Wildfire is no stranger to California, it only became a disaster after we got here. 

Today the 140K acre Station Fire is still flirting with just 25 percent containment.  The beautiful mountains that ring the Northeastern side of the Los Angeles basin are burning right down to their toes and further into the forest than anyone can see.

They predicted this long ago as the growth became ever more dense and developments encroached into this high fire hazard zone.

Those who have read Dana's noteworthy account, Two Years Before The Mast, there is a unique view of California in the Spanish period about 1820.  As his ship makes its way up the coast he remarks how the name Tierra del Fuego had been coined for this western edge of the continent.  Though some attribute this to the flame like orange of California poppy flowers, it is in fact derived from the reality described by Dana.  He observes the coast, shrouded in the smoke of slow burning wildfires that traveled across the natural landscape from early summer to Christmas time.

In William Brewer's account of his work for the USGS entitled Up and Down California, we find an inland account of open forests and mosaic of low level burns that were often enhanced by Native Americans to improve acorn gathering and wildlife populations.  Today the land here bears little resemblance to this presettlement model. 

Our wildlands have been protected to death, and what is happening in Los Angeles and throughout the west is merely a symptom.  The disease is exclusion of fire in a fire dependent ecosystem, which, like a child denied tough love, will ultimately destroy itself.