Hah! Fooled you: “Report, Once Removed, From the Ashes”
This piece originally appeared in the Kingston Whig-Standard on October 31, 1991, @ p.13. (there were more pages then; there was a local publisher…”) It is an account of the great Bay Area fire of 1991. Why do I reprise it now? Precisely because we shall be staying in CA on Agnes Street in Oakland, on the side of that street that did not burn nearly 14 years ago. Photos accompanying this account were taken from the porch of that home in October 2004, as a forest fire raged in the Point Reyes headlands, some miles to the north…..the sunset was spectacular, but only because trees and grassland were burning……
“Some Say the world will end
in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those
who favor fire.”—————– Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
She saw the fire in the late, late morning–and with foreknowledge from many warnings that this could happen she moved quickly. There, over a ridge high in the hills that comprise the Oakland-Berkeley border, came red, yellow, gold tongues of flame — seeking, licking, engulfing, consuming.
It was Sunday Oct. 20, and there had been a fire the day before, deep down in the canyon beyond the next ridge. Apparently some construction workers had burned refuse — against stringent anti-burn laws — before constructing yet another million-dollar home in a region where exquisite views of San Francisco, the Bay, the Golden Gate, and beyond stagger the imagination.
Yesterday had been very warm, another dry day in a succession of dry days — stretching back five years. During the half-decade little sustained rain had fallen — save for March 1990 when rain fell for 26 of 31 days. The “March miracle,” residents called it then. Yet in retrospect, though reservoirs were temporarily replenished, the prime result of this precipitation was the growth of a new dense crop of grass — which turned to combustible straw by June.
The Oakland Fire Department, making another in a long series of calls, put out that blaze. But as night fell Saturday, the department left the scene — the region was unsafe, the chief said, its slopes pitched too sharply. Someone might get hurt.
But the fire had not died. Embers smouldered beneath the ground, ready to leap back to life if given the chance.
Saturday had been a big day in Berkeley. Just down the road and a couple of canyons over, 88,000 fans had watched the University of California’s resurgent football team battle the Washington Huskies, one of the nation’s finest. Thousands of these fans travelled to the game via Highway 24, westward through the Caldecott Tunnel. Despite losing 24-17, the Bears acquitted themselves well.
If Saturday had been beautiful, clear and hot, as the Bay Area usually is in October, Sunday dawned with equal promise. But hot winds also had developed — similar to the Santa Anna (or Santana) winds known and feared by residents of Santa Barbara to the south. Thre had been a nasty brush fire in Santa Barbara a couple of years ago — one which developed such velocity as it moved out of the Santa Ynez foothills that it jumped several fireblocks and US 101 before burning itself out. That conflagration claimed nearly 600 homes.
These hot winds rush from hot to cold, from inland deserts to the Pacific Ocean. They are constant, and often reach 60-75kmh. Unlike southern California, where inland desert makes the Santa Anna a common occurence, Northern California seldom encounters these gusts. There is no northern California inland desert. Hence, although brush fires were a constant worry, residents of the Oakland and Berkeley hills did not face the constant hazard that southern California did.
XXXX
But this was no consolation for her, as gusty winds propelled the fire upwards toward Gravatt Drive. Already, she realized, as she reached for the garden hose to begin the fight to save her home, acquaintances living on the next ridge must have lost their houses. One family had spent a lot of money clearing brush to a distance of 1000 yards from their dwelling, and installing a sophisticated and powerful sprinkler system. As she turned on the water, she realized that even the most powerful sprinkler system remained useless — without water pressure.
For the water came out in spurts — nothing near what was required. When she turned toward the fire and its synergic gusts — strong as a slap in the face — the water simply blew back in her face. Nearby stood her hot tub, with its huge water supply. If the hose wouldn’t do the job, there were always buckets.
But now, as the eucalyptus trees exploded in the canyon beneath her, falling ash grew thicker, and what had been a hot, brilliant day became a hot, dark one. “Darkness at noon,” she thought. “Not even the water in the hot tub will save this house. We’ve got to get out of here or we’ll die.”
