Our View: We’ll all be needed to fight future wildfires

Against a raging wall of fire 30 feet high, a human can appear insignificant. But those willing to put themselves between us and the flames are all we can count on to save hundreds more homes from burning in the forests of California.

Already, 135 homes have been destroyed in Calaveras County and 400 in Lake County, where fire swept into the community of Middletown and reduced entire neighborhoods to ash in moments. One person is confirmed dead.

We feared the same fate would befall Murphys last week, before the Butte fire (named for a road, not the county) turned west. We remain hopeful, but not certain, that San Andreas and Angels Camp are out of danger as firefighters work to gain the upper hand.

The Valley fire is 5 percent contained; the Rough fire east of Fresno is at 40 percent; and the Butte fire in Calaveras County is 30 percent contained – which means all three are still burning. So far, just those three fires have burned 270,000 acres. To grasp the immensity, think of the entire city of Modesto, the entire city of Stockton and the entire city of Fresno. Add them all together, then double that and you’re in the ballpark.

For comparison, the Rim fire of 2013 was the third largest in California history, consuming 257,000 acres. There are nine other fires burning in California, smaller but no less dangerous.

Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency. But hundreds of Californians haven’t waited for official word.

In Oakdale, a veterinarian is taking in stranded animals. A competitive barbecue chef in Valley Springs took the ribs he had bought for a competition, cooked them and fed them to evacuees taking shelter in Valley Springs, according to a story by reporter Nan Austin. Hundreds are answering the calls of their churches, community clubs or conscience and packing supplies and hauling them to shelters. Many, many more are donating to the Red Cross, Catholic Charities and others involved in providing relief. The examples are too numerous to count.

Tuesday, TV station KCRA and the Red Cross will conduct the California Wildfire Relief telethon, accepting donations from 4:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. (call 800-513-3333).

In the fourth year of drought, we’ve been expecting this conflagration. The mountains are a tinderbox of brush and trees weakened by drought and disease. As these fires rage, all that stands in their way are a few thousand hearty humans, tiny by comparison to the flames but enormous in courage and determination.

This year, when the smoke clears, we should all become “firefighters.” We can do that by promising to do more than just set aside more state money to fight the fires (that’s obvious). We should acknowledge that our landscape has become far more flammable, that our forests and communities are in far greater danger than ever before. We should ask the scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, at UC Berkeley and other universities to help figure out what we can do to better fight these fires or keep them from becoming so explosive. And we should be willing to better fund all those efforts.

We owe that much to those willing to stand between us and catastrophe.

This story was originally published September 14, 2015 at 5:03 PM with the headline "Our View: We’ll all be needed to fight future wildfires."