2003. The year California “woke” to fire reality.

Like many Californians in 2003, I began to grapple with the new reality of megafires.* My first experience with wildfire occurred in 1993. That October my high school became an evacuation center for the Laguna Beach fire.

Then, after 10 years of relative calm, wildfires broke out in a fury no one could have forseen. San Diego took on an apocalyptic glow and when it was over the Cedar Fire had burned almost 300,000 acres. By the end of the fire season almost 1 million acres of CA land had been scorched.**

The response?

Some bordered on the comical. San Diego county seriously considered a plan to bulldoze 300 square miles of chaparral (1)(Reminiscent of the Dust Bowl when a firm offered to concrete one’s prairie land!)

Fire districts in the San Diego region, federal and local, realized they had to rethink their coordination strategies. 

On a national level, the Cedar Fire was one of the main driving forces of the creation of InciWeb, an incident report site that is maintained by nine federal agencies.

HOAs began to create and/or widen existing fire breaks. Hints of firescaping began to pop up as flammable plants were replaced with fire resistant ones.

2003 was a wake up call for some, but not all.  It took another 15 years and the deaths of many Californians in the 2018 Paradise Fire before people really began to take action.

*Megafires did occur before European settlement of California but stopped due to fire suppression.

**Even more alarming is that even though the total acreage burned was lower than in 1999, the average size of each fire was greater. The largest fire in 1999 was only 125,000 acres.

(1) https://californiachaparral.org/