"Benford-TheFireThisTime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

I thought this particularly because I was preparing, in late October of 1993,
the notes for a course in ethics which I would soon teach in the honors
humanities program at the University of California, Irvine. (Usually ethics is
strictly a matter for the humanists, but for the past five years I have served
as the token scientist in the honors courses.) It struck me how strongly Plato
believed in smooth certainties lying behind our rude world, the famous shadows
on the cave wall analogy. Socrates believed in higher ethical laws, too, which
men could but crudely glimpse and try to copy. Idealism emerged in the sharp air
of civilization's morning.

Somehow that city-state of a quarter million population produced an immense
flowering in art, literature, philosophy- and science. Many cultures yield up
art, music, and higher thought generally. But only the Greeks put together
science. I wondered why.

I saw the smoke as I went to my one PM lecture on a blustery Wednesday, October
27. The spire of oily black smoke was about seven miles inland, I judged, near
the freeway, far from my home in Laguna Beach. Dry winds off the desert called
the Santa Anas brought an eerie, skin-prick-ling apprehension to the sharp air.

By the time I had held forth on turbulence theory for an hour and a half, a dark
cloud loomed across all the southern horizon. The brush fire had swept to the
sea. On the telephone my wife Joan said the smell was already heavy and asked me
to come home.

I tried to reach Laguna Beach by the Pacific Coast Highway, only to be turned
back by a policeman at the campus edge. So I went south, looping the long way
around, leaving the freeway and threading through surface streets. When I had
bought my Mercedes 560 SL my son had deplored its excess power, quite
ecologically unsound, and I had replied lightly that I wanted to "seize
opportunities." Here was the chance: I cut through traffic, hoping to get ahead
of the predictable wedge wanting the only access to town.

I failed, of course. Traffic was chaotic. I took two hours to reach Monarch Bay,
the community immediately south of Laguna Beach. At Monarch Bay the police
stopped everyone. Smoke glowered across the entire horizon now.

I left my car at 5:30 and hiked north, striking up a conversation with a man,
Dave Adams, who was walking to his nearby home. I stopped there for a drink and
heard that the high school had burned. Our house sits three hundred meters above
the school. On the other hand, this was media wisdom, instantly discounted. I
went on, hitchhiking and walking the five miles to central Laguna by seven PM.
Police were turning everyone back but the acrid flavor in the air alarmed me,
and the dark clouds blowing thickly out to sea seemed to come from our hill. The
police stopped me several times. I always retreated, then worked my way around
to another street and went on.

I knew that Joan must have evacuated by then, but I had set out to come home and
just kept at it, through the gathering pall. Maybe there was something I could