"The Control of Nature"

[fiefoe]

This explains why wildfires can get so out of hand around LA:

• Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose.
• The dark material coming toward the Genofiles was not only full of boulders; it was so full of automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins.
• A METROPOLIS that exists in a semidesert, imports water three hundred miles, has inveterate flash floods, is at the grinding edges of two tectonic plates, and has a microclimate tenacious of noxious oxides will have its priorities among the aspects of its environment that it attempts to control.
• It occupies eighteen hundred acres in all, nearly three square miles, of what would be prime real estate were it not for the recurrent arrival of rocks. The scene could have been radioed home from Mars, whose cobbly face is in part the result of debris flows dating to a time when Mars had surface water.
• perforated riser. As the basin fills with a thickflowing slurry of water, mud, and rock, the water goes into the tower and is drawn off below. The county calls this water harvesting.
• In time, as his house was excavated from the inside, he would find that it had not budged. Not one wall had so much as cracked.
• Mountain time and city time appear to be bifocal. Even with a geology functioning at such remarkably short intervals, the people have ample time to forget it.
• The San Gabriel Mountains are as rugged as any terrain in America, and their extraordinary proximity to the city, the abruptness of the transition from the one milieu to the other, cannot be exaggerated.
• At the giddy extreme of oversteepening is the angle of maximum slope. Very large sections of the San Gabriels closely approach that angle.
• In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral. Fire nourishes and rejuvenates the plants. There are seeds that fall into the soil, stay there indefinitely, and will not germinate except in the aftermath of fire.
• air flows southwest toward Los Angeles from the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range. Extremely low in moisture, it comes out of the canyon lands and crosses the Mojave Desert. As it drops in altitude, it compresses, becoming even dryer and hotter. It advances in gusts. This is the wind that is sometimes called the foehn. The fire wind. The devil wind. In Los Angeles, it is known as Santa Ana.
• The frequency and the intensity of the forest fires in the Southern California chaparral are the greatest in the United States, with the possible exception of the wildfires of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
• If you walk in a rainstorm on a freshly burned chaparral slope, you notice as you step on the wet ground that the tracks you are making are prints of dry dust.
• the soil is so effective as an insulator that the temperature one centimetre below the surface may not be hot enough to boil water. The heavy waxlike substances vaporize at the surface and recondense in the cooler temperatures below. Acting like oil, they coat soil particles and establish the hydrophobic layer—one to six centimetres down.
• As rain sheds off a mountainside like water off a tin roof, the rill network, as it is called, may actually triple the speed, and therefore greatly enhance the power of the runoff.
• Mystically, unnervingly, the heaviest downpours always occur on the watersheds most recently burned.
• in a land of kaleidoscopic risks
• Now, in Los Angeles, I had been avoiding geologists in the way that one tries to avoid visits to medical doctors.
• Some of the rock up there had become so unstable that whole hunks of the terrain were moving like glaciers. One mountaintop was heading south like a cap tipping down on a forehead.
• The San Gabes look like a flake kicked around on plate boundaries for hundreds of millions of years.”
• Barclay Kamb—the tectonophysicist, X-ray crystallographer, and glaciologist,
• In the eighteen-nineties, electricity replaced the mules, and the street railways began to assume almost the exact pattern of the freeways that have replaced them. Under the influence of the Pacific Electric Railway, communities began to coalesce, like the alluvial fans.
• To the question “Why, then, do people live there?” the answer seems to be that they are like John Burroughs: they would rather defy nature than live without it.
• successive debris dams and accompanying basins—each unique, fitting the conditions of its canyon—became ever more proficient, designed to function like giant colanders.
• In Palos Verdes—for the rich people—they move hills.”
• The members of Sierra Madre Search & Rescue are so skilled and so famous that they have been called to emergencies in, among other places, the Adirondacks, Iowa, and Mexico. Needless to say, they cover the whole of California. Their phone number is on a wall at Yosemite National Park.