Foggy morning and rain is on the way today. We’ve had two glorious days of weather here, quintessential Indian Summer and it’s supposed to return tomorrow. The fourth day of the raging fires in southern California, a place normally known for its breezy, moneyed lifestyle. Now the place looks like the end of the world.
Novelist Raymond Chandler described the Santa Ana winds of southern California this way: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” Red Wind
It’s been awhile since I experienced the Santa Anas but yesterday I talked with a friend who lives in Brentwood and he described the nighttime winds blowing through as spooky. Because they are associated with high fire danger, particularly in the chaparral brush growing on the Southern California mountain slopes they’re called devil winds or devil's breath. They blow in from the Great Basin that lies between the Sierras and the Rockies from September through March and are thus dry and hot and troublesome. The weather prognosticators say that the winds are supposed to ease today, although they can whip up with the frenzy of a hurricane and yesterday at times the helicopters were grounded because of high winds. Normally they pummel through the canyons at 80 m.p.h. but during the recent firestorms that have decimated the region they’ve been clocked at up to 112 miles an hour.
It’s almost impossible to keep up with the stats, but San Diego County has been hit the hardest, the inferno has also hit the La Jolla Indian Reservation, Camp Pendelton, and about a dozen fires are raging. I-5 been closed, the fires have killed three, displaced about a 824,000 people, thousands who are holed up at Qualcomm Stadium, and destroyed or damaged at least 1,700 homes and businesses, and thousands of acres. Since the Civil War this is the largest forced displacement of Americans and the smoke from the fires are now reaching hundreds of miles into the Pacific.
We have heard over and over that the firestorms were simply too many, too hot and too mighty for the beleaguered fire crews. But here are two things to think about: why isn’t the mainstream media focusing on how most of these fires have been started by arsonists and how no one is talking about the California National Guard. In May a representative from the Guard noted that it was missing $1 billion in equipment such as trucks and radios because they were being used in Iraq or had never been replaced by the government.
You see when a Guard troop goes to Iraq or other countries the equipment doesn’t come home with them and the equipment for the Guard is funded by the Federal government. In March, the head of the National Guard told a congressional committee that units had on hand an average of about 40 percent of their required equipment and that rebuilding supplies to a proper level would require an extra $40 billion in funding. There are about 20,000 California National Guard troops and about 1500 fighting the fires. Does this mean the rest are in Iraq guarding Haliburton?
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