Marshall Fire

all campers are now herded into an artificial steel-and-asphalt “campground” in the hottest, windiest spot in the area; historic buildings are razed by bulldozers to save the expense of maintaining them while at the same time hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on an unneeded paved entrance road. And the administrators complain of vandalism.

Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel.

megalopolis endured three of the ten most costly national disasters since the Civil War.

There is a non-linear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fires. Fifty-year-old trees burn fifty times more intensely than twenty-year-old trees. However, because of the power of influential residents living in the Malibu region, since 1919 the local policy has been one of ‘total fire suppression’. This means t