6.2.2 Case Study #2: 2003 Southern California Fire Complex

“It was no longer ‘do what you can to protect the structures’ it was ‘do what you can to get these people out and to a place of safety’…”. Fox, 2013.

From its soils to its ecology, to its place and indigenous tribal names, California, and in particular its southern region is laden with geological, ecological, anthropological, and etymological clues that point to a fiery past. But for one species, fire would pose not a problem to the region, that species being H.sapiens, or more specifically, our present wildland urban interface architectural paradigm, which having regionally absorbed an area some 30-fold greater than in the late 1880s (Keeley et al, 2004) is at systemic odds with the regional fire regimes.

The scientific institutions of the 21st century endowed with sizeably greater real-time environmental data than they of 3-decades ago, that October 2003 would deliver one of the most intense fire seasons in decades came as no surprise, for state-wide, Remote Automated Weather [RAW] station readings read ‘extreme fire-weather’. However, when so many are the variables that impact upon the spread, intensity, and severity of wildfires, none could anticipate the moment-to-moment events as would unfold.

All, as yet identified, sources of ignition within the fire complex human-caused, including the lighting of a signal flare, and two cases of arson, the sCA October 2003 fire complex became emblematic of the dichotomy at the boundary of socio- ecological systems. As several of the region’s fire-adapted landscapes ignited into flame, species of which the reproduction is dependent thereupon propagated the fire through their various pyrotechnic endurer, evader, and resister functional traits, as simultaneously, both regional and national fire crews, comprised men and women from institutions as diverse as military troops, prisoners, and community volunteers mobilised to fight the fires.

As in London in September 1666, while a combination of people power and equipment saved some residences and businesses, 3,631 homes were destroyed, and yet more were damaged (FEMA, 2004) [Fig. 66]. However, though many were the properties lost to the 740,000 acres-wide fire complex, relatively few [22] lost their lives, the matter thereof a testament, to amongst others things, state agencies’ capacity to co-ordinate mass evacuations on barely any notice. Practice, the saying goes, ‘makes perfect’, which is pertinent because just four years later sCA would need implement a wildfire evacuation of even greater proportions.