Life amid combustion (San Diego Fires)

List,

I've put up a small photo album (in the photos section of metatuning) of some of what has been going on out here; I've been one of the lucky ones. The satellite shot shows So Cal all the way up to Ventura; the large plumes of smoke at the bottom are the San Diego fires. Even though some of it is east of the city, the entire region is covered by the smoke. The other shots give you a feel for what we've been up against.

There has been some progress, but even as I type there are areas in the local mountains that are being evacuated, so it is far from over.

Peace,
Jon

No fire here but the wind has shifted causing where i am to be in the thick of the smoke. Thank god i have an air purifier. But breathing is not easy!
BTW we would have fire reinforcement from the calif. national guard , but they are all in Iraq.

Jon Szanto wrote:

> List,
>
> I've put up a small photo album (in the photos section of metatuning) of some of what has been going on out here; I've been one of the lucky ones. The satellite shot shows So Cal all the way up to Ventura; the large plumes of smoke at the bottom are the San Diego fires. Even though some of it is east of the city, the entire region is covered by the smoke. The other shots give you a feel for what we've been up against.
>
> There has been some progress, but even as I type there are areas in the local mountains that are being evacuated, so it is far from over.
>
> Peace,
> Jon
>
>

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

> BTW we would have fire reinforcement from the calif.
> national guard , but they are all in Iraq.

What's your source on that? I didn't think the national
guard ever left the country.

-Carl

Good luck Californians! My asthma would be killing me softly by this point
if I had all those triggers in the air. I hope this gets under control toot
suite. Johnny

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

> What's your source on that? I didn't think the national
> guard ever left the country.

Looks like I'm wrong about that. Here are some reports...

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/10/27/calfires031027
On Monday, the National Guard was called out to aid
the more than 8,000 firefighters battling the wildfire.

http://tinyurl.com/sqza
Wyoming national guard sent to fight California fires.

http://tinyurl.com/sqzi
The commander of the California National Guard said
recently that all of his troops should expect to see
duty in Iraq, Kuwait, or somewhere in the Mid-East
this next year. How many more reservists is the
Pentagon planning to call up in the next six months?

http://tinyurl.com/sqzk
Sixty-five soldiers in the California National Guard,
some from Tulare County, were at Camp Roberts in San
Luis Obispo County on Friday getting papers in order
and training for a possible deployment for Operation
Iraqi Freedom.

-Carl

Hi Carl!
Even back in the carter/reagan days the national guard was sent to
Central America to deal with the Sandanistas. They should not be allowed to
leave and this illustrates why. imaghine an earthquake right now

Carl Lumma wrote:

> > BTW we would have fire reinforcement from the calif.
> > national guard , but they are all in Iraq.
>
> What's your source on that? I didn't think the national
> guard ever left the country.
>
> -Carl

The Perfect Fire
By Mike Davis

Sunday morning in San Diego. The sun is an eerie orange orb, like the eye of

a hideous jack-o-lantern. The fire on the flank of Otay Mountain, which
straddles the Mexican border, generates a huge whitish-grey mushroom plume.
It is a rather sublime sight, like Vesuvius in eruption. Meanwhile the black

sky rains ash from incinerated national forests and dream homes.

It may be the fire of the century in Southern California. By brunch on
Sunday eight separate fires were raging out of control, and the two largest
had merged into a single forty-mile-long red wall. The megalopolis's
emergency resources have been stretched to the breaking point and
California's National Guard reinforcements are 10,000 miles away in Iraq.
Panic is creeping into the on-the-spot television reports from scores of
chaotic fire scenes.

Fourteen deaths have already been reported in San Bernardino and San Diego
counties, and nearly 1000 homes have been destroyed. More than 100,000
suburbanites have been evacuated, triple as many as during the great Arizona

fire of 2002 or the Canberra (Australia) holocaust last January. Tens of
thousands of others have their cars packed with family pets and mementos.
We're all waiting to flee. There is no containment, and infernal fire
weather is predicted to last through Tuesday.

It is, of course, the right time of the year for the end of the world.

