Heat (8 page)

The mapper carries binoculars and a camera and several maps. “Avocado and citrus orchards and golf courses make good firebreaks,” he tells me.

He talks on and off about climate change. He wonders if the chaparral is entering a time when the fire season will extend throughout the whole year, when fires will burn in winter as they burn in summer. He comments, too, on the spread of housing and human activity deeper into the chaparral. It may be that an increase in fire frequency will come from climate change, but it could just as well come from increased sources of ignition, from the close proximity of humans, matches, and fuel.

The road, narrow and steep and winding, will not let two cars pass comfortably. It is not the sort of road I would associate with southern California. It is a road that would be at ease in parts of Montana or Alaska.

We pull off to look at fuel. “This one,” the mapper says, “is
Ceanothus megacarpus,
or big-pod ceanothus.” It is a lilac, in the buckthorn family. “Only the leaves and small branches burn in the first fire,” he tells me. “The leaves burn off and the trunks stay behind. But the trunks die and dry out and are burned in the next fire.”

Big-pod ceanothus is not the sort of plant one would grow in a firebreak. Its leaves carry flammable resin. Its seeds drop to the ground beneath it, saturating the soil, but only germinate after a fire. They germinate in response to heat or smoke or the presence of charcoal. A stand of big-pod ceanothus is a sure sign of returning fire.

“They take about eight years to mature,” the mapper says. “If the fire return rate is too quick, they will be replaced by laurel sumac. That’s what happened in the Santa Monica Mountains.”

If the land does not burn, the big-pod ceanothus grows old and eventually dies off, to be replaced by other plants. But, in fact, the land always burns. Big-pod ceanothus does not worry about old age.

At another stop, we look at spiny ceanothus,
Ceanothus spinosus
. It is wetter here, along the edge of a gully. It occurs to me that a wetter area would be a good place to avoid fire, to hide, to hunker down. I have heard that deer and bears often head into gullies during fires. But, in fact, the gullies burn hard and fast. Fire rips through gullies like smoke up a stovepipe, so much so that firefighters sometimes call the gullies chimneys.

There is jack pine, too, and ponderosa pine, and eucalyptus, each adapted to fire but in different ways. The cones of the jack pine only open in response to fire, and they open slowly, after the fire has passed, dropping their seeds onto the naked soil left behind by a hot burn. The seeds survive temperatures of one thousand degrees. The ponderosa pine survives fire by virtue of its thick bark. The eucalyptus, imported to California from Australia, full of flammable sap, reputed to explode if sufficiently preheated and ignited, possesses epicormic buds—growth sites hidden beneath the protective cover of bark, ready to sprout if the outer skin of the tree is damaged by fire.

Climate experts expect most of the United States to become hotter and drier. They expect less rain in summer, and less snowpack in winter.

The mountain pine beetle and the spruce beetle attack and kill conifers. The spruce budworm eats their needles. The beetles and the budworms are heat limited. Cold weather kills them, and warm weather speeds growth and breeding. As the climate warms, the beetles and budworms become more abundant.

In a warming world, they attack and kill entire forests, leaving standing dead wood over thousands of acres. On the one hand, this means an abundance of dry firewood, leaving some climate experts expecting more fires. On the other hand, when pine and spruce die, their needles disappear. Without needles, there is less fuel. Some climate experts expect fewer fires.

The chaparral, with its occasional Coulter pine or eucalyptus, with its dense shrubs covered by tiny leaves full of resinous oils and its accumulation of dead branches and twigs, is the most flammable plant community in North America. Chaparral fires have been compared to gasoline fires, with entire hillsides igniting in an instant to become a sheet of flame blasted by wind and whipping along the ground and reaching three and four and five times higher than the height of the shrubs themselves.

The mapper and I drive farther along the ridge and stop again near La Cumbre Peak. Fifteen months after the Tea Fire, the Jesusita Fire tore through here, taking an area ten times the size of New York’s Central Park. Eighteen thousand people were evacuated. Cal Fire, the largest fire department in California, posted the following message: “Wildland brush fire driven by slope, erratic winds and single digit humidity’s are causing significant runs with extreme fire behavior.”

A Santa Barbara County Fire Department captain reported that the fire was “moving very, very rapidly.” He called it what it obviously was: an uncontrolled wildfire.

Flames overran a Ventura fire engine and its five-man crew. Plastic on the inside of their fire engine melted. Afterward the men were evacuated with first-, second-, and third-degree burns.

Before it was over, flames caught more firefighters. The Jesusita fire injured thirty firefighters but, amazingly, killed none.

Within two weeks the Jesusita fire was completely contained. This does not mean the fire was out but that it was surrounded, subdued, and to some degree under control. The small task of mopping up remained. The fire burned across thousands of acres, but the first hot flush crossing the landscape left behind unburned fuel. That unburned fuel smoldered and flamed erratically, in small patches, smoke coming off the ground over here, charcoal working its way up the inside of a tree trunk over there, and just over there an unburned shrub dried and heated enough to suddenly transition into combustion.

