My Costly Race to Prepare for California’s Next Inferno: Essay

Strolling through the hillside urban forest that’s my California neighborhood, my dog thrusts his nose in the air, catching the scent of redwood, bay laurel and eucalyptus on the breeze as San Francisco Bay glitters in the distance. It’s a picture-perfect but disturbingly warm autumn day in the Berkeley Hills, and a premonition flashes in my mind, an echo of the scene in Terminator 2 when Skynet incinerates Los Angeles in a nuclear firestorm.

Instead of nukes raining down, on hot and gusty days like this one I see hundreds of thousands of flaming embers. They are launched, in my ...