Brushfire

While I was in New York, flames were racing across the grass less than one-tenth of a mile from my house on a very hot, windy day. Fortunately, the flames were only 100 yards from the end of Lucas Drive, and very visible to everyone there. Fortunately, they called the fire department. When my kids were driven up in their camp bus, the fire was out, only one fire truck was there, and the firefighters were spraying water to make sure there were no embers left.

Nevertheless, close to half an acre was scorched. And it is easy to imagine that, had the fire started a tenth of a mile further west, houses and trees would have hidden it from the people who called it in. My house was empty that afternoon until 3 PM. And with variable winds of up to 25 miles an hour, fires can move very quickly. I might have come back from New York to find that Mother Nature had arranged an involuntary asset conversion event plus a roasted dog.

So I want higher taxes! More fire trucks! Higher water pressure! Helicopter-based fire watches! Infrared-sensing spy satellites!

And we don't even have any eucalyptus trees in the neighborhood. I tell you, they are bad news: they use fire as a competitor-suppression mechanism. When one of those catches--with all the oils in it--it goes up like a torch. Its seeds, of course, survive the fire, spread, and grow in the ashes that fire makes of its competitors. We have largely native flora that do not try to use fire as a means of enhancing their fitness (well, the star thistles aren't native; neither is the pampas grass; the redwoods used to be native, but that was during the last ice age).

But sometimes on the Berkeley campus I look east up to the crest of the Berkeley Hills, covered with eucalyptus groves planted a century ago. It doesn't look like a firetrap...

Posted by DeLong at July 17, 2002 06:56 PM | Trackback