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Sprawling Into Nature's Fires
Online Auto Insurance Quote This past week's cataclysm of fire will go down as one of the worst disasters in the history of Southern California, killing at least 20 people, destroying more than 3,300 homes and laying waste to more than three-quarters of a million acres. It is likely to happen again.
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Car Insurance Online Quote According to scientists who study the urban ecology of the Los Angeles basin, more catastrophic wildfires are a near certainty, fed by sprawl, poor fire-prevention strategies, arsonists and local vegetation that, by its very nature, needs to burn.
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Low Cost Car Insurance Out here in the scrub-covered mountains northwest of the city, where new and expensive houses continue to march upward into scrub-covered canyons, there is still smoke in the air, burning embers in the hills and ash in the swimming pools.
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Car Cost Insurance Low Still, people who moved here recently are not talking about leaving, even though many had to evacuate last week because of flames just beyond their back yards. Residents say they are satisfied with their decision to live and raise families in a zone where periodic explosions of fire are as certain as freeway traffic.
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New York Car Insurance "When we moved out here two years ago, I told my husband that if there's a fire I couldn't see how our house would not burn," said Patsy Rowan, 47, whose $700,000 house was bordered by flames on Tuesday -- but did not burn. "We like the house, we like the area, and if it does burn down, we have insurance. There is the inconvenience of losing your stuff, but it can be replaced."
The Economical Insurance Group, previously called the Economical Mutual Fire Insurance Company, is one of the last mutual's left in Canada. Some of the current insurance products and services offered by Economical include auto insurance and home insurance...
Car Insurance New York The fires of Southern California are probably the most spectacular of the many strange and sometimes terrible troubles that keep erupting in the West along the shifting border between what is wild and what is urban.
Cheapest Car Insurance In the argot of planners and ecologists, the contact zone between citified man and untamed nature is called the urban-rural interface. Across the West, it is a fringe where Americans keep being surprised -- and occasionally injured or killed -- by forces that somehow seem too cruel for people with children, dogs and minivans.
Car Cheapest Insurance In western Montana, where the rich build luxury subdivisions in high country, the interface is a place where grizzlies -- enjoying their status as endangered species -- are seen by day nibbling grass on golf greens and heard by night busting up garages that smell of garbage.
Florida Car Insurance In the suburbs of Boulder, Colo., where predators can skulk down out of the Rockies for lunch, the interface is a place where growing numbers of mountain lions periodically stalk people. The cats have killed 18 people in North America since 1890, but, tellingly, almost half of the fatalities have occurred in the past 13 years. The rate of nonfatal attacks has also jumped sharply, to about four a year, from about one annually before 1970.
Car Florida Insurance The fires in Southern California, while certainly a more serious problem than bears or big cats, are part of the same weird rub between nature and man.
Free Car Insurance Quote Burning is part of the very essence of the native scrub vegetation that covers the hills and mountains around Los Angeles. Chemise chaparral, sage scrub and live oak woodland are what botanists call pyrophytic flora. Regular outbreaks of fire in the chaparral -- which happens to produce the hottest natural fire known in North America -- play a key role in seed germination and soil enrichment.
Car Free Insurance Quote Meanwhile, sprawling is part of the very essence of greater Los Angeles. With 18 million people and the world's 11th largest economy, it is a congested, car-addicted city where wave after wave of new residents head into ever-more-distant hills to build big houses that offer daily respite from the bad air and bad vibes in the city.
Cheap Car Insurance Quote "Growing up down in the San Fernando Valley, all I knew was congestion," said Paul Price, 39, an electrical contractor who moved out here last year with his wife and two children.
Car Cheap Insurance Quote Last week, they were ordered to evacuate their five-bedroom $800,000 house (which did not burn) when flames licked the hills just beyond the back yard.
Tesco Car Insurance "Moving out here was a way to get away from all that stuff in the Valley," he said. "Of course, it is house after house out here too now, but at least we are close to the mountains."
Car Insurance Tesco Over the past 60 years, this mix of mountain-loving Angelenos and fire-loving bushes has proved steadily more flammable, producing larger and more destructive fires at a pace of about one big, terrifying blowout per decade.
In Car Insurance There is a long and intriguing list of reasons why the city itself inspires fires that seem to get bigger and more lethal.
