California Journeys into the Ring of Fire

As a geologist, I believe the rocks beneath our feet

are fundamental to civilisations around the world.

I'm taking a tour of the Pacific Rim, stopping off at some of the most dramatic, diverse

and rugged landscapes on the planet, to see how human history has been shaped by the rocks.

My journey includes the awesome peaks of the Andes.

The perilous volcanoes of Indonesia...

..and the breathtaking landscape of Japan.

'In this programme, I'm in California, but I want to find out

'what makes millions of people put themselves at peril,'

in the path of geological devastation.

California is one of the most geologically volatile and dangerous places on Earth.

Every day, people that live here are under constant threat

from devastating earthquakes that cost billions of dollars worth of damage.

Landslides that sweep away entire towns

and terrifying firestorms

that can whip over suburban hillsides at over 70 miles an hour.

I study these geological hazards

and I'm intrigued to know why Californians are

prepared to live with the risks, and how they cope with them?

What's going through their minds, and is risk embedded in the culture?

To find the answers to these questions, I'm going on a 3,000-mile journey around California,

the most populated state in North America.

Through searing salt pans and deserts, frozen mountain heights

and narrow canyons, all the way back to the time of the gold rush.

It's a journey that'll go back a 150 years in human history

and millions of years in geological time.

As with all the places I'm visiting around the Pacific,

California's landscape has been created by huge geological forces.

I'm starting out from San Francisco,

a city that's long attracted fortune seekers from across the world.

I'm heading east to discover what brought them here in the first place.

Travelling across California you realise that the landscapes

are as diverse as the people who live here,

a contrasting mishmash of fertile valleys and barren deserts,

deep canyons and towering peaks.

My first stop is up in the Sierra Nevada Foothills,

the starting point for modern California.

It was on this ordinary river in 1848, that a carpenter by the name of James Marshall

made a chance discovery that would transform California forever.

In fact, I'm underselling it - it would transform the history of the world forever.

Marshall was one of the first few white settlers in the area

and he was here to make a living out of lumber.

He'd been trying to stop timber from blocking the flow of water

passing through the sawmill,

and his solution was to blast a deeper channel with explosives.

Hopping down into the blast zone to check how much sand and gravel

had been removed, his eye caught sight of something glittering.

He picked it up and examined it,

and in his hand was something heavy, very heavy.

Marshall had discovered gold.

Just here, near the town of Bridgeport,

there's a whole string of hot springs and they help explain

why gold was found here in the first place.

This pool is called Travertine Hot Spring,

and the water is really warm even though it's freezing out here.

And it says here, it tells us there's hot rocks down below.

Those rocks heat up water underground and force it up to the surface creating these pools.

Because the water's hot and under pressure, it dissolves the rock,

forming a kind of mineral soup.

But not all the water makes it all the way to the surface.

Sometimes it gets trapped in cracks and fissures, and as it cools

its cargo of minerals and elements

gets precipitated out, and amongst them is gold.

The gold in Sierra Nevada has been exposed by weathering, making it relatively easy to find.

Ice, water and wind erode the rocks.

Over time, they're crumbled into fragments

and get washed down the mountains to form the beds of streams and rivers.

Some of that crunched-up rock contained fragments of gold,

which ended up in the hands of the likes of James Marshall.

Here in the Sierra Nevada in the 1850s,

the gold was just lying in the stream beds waiting to be picked up.

The easiest way to find it was to sift the sediments with a pan.

Ed and Norm Allan are brothers who've spent countless hours working this river.

OK, Ed, what do I do here?

Well, first you've got to get some dirt in your pan.

You're going to get in as deep as you can

and pull up a load of material.

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start shaking this pan

back and forth pretty violently,

and what that's doing is, it's getting the gold down in this crevice at the bottom of the pan here.

The reason that that occurs,

is the gold weighs so much more than the rock that it's in.

-So it sinks down?

-That's correct.

So I can start washing this other material out of the pan.

-This is a long process.

-Yes, it is.

Fifty pounds a day were considered about all a man could do.

-Fifty?

-Fifty pounds a day.

-Wow!

-It was hard work.

The temperature in this canyon

gets to over a 100 degrees in the summertime.

It doesn't feel like it today.

No. But this river's been pretty cleaned out.

