2003 | iMac M8935LL/A, Cedar Fire, San Diego County
I dropped in for a few hours to help my friends dig out. Ron, who knows his way around a bronze foundry, looked at the kitchen cabinet hardware and estimated that the fire had burned through the house at about 2100˚F. This picture shows Janice’s computer, which had held her upcoming artwork. The firestorm ran out of oxygen after taking their house, so Ron’s studio, an adjacent building, was untouched as the advancing fire inhaled, then roared on.
With this, I recall Danny Lyons’s amazing and tragically prescient book The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), for which he faithfully followed the removal of the 19th-century buildings doomed by the plans for the World Trade Center. Along with his remarkable pictures, Lyons wrote about the wreckers’ handwork as they unbuilt floors, then beams, then walls: “Workers on the walls pull out one brick after another and in this manner the building is lowered to the ground. It’s all just a matter of changing shapes.”