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Life & Times Transcript

10/30/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

When wildfires strike, which houses burn and which stand? It's more than random luck.

Ben Viloria>> In one area, I said that I owe these guys a dinner or something. After I said that, a while later, I'm thinking, "A dinner? Man, I owe these guys thirty years of my life almost that I put into this place."

Val Zavala>> And then, they may have a high ick factor, but you'll be amazed by what you didn't know about spiders.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> More than thirty fires ravaged southern California last week and two of them were deliberately set by arsonists. One of those arson fires raced up Santiago Canyon in Orange County, which lies east of the old El Toro Marine Station.

One of the neighborhoods hit particularly hard is Modjeska Canyon. It's a close-knit community of about two hundred homes. Fourteen of those homes are now in ashes. Sam Louie went to Modjeska Canyon to find out why some homes survived and others didn't.

Sam Louie>> Ironically in fires like these, some houses are scorched while others are barely touched. Jeff and Tammy Davis have lived for twenty years near the very top of Modjeska Grade Road. The two retired police officers are playing it safe, watering down what's left of their barn and garage. Burned-out homes are all around them, but somehow their place was spared. When you returned, did you know if your house was still standing?

Tammy Davis: No. I actually was watching a news broadcast and they panned a shot talking about Modjeska Grade Road. At the highest point is where our house is and I saw black smoke coming from it and I told my husband that our house is on fire. So he decided to come up and get in here and take a look and see exactly what was burning. It turned out to be our barn, which is new, and our garage. Thankfully, it didn't get the house.

Sam Louie>> The only damage? Scorching under the eaves. Jeff has a theory about why it didn't burn. You had mentioned the house may have been saved because of the new window panes?

Jeff Davis: Because they were double-paned windows. That might have helped because the outer pane of glass broke out of all the windows, but the inners are pretty much intact, so that would have kept any embers and sparks from flying in.

Sam Louie>> And you'd recently put those --

Jeff Davis: -- yes. In fact --

Tammy Davis: -- three days before the fire started, we put the last one in on this side of the house.

Sam Louie>> But even though their house was saved, the couple is heartsick for neighbors who weren't as fortunate.

Tammy Davis: It’s a time to pull together and be with your family -- I'm sorry.

Sam Louie>> Do you understand that an arsonist may have been involved?

Jeff Davis>> Everyone I've talked to, even people that don't live here, they pretty much want to find him, catch him and turn him over to the people that live here and let us take care of him (laughter). But we hope he's caught and possibly never sees the light of day again.

Sam Louie>> Station 16 in Modjeska Canyon was the second unit on the scene at the fire.

Bruce Newell>> I can't explain why some of these houses did not burn. I mean, the fire has been all the way around the house and the house has no particular fire-proof capabilities and the house is standing there slightly toasted, but there. House after house, you can see that.

Sam Louie>> Another one of those houses belongs to carpenter Ben Viloria. He built this place himself twenty-seven years ago. As the fire started getting closer, his neighbor, a fireman, insisted it was too dangerous for Ben to stay.

Ben Viloria>> A three hundred yard stretch blew up in ninety seconds from being, you know, a grove of trees with leaves to sticks sticking out of the ground. He said, after the ninety seconds, you could actually walk across the street and there was no flames. They were gone. They were just poof.

Sam Louie>> Viloria, who lives about a half mile away from the Davis's, thinks he also did something that made a difference, putting sprinklers on the roof.

Ben Viloria>> You can see that I got the Rainbirds on the corners here, one there and one there. There's four of them up there.

Sam Louie>> When you say Rainbirds, those are the sprinkler heads?

Ben Viloria>> Yeah. It's controlled by a ball valve, so I can just turn them on and it pretty much gets everything wet, which I'm pretty sure saved the thing.

Sam Louie>> Officer Newell says that the fire has now, oddly enough, left the area protected.