People pan over where we're panning almost every day.

So do you really get gold in here?

Yes, we sure do. Yes, there's gold in this river.

-Do you want to see some gold from here?

-Yeah.

Let me put my pan down.

That's beautiful. Look at that.

That nugget was found right here, last March.

Wow! How much is that worth?

About 90, and that's 23-carat gold right out of the river.

Norm!

Norm! I think I've got something.

Let me look at it.

Oh, yes.

That's very nice.

-That's very nice.

-Good.

-That's at least a clinker.

-A clinker?

-A clinker.

-Oh, right, it's the same.

-That's a beauty, all right.

-I'll be having that.

-"Finders keepers" it says on that sign up there.

-That's what it says.

-Thanks, that's great.

-My pleasure.

That's a nice one too. I'm going to keep going, actually.

-I think you've got the fever.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-The gold fever.

I know, it's completely addictive.

Within weeks of Marshall's discovery,

people were running through the streets,

shouting about gold in the mountains.

From all around the world, thousands began pouring into what was then the tiny coastal port of San Francisco

and working their way by hook or by crook into the mountains.

The dramatic red cliffs at Malakoff Diggins looked natural,

but they're one of many huge quarries the miners left behind.

Historian Jim Hendley, has explored how risking everything

to make a fortune became the bedrock for the modern Californian mindset.

Oh, sure, it's an illusion to think that miners were grizzly old men.

They're young men, coming from the east coast,

who grew up in a technological environment

and they had concluded that there's a lot of gold here,

but it's not big nuggets, it's little fine dust.

By the end of 1848, it's a business, it's an industrial operation

that requires a scale that a single person can't do.

Within a couple of years, the pans and picks were replaced by mass mining on an industrial scale.

A quarter of a million miners were to reshape the Californian landscape.

But how did this ambition to make money

transform the culture of California?

Big towns like San Francisco and Sacramento become the supply centres

to these miners, and there becomes a culture of mining the miner.

There's more money to be made in supplying the miner with his needs

and relieving him of his gold,

than there is to be made standing in a stream that's cold or standing out in the rain like we are here.

It's... it's a nasty environment doing this.

The infectious nature of mining as a risk taking venture,

infected the merchants in the same way, it was OK to take big risks.

So you had this growing commercialisation very fast,

lots of entrepreneurs coming through,

and then is there a real start of a risk-taking culture?

It is a risk-taking culture, and that is what it's really all about,

because nobody is here to criticise you for making a mistake.

You look around, everybody else has made mistakes

and they get up and try again. That's OK.

That's the mindset, and it goes from the miner, to the banker,

to the commerce and commercial people right through the line.

So it was in this culture of "anything goes" freedom

that the Californian mentality was born.

It was all down to the geology, down to gold.

Gold was a geological jackpot that transformed California into a magnet for risk-takers.

In fact, they took enormous risks just getting to the gold fields in the first place.

California's loosely divided into three,

a low range of mountains along the Pacific Coast,

a wide, fertile central valley

and in the east, the biggest mountain range in the state,

the Sierra Nevada.

This virtually impenetrable mountain range, was a barrier

that filtered out all but the most determined of gold seekers.

It's easy to see why.

Towering above me is Mount Whitney.

At well over two-and-a-half-miles high,

it's the tallest peak in the continental United States.

Crossing the Sierra Nevada really was a formidable task

and one that forged a pioneering spirit.

But further south, trails could be even worse.

Especially here.

Death Valley,

a 250-mile long desert,

one of the hottest places on Earth.

The thousands who flocked westward in 1849,

became famously known as the "California 49ers".

Some of them tried to shorten the route by cutting across Death Valley.

For the early pioneers who saw this landscape,

which to me is absolutely magnificent,

it must have been absolutely terrifying.

Stumbling into uncharted territory,

the immigrants wandered about for weeks in this barren waste of dried up lakes

and weird salt formations.

Once here, it was virtually impossible to escape.

This is Bad Water, the lowest point in the western hemisphere, 85 metres below sea level.

Certain times of the year you do get water here.

It floods in through some of these canyons and transforms this place into a shallow lake.

The trouble is the water can't get out, it just evaporates away leaving behind all this salt.

