Word: brush
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Miller has come back for the cat. The flames are only a few feet away. They look like something alive -- a platoon of flames, no, a battalion, marching across the brush toward the house Miller has lived in for five years in the El Morro Beach trailer park on the outskirts of Laguna Beach, California. His wife evacuated their trailer hours earlier, but when Miller heard the cat was here, he returned, hiking two miles when the police forced him to get out of his car. Now he can see the fire heading for his house, and not a fire...
...ushering in what author Joan Didion has called "the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread . . ." If the state is unlucky, a spark, man-made or natural, will strike the canyon vegetation, thick and green in the damp months but now dried to tinder. The spiky brown chaparral brush will ignite like old Christmas trees, and a canyon will become a fire corridor through which flames roar faster than a man can run, burning at temperatures high enough to melt metal, billowing to start yet more fires $ and driving walls of flame to the ocean...
...community's border and eventually destroying 35 homes on 35,000 sparsely populated acres. Then early the next morning, 60 miles east, it seems a homeless Chinese immigrant named Andres Huang lit a campfire to warm himself at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. An ember set off brush, and Eaton Canyon was awash in waves of flame. By noon, they charred 4,000 acres and immolated hundreds of houses in the mountainside suburb of Altadena, sending families fleeing for their lives. Frustrated, endangered fire fighters, working with little or no water pressure, began bulldozing to fill up their...
...state has not learned all the lessons of its previous great fire, in Oakland in 1991. After that terrible conflagration destroyed nearly 3,000 homes, state legislation was passed forbidding construction in high-risk zones with certain flammable materials, such as wooden shingles, and requiring a 35-ft. brush- free perimeter around each structure. But enforcement was left to local authorities...
...this development: "You want to kill me but you can't." Feeling thus elevated, Max disengages from his former life, abusing his beautiful wife and son and flaunting various conventions of society. While Max gets his thrills from risking his life periodically and hanging out with other brush-with-death-survivor buddies, his devoted and one-dimensional wife (Isabella Rosellini) is apparently confined to the house, as well as to a limited repertoire of worries and complaints about his new persona...