Bruce Newell>> Our canyon has now been burned all the way around, so we're not going to get hit from the outside. There's still a lot of smoldering stumps and pieces of fire left around behind, so what we're doing is just going around constantly and patrolling the fire and putting out little smokes and making sure that we don't generate something inside. We're now an island inside the fire and we just want to protect our island.

Sam Louie>> Ben evacuated with no idea if his house survived. Then he saw his neighbor, Alan, the fireman.

Ben Viloria>> When Alan, my neighbor, was walking out, I asked Alan, "Do I got a house?" Alan just got this huge grin on his face. He didn't even say a word, but when he got that smile, I knew that the house was still there.

I really couldn't believe it. I mean, I pretty much sat at the corner during all that. At one point, I was just sobbing. I mean, all the years of work you put in and it kind of hit me, you know, that it might be all just down the tubes in sixty seconds.

Sam Louie>> Authorities are determined to find the person who deliberately set the Santiago Canyon fire.

Herb Brown>> "The FBI will bring to bear all its national resources with ATF, the Orange County Fire Authority, as well as the Orange County Sheriff's Department, to make sure that we track, apprehend and put this person or persons behind bars where they belong."

Sam Louie>> But investigators know all too well how quickly an arson trail can go cold. As the reward continues to grow, Ben Viloria is thinking about a different kind of reward for the people who saved his home.

Ben Viloria>> In one area, I said I owe these guys a dinner or something. After I said, a while later, I'm thinking, "A dinner? Man, I owe these guys thirty years of my life almost that I've put into this place." It's deep in my soul, all these hours I spent putting in this because I pretty much did it with my own hands. The gratitude is deeper than you could even express.

Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Experts predict that, when it comes to forest fires, we will be seeing bigger, more destructive fires in the future. Well, the future is already here in the San Bernardino Mountains. And it's not just global warming that's a factor. Ironically, the success we have in suppressing small fires sets the stage for bigger ones.

I asked George Watson, a reporter with the San Bernardino Sun, to explain. Watson has seen first-hand the growing intensity of fires in the San Bernardino Mountains. We may call a forest fire a natural disaster, but he and the experts who understand the situation call these fires unnatural disasters. [Technical difficulty] and more intense.

George Watson>> Anecdotally, we can talk about here in the San Bernardino National Forest. Historically, it's had about forty trees per acre and right now they're probably, on a lot of acres, it's about two hundred.

Val Zavala>> So normally you're talking about density now?

George Watson>> Correct.

Val Zavala>> Normally forty trees per acre. So now it's two, three, almost four or five times as dense as it should be?

George Watson>> It is. The reason it is is that we're the most urbanized national forest in the country. At times you can have a hundred thousand people up in these San Bernardino Mountains. It's one of the few places in southern California where you can drive to in a short distance and be up in the mountains. So you can come skiing during the wintertime and, during the summer, it's a good time to get away from the heat. It's a national forest, so there's a lot of places to go.

Val Zavala>> How did it get so dense?

George Watson>> Well, because of all those people, every fire is extinguished, every single fire. You can't allow these fires to do what they're supposed to do and Mother Nature wants to keep essentially a clean forest. The larger trees would be fine. The fire would only be one or two feet high at best and would just sort of move through a forest. The bark might be burned somewhat, but these larger, healthier trees would be fine.

Val Zavala>> So you're saying that the fires are supposed to go through, but they're supposed to be low-lying, basically thinning out the forest and not destroying it.

George Watson>> Exactly.

Val Zavala>> It hasn't happened recently?

George Watson>> It hasn't happened for quite a long time.

Val Zavala>> Because we keep suppressing them.

George Watson>> Because we have to suppress the fires because you have so many people, so many houses. I think it's been valued at a billion dollars worth of property. If the entire mountains burned down, it would be about a billion dollars worth of damage. Obviously, they need to keep the people safe and they have to jump on every single fire.

In the past, they've been able to have controlled burns in areas to try and keep things somewhat manageable, but this being southern California, you have a very, very limited window in how you can do that or when you can do it. During the summer, the fall and even parts of the winter, it's just too dry and the fire will get away. They've had that happen. Even in springtime, they've had fires get away.

