As Houses Rise in the Wild, So Do Fire Concerns

"Every fire in California is not a fire, it's a rescue," Upton said, "because people don't defend their own homes or they live in the middle of a fuel region."

A turning point in how wildfires are viewed came in 2003 with a week-long blaze in several Southern Californian counties that killed 26 people, destroyed 3,361 homes and laid waste to more than 750,000 acres at the cost of more than $2 billion. Fire specialists argued that residents needed to understand that infernos such as these were going to grow more likely as more people move closer to wild areas.

While there is general agreement that the problem is going to worsen, how to deal with it is a subject of much debate. For one, Americans don't take kindly to being told where they can live. In California, thousands of houses have been built not just in the woods and in chaparral but along perilous earthquake fault lines and in the flood plains of the Sacramento River.

Secondly, with respect to Southern California's wildfires, there is much debate about mankind's role in their frequency and intensity. One school of thought, led by Richard Minnich of the University of California at Riverside, contends that the fire-suppression techniques have contributed to the blazes' ferocity.

During the summer, he said, firefighters quickly extinguish small lightning-caused fires that historically ignited the chaparral. As a result, in late October, when hot Santa Ana winds whip across the region from the southwest deserts, the brush is more overgrown than ever and the fires burn hotter, longer and farther. Minnich bases his conclusion on a comparison between Southern California and the nearby Mexican region of Baja California. Because of man's work, he said, Southern California is the home to huge destructive fires, whereas in Baja, where nature has been left to its own devices, "they have 10 times as many fires, but they are one-tenth the size."

Minnich's research is challenged by scientists led by Jon E. Keeley and Max A. Moritz of the University of California at Berkeley. They argue that disastrous wildfires in the chaparral are natural and therefore must be planned for, similar to earthquake and hurricane preparation.

Back along Twin Pines Road, near where the firefighters died, residents had displayed huge thank-you signs for the firefighters who protected their property. John Rutgers, one of Watkins's neighbors, was rooting around in his shed amazed that it, too, had escaped the blaze. Inside was his Toyota MR2 sports car with a full gas tank, a motorcycle, jugs of kerosene, paint thinner and other flammables. The wooden half of the shed looked like the remnants of a big campfire. But here in the cement half, only a little charcoal dust provided evidence of the blaze.

Rutgers, 55, said he, too, planned to start building his dream house later this year. Did the fire change his mind? "Not at all. The only thing it changed," he said, surveying a charred field of small trees and scrub brush, "is that this year it looks like we're not going to have to do weed control."