Not surprisingly, as is usually the case with large wildfires, arson is partly to blame. Surprising, though how many arsonists there are and how many have been arrested.
[quote]One of the larger fires in Southern California was deliberately started by someone with apparent knowledge of arson, a fire official said Thursday.
The Santiago Fire in Orange County was started in two places along a little-traveled road, according to Chief Chip Prather of the county’s fire authority. . .
The reward for information leading to an arrest has increased to $150,000 – $50,000 each from the governor’s office, the U.S. agency of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the FBI, Prather said. . .
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Fire Department investigators are looking into whether a man who was arrested on suspicion of arson in the San Fernando Valley may have had a role in any of the ongoing blazes, an L.A. police spokeswoman said.
Catalino Pineda, 41, was arrested Wednesday, Officer Kate Lopez told CNN. Witnesses told police they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside in the West Hills area of San Fernando. . .
In San Bernardino County, John Alfred Rund, 48, was arrested Tuesday evening and charged with setting a small fire along a rural roadside near Victorville. . .
The county’s district attorney’s office on Thursday also filed arson charges against Anthony Riperti, 47, of Redlands. . . .
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department also arrested an adult and a juvenile accused by an anonymous tipster of starting a fire in Vista . . .[/quote]
cnn.com/2007/US/10/25/fire.arson/index.html
Aside from those dangerous, criminal nutcases (who are often firefighters themselves), and without diminishing the tragedy of this for so many people, I was thinking this morning how such fires are a perfectly normal and ordinary part of the environment. Southern Cal is so hot and dry and the hills are covered with manzanita and other dry vegetation that catches fire with only the slightest spark and burns long and hot; coupled with the warm Santa Ana winds, it would be amazing if such fires didn’t occur. I remember when I studied Botany at Palomar College, in the dry hills of Northern San Diego county, right next to where the largest of the fires is now burning, my botany teacher explained that So Cal has many very beautiful wildflowers and other species whose seeds have a thick, hard shell, so they can’t germinate and grow except after a fire. In other words the local vegetation has evolved based on the expectation that there will be regular fires.
And I’m reminded of the huge fire at Yellowstone Park, about 1980, that burned a huge portion of the park and the controversial decision that was made then to let it keep burning naturally, rather than try to extinguish it, because throughout the eons (not just the very short time man has been around and tried to tame the environment) wildfires have always been an important part of the life of many ecosystems.
And I’m reminded of the futile efforts man makes to control shifting shorelines, when the tides regularly scour all the sand from beaches where it is wanted and deposit it in bays and shipping channels where it isn’t, and men are forced to constantly dredge, build piers, rebuild beaches and constantly battle the forces. Or all the people who build expensive houses on bluffs with phenomenal views of the ocean, only to have their yards and sometimes their houses erode over the edge.
These fires are terrible, but they’re also terribly predictable and (aside from the arsonists) natural.