In some settings, fires smolder for days, eating through the duff that lies on the ground. In other settings, fires can smolder for years. For the purposes of mop-up, chaparral is forgiving in comparison to, for example, stands of spruce and pine. Mop-up is easier in chaparral because the fire takes most of the fuel and leaves behind exposed mineral soil, but that is not to say that it is easy. Crews are tired. Smoke and ash fill the air and saturate clothes and skin and hair. The heat of the ground finds its way through boots.

The crews search for smoke. They scan the ground with infrared scopes, looking for hot spots. When they find something smoldering, they attack with water or hand tools. In places, they work through the goop of fire suppressants dropped from airplanes and helicopters.

The Jesusita Fire burned in part over regrowth that had sprung up after the Painted Cave Fire, which had burned twenty years before. The Jesusita Fire was contained in part by the more or less barren ground left by the Gap Fire, which had burned eighteen months before. Older firefighters on the Jesusita Fire told younger firefighters about fighting the Painted Cave Fire, and younger firefighters told rookies about fighting the Gap Fire. The firefighters could, without leaving the greater urban area of Santa Barbara, also spin tales about the Refugio Fire, the Polo Fire, the Coyote Fire, the Romero Canyon Fire, the Sycamore Canyon Fire, and the Eagle Fire. Cumulatively these fires burned an area twelve times the size of Manhattan.

From our vantage points along the road, the mapper points out a wide swath of charcoaled hillsides. Through binoculars, the blackened skeletons of trees stand above a ridgeline with exposed tan bedrock and scattered boulders. I cannot tell where one fire started and another ended. The mapper finds a subtle change in color, from one shade of green to another, barely perceptible to my eyes, and says that it marks a fire line from an earlier fire.

He points to a stand of dead trees with their branches and twigs intact. “Sometimes fire will pass an area without burning it,” he tells me, “but the trees are killed by the heat or by the ash.”

Today there is no fire. Smoke does not obscure the view. Three paragliders hang in the air above us, and bicyclists pedal along the ridge road.

We scurry down a hillside of loose, sandy gravel. The smell of ash prevails.

In his work with aerial images of burned and unburned hillsides, the mapper looks at more than just color, and he maps more than just plant communities. “Water has a particular spectrum and signature,” he says.

Moisture content goes into his computer models. He starts simply, looking at fuel and slope and moisture. From there, he adds wind. He tosses in subtle changes in fuel loading that let his virtual fire move in sudden leaps interspersed with stalls. This patch of ground might be beetle killed, that patch might have a stream running through it, another patch might have burned within the past few years and have little to offer in the way of fuel.

In computer models of wildland fires, a pixel changes from green to red, indicating ignition. That pixel ignites neighboring pixels. The fire spreads. Before long, the fire creates its own weather. The fire’s own heat dries out moist vegetation. The fire’s own winds roar up gullies. The fire reaches the crest of a hill, with an updraft on one side and a downdraft on the other. The fire leaps across three green pixels, leaving them untouched, to turn four more green pixels red.

The challenge is to come up with models coupling the reasonably static reality of the landscape with the overwhelmingly dynamic reality of an uncontrolled wildfire. The challenge is to create a model that captures land burning with a ferocity capable of creating sounds that firefighters have compared to the sounds of trucks, trains, tornadoes, hurricanes, and volcanoes.

The mapper tells me of measuring temperatures during fires. It is not unusual, he tells me, to measure temperatures hotter than two thousand degrees.

With the photographer, I drive into the hills behind Santa Barbara, toward where the photographer’s house no longer exists. We stop at a neighbor’s house. The neighbor is rebuilding. He has cut down the charred trees that once grew on his property and had them milled into floorboards for his new home. In the ceiling, framed in but not yet finished, he has installed a sprinkler system of the kind usually seen in public buildings. In a wall, he has framed in a fireplace. In his backyard, a few orange trees survive, standing amid burned stumps, their oranges shriveled and scorched and misshapen, oranges that would be at home in a heat-warped basket on top of a sagging file cabinet.

The neighbor points out the source of the fire, the point of ignition, near the Tea House. The Tea House is uphill from here. Despite its name, it was, before it was abandoned, before it burned, a tea garden. In the gardens stood a stone platform and three arches built in 1916. No longer used for tea parties, the overgrown gardens attracted kids with beer.

The fire swept downhill, driven by the sundowner wind. Witnesses would later describe the fire coming down the hill like a liquid, following low spots that funneled wind.

“I had maybe fifteen minutes of warning,” the neighbor says. His family—his wife and daughter—were away. The warning came in the form of word of mouth. There were no police knocking at the door. No sirens sounded. He heard the noise of a hot wind and, before he drove away, the noise of the fire itself. He saw the flames.