Car In Insurance According to Philip W. Rundel, a professor of biology at UCLA who has written extensively about wildfires here, the list begins with local intolerance of the small lightning-caused fires that historically ignited the chaparral in late summer. Those fires hardly exist anymore, since firefighters rush to put them out.
Compare Car Insurance The natural fires, Rundel said, tended to burn themselves out in August. They reduced the amount of fuel in the mountains that might erupt in late October, when hot Santa Ana winds often whip down the mountains and across the Los Angeles basin from the southwest deserts.
Car Compare Insurance Those winds arrived last week just in time to energize several fires that had taken hold in overgrown brush lands and local forests where fuel had been accumulating for years and had been baked tinder-dry by drought.
Direct Car Insurance Automobile pollution from Los Angeles also plays a major role in making nearby forests more susceptible to fire, according to Rundel. He said studies show that pollution, as it moves east from the city into the San Bernardino National Forest, has compromised the immune system of trees, making them more vulnerable to killing infestations of bark beetles. Dead trees ignite easily.
Car Direct Insurance "It has been a disaster up there waiting to happen for more than two years," Rundel said.
Car Insurance Los Angeles The fires in and around the San Bernardino Mountains, where four people died last week and more than 171,000 acres burned, are among the worst in the region, and firefighters are still struggling to contain them.
Angeles Car Insurance Los Making matters worse, the federal government has been slow to spend money in Southern California to reduce fire hazards. According to U.S. Forest Service figures, counties around Los Angeles received less than $4 million of the $53 million allocated for California this year to reduce fire hazards. Most of the money went to big timber areas up north.
Affordable Car Insurance Los Angeles, as a vast polyglot of humanity, some of it not well behaved, also produces another vital ingredient for fires in the hellish Santa Ana season -- arsonists and lost hunters.
Discount Car Insurance At least four of the 10 wildfires that erupted over the past week may have been set, authorities say. A lost hunter who fired a flare may have started one fire.
Car Discount Insurance "The weapons of mass destruction have been found," a San Diego resident wrote in the letters page of Thursday's Los Angeles Times. "They are poor land-use planning, budget cuts, arsonists and one foolish hunter."
Car Insurance Ny The people of Los Angeles, though, are getting considerably better at building houses that stand up to fire. Here in the Stevenson Ranch development, concrete roofing tiles are de rigueur, along with stucco exteriors and a 200-foot, brush-free buffer around every house.
Classic Car Insurance Insurance rules, too, penalize people who do not take precautions. For houses in fire-prone areas, rates can triple for owners who fail to clear bush around their houses.
Car Classic Insurance Still, there is an arresting fatalism about fire here. Because it cannot be prevented, people try to look on its bright side. A dozen or so Angelenos said last week that because of fires, they have gotten to know their neighbors in ways that otherwise would be impossible -- given that everyone spends so much time alone in a car.
Car Insurance Price "It is a very special kind of bonding that occurs," said Gretchen Hays, whose house in Malibu was burned to the ground in the big fire of 1993. The house has since been rebuilt. "I met neighbors that I would not have met. The spinoff is very, very rewarding."
Low Car Insurance Hays threw a 10th anniversary reunion party Saturday night for all her neighbors -- now close friends -- who survived the Malibu burn.
Car Insurance Low By this weekend, the worst-ever season of fire in greater Los Angeles was sputtering toward the past tense. Rain had dampened the mountains and cleared the air. The incessant din of TV and radio reports on the fire was increasingly peppered with the words "mopping up."
Car Insurance Comparison Los Angeles is a megalopolis that seems to prefer the present tense. To that end, in one of the pricey new housing developments out here in Santa Clarita, skin therapist Nancy Morris had dressed for her Friday Halloween workday in a pink fairy outfit with sequined pink wings. She was booked solid with suburbanites seeking aprs-fire complexion treatments.
Car Comparison Insurance "It was hell here all week, and the place was empty," said Morris, who works in a spa at a new shopping center surrounded by the new Stevenson Ranch housing development, which is ringed by mountains charred black by fire.
Texas Car Insurance "Now," she said, "skin is back on the menu."
Car Insurance Texas By Blaine Harden
Washington Post - 11/2/2003
Topic: Fire
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