Val Zavala>> Controlled burns?

George Watson>> Controlled burns, yeah.

Val Zavala>> Now when you talk to firefighters, they must be really frustrated because they know what nature is supposed to do and hasn't been able to do it.

George Watson>> Definitely. They have to put them out. You know, I think that this is also what they do and they do it well, so they attack and they get to these things very quickly.

We have a professor out here who's a fire ecologist. He's been saying for years to look down in Baja, Mexico which has a lot of similar conditions, weather, a lot of the same terrain, a lot of the same vegetation. They don't have big fires. They haven't had a big fire at all. His feeling is that it's because there's nobody there. They let the fires go and they burn out and the big trees survive.

Val Zavala>> Now you say they suppress all the fires, but that's not happening this time around with this recent firestorm. They haven't been able to suppress the fires as much. Are you saying that that's because, in part, there's so much density?

George Watson>> There's so much density, there's so much dead wood up there. We've had the Bark Beetle infestation.

Val Zavala>> Explain how that works.

George Watson>> The Bark Beetle attacks the bark and gets in and essentially prevents trees from continuing to get the water and be able to essentially survive. It kills these trees when they're weak. They predicted somewhere around ten, twelve, thirteen million dead trees in the mountains.

Val Zavala>> So they're just dead and they haven't been cut down, so they're also incredibly perfect fuel.

George Watson>> Exactly, exactly. In the last couple of years since the 2003 Old Fire which was our monster fire, I guess --

Val Zavala>> -- it was a terrible one.

George Watson>> It was a terrible one. About nine hundred ninety homes burned, ninety-two thousand acres, and it was during the whole southern California wildfires of 2003 which is basically what we're doing all over again. After the Bark Beetle, millions of dollars came here. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred twenty million dollars came to cut down trees.

What they've done is -- they can't thin the entire forest. It's just unmanageable. It's too big. But they've done that around the communities to make them safer and, at the same point, you still have these forests that are essentially like gasoline ready to go up.

Val Zavala>> Worse than ever now, right?

George Watson>> Worse than ever, definitely. I think there have been several fire chiefs in the last few years who've said we're going to see more and more and more of these fires like this because of all the reasons that we're talking about. I mean, the forests are bred to burn, but they're not bred to burn to the ground.

Val Zavala>> In fact, the San Bernardino Sun did a special series called -- what was it called? "Bred to Burn"?

George Watson>> No, it was called "Unnatural Disasters".

Val Zavala>> "Unnatural Disasters".

George Watson>> "Unnatural Disasters". It was looking at something called the fire-flood complex. What happens is that you have fire and then, after the fire, you're going to have floods because the land has been denuded. It doesn't have the vegetation to hold it and then you have these storms that come through and cause massive flooding.

In 2003, we had the Old Fire that killed, I believe, six people and then a couple of months later, on Christmas Day 2003, we had a debris flow which is a very fast-moving body of water, tumbling boulders and trees come down Waterman Canyon and kill sixteen people. In the aftermath of this, we tried to take a look at this about developing in places where you know are repeatable, predictable disaster zones.

Val Zavala>> So are we basically building where we just should not be building?

George Watson>> Well, in parts. At no point has the paper or really anybody advocated that they shouldn't be building there. There's a question of how smart it is, but it's part of the great American ideal that we can do what we want, when we want, however we want. That was the other thing. For a long time, the mountains were just a weekend getaway. There were peoples' second homes, little cabins. Now you're having these huge homes, giant landscaping.

Val Zavala>> So I understand in the course of your actually covering fires on the front line, you're one of the few people perhaps that got hit by that red fire retardant. What is that stuff like?

George Watson>> It's kind of sticky. With its drop low enough and if it's a big enough of a payload, it will put you on the ground. You worry about it hurting your neck, but it was not something like that.

Val Zavala>> Did it stick on you forever?

George Watson>> No, you wash it off. It comes off pretty easily.

