LA Weekly

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The city was shaken and stunned. Newspapers and authorities looked for villains. The Times speculated that "the blaze was caused by some Red, some half-unhinged firebug or some person with a fancied grievance against society." For several days after the fire, a 29-year-old unemployed studio technician named Robert D. Barr looked like he fit the Times' description perfectly.--The Griffith Park Fire, October 3, 1933

It's national news now that a fire is smoldering in Griffith Park, a 4,000-acre patch of open space at the eastern edge of L.A.'s Santa Monica Mountain range. The Hollywood Hills share the same patch of turf, as does the Hollywood sign; the Greek Theater, the newly renovated observatory and the Zoo are up there, too. None of these seem to be threatened, and my guess is that as the weather cools today, the now 600-acre fire will be contained.

Six-hundred acres, though, is a pretty big fire up here. That fire referenced above burned under 50 acres. But it was the deadliest in the city's history: Twenty-nine Depression-era work-crew firefighters died when the wind suddenly shifted.

Like that fire, this fire seems to have been caused by a human. Last night the story was that a homeless man had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his pocket; this morning there are reports that the fire had been set deliberately. (The man has been treated for burns and released -- he's no longer a suspect.) But the real culprit, I suspect, is the last three years of weather.

Frankly, I'm amazed that we've made it this long without a burn.

In the 12 years I spent living within a half mile of the park, I expected fires to start all the time. The hillside above the house where I last lived up there looked like a tinder box every autumn; the neighbors would go reasonably crazy if you didn't clear your brush.

But you can only hold back the fire cycle for so long: As the Sierra Club's magazine noted in a 1995 article: "Only You Can Postpone Forest Fires." There's plenty of human activity in Griffith Park. Cigarette butts litter the ground; kids play with firecrackers (I have climbed the hill to stop them); other people light prank fires. It's when those incidents follow one winter (2004-2005) of record rain, and then two more of obliterating drought, that we're in trouble. Two years ago the hills were wild with purple, yellow and green. This year -- in the spring -- so much had turned brown, it looked like August. It's not climate change or doomsday or pollution causing this, but simply Southern California's natural cycle of flood and fire.

I have to worry, though -- this isn't fire season. If it's like this in April and May, what's in store for October?

And how well did that new fire-protecting water system perform?

Larry Mantle on KPCC has an excellent show on the fire going on even as I write: He's interviewing one of my favorite fire experts, UC Riverside's Richard Minnich, and talking about habitat and drought. You can listen online following appropriate links, here.

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