Just like those early pioneers, it's easy to get into these valleys

but really difficult to get out and get on to the gold fields beyond.

Death Valley is so dry because it lies in the range shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Clouds coming east from the Pacific dump their load of rain as they pass over the cold mountain heights,

leaving the air dry and clear here on the other side.

The stranded pioneers only just made it across, having killed their oxen for food

and burned their wagons to cure the meat.

It's legendary adventures like this that became woven into the Californian risk-taking psyche.

Bodie Ghost Town.

Elevation - 2,500 metres.

Population - zero.

This is what greeted many who came to make their fortune.

A harsh mining town in the middle of a mountain wilderness.

Prospectors the world over were blinded by the slim possibility of making a better life from gold.

For many, though, this is what lay in wait.

A tough life in bitter isolation.

In the year following Marshall's discovery, 100,000 so-called 49ers

poured into California

and towns like these sprung up throughout the state.

It was here that these young ambitious men came

to gamble with their futures

and although hopes were high, the odds were stacked against them.

You may think James Marshall was a lucky man, but he wasn't.

He was just one of many for whom gold would bring nothing but broken dreams.

He didn't own the land where he made his discovery,

and his sawmill went down the pan as soon as all the able-bodied men

were dazzled with the hunt for gold.

Although the chances of success were small, miners went to any lengths.

Many who came risked everything and ended up with nothing.

On my journey, it's becoming clear to me how the rush for gold

laid the foundation for a risk-taking culture.

Thanks to the geology of California, the ultimate home of the American dream was born.

If you took a chance, the world could be yours for the taking.

With the construction of the Trans-Continental Railway in 1869,

it was suddenly no longer a five-month ordeal to get here.

And as if gold hadn't drawn enough risk-takers to California,

there was another geological jackpot to pull them in.

I'm on Highway 150 near Ojai, Santa Barbara.

Right here on the roadside, this black gooey stuff is oozing out of the hillside.

It's a naturally occurring tar and it's a sign that beneath these rocks

lies another fortune-spinner, black gold.

Kern County in the Central Valley

sits on top of one of the largest oil fields in California.

The whole landscape here has been completely transformed into a vast sea of oil wells.

The scale of this is absolutely immense.

There's something like 50,000 oil wells here.

To give you an idea of how massive the oil field must be underground,

they pump out about 220 million barrels of oil every year here.

But there's still 3.5 billion barrels left in the ground.

The crude oil here formed from plankton that lived

on the surface of the ocean over six million years ago.

As they died, they settled to the ocean floor.

They were covered with a layer of mud, eventually breaking down into compounds of hydrogen and carbon,

the building blocks for fuels and plastics.

The whole of Central California is one enormous valley,

the San Joaquin Valley, and its formation

is key to how the oil got here in the first place.

This area used to be a huge section of seabed that's been lifted up by geological forces.

As it was raised up, this sand and silt layer that contained the oil

was bent and contorted,

trapping the oil and leaving it down in the ground ready to be tapped.

So the richest land-based oil wells in the United States were formed, thanks to the forces of geology.

Just like the influx of the 49ers of the gold rush,

thousands poured into the state in search of their own gushers.

For some, it would become a personal passport to instant wealth.

With all that oil and the gold before it, this state had

an ingrained mentality of commercial risk taking and speculation.

Huge numbers of money-minded entrepreneurs poured in, selling everything from Levis jeans to cars.

New industries are often regarded as risky because

they're trying to find a footing in an uncertain area of commerce.

But in California, cutting-edge ideas were embraced.

This made it the perfect place for new ways of making money, like the movies.

People say film-makers came here because of the great weather and fabulous locations.

I'm sure there's something in that but its not the only state with good weather.

Just as important is the bedrock of innovation.

A culture that was open and hungry for new ideas, new industries and creativity.

The natural place for an upstart industry like film.

That culture continues today.

Silicone Valley is the largest concentration of high technology in the United States.

Just like the gold, the oil and the movies,

it's no surprise that this 20th-century industry emerged in California.

New hi-tech ventures can be just as risky.

Think back to the collapse of the dotcom movement.

But if you are successful, the rewards can be huge.

In California, you really can turn up with nothing and become a self-made millionaire.

Thousands have done just that.

It's no surprise Californians are so positive and have this "who dares wins" attitude.