Val Zavala>> With water?

George Watson>> It comes right off with water. One of the things that the firefighters always tell you is to get it off your car right away because it can stain your car. But other than that, I don't know if it has any sort of environmental impacts. I would be surprised that they'd be allowed to use something like that, so I would think that it doesn't.

Val Zavala>> Well, no long-term effects for you yet.

George Watson>> No, not at all.

Val Zavala>> It's not like getting slimed (laughter).

George Watson>> (Laughter) No, not a bit.

Val Zavala>> George, thank you so much for your thoughts and your hard work.

George Watson>> Well, thanks for having me.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> We're about to take you into an exhibit that some of you may want to steer clear of. It's at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and this is the Spider Pavilion. Arachnaphobiacs need not enter. But one man who loves to walk through these doors is Brent Karner, also known as the Bug Man.

He's an expert on spiders. In fact, he created this Spider Pavilion. He personally planted about four hundred spiders in the trees and shrubs inside this scary structure. How did he get the idea for it? Well, it started with the Natural History Museum's popular Butterfly Pavilion.

Brent Karner>> A spider got in and this spider was starting to eat some of those butterflies. I was amazed at how people that were visiting the exhibit were horrified that a butterfly should be caught by a spider and how we would let that happen. No matter how much I told them that it was a natural occurrence, they just wanted to hear none of it. What started to get me thinking was why is one animal viewed so highly and the other one viewed so poorly when they both have a role to play?

Val Zavala>> So he decided to let the public experience spiders close-up, to get to know them, to undo some of the bad PR spiders have gotten.

Brent Karner>> Now it wasn't easy because this is pretty much a world-first. Even the first year I opened it, I never really opened it at all. I prototyped it for a fall just to see what they'd do, if I could actually deal with it properly. It was not until a year later that we actually opened it to the public.

Val Zavala>> The exhibit begins with the big guys, tarantulas. Actually, these are all gals.

Brent Karner>> We have a very large bird-eating type spider here from South America. They don't actually go around eating birds, but they do have it within their name. We even have some old-world representatives, the sort of less hairy types. But I have a type of tarantula that is often kept in the pet trade and easily handled called the Mexican Red-Kneed tarantula.

It's a very easy spider to deal with. It's easily handled, as you can see. It's easy to pick up. She's not doing too much of a struggle. This is one of the spiders we even let people give a touch to. If you want to touch it right there, you can see how soft they actually are.

Val Zavala>> Oh, yeah.

Brent Karner>> And, of course, holding her this way as opposed to just putting her in your hand as so many people do, number one, this is a far safer way to hold the tarantula. Even a fall of even this distance here could potentially kill the spider.

Val Zavala>> Really?

Brent Karner>> The abdomens of the tarantulas are very soft and they're very expanded and easily ruptured. So if they are dropped, that can be the death of a spider like this. It's a tragedy anyway, but even more so given that even this spider here is already about eight or nine years old and can live to be about thirty-five.

Val Zavala>> No kidding?

Brent Karner>> No kidding, so it's not one I want to lose now.

Val Zavala>> There are spiders that look more like a fungus than an insect, like this Giant Crab Spider from Malaysia.

Brent Karner>> They get their name of Crab Spider from the fact that, when they move, they can often take off sideways like a crab and they can really dart.

Val Zavala>> And contrary to popular belief, only a tiny fraction of all spiders are poisonous. Out of thirty-eight thousand species, only twenty-eight have been known to severely hurt humans. In fact, spiders are much more likely to be hurt by humans than the other way around. Most of them are content to stay hidden and weave their webs.

Brent Karner>> There are about four major groups of web-makers, those that make very nice flat sheet webs, those that have a funnel which are called funnel webs, those that make sort of haphazard webs which are called cob webs, and then the recognizable round spiral, orb webs.

Val Zavala>> The biggest job that Brent has in the Spider Pavilion is keeping the hundreds of spiders fed.

