Editorial: When smoke clears, we all should fight fires

Against a raging wall of fire 30 feet high, a human can appear insignificant. But those willing to put themselves between us and the flames are all we can count on to save hundreds of more homes from burning in the forests of California.

Fueled by drought, heat, climate change, insect infestations and fire patterns intense enough to create their own weather, wildfires have borne down on California with biblical vengeance.

The Rough fire remains the largest active fire in the state, with nearly 141,000 acres of Fresno County land consumed as of Wednesday. The blaze is 67 percent contained.

Fire officials are calling the Valley and Butte fires two of the most destructive in California history based on the number of homes burned. The Valley Fire started Sept. 12 in Lake County and has claimed at least 585 homes. Officials say that number could swell to 1,000 or more. The Butte Fire – burning in the hills of Calaveras and Amador counties since Sept. 9 – has taken at least 233 homes.

To grasp the immensity of the firefighting challenge (and the destruction to our forests), think of the entire city of Fresno, all of Modesto and all of Stockton. Add them together, then double that and you’re in the ballpark of the total acreage consumed.

Our hearts go out to the traumatized evacuees, many of whom were drawn to these rural areas by the chance to be close to nature.

Now hundreds of homes are destroyed. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced. At least one person – retired teacher Barbara McWilliams, 72, of Lake County – is dead.

The threatened land is some of the most beautiful and historic in California – tawny slopes of oak and grassland, ancient stands of giant sequoias. The natural loss from these fires is sure to be massive, too.

State fire officials say their money and manpower are sufficient. But federal funding has been shaky for years, with agencies regularly dipping into fire-prevention budgets to cover fire-suppression shortfalls.

In the fourth year of drought, we’ve been expecting this conflagration. The mountains are a tinderbox of brush and trees. As these fires rage, all that stands in their way are a few thousand hearty humans, tiny by comparison to the flames but enormous in courage and determination.

This year, when the smoke clears, we should all become “firefighters.”

We can do that by promising to do more than just set aside more state money to fight the fires (that’s obvious). We should acknowledge that our landscape has become far more flammable, that our forests and communities are in far greater danger than ever before.

We should ask the scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, at the University of California, Berkeley and other universities to help figure out what we can do to better fight these fires or keep them from becoming so explosive. And we should be willing to better fund all of those efforts.

We owe that much to those willing to stand between us and catastrophe.

This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 10:32 AM with the headline "Editorial: When smoke clears, we all should fight fires."