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

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Writing

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

by Howard V. Hendrix

Episode Two:
Remembrance of Fires Past

Before he and Yolanda took early retirement and moved to the mountains near Shaver Lake, Joe Shaw taught physics at Santa Barbara Community College. He understands that every fire is a complex problem, an equation, a computation whose inputs are fuel, oxygen, and spark.

He knows that anything capable of burning will burn once it gets hot enough. He knows that a little over a fifth of every breath we take is made up of oxygen. A spark can be provided by a hiker striking a match, a smoker tossing a cigarette out a car window, a broken bottle concentrating sunlight in dry grass.

Or by lightning striking to earth, millions of times.

As Joe watches the fires in Jose Basin lick up toward the crowns of the trees, he realizes it’s not what he knows that’s important — it’s what he remembers. What Joe remembers is the nightmare of the Painted Cave Fire, which destroyed more than six hundred homes and businesses near Santa Barbara in late June of 1990...

Joe is on a flight returning him to his home in Santa Barbara. It will turn out to be the last flight that will be allowed to land in Santa Barbara for several days. As the plane nears the airport, he sees a huge pillar of smoke to the northeast, near where he and Yolanda have lived for over twenty five years. When he calls home from the airport, neither his wife nor his fifteen year old son Paul answer the phone — both a relief, and a further worry.

After making half a dozen calls to friends around town, he eventually determines that his wife and son have made a quick escape from home and are now staying at the home of Paul’s girlfriend, Claire. Reaching Claire’s house by taxi, he is reunited with his family, to everyone’s joy and relief.

Things don’t remain settled, however. Around ten o’clock that evening, his son gets a call from one of his friends saying that he’s seen their house, still standing, in a long-distance shot on a TV report. Paul is determined to ride his mountain bike up to the house.

Unable to talk him out of it, Joe leads his son on a circuitous bike ride through the dark. Making their way around several roadblocks by taking smaller side-streets and bike paths, they manage to get several miles behind the fire perimeter and onto San Antonio Creek Road.

There, amid a pall of acrid smoke and eerie quiet, they ride through a landscape of surreal devastation. Two thirds of the houses have been reduced to beds of ashes on slabs, with the occassional lonely chimney still jutting into the air. The entire scene is lit by the ghostly glare of flaring gas, burning in mid-air above melted gas meters.

Although their 5,000 gallon water tank is empty and all the outbuildings have burned to the ground, their house is still standing. Joe and his family did a good job of brush-clearing around the house. That defensible space has saved the place.

Throughout a mostly sleepless night they patrol the edges of the property. In the distance, houses that survived the initial fire eight hours earlier now flare up and burn to the ground, one by one...

That was the night Joe got what his cousin Pete, down in Twin Ponds, jokingly calls “fire-prevention religion.” He knows that fire can be a powerful servant but also a tyrannical master.

Once he and Yolanda moved to the mountains, Joe became very much involved with the Highway 168 Fire Safe Council, where he learned more about the importance of defensible space. He religiously applied that concept to his own land and home. With the help of the Fire Safe Council, he and his neighbors on the southern edge of the West Village applied for and received a grant for hazardous fuels reduction.

With local California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection help, he and his neighbors used that grant and their own in-kind labor to help CDF/CalFire selectively remove brush and small trees from a corridor nearly a mile long and extending two hundred feet on either side of their tract’s roads. Along with several of his neighbors he also became part of the Shaver Lake Volunteer Fire Department.

As he begins suiting up in his SLVFD gear now, Joe hopes his cousin Pete isn’t facing something like the fire he’s watching move through Jose Basin, and toward Shaver Lake.

Like many other people in the foothills and mountains who have begun to smell smoke, Joe looks at the landscape around him, and begins his own calculation. He wonders if he’s improved his odds enough. Combined with nearby lands owned and similarly fuel-treated by Southern California Edison, his treated area along the southwestern edge of Shaver Lake’s West Village provides a much needed fuel break. But will it be enough?

There is never any way to insure absolute safety, but he and his neighbors have done what they could — and much more than Pete and his community, or even the rest of West Village, have.

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.

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