C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 , 2019
200 acres in Jurupa Valley, de-
stroyed three homes and prompt-
ed evacuations. It was a man-
made fire fueled by scrub like
chaparral, which requires fire to
germinate and propagate. Unnat-
ural and natural, simultaneously.
This is the dissonance that has
settled in Southern California.
Schools announce closures on
balmy autumn days. Generators
hum as residents try to maintain
continuity through blackouts.
Families become temporary refu-
gees at evacuation centers. Win-
dow shoppers catch a whiff of
smoke in Beverly Hills.
The ‘threshold of control’
“There’s no promises in this
life.”
Thirty miles southwest of the
46 Fire, Dean Koontz, the mega -
selling novelist, was standing
outside his enormous new home
the morning after Halloween.
“We had friends who wouldn’t
move to California because of
earthquakes.”
Like other Californians, he has
stood on a roof with a garden
hose and a stance of defiance.
“They moved to the Gulf Coast
and got hit by a hurricane.”
It costs a fortune to insure
some homes in California. This is
why Koontz invited Moseley and
his team for a consultation about
a defensive sprinkler system and
his SPF3000 spray. Local authori-
ties have challenged the effective-
ness and safety of the product,
but Moseley has testimonials
from grateful clients and docu-
mentation of test results.
He also has his on-the-go dem-
onstration. On Koontz’s front
stoop, Moseley blowtorches one
end of a piece of wood. It ignites,
burns, starts to disintegrate.
Then he torches the other side,
which has been treated with
SPF3000. It blackens but does
not ignite. Then Moseley scrapes
the charred veneer with a car key
to reveal intact wood under-
neath.
“Impressive,” Koontz says. His
Tuscan-style villa is in a gated
community near Irvine. This is a
place of Bentleys and catering
trucks, and an air of invincibility.
Koontz knows that nothing is
invincible. If he were younger,
maybe he’d move to a place that
wasn’t quaking and conflagrating
so much. Arizona, perhaps. But
he loves it here.
“None of us live forever,” he
says. “And you have to weigh the
quality of life with the risk.”
Southern California is a pre-
posterous paradise, a luxurious
dystopia. Over this past month,
fire crews made of criminals were
released from prison to protect
mansions in Brentwood. In Whit-
tier — where you can actually
hear the power lines fizz over-
head — a brushfire displaced an
encampment of homeless people
that residents had complained
about for months. In recent de-
cades, California has sprawled
rapidly into the “wildland-urban
interface,” or WUI, where the
views are pretty but the ecosys-
tem bridles at our presence.
On Friday afternoon in San
Bernardino, a lone firefighter sat
in his truck, right in the WUI. In
front of Capt. Matt Topoleski was
a scorched slope leading up to
national forest. Behind him was a
house that was totaled by the
Hillside Fire. He’d been on the job
for 19 days straight, and had just
finished mopping up the scene.
The shadows were long. The wind
kept trying to shut the door to his
truck.
“For thousands of years, fires
have come down these canyons,
long before man,” said Topoleski,
57, his hands sooty. “Now here we
are. We’re the intruder.”
California burns. Always has.
Topoleski remembers the Panora-
ma Fire in 1980. The Old Fire in
- Same hills here. He men-
tions the “threshold of control,”
the point where the capability of
a firefighting force meets the
power of the fire itself. It’s fire
jargon, like wildland-urban inter-
face, but it sounds in this moment
like a natural truth. With a fire
you can exert some control. You
can build a home out of board-
form concrete instead of stucco.
You can pay for the remote-con-
trol sprinkler system. You can
take a chance on a spray with a
cute name. But there’s no sure
thing in the WUI, Topoleski says.
He pronounces it “woo-ee.”
“We all want to prosper and
appreciate beauty,” Topoleski says
as his radio crackles with a bulle-
tin about someone setting off
fireworks across town. “You’ve
just got to be prepared to leave.”
[email protected]
Miwok used fire to stimulate
grasslands and cultivate acorn
production. But often the fire has
come unbidden, forcing residents
to play defense. In November
1961, Richard M. Nixon, a year
after losing the presidency, found
himself on the roof of his Brent-
wood rental home on North Bun-
dy Drive, wearing a dress shirt
and tie, hosing down cedar shin-
gles as a wildfire barbecued the
hills around him.
At 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 28, in the
1800 block of North Sepulveda
Boulevard, high winds knocked
a eucalyptus branch into a pow-
er line. A couple of white flashes
of electricity turned into the
Getty Fire. A few hours later,
eight houses up from Nixon’s old
rental, developer Ramtin Ray
Nosrati found an inferno ad-
vancing on the palatial lumber
frame of his 20,000-square-foot
construction project. He had
already activated a sprinkler
system remotely to douse the
property, and credits it with
helping to spare the house.
In those moments, Califor-
nians can feel in control. Fire, and
fate, can be outmaneuvered. “You
can’t make an earthquake stop,”
Nosrati says. “A hurricane, it’s
going to go where it’s going to go.
With a fire there’s a lot you can
actually do.”
