Wild Fires

Southern California can seem an idyllic place to live.   It's warm but pleasantly dry, the sun shines 320 days a year, and there are a lot of celebrities to gawk at.

But there are downsides, and one of the big ones is the constant risk of wild fires erupting and taking away lives and homes.  

This can happen anytime of the year except the wettest part of the wet season (late December through, say, March), when the few paltry inches of rain that fall somehow manage to keep potential tinder too soggy to burn.

The cruelest time for fires is right now, the late fall heading into winter.  There may have already been a little rain by then (there was a bit this year), and the temperatures can drop at night to the point sweaters are donned and furnaces stoked.  Fires, at least unintentional ones outside the home, are far from mind.

But the fickle winds that often bring cooling breezes from the ocean can shift to bring dry winds through the mountains from the vast California desert. And these winds do not need to be hot to do their damage, just dry.  And they are very dry.

In the past two days such winds from the inland have helped spread small fires into firestorms that have caused havoc in two places:  Montecito, a very upscale community home to many celebrities and located near Santa Barbara on the coast, and Sylmar, an inland town in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, near the I-5 freeway north of Los Angeles.

Montecito saw homes lost and at least one reported death.  In Sylmar, the winds coming from the desert reached gusts of 76 miles per hour.  In the face of near-hurricane forces such as that, fire fighters were overwhelmed, and many, many homes were lost.   

There may be more before the wet season finally comes, taking the threat of fire away until next year. 

So, please, those of you who live in parts of this country, and the world, where right now it is cold, rainy, possibly snowing.  When you look out your windows and see weather similar to that which stymied Scott in the Antarctic, think of us living here in sunny California and wish some of that stuff our way...