Behind Most Wildfires, a Person and a Spark: ‘We Bring Fire With Us’
By Tim Arango
LOS ANGELES — In the summer of 1965, Johnny Cash was living in the wilderness of Southern California when — possibly high on drugs — he sparked a wildfire with his overheated truck that blazed through more than 500 acres and threatened the lives of endangered condors.
When asked by a judge if he started the fire, he said, “my truck did, and it’s dead, so you can’t question it.” (Mr. Cash ended up settling the case for $82,000, or about a half a million in today’s dollars.)
California is experiencing its worst fire season in memory, with one million acres burned so far this year, more than twice the amount in the same period last year — and with each new blaze Californians are asking themselves: How did this happen?
The answer, in Mr. Cash’s time and even more so now, is that destructive wildfires nearly always begin with a human being, either intentionally or by mistake. There are endless ways people start fires — a discarded cigarette, a child playing with matches, a campfire, fireworks, a car accident.
This year, even as firefighters battle one blaze after another across the state, investigators are already finding answers for how some of the fires started.
One began with a spark from a flat tire. Another when someone hammered a fence post amid dry vegetation. Still another was allegedly ignited by a conspiracy-minded recluse who had sent a text message to a local firefighter warning the place “is going to burn.” The suspect, Forrest Gordon Clark, is being held on $1 million bail and faces the possibility of life in prison, after being charged with setting the Holy Fire in Cleveland National Forest in Southern California.
Rising temperatures and prolonged heat waves are also a factor, scientists say. A signal of a shifting climate, they help set up the conditions that lead to more devastating fire seasons.
The Trump administration has rejected the role of climate change, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who recently toured the scenes of California’s wildfires, has blamed the fires on tough environmental laws that limit timber harvesting, calling backers of the measures “environmental terrorist groups.”
Many scientists and experts, however, disagree, and say that climate change plus rapid development in wilderness areas allow for ever more destructive fires. “You’ve got a warming climate and you’ve got more people living in flammable places,” said Jennifer K. Balch, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has studied the human causes of wildfires. “And we’re literally putting homes in the line of fire, and these are fires that people are starting.”
She continued, “We almost forget it, but wherever people go we bring fire with us.”
The Mendocino Complex Fire, which has become the largest in state history with more than 300,000 acres burned, is actually two fires, burning in the same region. At least one of them is believed by the authorities to have been started by a spark set off by a man using a hammer.
James McMullen, California’s former chief fire marshal, has made a career of investigating wildfires. He traced back Los Angeles County’s largest fire, the Station Fire in 2009, to an arsonist who was brazen enough to start it in a canyon across from a fire station.
The first step in tracing a fire, he said, “is going from the least burned area and making your way to the worst burned area. Where it started is likely where it has burned the longest.”
A 2007 fire on Santa Catalina Island that he looked into was ignited by workers who were cutting metal wires with a torch. And Mr. McMullen’s investigation of the second deadliest blaze in California history, a fire in Oakland in 1991 that killed 25 people, zeroed in on a backyard barbecue pit.
“The key thing as fires starting is concerned, when you’re in these dry areas you can’t act like you’re in green vegetation,” said Mr. McMullen, who these days works as an expert witness in court cases.
Days of abnormally high temperatures have contributed to the intensity of fires, by making vegetation drier and more likely to ignite. This has coincided with an increase in the number of fires started by humans, too. Population growth has meant more people on the roads — cars are a prime cause of fires — and developers are increasingly pushing past urban boundaries and building homes in wilderness areas prone to fires.
In California, almost 95 percent of fires are started by people, and about 7 percent of those are caused by arson, according to Lynne Tolmachoff, the chief of public education at Cal Fire. The rest are mostly fires started by lightning, or other acts of Mother Nature such as wind taking down a power line.
Sometimes even those who mistakenly start a fire are held criminally liable. In one case, a man went to prison for setting a fire in 2004 near Redding when his lawn mower struck a rock, setting off a spark that sent a fire racing through the neighborhood and destroying dozens of homes. (A report by Cal Fire from 2016 details the numerous causes, from arson to campfires to smoking to faulty power lines.)
In another notorious case, a hunter named Sergio Martinez got lost in the forest in San Diego County in 2003 and set a fire in the hopes of alerting the authorities to his whereabouts. The fire quickly spread, and ultimately became the third most destructive in state history, with more than 200,000 acres burned and 15 people killed.
“He was a really bad hunter, and he got lost,” Ms. Tolmachoff recalled. “Because of the enormity of what happened someone had to be held accountable.”
Mr. Martinez faced criminal charges, but avoided prison when he was sentenced to community service and a work furlough program.
Every fire is investigated, and as wildfire seasons have grown worse, California has been more aggressive in holding people accountable — either with criminal charges for arson or negligence, as with Mr. Martinez, or, if there is a deep-pocketed culprit, with a lawsuit to recoup costs from fighting the fires.
In the summer of 2013, a wildfire broke out in Riverside County and grew to threaten the desert resort town of Palm Springs. No one was killed, but it took thousands of firefighters, and almost $26 million, to put it out. Investigators found the blaze started with a faulty electrical box on a private property. Lawsuits in both state and federal court against the owner, a wealthy Saudi businessman, are still pending, although the state case may be resolved soon by mediation, according to the Idyllwild Town Crier, a newspaper in the area where the fire occurred.
“Our civil cost recovery is definitely something we do on a regular basis,” Ms. Tolmachoff said. “Ninety-five percent of these fires are caused by humans and they could have been prevented somehow.”
Last year the state saw what was then its biggest wildfire in recorded history — the Thomas Fire, in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties — and its most destructive, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California’s wine country. The causes of both fires are still under investigation, but some lawsuits point the finger at the power companies Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. And in several other Northern California fires last year, Cal Fire determined that faulty power lines were the cause. In the aftermath of those fires, California’s power companies have received close scrutiny from the State Legislature.
“They talk about climate change,” said Steve Campora, a Sacramento lawyer who has made a career of suing utility companies on behalf of fire victims. “And climate change makes it more difficult to control the fire. But climate change does not cause ignition.”
Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy in Ontario and the author of “Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future,” said he believes fires will continue to get worse, year by year, through a combination of climate change and human activity.
“There is no end in sight for this fire activity,” he said.
Referring to the human causes of wildfire, he added that “education is still a really big problem. There are many people who are oblivious to the dangers and volatility of forests.”
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