Terrierman's Daily Dose is a daily read for me and today, he reminds us of California's weather history with a quote from John Steinbeck - East of Eden:
Fire, like drought, is a failure of memory and a longage of people.
In East of Eden, Nobel-prize winning author John Steinbeck's (1902-1968) put it well:
I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
The ignition of the Camp Fire was from a malfunction at a PGE electrical tower. The reason the fire escalated so rapidly is because of the huge fire load caused by poor forest managment. We should have learned our lessons from the Yellowstone conflagration thirty years ago but noooooooo...
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