10-30-03 Fire

Right before we left the nice hotel in Tucson, Arizona (we had been attending Dawn's Social Venture Network conference), I sent an email to my dad in San Diego, confirming that we were coming. He wrote back and said there were fires everywhere, jumping freeways. Since I had only heard about fires in Los Angeles, I assumed he was confused about our route. I was determined to get there and certain there would be no problems, and so we forged ahead, to within about 30 miles of my parent's house, without checking the radio. (Later, the analogy to failed software projects kept haunting me, but I will assume the association is obvious and not dwell on it.)

We began to see cars and trucks parked along the freeway. I'm not sure what I was thinking at this point, but I didn't actually stop until I saw the glow of flames, and all the cars were being stopped and turned around. If the Highway Patrol had put some kind of sign a few miles back, we all could have turned around without waiting an hour, but apparently they were as unprepared as anyone else.

I had begun hunting for gas some miles back. When we finally got turned around I began hunting again, but in the other direction. The first place we came to was one of those little towns that shuts down early, or was boarded up. We couldn't tell because they had all their lights off, and the gas station was clearly closed. When we came to the second village and closed gas station we decided we should camp in the back of the truck rather than running out of gas on the side of the freeway, and that seemed a nice spot, far enough away from the freeway noise. Only in the morning did I realize that there was no power. I had such a strong assumption that power was like air, always there, that it didn't occur to me that it could be unavailable, but the fires further in towards San Diego had cut the power. So there was gas in the pumps, but no way to get it out. And there were gas stations when I was looking for them, but they weren't lit up so I couldn't see them. Like a well-told movie, everything suddenly made sense.

The little store in the town of Live Oak Springs (I have no idea if the village is still there, now) had no power, and all the perishables were perishing. People were slowly emptying the shelves. (I heard later that all the stores in the US have about two days worth of food.) Bottled water was disappearing; one town resident said their pumps weren't working. A small generator showed up for the nearby restaurant and they cooked breakfast (using propane) for some of us, for which we were grateful.

We talked to many people who had also washed up in Live Oak Springs, waiting for the fires to recede or the freeways to open. Many were convinced that they had no homes to return to, but were usually surprisingly cheerful about having escaped with what was important to them – invariably, spouses, children and pets.

We finally heard that the local casino (the Golden Acorn; we were among oaks and on Native American land) was selling 10$ worth of gas to each car. They alone had the foresight to have serious generators on hand, and the slot machines were still ringing as people tried to forget their unpleasantness. We decided this was our best bet, got in line for four hours, then drove to El Centro where we eventually found stations that had gas (a bit chilling at first to discover that the stations close to the freeway were also out of gas. And the feeling of a full tank and a direction to go away from the chaos was very comforting). After paying artificially-high prices at the Shilo Inn in Yuma for a bad room (we will never go to one of those again), we found an internet cafe and researched hotels using Hotels.com (a bit like ebay for hotel rooms), finding a very nice place in Phoenix for a very reasonable price. The internet worked, (alas, trying to load a printer driver for the cafe's printer caused Dawn's XP machine to crash regularly until she took it off. Oddly, I briefly had crashing problems a couple of days later from a bad wireless PCMCIA card – failing systems were the dominant theme) and cell phones worked. Everything else seemed very vulnerable to failure.

We fled to Phoenix to hang out and work until the AYE conference.

In a sense, the infrastructure of Southern California is a kind of natural mimicry of the environmental scheme of the area. Grow like crazy, then periodically have a fire to burn back some of the growth. Many plants are designed for periodic fires, and cannot thrive without them. The seeds from a particular tree cannot germinate without the temperatures caused by fire. Southern California in general does not seem to prepare for disaster, preferring instead to assume it will not happen and spending money on more interesting things than disaster preparedness. After all, the sun is out and the weather is fine. Above all, there is no testing, and the last test (rains, earthquake, or fire) is a distant unpleasant memory that is best forgotten. The majority of the California population has come from elsewhere, hoping to forget something else, so forgetting is a practiced operation.

I seem to learn a new lesson about testing – which I've discussed in other weblogs – every time I think I do it effectively.

Folks who are tested regularly cannot understand the attitude of forgetfullness. People from Minnesota and the Dakotas usually carry things like a shovel, sand, food, water and blankets in their car, since it gets cold every year and you have to be ready to get stuck on the road. I notice that their attitude towards each other is gentler and more caring, as well. My theory is that anyone you meet might save you in times of trouble, and so you want to be nice to them ahead of time.

Coincidentally, someone in Crested Butte pointed out to me a few weeks earlier that the town was dependent on a power plant located on the other side of a mountain or two, and he explained what services would begin failing as soon as the power went out. Anyone who lives in a house heated solely by electricity is in trouble, but our solar-and-gas heated condos wouldn't fare much better since those systems rely on electricity. One failure I hadn't thought of was waste water. The treatment system will back up, and thus the sewers will fill. This fellow argued that Crested Butte has some naturally running water that could be used for backup for the wastewater treatment plant. But Crested Buttians, perhaps because they are (also) primarily from somewhere else, assume that the systems will continue to work as they always have. You have to be in a situation where you see just how fast things fail to make you take it seriously, I guess.