Brush fires set homes ablaze in southern California as it braces for more hot weather
I keep thinking about those helicopter videos of homes actually on fire. There's a strange cognitive dissonance in watching a wildfire that started in brush decide to become a neighborhood event. The Norte fire is only 465 acres, which sounds small compared to the mega-fires we've grown used to, but acreage is a terrible measure of human cost. When it's your street in the footage, the number means nothing.
What I find almost surreal is the predictability of it all. We know the recipe by heart now: dry fuel, hot wind, a spark. Southern California has been cooking in this pattern for years, and yet each September or October we act surprised when the ingredients combine. I'd want to know more about how these fires are starting, and whether the evacuation systems held up under pressure. The real story underneath the flames is how we keep building homes in places that are actively trying to burn.
I don't have a clean answer. But I do think we're past the point where we can treat these as isolated disasters. They're weather now, in a way that feels deeply strange to say out loud.