We'll be back, promise resilient Californians who have watched their houses go up in smoke, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
It was the perfect fire storm. Four things came together to produce the worst and most expensive fires in modern California: a historic drought, a dry wind, a deadly beetle and an arsonist.
Localised brush fires are common in California, but the southern part of the state has been suffering from exceptionally severe drought conditions for four to five years. The scrub and trees in the canyons and forests have become dry and brittle.
Then the Santa Ana winds arrived, as they usually do at this time of year. They always blow from the east and north east around high pressure that builds in early autumn over central California. They are named after the Santa Ana canyon in south-west California, but today the name is used to describe all such winds.
As they swept down the western slopes of the mountains that lie between the deserts and the Pacific they got hotter and faster. They acted like blow-dryers on the vegetation in their way, including millions of pine trees that had been weakened or killed by the western bark beetle. These insects attack the tree by boring through the bark and carving galleries to lay their eggs. After hatching, the larvae burrow into the cambium between the outer bark and the heartwood.
The spreading fungus curtails the tree's ability to draw up water, and, if it cannot produce enough resin to drown the beetles, it literally dies of thirst. The tops of the trees first turn light green and then brown, and huge bunches of needles become so desiccated that a spark will produce instantaneous combustion.
The spark that set off fires that this week ranged in an arc from the Mexican border to north of Los Angeles, killing 20, was produced by humans. The Santa Ana winds do not produce lightning, nature's most common method of setting fires. The conflagration that became the Cedar Fire outside San Diego was started accidentally by a hunter who got lost and set a signal fire.
The second biggest blaze, the Old Fire - in California fires are given names - was almost certainly set by an arsonist, a man who was seen throwing a lit object into undergrowth and driving off. That being said, fires are to California as hurricanes are to Florida and tornadoes to the mid-west. They happen every year, since time immemorial. What makes these fires so catastrophic is the impact they have had on the lives of the people who have colonised the canyons and forests.
The Cedar Fire is the biggest in California's history, killing 14 people and incinerating at least 1,500 homes in an area of 250,000 acres. By comparison the previous record Californian fire, which devastated 220,000 acres in Ventura County in 1932, did not cause any deaths or destroy a single dwelling.
Since the 1930s, California's population has risen year after year to its present level of 35 million and the new rural-suburban population has become well established in the wilderness. The cities are expensive and crime ridden and the urban air is polluted. Therefore, to those who can afford it, it is much more attractive to live in a friendly community where the views are breath-taking, there is wildlife, and the skies are always blue.
This is especially true of the San Diego hinterland. Peter Martin, a real estate agent in San Diego, explains that most people affected did not deliberately buy in areas where the fire risk was great.
"Realtors [estate agents\] have to explain to buyers that the area in which they are buying could possibly be a fire threat," he says. "In my personal opinion, the developments between seven to 10 miles north and north east of San Diego should not have suffered. A lot of the houses that burned were in such areas where people would assume they were safe."
Many houses destroyed in the Cedar Fire were four- to five-bedroom homes built in the last 10 years, he says. "They were bought by suburban middle-class families who want good schools and a place safe from crime so that their kids can walk the streets or cycle to school."
Without a proper fire-alert system, many of the victims were unprepared for the 200-feet high wall of flame that rushed towards their homes. Like 16-year-old Ashleigh Roach, a high-school junior in the middle-class community of Valley Central, who was recently named Queen of the House of Ireland in Detroit's Balboa Park where she excelled in Irish dancing. She was in a car fleeing from the fire with her brother when it crashed and was engulfed in flames.
Some older communities in the Cedar Fire zone thought they were immune. Claremont, an upmarket college town of artists, doctors and professors, dodged every wildfire in 40 years, but on Sunday, in just a few minutes, lost 43 of its 47 rustic homes.
The second biggest fire of the week occurred 200 miles north, in the San Bernadino national forest park. Some of the best marijuana in the US is clandestinely grown there - giving rise to some wry jokes about what was being inhaled along with the fire smoke. But in San Bernardino's hills, just as in San Diego, the victims whose lives were devastated in the past week, who lost their family albums and antiques along with their homes, tended to be ordinary middle-class Californians with the resilience and the resources to rebuild.
Malibu real estate agent Cormac O'Herlihy says that this is typical. He recalls the 1993 Malibu fire which destroyed 300 homes. All were rebuilt, he says. In some cases the previous owners did not return, but sold the land and kept the insurance pay-outs. House prices went down, however. Because of the "moonscape" left after the fire, many people were reluctant to buy property in Malibu.
"But people have a real short memory," he says and the area, now showing no traces of the 1993 fire, is just as vulnerable to fire as it was then. From what he could see, most of the houses destroyed in this week's fires near Los Angeles were quite expensive, costing anything from $400,000. Nothing would stop the spread of people to rural and suburban California, he believes.
"There is not enough housing in California. The demand for real estate is always there. Builders are going outside the cities and houses are sold before they are finished."
Demographers in California estimate that the population will increase by a further six million in the next 20 years and the fire danger in future will worsen. Fire regulations are strict, especially for rebuilding "burn-outs", O'Herlihy says. If a property owner does not clear vegetation 100-200 feet around the residence, the local authorities will send in a crew to do it for them, at heavy cost. But when there is a severe drought, "there is only so much people can do".
California's media carried many accounts of houses burning down this week despite the most stringent use of fire-resistant materials.
There were poignant tales of double loss, like the experience of Judi Richardson. Her first house was burnt down in 1970, so she used thick adobe blocks and Spanish tiles in her new house, only to see it reduced to ashes on Sunday.
"Few structures can withstand a direct hit from a high-intensity wildfire," wrote Prof Stephen Pyne, author of Smoke-chasing, in the Los Angeles Times.
Nevertheless, people in San Bernardino who have lost their homes say they cannot wait to go back to the mountains for the peace and the safety. One mother who arrived with her husband and four children last year told the San Bernardino Sun they knew a big fire would come along some day, but didn't expect it immediately.
"It came sooner than we thought," said Michelle Moheit after fleeing from the approaching wall of fire. "If the house is burning I wish it would hurry up and finish so we could go back and rebuild."
Not far away, in Del Rosa, people who have have been back to look over the blackened shells that were once neat detached houses, are also making their intentions clear. On one property is a sign that says simply: "Mr and Mrs John Rodriguez Jr and family will be back".