much trouble.
I am sorry to hear about the house. That is tough.
Our hearts down here go out to everyone involved.
dyslexia wrote:following the Reagan principle, if there were no trees there would be no forest fires.
And if the tree huggers hadnt gone to federal court to stop the Bush forest initiative back in 03, there would have been a lot less undergrowth and dead brush to burn.
But, playing "what if" is meaningless and stupid.
Unless you are one of those that are blaming Bush for starting the fires.
You arent that dense, are you?
Sorry to hear about your sister, mm, but glad that they are unharmed.
CJane, stay safe and check in as you are able.
Ditto, mysteryman, and CJ and Seaglass - so glad to hear your families are safe! The news is updating everyone all the time - it looks so frightening and scary. I pity the asthmatics.
Good luck to all of you.
It's a sad situation, but the reality is there are some places not suited to build homes, chaparral is one of them. Same is true of flood zones.
Chapparal is part of the fire ecology but tends to burn fast... and in the days of yore, it would burn up to the border of the last burn, if I remember right.
Now we've got a lot more fuel.
I'm not entirely against building in mountain forested land, ever, but I believe in building light-on-the-land. Light and smart. Frankly, lose-able. Not extravaganzas that divert attention to saving them as a priority.
As I went on and on like a broken record earlier in the thread, tired with two drinks, aaagh, shut up --- but... my friends with the zillion dollar house on the beach that malibu canyon opens onto at the shore have a house I disagree with the building of.
When I was younger, what houses were along the shoreline were, mostly, beach-shacky. Those are pretty much gone now.
(I also tend to be for extensive public coastal access.)
I agree with mysteryman to the extent that there is a lot of dry dead tinder material in the forests now (plus the dry trees themselves). Apparently the forest service is all busy saving houses much of the year. Am not familiar with the particulars of Bush et al's plan versus other plans. I did read, a few years ago, what seemed to me a sort of composite plan that cleared undergrowth and left the oldies and many mediums, but it's lost in some of my computer death scenes.
Mysteryman, I'm sorry re your sister's place.
The problem is bigger than the Bush's plan, which was the same old crap we've been doing for years. The management of our forests has always been tilted to make the lumber companies happy and in the process destroy what nature has crafted for thousands of years to work well. For a healthy eco-system you must leave old growth and some decay. Old growth does not burn as fast and decay is the life of the forest. Basically the policy of this country has been to let the lumber companies take the healthy (most resistant to fire) trees and pull out the underbrush to prevent fires. What is left is a mess of poor tree stock and underbrush that is never allowed to burn on a small scale - thus when the flames start they basically explode. These areas are meant to burn on some scale, many of the plants can't germinate without fire. We need to start a system of controlled burns and stop cutting the biggest and best of the trees. Maybe then you could have a few communties amongst the balance.
I agree with Osso, part of the problem is also the design and materials of the homes involved. Cedar shingles anyone?
NYT article posted an hour ago, contrasting the same natural ecology and how it fares in Mexico and in San Diego.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/us/28threat.html?pagewanted=all
That's a good article, thank you, osso.
When I first moved to San Diego, those areas where the fire hit in 2003
and now (with the exception of Julian) were practically non-existent, there
was open land and lots of it.
Over the years, developers came in and built up suburbia as we know
it today. There is still demand for housing and very few vacancies.
Southern California, and particular San Diego and SD County is a desirable area to live in, and every year the population grows and grows.
The San Diego police chief resigned after the 2003 fires, as his precautions and requirements for fire prone areas were disregarded. He advised not to over build the very same areas that burned 1500 homes in 2003. Almost all of the lost homes were rebuilt, making it a continuous fire hazard in the years to come.
I don't know what the solution is, but as long as there is a demand
for housing, developers will build.
Well, we learned to build earthquake proof housing, why not have fire
proof ones as well?
