The fires are raging in the mountainous forests outside Los Angeles for what looks to be the greatest conflagration of its kind in many decades. More than 105,000 acres have burned at the time of this writing. For anyone who has never seen those fires, I can only report that they are terrifying beyond description no matter how far away they seem to the eye.
When I first lived out there in the late 1970s, I witnessed a “small” fire in the Hollywood Hills above the Sunset Strip near La Cienega Boulevard. It was a weekday mid-afternoon and I was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard when the fire broke out, within sight, on the top ridge between Kings and Queens Roads.
Whatever its origin, it seemed to have flared up out of nowhere (and the flash of its sudden flames followed by plumes of smoke caught my eye as I was walking along the boulevard several hundred yards below).
I stopped to watch. At first it was a small ground fire, the likes of which I’d seen many times growing up in New England when people burned their leaves at the end of autumn before the frost. Then, within three or four minutes, suddenly, a large fireball literally popped up into the air, as if shot from a cannon, like a living thing, and it hopped like a bouncing balloon up into the air and across the canyon where it landed like a fiery leech on the flat rooftop of a house on the ridge. Then, just as suddenly, the house was engulfed in explosive flames.
Anyone in that house obviously had only seconds to evacuate. It was terrifying in a monstrous way, just to watch, and knowing the lay of the land with its narrow, winding, hill-hugging roads of the hillside, it must have been beyond terrifying making an escape.
Within minutes a DC-10 plane (called Super Scoopers) flew over spraying masses of water over the house and the hillside. In short time this was followed by another Super Scooper, again dispensing thousands of gallons of water scooped up from the Pacific fives miles to the west. But not before several houses were burned to charred skeletons.
Richard Reeves wrote a memorable piece in the New Yorker a number of years ago about Los Angeles in which he stated that it was a “natural disaster area” prone to earthquakes, floods and fires (and of course mudslides). He pointed out that the brown, dry scrub that covers those Southern California hillsides store an oily substance in its roots, and when these oils are heated up by the ground fire, the roots explode with a ferocity hotter than burning petroleum when exposed to air. And then the winds do the rest.
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| Louis and Lila at the Shambala Preserve. |
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Last night my friend Schulenberg (whose illustrations have graced these pages a number of times) reported that Tippi Hedren’s Sambala Preserve (http://www.shambala.org/ [2]) was under siege and had been ordered to make a mandatory evacuation of the animals. Moving the cats, Schu reported, is “a logistical nightmare.” Anne Crawford, another Los Angeleno friend reported that there was a call out in the area of the Preserve for large flatbed trucks to move the animal containers: “Anyone who lives near there with commercial flatbed trucks or similar vehicles should call ... everyone else should stay away.”
This current fire has consumed tens of thousands and miles and miles of acres already.
Longtime Los Angeles residents are very familiar with those “earthquakes, floods and fires” that occur fairly frequently although usually not extracting such massive retribution. Michael McCarty, proprietor of Michael’s restaurant here in New York and in Santa Monica, lost his house in the hills above Malibu in one of the fires several years ago. The fires traveled so fast with the wind that its victims had no time to tarry.
Kim McCarty, Michael’s wife, told me that the only thing she could take when she left the house was the box containing her sterling silver flatware. Within minutes after she’d pulled out of the driveway the house was up in flames and entirely destroyed. Ironically, when she later opened the box to look at her only surviving belongings, she discovered that it was empty: Her housekeeper had taken it out to clean and hadn’t yet put it back.
The McCartys, like tens of thousands of other Southern Californians, however, started over again, built themselves a new (and wonderful) house and got on with their lives. Michael told me as they made their way down the long, winding roads of the steep mountainside, all kinds of four legged creatures as well as reptiles were rushing along with them in effort to literally save their skin, desperate to avoid a tragic ending.
The following are some photographs taken by Los Angeles County residents and submitted to the Los Angeles Times. |
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