Three Perspectives on Our Days and...

Mayor Richard Riordan looked like an old-fashioned, small-town political hack Wednesday instead of the fresh, smart outsider he had promised to be.

Maybe it’s just that he’s hopelessly inarticulate, and said the wrong thing when confronted with one of the region’s worst fires. But anyone whose home had been threatened or destroyed by the fire must have been infuriated to hear him talk proudly on television about how the fire was held at the Los Angeles city border.

It sure embarrassed me, one of his constituents.

Riordan started out well enough at a press conference staged near the fire. “I’d like to compliment the firefighters of the city of L.A. who helped out in the county in areas not in the city of L.A., but as a result of that saved many hundreds, maybe thousands of homes that could have been lost.”

Then he misstepped. “As a result of that, also, the fire has not reached the city limits of L.A. at this time.”

It wasn’t just Riordan’s words, it was his parochial attitude. Neither Riordan nor Councilman Marvin Braude, who also spoke at the press conference, expressed much sympathy for the fire victims whose homes just happened to be outside the city proper. Nor did they praise the firefighters who weren’t wearing the L.A. city uniform.

This was no time for cheap civic boosterism. L.A.’s firefighters did a great job, but so did the men and women from L.A. County, the state, Chico, Paradise, Butte County, Kelseyville, Merced County, Tulare County and other departments from all over California.

What these professionals understand--that the mayor didn’t--is that fires know no political boundaries. In fact, by the end of the day, the fire had jumped the mayor’s line of demarcation. And it became clear that luck had played the major role in temporarily keeping this blaze from L.A.’s door.

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After watching the mayor, I drove to Pacific Palisades, parked and walked down Sunset Boulevard to Pacific Coast Highway to see the fire.

As I walked west on Sunset, in L.A. city limits, I saw many fire hazards.

A house covered with wood shingles was shaded by two huge, highly flammable eucalyptus trees. Next door was a garage with a shake roof. The home in back was flanked on all sides by huge trees, again eucalyptus. Seven more eucalyptus trees lined the street farther west. The foliage around the houses was deadly dry.

These sights were repeated block after block. A few cinders, a few sparks, a single arsonist could destroy this upscale, well-developed section of the city of Los Angeles.

Along Pacific Coast Highway, still in Los Angeles city limits, dry trees and brush seemed to be the landscape of choice. The yard at one neglected old Spanish-style house was completely overgrown. Parts of wooden packing boxes littered the front yard.

It was pure luck that for much of the day the fierce winds, which carry fire from one neighborhood to another, happened to be blowing in other directions.

What impressed me on my walk up Pacific Coast Highway was seeing how many firefighters had joined the fight from other cities and counties. I talked to two residents whose houses had been saved by these out-of-town firefighters.

“There was a truck for every two houses and they washed down the hill,” said Nira Kocher. She was cleaning the front patio of her house. The slope across the highway was blackened from flames that had lapped against it before dawn.

“The Contra Costa Fire Department saved us,” said Kent Knudsen. “They fought it from the roofs. It was incredible.”

Toward the end of the morning, I hitched a ride with some other reporters up Tuna Canyon, where a fire had broken out in an area that had burned just the previous night. It was so fierce as it burned through the canyon that we turned back. Then it got worse.

As I am writing this, the fire was in the city of Los Angeles, being carried on sea breezes toward Palisades Highlands, in the Pacific Palisades.

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The fire is another example of how we live in a vast collection of neighborhoods linked together by their vulnerability to natural forces.

Fire, floods and landslides ignore all political boundaries. Earthquakes do, too. So, as a matter of fact, do most of our problems--transportation, race, the recession, smog and the rest.

The mayor forgot that in the heat of the fire. He would have been better advised to forgo the press conference and sit down over coffee with the firefighters from faraway Kelseyville.