View from Mt. Wilson just off Angeles Crest Highway

Last Friday, Caltrans announced that the portion of California State Route 2 known as the Angeles Crest Highway is now open over its full 66-mile length from La Canada Flintridge to Wrightwood (see June 3 press release on this page). This has been a long time coming for Los Angeles area sports car and sport bike enthusiasts, as well as hikers and others who have discovered this nearby escape route over the years. Unfortunately, the Highway has had more destructive disasters than the castle in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

After discovering the Highway in my road atlas, I had a great date up there in November 2008, enjoying the drive and the scenery, including the short detour to the Mount Wilson Observatory. Even then, however, a middle section of the Highway was closed, and had been since 2005, due to storm-related damage. When the section finally reopened in May 2009, it was only a few months later that the whole thing was ruined, and closed, by the massive Station Fire and ensuing rock slides and mud slides. More recently, even as other sections of the Highway have reopened, drivers have been unable to access the entire beginning section from La Canada Flintridge to the Angeles Forest Highway.

So yes, it’s a big deal that the full Angeles Crest Highway has reopened for the first time in approximately six years. I know I’ll be heading there again soon, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that disaster won’t strike first — again.

Corner of Franklin and Vermont about 12:15AM, 4/29/11

Someone was Lighting a String of Trashcan Fires late Thursday Night / Early Friday Morning

I took the picture to the right myself. Firetrucks were already on the way, and in fact, already in the area, as this was at least the third trashcan fire lit.

I felt slightly guilty snapping the pic, like I should have done something more, but my Android doesn’t have a “Fire Extinguisher” App, and I really didn’t have that much water on me at the time.

“I.C.M.E.” indeed. Eyewitness account after the jump.

I came across a group of friends having a bite outside Palermo’s on Vermont around 11:30 – 12AM. As we were chatting, someone mentioned there had been some trashcan fires around the neighborhood that night, and sure enough, just then I turned around and farther south, pretty much across from the Dresden, a trash can is fully ablaze.

We watched a few people, presumably from neighboring businesses, pouring water on it and hitting it with an extinguisher just before the firetruck showed up.

We continued chatting as the truck pulled up to House of Pies and the firemen stopped a homeless man to talk to him. Whether they suspected him, or just hoped he witnessed something, I don’t know, but they let him go and he made his way South on Vermont, down the street.

As we chatted a bit more, I look North from where I’m standing on the sidewalk and see smoke billowing up from where the 7-11 is on Franklin and Vermont. That’s when I walked up and took these pictures.

I normally can’t help but do a Beavis, “Heh. Fire. Heh heh…” at any mention of the element, but I just can’t bring myself to with this. Maybe because that’s actually someone’s mind set right now, as they light these things up. Someone is quite disturbed.

It’s unknown at this time if a suspect has been apprehended.

Local government prepares for everyday emergencies. However, during a disaster, the number and scope of incidents can overwhelm conventional emergency services. The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program is an all-risk, all-hazard training. This valuable course is designed to help you protect yourself, your family, your neighbors and your neighborhood in an emergency situation.

CERT is a positive and realistic approach to emergency and disaster situations where citizens may initially be on their own and their actions can make a difference. While people will respond to others in need without the training, one goal of the CERT program is to help them do so effectively and efficiently without placing themselves in unnecessary danger.

The course is one day a week for seven weeks with a total of 17.5 hours training time. In the classes you’ll learn to:

• Manage utilities and put out small fires,
• Treat the three medical killers by opening airways, controlling
• Bleeding, and treating for shock,
• Provide basic medical aid,
• Search for and rescue victims safely,
• Organize themselves and spontaneous volunteers to be effective,
  and collect disaster intelligence to support first responder efforts.

I missed the initial classes but now that I’m back in LA I’m getting my training at the first available class. If this sounds like something you’re into (and it should be dammit) check their calendar for a class near you! You can also peruse the class manual online.

A small brush fire is burning in Monrovia Canyon Park. No structures are threatened and no evacuations have been ordered. The fire was apparently set off by a downed power line. A major Fire Department response has put dozens of firefighters and equipment on the scene. Watch this notice and the City of Monrovia page on Facebook for further updates.

From the old timers in the neighborhood they advise that that area has not burned since the mid-1960′s and is a concern to them.

According to my daughter the best place to view the ‘copter activity is from the Pavillions Shopping Center at Myrtle and Foothill.  For gawds sake…don’t attempt to drive up the hill for a better view of the activity, stay out of harms way and don’ t do anything to impede the fire fighters.  As for me, I have my suitcase still packed from the weekend so all I’m tossing in is the trusty insurance policies in the car and will be set to boogie if the fire gets bigger and they order evacuations.  (Good excuse as any not to unload the car and do nothing for a bit).