Just before Halloween, the pressure differential between the Colorado
Plateau and Southern California begins to generate the infamous Santa Ana
winds. A spark in their path becomes a blowtorch.

Exactly a decade ago, between Oct. 26 and Nov. 7, firestorms fanned by Santa

Anas destroyed more than a thousand homes in Pasadena, Malibu, and Laguna
Beach. In the last century, nearly half the great Southern California fires
have occurred in October.

This time climate, ecology, and stupid urbanization have conspired to create

the ingredients for one of the most perfect firestorms in history. Experts
have seen it coming for months.

First of all, there is an extraordinary supply of perfectly cured,
tinder-dry fuel. The weather year, 2001-02, was the driest in the history of

Southern California. Here in San Diego we had only 3 inches of rain. (The
average is about 11 inches). Then last winter it rained just hard enough to
sprout dense thickets of new underbrush (a.k.a. fire starter), all of which
have now been desiccated for months.

Meanwhile in the local mountains, an epic drought, which may be an
expression of global warming, opened the way to a bark beetle infestation
which has already killed or is killing 90% of Southern California's pine
forests. Last month, scientists grimly told members of Congress at a special

hearing at Lake Arrowhead that "it is too late to save the San Bernardino
National Forest." Arrowhead and other famous mountain resorts, they
predicted, would soon "look like any treeless suburb of Los Angeles."

These dead forests represent an almost apocalyptic hazard to more than
100,000 mountain and foothill residents, many of whom depend on a single,
narrow road for their fire escape. Earlier this year, San Bernardino county
officials, despairing of the ability to evacuate all their mountain hamlets
by highway, proposed a bizarre last-ditch plan to huddle residents on boats
in the middle of Arrowhead and Big Bear lakes.

Now the San Bernardinos are an inferno, along with tens of thousand acres of

chaparral-covered hillsides in neighboring counties. As always during
Halloween fire seasons, there is hysteria about arson. Invisible hands may
have purposely ignited several of the current firestorms. Indeed, in Santa
Ana weather like this, one maniac on a motorcycle with a cigarette lighter
can burn down half the world.

This is a specter against which grand inquisitors and wars against terrorism

are powerless to protect us. Moreover, many fire scientists dismiss
"ignition" -- whether natural, accidental, or deliberate -- as a relatively
trivial factor in their equations. They study wildfire as an inevitable
result of the accumulation of fuel mass. Given fuel, "fire happens."

The best preventive measure, of course, is to return to the
native-Californian practice of regular, small-scale burning of old brush and

chaparral. This is now textbook policy, but the suburbanization of the fire
terrain makes it almost impossible to implement it on any adequate scale.
Homeowners despise the temporary pollution of "controlled burns" and local
officials fear the legal consequences of escaped fires.

As a result, huge plantations of old, highly flammable brush accumulate
along the peripheries and in the interstices of new, sprawled-out suburbs.
Since the devastating 1993 fires, tens of thousands of new homes have pushed

their way into the furthest recesses of Southern California's coastal and
inland fire-belts. Each new homeowner, moreover, expects heroic levels of
protection from underfunded county and state fire agencies.

Fire, as a result, is politically ironic. Right now, as I watch San Diego's
wealthiest new suburb, Scripps Ranch, in flames, I recall the Schwarzenegger

fund-raising parties hosted there a few weeks ago. This was an epicenter of
the recent recall and gilded voices roared to the skies against the
oppression of an out-of-control public sector. Now Arnold's wealthy
supporters are screaming for fire engines, and "big government" is the only
thing standing between their $3 million homes and the ash pile.

Halloween fires, of course, burn shacks as well as mansions, but Republicans

tend to disproportionately concentrate themselves in the wrong altitudes and

ecologies. Indeed it is striking to what extent the current fire map (Rancho

Cucamonga, north Fontana, La Verne, Simi Valley, Vista, Ramona, Eucalyptus
Hills, Scripps Ranch, and so on) recapitulates geographic patterns of
heaviest voter support for the recall.

The fires also cruelly illuminate the new governor's essential dilemma: how
to service simultaneous middle-class demands for reduced spending and more
public services. The white-flight gated suburbs insist on impossible
standards of fire protection, but refuse to pay either higher insurance
premiums (fire insurance in California is "cross-subsidized" by all
homeowners) or higher property taxes. Even a Hollywood superhero will have
difficulty squaring that circle.

Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most
recently, Dead Cities: and Other Tales

. Copyright C2003 Mike Davis

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

I hope all out Southern Ca. microtonalists are safe and sound.

--
* David Beardsley
* microtonal guitar
* http://biink.com/db

--- In metatuning@yahoogroups.com, "Jon Szanto" <JSZANTO@A...> wrote:

/metatuning/topicId_6142.html#6142

>
> I've put up a small photo album (in the photos section of
metatuning) of some of what has been going on out here; I've been one
of the lucky ones. The satellite shot shows So Cal all the way up to
Ventura; the large plumes of smoke at the bottom are the San Diego
fires. Even though some of it is east of the city, the entire region
is covered by the smoke. The other shots give you a feel for what
we've been up against.
>
> There has been some progress, but even as I type there are areas in
the local mountains that are being evacuated, so it is far from over.
>
> Peace,
> Jon

***Spooky photos, Jon! Real life Halloween...

jP

still smokin but only in the astral way!

David Beardsley wrote:

> I hope all out Southern Ca. microtonalists are safe and sound.
>
> --
> * David Beardsley
> * microtonal guitar
> * http://biink.com/db
>
>
> Meta Tuning meta-info:
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-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

That's cool. Where is John Schneider located?

kraig grady wrote:

>still smokin but only in the astral way!
>
>David Beardsley wrote:
>
> >
>>I hope all out Southern Ca. microtonalists are safe and sound.
>>
>>--
>>* David Beardsley
>>* microtonal guitar
>>* http://biink.com/db
>>
>>
>>Meta Tuning meta-info:
>>
>>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
>>metatuning-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>>
>>Web page is http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/metatuning/
>>
>>To post to the list, send to
>>metatuning@yahoogroups.com
>>
>>You don't have to be a member to post.
>>
>>
>>
>>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>> >>
>
>-- -Kraig Grady
>North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
> http://www.anaphoria.com
>The Wandering Medicine Show
> KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST
>
>
>
>Meta Tuning meta-info:
>
>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
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>
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>
>You don't have to be a member to post.
>
> >
>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ >
>
>
> >

--
* David Beardsley
* microtonal guitar
* http://biink.com/db

Hi David!
John is in lower santa monica /venice area surrounded by a good ten miles
of city. i got a message from him this morning and he didn't mention the smoke
although today the ocean layer seems to have brought back alot of the smoke
back in a new humid laced form so he might be getting the worse of this. Rod
Poole is in hollywood so equally sheltered, if living in hollywood could ever
be sheltered

David Beardsley wrote:

> That's cool. Where is John Schneider located?
>
> kraig grady wrote:
>
> >still smokin but only in the astral way!
> >
> >David Beardsley wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>I hope all out Southern Ca. microtonalists are safe and sound.
> >>
> >>--
> >>* David Beardsley
> >>* microtonal guitar
> >>* http://biink.com/db
> >>
> >>
> >>Meta Tuning meta-info:
> >>
> >>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
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> >>
> >>Web page is http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/metatuning/
> >>
> >>To post to the list, send to
> >>metatuning@yahoogroups.com
> >>
> >>You don't have to be a member to post.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >>
> >>
> >
> >-- -Kraig Grady
> >North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
> > http://www.anaphoria.com
> >The Wandering Medicine Show
> > KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST
> >
> >
> >
> >Meta Tuning meta-info:
> >
> >To unsubscribe, send an email to:
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
> * David Beardsley
> * microtonal guitar
> * http://biink.com/db
>
>
> Meta Tuning meta-info:
>
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-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

Humid seems to be good for guitars, they don't go out of wack! The smoke has to
be rough. I was in NYC 2 days after 9/11 and it smelled quite funky.

I'd expect you and Rod to be OK. As for Hollywood being sheltered...
I don't know, but not anymore than any major city. After working in NYC for
17 years, it was more to do with the people than the city.
I know that someone in Kansas is going to see things a bit
different then someone from LA or NYC., but I know quite a few
folks in NYC that are a bit sheltered. I ain't talkin' 'bout
them microtonaists either...