Brent Karner>> This one here is feasting, I should say, on a cricket that I fed it a little earlier today. We do have to feed these spiders in here. The spiders we have, like all spiders, are predatory and I don't have a lot of free-flying things in here now. So I have to sort of bring them in and get them to eat.

Val Zavala>> You actually have to feed all these spiders in here? There's like a dozen or twenty-some spiders.

Brent Karner>> There's a few hundred in here.

Val Zavala>> Few hundred? You have to feed them?

Brent Karner>> Yeah. As we start to walk around, you'll see. It's amazing how people don't see how many there are here right away because a lot of them are in some of the nooks and crannies. But, yeah, twice a week, we have to get to them.

Val Zavala>> Okay, time for a little demonstration. This cricket will do nicely as a reluctant volunteer about to encounter a native of California, the Golden Orb Weaver. It took a couple of attempts to get the cricket to stick to the web.

Brent Karner>> She doesn't know where it is. It's right there, honey. There she goes. Now she's got it. She's using her silk instantly to wrap it up. You can see it coming out of her rear.

Val Zavala>> Oh, is that fast. That's amazing.

Brent Karner>> Now she knows where it is. Then she's going to bite it when she's ready --

Val Zavala>> -- oh, I think she's biting it now.

Brent Karner>> And then it's lunch. Well, they use their fangs to pierce it and inject their venom and a host of other digestive enzymes. They pretty much have to turn this cricket into a liquid slurry and then use their fangs to kind of squish it all out. They have a tiny mouth at the base of their fangs that actually sucks the stuff out. So it actually takes them a while to eat. They'll eat for a few hours, especially if it's a big meal.

Because this one actually ate more recently, I think this one I even fed this morning, she didn't necessarily need another cricket. She may not even eat this one now, so her wrap-up job becomes a little bit of a doggie bag and she'll let it hang. She may just go back to the middle without it, but she'll remember it's there.

Val Zavala>> How do you know you're feeding all of them?

Brent Karner>> We never really do know we're feeding all of them, at least not on any one trip. However, because we're coming in routinely, there's always a different spider that's made a web and we're always going to feed every web we see. As is typical, if a spider is not eating right, it's going to make a very conspicuous and probably larger web. We know the hungrier spiders.

There are some that, if we feed them routinely and we're getting them almost every time, will probably give up on making a web for about a week and they'll just sit there because they don't need any more food, so those ones aren't getting fed.

Val Zavala>> In a way, they get to be lazy, don't they?

Brent Karner>> Oh, yeah, they do. Some of our spiders get pretty fat.

Val Zavala>> So the cricket is wrapped up in the equivalent of spider saran-wrap, ready for the next time she gets the munchies.

Brent Karner>> She'll turn herself back into the position she likes which is upside down, and there you go. She will eat that cricket. That won't be wasted.

Val Zavala>> Oh, I have no doubt. And what you've heard about spider silk is true. It's the strongest biological fiber in nature.

Brent Karner>> If we had a way of commercially manufacturing spider silk in large quantities, we could do all sorts of crazy things. You could build another version of the Golden Gate Bridge with about one-fifth the material. Instead of main cables, it would hold the same amount of cars.

Val Zavala>> But we can't make something this strong?

Brent Karner>> We can't milk spiders as good. We have no way of getting enough of it. Another great use for it because of its strength and its flexibility, things that have been promoted such as bulletproof vests that you could wear like sweaters. You'd wear them, they'd go on and they'd stop a bullet and you could be completely movable. It is that strong.

Val Zavala>> No kidding?

Brent Karner>> Yeah. As you pile this up layer on layer, it's incredibly strong.

Val Zavala>> The Bug Man is hoping the Spider Pavilion will help humans realize that spiders are gentle, timid and more afraid of you than you are of them. Think E.B. White's "Charlotte", and you'll be on the right track.

By the way, the dreaded Brown Recluse Spider that's so poisonous is not found in southern California, but you can see one here at the Spider Pavilion which is open through November 4. For details, go to the website of the Natural History Museum at nhm.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

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