Summer’s heat wave:
Island ablaze

Why those residents set their side of the island ablaze this time of year I haven't quite figured out. It could be a holdover from the sugar-cane days when the sugar companies used to set huge tracts of cane land on fire.

They said they did it to burn off the annoying leafy stuff from the cane, but I think they did it just for the fun of it.

There are few things as fun as watching fire race across the landscape, provided your house isn't in its path.

When I lived in Kunia, the smoke from these cane fires would engulf my house, and huge black ashes would cover the lawn, kind of like snow.

We tried to roll up the ashes in balls and make ashmen and have ashball fights and lie on the grass and make ash angels, but it couldn't be done. Actually, the nasty falling cane ash is nothing like snow.

I doubted that setting fire to the cane fields really was necessary because you never saw it done to any other crops.

They couldn't burn pineapple fields even if they wanted to, because pineapples are hard to light.

So I suppose that igniting the western half of the island each summer could be some kind of a nostalgia thing.

You know, crack open a beer, sit on your lanai, watch fire tear across the hills behind your house and remember those good old plantation days.

I live on the Windward side, where everything is wet and relatively inflammable. It's generally hard to get a good, rip-roaring fire whipping up the sides of the Pali. All that bothersome greenery, you see.

A hillside near the Kaneohe Marine base is sometimes ignited this time of year, but the Marines put it out quickly because they don't appreciate the aesthetic aspects of a raging wildfire and, besides, their base might blow up.

If there's one thing all these recent fires tell us, it's that there's a lot more undeveloped land on Oahu than you think. Everyone complains about how crowded and overbuilt the island is, but really, how crowded can it be if there's room for half of it to be on fire all summer?

We obviously need to launch a major fire-eradication program consisting mainly of paving over and building on all of that flammable empty land. You rarely see firefighters battling raging brush fires in downtown Honolulu.

Some residents of the west side of Oahu might not like the idea of turning their meadows and hillsides into parking lots and concrete soccer fields. But it's unfair to force firefighters to spend the entire summer fighting brush fires when they could be sitting in their stations making chili and watching the soaps.

Most of the fires are started by "natural causes," meaning there's always a few idiots who naturally want to toss road flares and Molotov cocktails from their cars each summer. Police actually caught one of these dummies the other day with gasoline bombs in the back seat of her car. Her claim that she was a Sugarcane Field Ignition Engineer apparently didn't fly with the cops.