UPDATE 2:48PM from the city facebook page:  Firefighters have contained a small brush fire burning in Monrovia Canyon Park. Full encirclement is expected later this afternoon. No structures are threatened and no evacuations have been ordered. A major Fire Department response put dozens of firefighters and 40 pieces of equipment on the scene. Keep checking with us and our website for more details. Thank you.

Fortunately, KCBS TV just reported that it’s a deliberate “refinery burn off.”  I sure hope that word spreads, otherwise there could be plenty of alarmed folks out there.

I’m going to assume it’s some sort of enviornmentally toxic discharge (isn’t THAT a relief!?) from one of the oil refineries out there nearer the coastline. Or the marketing people for the final season of “Lost” have outdone themselves.

After the jump is the plume a half-hour-later

The picture of the fire as seen from the 134 overpass above the 5 Freeway comes from my friend Patricia (taken by her friend Monica) who posted it on Twitter around the same time as the LAFD’s last update.

UPDATE (10.01): LAist is reporting that it took firefighters 59 minutes to contain the blaze. There were no reported injuries or structural damage, and the cause is under investigation.

I am not the first to note this resemblance, of course.  Not even the first Metblogs author to do so.  Nor the first to think and write about the identity of the thermodynamic mechanism of the formation of an H-Bomb’s mushroom cloud over the course of seconds, and the fire’s formation of one over the course of days or weeks.

One thing I have not seen specifically compared, however, is the scale of the two events.  I figured it was time to grab the back of an envelope.  Just how much explosive power is a megaton of TNT, as the bombs are measured? Well, it turns out that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has actually defined the canonical yield of a gram of TNT as 4,184 joules.  Grams add up to kilograms, kilos to tons, and tons to megatons.  Simple enough multiplication.  What about fires? Just how much flammable material is there in 160,357 acres? What is the energy content of that material when burned? Lots of web sources helped me find approximate values all around, and multiply lots of numbers together.  Sparing readers most of the steps, my not-completely-wild-assed estimate here is that the Station Fire amounted to the same energy yield as 3 megatons of TNT.  Not the biggest H-Bomb built, but solidly in H-Bomb territory.

What does it all mean? I dunno.

Somehow the equivalence, however, makes me think of a point made by Thom Andersen, in Los Angeles Plays Itself, which I had the pleasure of seeing a few weeks ago at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, with live questions and answers with the writer/director.  Andersen observes, among many things in his essay-as-film, how often Los Angeles plays the scene of post-apocalyptic disaster, and how well suited to this role are the desolate downtown neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill.  Part of this type casting is, no doubt, a certain Weltanschauung of audiences and producers about Los Angeles.  Andersen notes,

Mike Davis has claimed that Hollywood takes a special pleasure in destroying Los Angeles, a guilty pleasure shared by most of its audience. The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.

However, beyond the appeal of German words (Schadenfreude comes to mind here as well), there is a whole lot Los Angeles does to choose its roles, and type cast itself.  The first times I ever walked around Downtown at night, I was shocked, perhaps mortified, at what appeared to every examination, to be the ruins of a once populated and great city.  But a city that had been stripped of its inhabitants, leaving only vacated concrete and steel.  I’ve lived in small towns that closed at 9:00 p.m.; somehow I didn’t expect the second largest city in the United States to be one of them.  A slow motion Armageddon is just, like, totally L.A.  Or in a line from Buffy, “I never thought I’d need to learn the plural of apocalypse.”

Andersen continues:

The end of Bunker Hill is visible in The Omega Man. By 1971 it made a good location for a post-apocalyptic fantasy. Charlton Heston plays an urban survivalist in a cityscape depopulated by biological warfare. He has learned to become totally self-reliant. If he wants to see a movie, he has to project it himself. [...]

Thirteen years later, the same plot and the same location reappear in Night of the Comet. In the wake of a disaster apparently brought on by comet dust, a small band of human survivors again battle zombie-like mutants, but the center of the action, Bunker Hill, has been totally transformed.The new Bunker Hill looks like a simulated city, and it played one in Virtuosity.

Was it Hollywood that started the Station Fire, as a means to insist that life must follow its “art?!”

Station Fire photo by Brittany Bagheri and American Red Cross

People who live with fires think a great deal about what will happen “when,” as the phrase goes in the instruction leaflets, “the fire comes.” These leaflets, which are stuck up on refrigerator doors all over Los Angeles County, never say “if.” When the fire comes there will be no water pressure. The roof one watered all the night before will go dry in seconds. Plastic trash cans must be filled with water and wet gunny-sacks kept at hand, for smothering the sparks that blow ahead of the fire. The garden hoses must be connected and left where they can be seen. The cars must be placed in the driveway headed out. Whatever one wants most to save must be placed in the cars. The lights must be left on, so that the house can be seen in the smoke.

That’s from Didion’s essay “Fire Season.” You can get it here