aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, October 29, 2007

The great hoary myth of arson

You’ll remember that last week California officials said at least one fire was arson and a $70,000 reward was offered to find the arsonist.

Funny, we always hear about arsonists - this time around we even hear about al Qaeda - but never that fires are started by downed power lines. Makes you wonder if downed power lines just don’t make as interesting a television news story.

Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear:

Certainly there, you know, are arsonists, and anybody who sets a fire with the deliberate goal of killing people and destroying their homes should be in super-max in Pelican Bay.

But this is one of the great hoary myths of the American West. During the First World War, of course, you know, there were German arsonists everywhere; during the Second World War, the Japanese. And my fear today, because there’s an FBI arson investigation going on, is we’re going to find some convenient link to the war on terrorism or to the immigration issue.

What fire scientists will tell you is that the biggest single cause of big fires like this is probably power lines blowing down, as they always do, during big Santa Ana winds. And even if all the arsonists could be identified genetically and locked up, it probably wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the fire pattern.