Over the decades, Californians
have gotten good at dealing with
wildfires. There are brush-clear-
ing regulations and no-parking
rules on narrow roads during
high-risk weather. In Malibu,
mansions get built with under-
ground water cannons that rise to
meet a blaze, and residents train
to activate hydrants on their
streets. Choppers snort water
from the surf and dump the
Pacific Ocean over the flaming
Palisades. Homeowners in Holly-
wood strip their property of pines
and replace them with succu-
lents. Insurance companies dis-
patch private teams to foam cli-
ents’ property lines. Architects
and Realtors use terms such as
“defensible space” and “fire resil-
ience.”
But the fires still start, and the
fires still come, and panicked
Angelenos still chuck the good
silver into their saltwater pools
before fleeing. In the past two
years, at least 17,000 wildfires
have burned 5,000 square miles
of California. Since 1972, the
state’s annual burn area has quin-
tupled, which is probably driven
by human-caused global warm-
ing, according to a research arti-
cle published in August in the
journal Earth’s Future. Large au-
tumn fires will probably become
more frequent.
Into this anxious moment
comes a man named Jim Moseley,
who looks like Richard Dreyfuss
from the “What About Bob?” era.
Moseley is a trombonist who has
played with Frank Sinatra. He is
also an entrepreneur who offers a
suite of fire protection services,
including a spray called SPF3000,
which he claims can give your
home a fighting chance when
other defensive measures have
failed. It’s about $4 per square
foot of coverage. He has sprayed
Neverland Ranch. He has sprayed
the home of a “Star Wars” actor,
he says. And on Halloween after-
noon, another “red flag” day of
high fire risk, Moseley paid a visit
to writer-actor Bo Svenson, who
in “Kill Bill: Volume 1” plays the
reverend at the massacre of Uma
Thurman’s wedding.
“You have so much fuel around
your house,” Moseley told Sven-
son, whose backyard overlooks a
canyon in the Pacific Palisades.
There are homes up narrow,
twisting roads that have breath-
taking views — and driveways
that don’t accommodate
firetrucks.
“I suspect this hill could be a
gold mine for you,” Svenson said
in his Swedish baritone, name-
checking an Oscar-winning ac-
tress with a neighboring abode.
“There’s money here. And every-
one’s nervous.”
Across the L.A. area, cars are
parked facing out. Plastic tubs are
loaded with important docu-
ments and priceless mementos.
Power is cut to thousands of
people, to avoid live wires going
down in the Santa Ana winds.
Wildfires are happening any-
way. The Saddleridge Fire, Oct. 10
in the San Fernando Valley,
forced 100,000 people to evacu-
ate. The Tick Fire, Oct. 24 near
Santa Clarita, destroyed 24
homes. At a winery in Northern
California on Oct. 26, a bride and
groom took wedding photos
wearing face masks; the orange
haze of the Kincade Fire illumi-
nated the vineyard behind them
as it consumed 120 square miles
of Sonoma County.
In the first minutes of Hallow-
een, at 12:18 a.m., police identi-
fied a stolen Dodge Dart traveling
on Van Buren Boulevard in River-
side. The driver refused to pull
over, led officers on a high-speed
chase, crashed into a field and
sparked a brushfire. By dawn, the
46 Fire had swallowed more than
28, is evacuating alpacas, pigs
and horses from her family’s
ranch.
She is dressed as a mermaid. It
is Halloween.
Baker’s husband and father
stay behind to extinguish the
trees one by one, using their own
water trucks, as firefighting
crews encircle homes along East
La Loma and begin the defense.
“The fear comes around every
year,” Baker says two days later,
after the evacuation order is lift-
ed. “It happens between October
and November when the winds
pick up. And the winds in Somis
are unbelievable. They’re hurri-
cane-level winds, every year. And
that alone is terrifying for the
kids and animals. And us. Each
year we get a little better at it.
Prior to any wind warnings, I
have our cars packed up. It be-
comes a way of life.”
Living with wildfires
California burns. Always has.
Purposefully, in some cases: A
thousand years ago, the Sierra
moving fog past Ventura County
firefighters on East La Loma.
Capt. Steve Kaufmann is sur-
veying the fire. Unpredictable, he
calls it. Erratic. Its movement
reminds him of the Thomas or
Woolsey fires, which over the past
two years burned 600 square
miles in the greater Los Angeles
area. Humidity’s at 3 percent.
Winds are at 30 mph. That means
“explosive fire behavior,” Kauf-
mann says.
If you have nothing at stake
but yourself, it’s possible to stand
within 100 yards of this wildfire
and just watch it. It is an eerie,
mesmerizing experience.
If you do have something at
stake, you are inside your own
little apocalypse. On one side of
the street, a farmer and his crew
are yanking an industrial hose
around, spraying the tree line of
the property in a last-ditch at-
tempt to protect his lemon and
avocado orchards. On the other
side of the street, Alexia Baker,
FIRES FROM C1
Where there’s smoke, there’s California
ALLAN GRANT/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES
Richard M. Nixon soaks the wood-shingled roof of his Brentwood
rental home as a wildfire consumes the hills around him in 1961.
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