California Burning

The 52nd Congressional District of California, where I grew up, encompasses the eastern suburbs of San Diego as well as a vast hinterland of granite-bouldered mountains and almost impenetrable manzanita chaparral. In recent years this picturesque back country has been a magnet for trophy homes, luxury estates and horse ranches. Its older, Ozark-like culture of modest cabins and pickup trucks, cowboys and Indians, has been overwhelmed by the new chardonnay and Hummer folkways of stockbrokers and software engineers. Developers and county supervisors, eager to service the soaring demand for luxury living in low-tax unincorporated areas, have paid little heed to persistent warnings from fire officials that 80 percent of the brush was more than twenty years old and thus explosively flammable. Likewise, until the beginning of this year, scant attention was given to the bark-beetle infestation, following in the wake of the driest year in San Diego history, that is killing pine forests in local mountains.

Now nearly 300,000 acres of the 52nd district, including parts of nine Indian reservations, are an ashen desert. ("Hiroshima," gasped an awed childhood friend.) For a full week, a whirling dervish of a firestorm--flames 200 feet high erupting across a twenty-five-mile-wide front--chased firefighters back and forth across rugged terrain. Started by a lost hunter's careless flare, wind-whipped flames initially raced westward at high speed, overtaking and burning alive a dozen rural residents. Within a day they were incinerating affluent lifestyles in eucalyptus groves east of La Jolla, as well as more modest homes in Tierrasanta, well inside the San Diego city limits. Making an about-face at the command of onshore winds, the firestorm then returned toward its point of origin in the mountains.

At this writing, authorities estimate that the death toll from the ten great wildfires that swept Southern California will exceed twenty. More than 3,600 homes and businesses are now charcoal. One belonged to GOP Representative Duncan Hunter, the paleoconservative chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Together with his personal megaphone, hate-radio host Roger Hedgecock, Hunter is demanding old-fashioned frontier justice. In their view, the chief arsonist is lame-duck Governor Gray Davis, who, they claim, failed to dispatch aerial tankers and water-dropping helicopters that could have squelched the "Cedar Fire," the most murderous of the conflagrations. (Fierce Santa Ana winds and darkness, forestry officials respond, made such water drops ineffective.) Indeed, Hedgecock, a defrocked former mayor of San Diego (convicted of criminal offenses in the 1980s), has claimed on local and national radio--where he pinch-hits for drug-addled Rush Limbaugh--that Davis deliberately withheld firefighting resources from pro-recall San Diego County in order to concentrate them on Democratic Los Angeles County. Hedgecock also asserts that the fire tragedy is being exploited by "the left" (allegedly headed by Davis) and unions to raise taxes.

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