Fire next time?

Earlier this week, I accompanied Ventura Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Renne and Battalion Chief Don McPherson on an inspection of the still-smoldering ash-covered Santa Barbara hillsides. McPherson commanded five engines for a 32 hour shift on the day where a wind-whipped firestorm trapped three Ventura County firefighters on the next ridge over from McPherson's strike team.

Living where we do, wildland fire is part of our lives, like tornadoes in the Midwest and Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. I've lived near California's tinderbox foothills nearly all my life. I remember being evacuated from Sierra Madre Elementary School under a purple and orange sky. As a city official I've dealt with at least a dozen major blazes in three cities.

Yet I continue to be amazed -- at both the horrific power of wind-driven flames to create a moonscape and the extraordinary ingenuity of firefighters as they somehow manage to protect hillside homes as flames roar around them.

As part of the network of mutual aid that can mobilize thousands of firefighters from around the state, our Battalion Chief McPherson and his strike team had been assigned to defend a ridgeline full of homes strung along a web of narrow roads and lanes with only one fire hydrant. After sleeping in their trucks Tuesday night, his strike team was deployed early Wednesday morning. They did their best to prepare for the predicted "sun-downer" winds that can suddenly gust to 50 miles an hour. But within minutes of their arrival, the hillsides exploded with flame, forcing two of his crews to temporarily take cover.

In the end, some homes were scarcely touched while others were left with only a blackened chimney -- with each telling a unique story of how location, landscaping, luck and the heroic efforts of a handful of firefighters dictated their fate.

But taking a step back from the dramatic stories of homes saved and homes lost, you have to wonder about the sanity of building deep in the foothills. Yes, the roads could be wider and there could be more fire hydrants and water dropping helicopters. Yes, a better job could have been done in clearing brush around homes and preparing the kind of contingency plans we have for our hillside fire deployments. But the prospect of having more staff and more money to throw at protecting our hillsides seems bleakly remote for a long time, if ever.

Of course, most of the building in the Santa Barbara hills, like the building in the Ventura hills, took place decades ago when we more often thought of "conquering nature" than we did of "living in harmony with our environment." We know better how to build in what we today call the "urban/wildland interface." In most places, including Ventura, we are far more cautious about venturing out into brushlands and flood plains. But where we've already allowed building, it is hard to resist the continued incremental encroachment of bigger houses built on steeper lots -- or the rebuilding of bigger houses where ones have just burned down.

It's beautiful living up there in hills with gorgeous views and intimate contact with wildlands. But the danger and foolishness isn't obvious until the humidity drops near zero and the devil winds sweep away a lifetime of memories and sometimes lives themselves. It cost a cool ten million dollars to battle the Jesusita fire and it destroyed more than ten times that in expensive homes. The value of what else was put at risk during those fiery days and nights -- the lives of thousands of residents and firefighters -- is far beyond that. It's something to keep in mind the next time someone wants to build yet another dream home on stilts in our foothills.