But what I want to know is whether this explains why they're prepared to live with geological peril?

To dig deeper, I'm heading back to San Francisco.

Jutting out into a natural harbour,

you'd think there couldn't be a better place to build a city.

The early settlers probably thought that too.

At first sight, you get that same thrill of excitement that must have greeted the immigrants.

When the first miners came running through the streets in 1848

with bags full of gold, there were only 800 residents.

Within two years, there were over 30 times as many.

Today, San Francisco has all the hallmarks of the liberal,

open-mindedness that grew out of those early gold rush days.

Japantown, Chinatown, Russian Hill and the Italian Quarter,

they all reflect the world-wide influence of the gold rush.

These streets look great in Hollywood car chases,

but I'm amazed that they even considered building a grid system on such steep slopes,

let alone a network of cable cars.

In a culture where anything is supposed to be possible,

this must have seemed like a triumph over nature

and all that troublesome topography.

But Mother Earth has dealt a cruel blow to San Francisco.

All 43 of her hills and 800,000 residents

lie right across the most geologically unstable zone in California.

The San Andreas Fault.

In 1906, a colossal earthquake tore through San Francisco.

The city was almost completely destroyed, leaving over half the population homeless

and at least 3,000 dead.

Today, inhabitants are still prepared to take huge risks

even though the warning signs are right under their noses.

Just south of San Francisco, in Hollister, you can see

what happens when a fault cuts right under people's homes.

If you take this wall here, there's a lot of cracks in it,

there's one running across here, there's one down here, right across.

Here's another one, that's a big one, and the whole thing gets twisted around and also bent down.

In fact there's a steep slope in the garden where the fault line passes through and goes off,

crosses the pathway and it continues on to the side of the road.

At the side of the road, the kerbstone is offset.

There's a little crack in the Tarmac which continues off.

If I don't get killed here,

over in the old kerbstone,

there's a bend and this is all broken,

the fault crosses the park, there's that gentle slope.

It literally slices the neighbourhood in two.

The Earth's surface is covered in giant plates which float around on a plastic-y interior.

The whole of California is one big collision zone where two of the plates meet.

The San Andreas Fault carves right through California

where the Pacific plate is grinding past the North American plate.

Several kilometres beneath my feet, huge stresses are building up.

As the enormous pressure builds up as the two plates try to move,

eventually the rocks can't take it any more.

Friction is overcome and the two plates move and slip past each other,

and that's what radiates out massive seismic waves,

the violent shaking that we feel during an earthquake.

San Francisco is rocked regularly by terrifying earthquakes.

One of the worst was in October 1989.

At 5.04pm, there was a huge earthquake at Loma Prieta near Santa Cruz.

The quake killed 63 and injured nearly 4,000.

I'm close to the spot where a double-decker highway, Interstate 880, once stood.

It wasn't designed to withstand the huge stresses

created by the buckling and shaking earth, and it collapsed.

If it wasn't for the fact that there was a World Series baseball game on TV,

it would have been gridlocked with rush-hour traffic when the earthquake struck.

Even so, 42 people were killed

when the upper concrete tier collapsed down on the lower one,

crushing the vehicles.

So why are people in California prepared to live with this kind of geological threat?

Is this all down to a culture of risk-taking or is something more subtle going on?

Someone who's been looking into these attitudes is psychologist, Doctor Christine Rodriguez.

Well, the California culture has had a risky streak since 1849 with the advent of the gold rush.

But this risk taking culture does not really have anything to do with

the riskiness of the physical environment here.

There's earthquake risk, there's wildfire hazard risk,

there's landslides, there's floods, there's droughts, you name it.

But that does not have an impact on a culture so much, because people's perception of risk is very faulty.

People tend to not understand probabilities very well.

That's what keeps Las Vegas in business.

You know, you talk to people about what is their retirement plans

and they'll say, "I'm counting on winning the lottery".

The chance is less than being struck by lightning in the state of California,

but a lot of people really think of that as their retirement plans.

How do people in California feel about earthquakes? Do they accept there's a risk there?

They do accept them, but most of the time people just tune it out.

They want to live here and earthquakes come with the package

and they just would rather not think about it.

It's a denial mechanism and people use denial mechanisms

in many parts of their life, to avoid facing things that are unpleasant.