Both of my cousins and families are ok, one close to the Silverado Fire and the other to the Encinitas fire. The one near the Silverado fire is having a lot of breathing problems with the air such as it is.
Nice little editorial opinion in the LA Times with literary and musical references to Californians and catastrophe. Changes are, re the cartoon, that people will be staying...
Cliche and Cataclysm, by Meghan Daum
You have to register with the LA Times to read the article.
I am just looking at your signature, at first a bit confuse - but now
I understand. It's really a good salad!
Oh, really? I guess that's true. Um, maybe I'll clip some of it then. Not that it was thaaaaat great, but seemed apropo.
As I recall (from the six years I lived in La Jolla (1970-1976) Rancho Bernardo was one of the most "exclusive" areas of San Diego and it has just received most of FEMA's attention.
And I heard on the radio this morning a woman calling in to complain that she's been evicted from the Football Stadium in order for them to play their money-making game this weekend.
Fortunately, a friend of mine whose house is located in the hills outside of San Diego (Alpine?) has been spared, although there are still threatening "hot spots" in his neighborhood.
Scary business.
clip from above link -
Whenever California burns or shakes or collapses in mudslides, a cavalcade of familiar noir-isms comes along for the ride. Social critics wax nihilistic about impermanence as a permanent state of mind. Inevitably, Joan Didion quotes blow in like the Santa Anas themselves, offering up heavy doses of the line about the winds forcing an acceptance of "a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior." Inevitably, references will be made to Nathaniel West's "The Day of the Locust," to Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind," even to Steely Dan lyrics.
This hip mix of dread and sang-froid, especially when it comes to natural disasters, is crucial to our regional literary and cinematic identity. In hard times, New Englanders may have their flinty stoicism, Southerners their gothic rhapsody and Midwesterners their sandbags. But when it comes to the way we appear to respond to apocalyptic tragedy, citizens of the Golden State seem marked by a grim nonchalance. As bad as things get, we never entirely let go of the idea that a Californian watches his house burn down while standing in his driveway in a pair of Ray-Bans, drinking gin and humming a Doors song.
Such caliginous images are not just a mythology we impart to the outside world, they're integral to the cliches that remind us why we live here. In the same way that New York City dwellers wear the hassles of their daily lives as a badge of honor, Californians like to view their proximity to impending disaster as a direct reflection of their toughness; evidence that they're more interesting, more glamorous than everyone else -- and the closer they live to the precarious edge, the more quintessentially Californian they are.
Of course, this form of interestingness comes at a price, most notably the price of real estate. And the fact that the most at-risk property in the region is also the most expensive makes our apocalypse narratives that much more enticing. "There were no streetlights . . . that was one of the attractions," writes T. Coraghessan Boyle in "The Tortilla Curtain," a novel in which the craggy topography of canyon life obscures the view of unpleasant social realities (though not for long). "The rural feel, the sense that you were somehow separated from the city and wedded to the mountains . . . there were even stars, a cluster here and there fighting through the wash of light pollution."
End/clip
Sure, romantic hoo-hah. But, there's a bit of truth to it.
JLNobody, Rancho Bernardo was basically a haven for retirees, the climate
is mild and the restrictions on land and business use were stringent.
Today, RB is inhabited by many many young families as more and more
affordable housing was built in RB and surrounding areas over the years.
Five years ago, the Ralphs family who owned extensive land next to RB,
sold almost all of its land to developers who transformed it into a modern
housing dwelling with 4000+ homes clustered closely together.
I'd say, Rancho Santa Fe is the most exclusive area today, aside from
La Jolla.
----
Osso, thanks for the article.
Welcome, CJ (that's about half of it).
JL, I forgot, if I ever knew, that you once lived in La Jolla. (I was there in '65 for about seven months).
I guess the funny part in all this is that FEMA did their own interviewing and press conference. While the media wasn't even invited to ask questions,
they instead used FEMA employess who, of course, only asked the right
kind of questions. As they say: Bush wasn't amused!
