The fires are spreading and more igniting in Los Angeles County. (From USA Today and other publications of January 8)
I first felt the eeriness of the Santa Ana winds when I lived in Long Beach in Los Angeles County's expansive Southland. The winds blew hot, which already felt strange. An unusual homicide? Fellow newspaper journalists agreed, with a shrug of the shoulder, that it was the Santa Anas.
In Red Wind (1938), crime detective writer Raymond Chandler famously wrote:
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. "
As of January 9, the Santa Ana winds have fanned the L.A. fires. A total of 28,689 acres have burned in the fires that only began on January 7, killing five and damaging or destroying more than 2,000 homes, businesses and other buildings, reported the Los Angeles Times (January 9). At least 130,000 residents are under evacuation orders.
Some Angelenos are calling the fires apocalyptic and the Santa Ana winds, named for one of the canyons it rushes through, the devil winds. However, it is not the first time that the winds have contributed to fire.
The Santa Ana winds usually last a few days. However, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1969), Joan Didion wrote of winds which wreaked chaos for 14 days in 1957. Along with a suicide of a attorney who also killed his wife and two sons, record traffic fatalities and the murdered body of a 22-year-old divorcée thrown out of a car window, there was also a horrific fire.
On the first day, November 21, the fire burned 25,000 acres in the San Gabriel Mountains with 100-mile-per-hour gusts. On November 30, it was still out of control.
Today, the Santa Anas also are gusting at 100 miles per hour, making it next to impossible for firefighters to work toward containment.
Mike Wofford, of the National Weather Service office in Oxnard, California, said that these Santa Anas are "not typical", reported National Public Radio (January 8). He explained that the winds are caused by high pressure over the desert of the southwestern United States that pushes through the mountain passages in Southern California toward an area of lower pressure off the Pacific coast.
"This one is not typical," Wofford says. This time, the Santa Anas are coupled with "very strong winds in the upper atmosphere. In addition to funneling through the mountains, they went up and over the mountains and then they descended down into the basin area."
The result is wind gusts as high as 100 miles per hour in some places, he says, adding that the current dry conditions mean, "everything is just primed and ready to go" for wildfires.
"Obviously, we've got a zillion cars in the area. If one breaks down, overheats and someone pulls over next to an area where there's some dry brush, that can kick it off."
Joan Didion wrote: "Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.
"The winds show us how close to the edge we are."
I am hoping, praying, that the Santa Anas die down soon, so that the Los Angeles fires can become a memory, an awful memory, but a memory nonetheless.
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