Like a conflict with their boss or with their children.

We tune out the risk that we're taking getting into our car to drive to work,

we just as soon not think about it.

But sometimes that nervousness about the environment is still there, so what we'll do is displace it.

Everybody in California seems very, very concerned about tornadoes in Oklahoma

or hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.

When I was visiting Puerto Rico, the big thing there,

instead of focusing on their earthquake hazard and on their hurricane hazard,

they were fascinated with earthquakes in California.

So there's a basic human trait to misjudge risk.

-But this is particularly bad when you live in such a perilous environment.

-Yes.

We have so many risks perceived inaccurately.

There's undeniably a history of risk-taking here, when it comes to making money and fortune seeking.

But when it comes to geological disasters,

it seems like Californians aren't risk-takers after all.

It's more that they avoid thinking rationally about the odds in the first place.

I don't think it's unique to Californians.

With natural disasters, our mind plays all sorts of tricks on us.

We avoid thinking about life's dangers in order to cope with them.

We bury our heads in the sand and we don't really realise that we're doing it.

Unfortunately this human trait may leave many Californians unprotected

from the real sources of danger.

You'd think that with such a catalogue of disasters behind them,

Californians would be more prepared for catastrophe.

Instead they seem to carry on as normal.

Somehow the lessons of history have been ignored.

This is the San Francisquito Canyon, site of one of California's worst catastrophes.

Built in the 1920s by engineer William Mullholland,

the St Francis Dam was one of several crucial water supplies for Los Angeles, further south.

But on the 12th March 1928, the dam gave way.

A ten-storey wall of water surged towards the Pacific, wiping out everything in its path.

The flood destroyed 1,200 homes, and over 500 lives were lost.

A disaster second only to the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

It's incredibly eerie to revisit the site of such a devastating disaster.

It's also quite difficult to know what goes where, it's a bit of a jigsaw here.

I guess one side of the dam was over there and it swings over

where we are and goes to the other side in the shadowy ravine there.

These massive concrete blocks are all that's left of the dam.

The remains were blasted away with dynamite, almost as if to erase the memory of it forever.

These huge chunks are all that's left of the front of the dam.

The side facing downstream away from the reservoir,

was built of a series of concrete steps, and here they are lying on their side like giant tombstones.

To find the reason why the dam failed, you have to clamber up

above the dam site itself, onto the steep sides of the ravine.

This is probably the spot where the dam gave way.

You can see why when you look at the rock.

This is a rock called schist which is made up of lots of little slippery layers -

you can see them glinting in the sun.

This whole slope is made of those same slippery layers which are pointing down slope.

They probably just gave way and took the dam with it.

So with weak layers of rock forming the dam's eastern foundation, it's not surprising it gave way.

The steep valley sides were in fact a result of an ancient mega landslide,

so the entire mountain was a vast mound of rubble.

The valley that Mullholland thought was so ideal for a dam,

was because of those weak rocks underfoot, riddled with landslides.

You can see them all around here disfiguring the grassy slopes.

Mullholland accepted all the blame for the disaster, telling the coroner that he envied the dead.

He resigned and seven years later he died a virtual recluse.

'The tragic story of the dam disaster should have been a warning, that much of the rock in California

'is unstable and susceptible to devastating landslides.'

But it seems to have gone unheeded.

Similar mistakes have been made to this day, right next to people's homes.

I'm travelling along the Pacific Coast Highway, north of Los Angeles.

Landslides happen somewhere along this stretch of coast every few years.

But it doesn't seem to stop people living here.

With the Californian population ever increasing,

more and more people are spreading along the coast.

Competition for a piece of the idyllic Californian lifestyle is driving people into the danger zone.

Steep slopes made of weak sedimentary rock are found all over California.

I'm standing on a mountain of it, 200 metres of sand, silt and gravel.

Down there is La Conchita.

Sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean

and steep walls of crumbly sedimentary rock,

La Conchita had been a disaster waiting to happen.

'Early in 2005, the Californian coastline endured a record-breaking winter storm.'

It rained continuously for five days so that the ground became completely saturated with water.

One January afternoon, the hills above La Conchita suddenly gave way.

Nearly half a million tons of debris slid down the mountainside, ploughing into the community below.

