Dragon in the Land:

People and Mega-fire in California

• Episode One:
  Lightning and Smoke
• Episode Two:
  Remembrance of Fires Past
• Episode Three:
  Red Ball Sun
• Episode Four:
  The Running Battle
• Episode Five:
  Evacuations and Destinations
• Episode Six:
  Maze of Chaos
• Episode Seven:
  The Dragon in the West Village
• Episode Eight:
  Fire Camp
• Episode Nine:
  Man-dragon
• Episode Ten:
  Percent Contained
• Episode Eleven:
  Smart Work, Dumb Luck
• Episode Twelve:
  What To Do Before The Nightmare Comes True — Again

What's New

Writing

Dragon in the Land:
People and Mega-fire in California

by Howard V. Hendrix

Episode One:
Lightning and Smoke

Thunder rolls across a thousand miles of dry August sky. It has happened before, but never this bad. Not in living memory. Not in written history.

Living memory is short. People forget. Even written history, here near the geographic center of California, goes back at most only a few centuries. What is about to happen, however, will be remembered – and will be written about.

A few days ago, forecasters began tracking a flow of monsoonal moisture out of the Gulf of Mexico, moving west and north. With every basin and range it crosses between Texas and Nevada, however, more moisture is rung out of that flow. By the time the parent storm reaches the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and begins to climb above Mount Whitney, it is dry – painfully dry.

Conditions are already drier than normal, too, in eastern Fresno County, at the midpoint of the great arc of the approaching storm. In a typical central California August, live fuel moisture drops to around seventy per cent. In manzanita, live fuel moistures below eighty per cent are considered critical, and the bushes will burn as if dead. In the manzanita of the foothills from Corlew Mountain to Watts Valley, fuel moistures are running at fifty-five per cent. The situation is not much better in the brush and conifers blanketing the mountains near Jose Basin. There, fuel moistures top out at sixty per cent.

Day-time temperatures over much of inland California have remained in the low hundreds for over a week. Humidity has been hovering below ten per cent, with no significant nighttime recovery. Fine dead fuels, including the sunbleached grasses from Sky Harbor to Loper Valley, are down to two per cent moisture content. In grass that dry, even a broken bottle among the stems can lens the sunlight enough to make the grassland flash into flame.

Having overtopped Mount Whitney, the oncoming storm at last rains itself down – very little in water, and very much in lightning. In the dry lightning episode of August 23, 1999 (the most recent event of similar magnitude) more than a million strikes torched off 3,000 fires across California. In the space of a few hours, however, this new August storm’s progress results in nearly twice the number of strikes and ignitions, throughout parched and tinder-dry wildlands from the Anza-Borrego Desert to the Oregon border.

By late afternoon, the thunder has echoed away into memory. The worst of the day’s storm has passed, but it has sewn the dragon’s teeth in its wake.

In their house on the eastern edge of the Twin Ponds tract, Peter and Mary Shaw open the north windows to let in the fresh evening breeze – and smell something burning.

They search through the house first. Then, walking past two of their grandkids playing in the front room, they see out the picture window a dozen columns of smoke rising to the east, some of them closer (what looks like small plumes in the Loper Valley country) and some further away and larger, above what Pete guesses must be Burrough Valley and Watts Valley.

Moving through the house, Mary and Pete agree the smoke smells like it’s coming not from the east, but from the west – which is odd, since they see no evidence of fire in that direction.

At about the same moment, Peter’s cousin, Joseph Shaw, and his wife Yolanda are stepping out onto the back deck of their home near Shaver Lake, each of them holding a glass of wine. As they look toward the declining sun over Jose Basin, they see smoke in the south and west.

Joe steps inside for a pair of binoculars. Returning to the back deck, he sees through the binocs into the smoke, where long red-orange tongues of fire lick upward toward the crowns of trees – distant, but not distant enough.

A dragon a thousand miles long has awakened. It yawns, stretches. Soon it will run. Then it will fly.

All episodes were originally published in 2007 as a fire education series in the Mountain Press, the Sanger Herald, the Snowline Tiimes, and their sister publications covering the central California portion of the foothills and Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Online Resellers:

- all rights reserved