Scientists say the severe wildfire season that Southern California has experienced this fall will likely become more common because of climate change. Years of drought were followed by a particularly wet winter last year that caused a bumper crop of grasses and other vegetation. That wet spell was followed by another very dry and very hot summer that turned all that vegetation into tinder, experts say.
Across the region, people wiped stinging smoke from their eyes and huddled inside. They stood in their front yards and prayed. They sifted through their charred homes, fled to evacuation shelters and said that even in this wildfire-prone state, they had never confronted late-season blazes as fast and ferocious as these.
“We’ve always been under threat of fire; we’re used to it,” said Suzanne White, who drove past curtains of flames above the 101 freeway as she fled her home in the mountain-fringed town of Ojai. “But this year, the fires are raging so fast and furiously that you can’t get ahead of them.” “It burns,” she said, “and it keeps burning.”
Some people agonized over whether to stay and defend their homes or join the thousands who had already evacuated. In Ventura, Paul Sezzi warily watched the sky and reflected on his losing battle earlier in the week to save his 77-year-old mother’s home, which his father had built by hand. After his mother fled, Sezzi, 51, returned to the home and tried to stave off destruction with a garden hose. He could see a glow behind the ridgeline above him, and as the winds kicked up, the hillsides erupted into quilts of fire. Flames skittered down the hills toward avocado orchards, neighboring streets — and him.
“It was like someone had turned on a burner from a range,” he said. “The fire, the ash, the smoke — everything right toward me. It’s coming at me, getting in my eyes.”
Galaxies of ash and embers rained down, and palm trees and pines exploded like matchsticks, Sezzi said. As the flames began to surround him, he decided his battle to save the house was lost, and he had to go.
“Everything is just gone,” he said on Thursday from his own home in Ventura — safe for now — where he was warily looking out the window and watching the winds. “It’s really scary. You just don’t know. We never think that the fire could reach us, but everybody’s a little bit on edge. Because where do we evacuate to?”