So let me get this straight....the fire is only burning
the parts of Southern Ca. that voted for Arnie? What's up with that?

dB

kraig grady wrote:

>Hi David!
> John is in lower santa monica /venice area surrounded by a good ten miles
>of city. i got a message from him this morning and he didn't mention the smoke
>although today the ocean layer seems to have brought back alot of the smoke
>back in a new humid laced form so he might be getting the worse of this. Rod
>Poole is in hollywood so equally sheltered, if living in hollywood could ever
>be sheltered
>
>David Beardsley wrote:
>
> >
>>That's cool. Where is John Schneider located?
>>
>>kraig grady wrote:
>>
>> >>
>>>still smokin but only in the astral way!
>>>
>>>David Beardsley wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> >>>
>>>>I hope all out Southern Ca. microtonalists are safe and sound.
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>* David Beardsley
>>>>* microtonal guitar
>>>>* http://biink.com/db
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Meta Tuning meta-info:
>>>>
>>>>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
>>>>metatuning-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>>>>
>>>>Web page is http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/metatuning/
>>>>
>>>>To post to the list, send to
>>>>metatuning@yahoogroups.com
>>>>
>>>>You don't have to be a member to post.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> >>>>
>>>-- -Kraig Grady
>>>North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
>>>http://www.anaphoria.com
>>>The Wandering Medicine Show
>>>KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Meta Tuning meta-info:
>>>
>>>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
>>>metatuning-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>>>
>>>Web page is http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/metatuning/
>>>
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>>>
>>>You don't have to be a member to post.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> >>>
>>--
>>* David Beardsley
>>* microtonal guitar
>>* http://biink.com/db
>>
>>
>>Meta Tuning meta-info:
>>
>>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
>>metatuning-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>>
>>Web page is http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/metatuning/
>>
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>>
>>You don't have to be a member to post.
>>
>>
>>
>>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>> >>
>
>-- -Kraig Grady
>North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
> http://www.anaphoria.com
>The Wandering Medicine Show
> KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST
>
>
>
>Meta Tuning meta-info:
>
>To unsubscribe, send an email to:
>metatuning-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>Web page is http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/metatuning/
>
>To post to the list, send to
>metatuning@yahoogroups.com
>
>You don't have to be a member to post.
>
> >
>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ >
>
>
> >

--
* David Beardsley
* microtonal guitar
* http://biink.com/db

db,

--- In metatuning@yahoogroups.com, David Beardsley <db@b...> wrote:
> So let me get this straight....the fire is only burning
> the parts of Southern Ca. that voted for Arnie? What's up with that?

As of today, the fires still raged in San Diego county. More than 1,600 homes have burned to the ground, and today a firefighter was killed trying to save the house of someone he never knew. Along with this, the majority of the forested areas where I as recently as a month ago was hiking have been incinerated.

It hardly seems a joking matter, just as none of us out here yucked it up 2 years ago...

Regards,
Jon

hi Jon,

wow! thanks for putting up these shots. i was thinking
about doing it myself ... glad you did. the Otay Lake
photo is amazing.

--- In metatuning@yahoogroups.com, "Jon Szanto" <JSZANTO@A...> wrote:
> List,
>
> I've put up a small photo album (in the photos section
> of metatuning) of some of what has been going on out here;
> I've been one of the lucky ones. The satellite shot shows
> So Cal all the way up to Ventura; the large plumes of smoke
> at the bottom are the San Diego fires.

in fact, the entire San Diego coastline is invisible under
the smoke.

-monz

--- In metatuning@yahoogroups.com, kraig grady <kraiggrady@a...>
wrote:

> No fire here but the wind has shifted causing where
> i am to be in the thick of the smoke. Thank god i have an
> air purifier. But breathing is not easy!
> BTW we would have fire reinforcement from the calif.
> national guard , but they are all in Iraq.

not to mention that Führer Bush could have provided federal
assistance much more quickly if he had the $87 billion
available that he just wasted on Iraq.

-monz