Insight: The Urban/Rural Politics of Wildfires
- William Fulton
- Dec 28, 2017
- 4 min read
The Thomas Fire started in a Ventura County park near Santa Paula one evening and within only a few hours – aided by winds up to 80 miles an hour – reached the beachfront city of Ventura, my former hometown. By the next afternoon 400 homes had burned down – most of them in hillside neighborhoods, but a few of them down in the flats where the winds blew embers. For two weeks the fire threatened towns up and down the Ventura/Santa Barbara coast. Now it’s contained, but not before burning almost 300,000 acres and winning the distinction of being the biggest wildfire in California history.