She recalled that a few years before one of her daughters had received as a classroom assignment one of those hypotheticals that seemed unreal at the time. “If your house was burning down, and you had only a few minutes to choose, what would you save?”
She immediaely grabbed photographs, sweatpants and suit, one of two cats (the other is still missing), a few odds and ends, and took off. Now the fire was nearly upon her — Gravatt Drive had turned, it seemed, into a one-way street. But which way? The wind was roaring, sparks and embers falling everywhere.
But there was no one present to direct traffic — no police, no fire department personnel — no one — to tell residents which roads NOT to take. As she and her husband drove from their home, they felt certain that this was “goodbye” to that structure. No fire appeared to erupt on all sides. But she and her neighbours were fortunate: they chose a route that the inferno had not transformed into a deadly cul-de-sac. She and her husband had lost everything, but they were alive. That was enough.
Imagine, if you will, a huge blaze breaking out at Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard, stretching from Brock to King streets, sweeping unchecked to Ontario Street and the water, consuming all before it — with residents left to fend for themselves. That would give some idea of the terror residents of the Oakland/Berkeley hills confronted early that Sunday afternoon.
Most significant, the Berkeley inferno that killed 26 people, consumed more than 700 homes and apartments and condo complexes, and cost an estimated $5 billion pointed up anew the sorry state of California’s social support systems. Since 1977 and the passage of Proposition 13, a majority of Californians have not paid property taxes — testimony to the Reagan-Bush political philosophy that all Americans stand free, unfettered, rugged, and individual. But the fire that had long been predicted made it clear that without tax monies to support proper fire and police presence, ALL Californians are in as great jeopardy, not merely the working classes, the homeless, and the disposssessed.
Where the great Bay Area earthquake of 1989 devastated poorer parts of Oakland, especially near the Cypress section of the Eastshore Freeway, this much-delayed firestorm ravaged the wealthy. Ricky Henderson of the Oakland Athletics lost a home, as did former baseball superstar Reggie Jackson. BMWs and Mercedes burned; hot tubs boiled and melted; magnificent redwood homes, decks, and detached garages (many built on stilts to afford an even better view of the Pacific sunset) turned in moments to ash and dust. The accumulations of many Yuppie and CEO lifetimes vanished.
The majority of those who lost everything (often everything except a car and the clothes they wore) were — if not well to do — comfortable. Today, no doubt, they are contemplating how transitory, even unimportant, material goods are. They may also now recognize that no less than the poor, they too are ill-served by deregulated, privatized, vastly abridged social services. “Standing tall” in the free marketplace is just as precarious for them as for the downtrodden. In fact, their devastated cliffside perches provide a telling political metaphor. Now residents of the burned-out region look forward to the insurance companies pointing their finger at the fire department and the fire department pointing its finger at the construction company, whose employees were engaged in the illegal Saturday burn.
When, and from whom, will the burned-out residents collect?
She returned the following day to the site where her house had been. Tears in her eyes — and her husband’s and her father’s and mother’s — she beheld an empty lot where her home once stood. Complete destruction surrounded her — of the sort, she thought, that might occur in a nuclear attack.
The view across the Bay was as beautiful as ever — there stood San Francisco, the Golden Gate, the azure Pacific. Another clear day. She and her husband could rebuild. It was though she had died, she thought, and come back without her stuff.
But then she noticed that of all of the telephones and mailboxes on her street, hers alone survived. And on a whim, she looked in the mailbox.
There, sitting neatly, was a business card from a construction company in neighbouring Richmond, offering good terms to rebuild her home. Whoever left the card had entered the fire area against the law, against police orders. A free market with empathy and taste, she laughed scornfully, as she again fled the scene of utter devastation.
XXXX
“April is the Cruellest month
breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land….”———-The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
Perhaps. But in the San Francisco Bay Area, October clearly predominates.
(I wrote this account from telephone conversations with a friend who lost her home in the Berkeley hills, and others who did not).