While New Yorkers sweep leaves from their driveways and South Texans
play in the snow this week, thousands of Southern Californians are still
anxiously awaiting evacuation orders and watering their roofs to protect
against flames. The Thomas fire, the colossus of the current fire swarm,
started in Ventura County, north of Los Angeles, on Wednesday, and has
now invaded Santa Barbara County, reinvigorated by the stronger winds
and a new diet of century-old unburnt coastal sage and chaparral. One
wing of the blaze is pushing through the mountains while another is
descending on Highway 101 and the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of
firefighters are making a last-ditch stand to save the picturesque beach
community of Carpinteria, while, eight miles to the north, evacuations
have begun in Montecito, an enclave of old money and the location of the homes of celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres.

With steep canyon topographies acting as bellows, the Santa Ana winds
have propelled the Thomas fire forward at velocities that have stunned
experts. In the first twenty-four hours, for instance, the conflagration
consumed brush at the incredible rate of an acre per second. The
herculean exertions of five thousand firefighters, including élite
“hotshot” crews and prison inmates (the unsung heroes of fire season),
are confined to areas along the circumference of the conflagration;
otherwise, as weary fire officials constantly remind television viewers,
nature alone is fully in charge. Regardless of how many engines and
crews are deployed, no fire line in California history has ever stopped
a major wind-driven fire from advancing. Traditional defensive measures,
such as fire breaks, are useless in the face of blazes that can easily
vault six- and eight-lane interstate highways, as they did in northern
San Diego County a few days ago. The fact is that such infernos are only
“contained” when the winds subside or the rains arrive.

Like their “Diablo” cousins that incinerated central California’s wine
country two months back, Southern California’s Santa Ana fires are
deviously capricious, leaving one home intact in an incinerated block
or, conversely, burning down a single house on an otherwise untouched
street. We imagine a moving wall of flames when we think of wildfires,
but the current fires are more like the Biblical “fiery rain” that
Pentecostals talk about: sending firebrands aloft to ignite brush and
homes as far as a half mile ahead of the notional fire front. Firefighters must
stay alert to insure that such airborne incendiaries don’t ignite fires
at their backs, cutting off their avenue of escape.

The Santa Ana winds are generated by seasonal pressure differentials between
cold, heavy air masses over the Colorado Plateau and warmer, lighter air
in California. As they approach the coast, their interaction with marine
weather becomes complex and nonlinear, leading in some cases to
reversals in wind direction that send fires back over previously unburnt
areas. During the 2007 Witch Creek fire, which destroyed thirteen
hundred homes and forced the evacuation of a half million San Diego
County residents, a friend’s avocado ranch, located thirty-five miles
inland, miraculously survived the firestorm’s initial onslaught, as it
avalanched downhill toward the ocean, only to be incinerated on its
return trip. No doubt the Thomas fire, which is expected to burn through
Christmas Eve, still has some tricks up its sleeve.

Yuletide fire? Visitors often wonder whether Southern California
actually has seasons. In fact, a remarkable landscape metamorphosis
usually begins with the first rains of November. The parched brown hills
surrounding our cities begin to turn green—by March, they’ll sometimes
look like Connemara—and the clock hands on the fire-danger signs are
dialled back from red (extreme danger) to blue (moderate) or green
(low). But not this year. The year’s pattern of record-breaking high
temperatures continued into the fall, without a moisture-laden cumulus
cloud in sight. And the current level of fire danger is so high that the
U.S. Forest Service has described them using the hyperbolic color
purple, to signify “extreme.” In such conditions, one either prepares to
run or prays to Eurus and Ehécatl, the respective Greek and Aztec wind
gods.

Who or what is causing these outbreaks? There are two schools of
thought. Those who study historical fire patterns argue that the sources
of ignition are irrelevant. The fundamental fire equation in California
has three variables: the fuel mass, including the age and dryness of
brush; the extent of residential and other development into chaparral
and forest ecologies; and the intensity of the wind. Wildfire, in
other words, “happens” with or without human assistance, although
traditional Smokey-the-Bear-type fire prevention, which reduced the
frequency of fires and thus preserved unnaturally large areas of old
brush, made great firestorms more likely. Today this irony is fully
understood by fire professionals, but their efforts to reduce fuel
accumulation through controlled burns comes up against the
ever-increasing presence of residential development in foothills and
mountains. For one thing, homeowners have hungry lawyers who love to sue
public agencies after a burn goes wild or simply generates too much
unhealthy smoke.

The other school of thought focusses on chronic sources of ignition. The
Witch Creek fire, to take only one example, was caused by an arcing
power line in the San Diego backcountry. San Diego Gas and Electric,
while insisting that the blaze was an act of God, eventually paid out
two billion dollars in damages to fire victims. (The utility’s attempt
to shift part of that cost to ratepayers was recently defeated in
court.) Poorly maintained power lines are prime suspects in some of this
fall’s fire outbreaks as well. And there is the additional worry that
terrorists, domestic or international, may someday become part of the
fire cycle. A friend of mine, a world-renowned authority on wildfire,
once told me about a nightmare he has during periods of high fire
danger, in which a single, determined arsonist, with a map and a
cigarette lighter, rides a motorcycle.

News coverage of great conflagrations runs in the well-worn grooves of
cliché and sensationalism. Needless to say, the hoi polloi in
incinerated trailer parks or tract homes get no more traction in
headlines than the forgotten and uncounted victims of Hurricane Maria in
Puerto Rico. The destruction of celebrity property, on the other hand,
is always on the front page, and last week it looked like a few burning
super-mansions in Bel Air and the phony fire threat to the Getty (one of
the most fireproof structures on Earth) would dominate the news. Then
came the tragic story of racehorses at the San Luis Rey Downs training
facility, in San Diego County, and most people instantly forgot about
the plight of Rupert Murdoch’s Bel Air vineyard.

At San Luis Rey, workers, together with the professional trainers,
refused to flee the Lilac (or Bonsall) fire until the danger became
acute and one trainer was set ablaze (he’s still in critical condition).
Approximately fifty horses burned to death, but, thanks to the courage
of their caretakers, many of them Mexican immigrants, hundreds more
escaped. A photograph of these thoroughbreds desperately galloping to
safety is currently among the most iconic of the myriad fire images on
the Internet.

There’s an even more uncanny aspect to the Lilac fire, which is that it
was described in detail in a forgotten 1956 novel by the science-fiction
author Ward Moore. Moore lived in Bonsall at some point in the late
nineteen-forties or early fifties, amid a hundred or so chicken
ranchers, horse breeders, avocado growers, and their employees. His
novel “Cloud by Day” portrayed an intolerant little community organized
by a hierarchy of bigotry—against Jews, radicals, Mexicans, and blacks,
in ascending order—that is reluctantly forced to unite to survive an
apocalyptic Santa Ana fire approaching from the east. The geography of
his fictional inferno (he provides a map), and his strikingly precise
description of its dynamics, prefigure the current fire in amazing
detail. When I first pondered this example of fiction prophesizing an
actual event, I thought that the coincidence must be fantastically
improbable. But, the truth is, if you write a story about a fire and set
it anywhere in Southern California, someday it will come true.