I worked on a wilderness crew and a soil conservation crew for a few summers in college. I know that fire is important for the replenishment of the land, but the drought we've had here is truly the worst ever recorded and as a result, the fire danger is also the worst ever. Also, deserts are truly fragile ecosystems that can take a long time to replace. We don't have seeds that need a burn to work. We have a very small spectrum of plants that live here, in fact.

I'm all for controlled burns and I don't think they do them enough. I think controlled burns are a good means of preventing this level of destruction, though I don't think they could do it well here because of the changeability of the winds here. We maintain defensible space around our house, but you could tell that that was not the case for many of the people who lost houses. Also, shake rooves count as a predictor for what burns and what does, something we also do not have. I saw Bob Vila yesterday talking about enviroshakes, which look like shakes, but do not have the flammability of real shakes and he was talking about how much research went into them and I was thinking how it would be nice if we had more research into stuff like that for the materials that we build houses with -- just for such an occasion. Wouldn't it be cool if you knew your house had a good chance of surviving the fire because you used fire resistant building materials in a situations like this?

Overall, I think fire is a good thing for the environment. Yosemite, for example, posts on their website where the controlled burns are, so people don't freak -- Yosemite has had a number of burns that were not controlled that you can see as you drive through.

However, it's sad to see the areas with homes dotted up the hill, where I know families -- my neighbors-- lost houses. We get a lot more media coverage of it than you guys do, so maybe it's the combination of the sad stories and the visualization that goes with it. I think for me, it's what all that charring means to the 14 families who lost their homes, especially because many of them were retired, so that starting again at their age is a monumental undertaking in their lives. Bad smoke for me means a lot of medication, but so far it's been treatable. Mike's boss sent pictures out -- the fire was so close to his house that it melted the drip line on the landscaping. There's a picture of him packing up his truck, while the smoke and flames billow over his roof.

Fortunately, this is a very tightly-knit community, so people are pitching in a lot of donations, assistance, and just general good will. I know when they make a call for volunteers to reseed the mountains, that they'll probably have more volunteers than seeds.