Ten people were buried alive as a wall of mud engulfed their homes.

Virginia Costas watched from her upstairs window as the landslip careered towards her home.

I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a train but it was much too loud to be the train.

So I looked out my window and that's when I saw just the mountain moving

with fences and treetops and bushes and garage doors.

The street was covered. So it hit the top-storey windows of my home.

Wow! And there's crosses and things like that, so I guess houses under there? I mean, what's the story?

Houses are buried, people were buried, ten fatalities.

-Ten?

-The emergency workers lived in my home for a week.

What they dug out were crayon books and Halloween costumes and the things of daily life.

I don't know if you were aware of the story of the Wallet family,

but they were staying here temporarily with my friend Charlie

who owned the house across the street.

He lived in his bus temporarily to give them a place to stay.

His wife and three children were in the house and he went down to the store.

That's when it occurred at 1.30 in the afternoon.

They were walking up the street just like you and I just walked up, when the hill let go

-and buried his children and his wife.

-So he saw the thing come down?

-He saw it bury all five houses.

Charlie lost his life and his friend lost his family, his wife and his three children.

On this street we all had birthdays, December one, two and three.

Charlie's was the first.

Maybe it's understandable that after nearly a century,

people forget about historical events like the San Francis Dam disaster.

But here in La Conchita, there had been a much more recent warning.

The hillside had already plummeted into the town ten years earlier, burying nine homes.

Miraculously no-one was killed.

Despite this near-miss, people went on living in a danger zone.

My father lives here full-time.

He wanted to come back to the house.

He helped me repair it and expects to be here

with the risks. He thinks it's worth it.

Others have sold because Los Angeles commuters would like a beach house

and have purchased the properties knowing the risks.

-So this is still a place that people want to buy?

-Oh, yes.

-Even this street?

The house next door to me was sold three months after the slide, in March. The slide was January.

They know they're buying a house at the base of a landslide zone?

Correct. But just go up ten minutes up the road

and fixer-uppers started a million dollars with a view like this.

Gosh! It's got an amazing hold on people, this place, hasn't it?

It does. It does, you stay here any longer it'll hold you too.

So why do people cling to their homes in the face of certain danger?

Somehow lessons from history about landslides seem to have been forgotten.

Dr Susanna Hoffman is an anthropologist who's found similar stories all over the state.

California in a funny way has been a cutting-edge of coastalisation.

Tons of people moving to the coast for good life,

the view, for the recreational activities.

Part of the good life has also lead to this incredible, unbridled development

in which any private piece of land could suddenly become 25 lots or 300 lots. People will move into it.

It's a cultural illusion that we can have good life and there is no consequence.

There's no price, there's no risk here.

In La Conchita, we've had these repeated landslide disasters

but people still want to live there, why is that?

Actually, it's one of the hardest things to understand.

We call it "place attachment".

In disasters, people repeatedly go back to where it was before,

even if there's extent danger and they know it's going to happen again

or they're aware that... it's very likely.

So now also as well as place attachment, you get the fact

that it's somebody else's responsibility to make everybody safe.

The government or somebody should do something about it.

But it's becoming increasingly clear that people have to take

some responsibility for the acknowledgement of the extent dangers around them.

Society has to understand that they can't put up a wall,

they can't change a beach, they can't protect against the waves.

There's no physical solution to disasters, the solutions are social.

Instead of learning from repeated disasters and moving away, people prefer to live with the risks.

They look for a safety net to protect them.

But I'm not convinced it's a battle you can ever win when you're dealing with mother nature.

I can't deny that California is breathtakingly beautiful.

The views from the mountains down onto the Los Angeles basin are world-famous.

People are prepared to pay any price for a house on the hilltop.

But is it a price worth paying?

If earthquakes and landslides aren't bad enough,

there's another catastrophe just waiting to sweep over these hills.

In October 2003, a fire exploded into life in Southern California.

Freak conditions had coincided to create a towering firestorm

that stretched from LA to the Mexican border.

It was the worst wildfire in California's history.

Nearly 4,000 homes were destroyed and 24 people lost their lives.

Houses are continuing to be built in areas where raging fires are a dead certainty.

They're inevitable because here, the environment, the landscape,

the climate, the vegetation is primed for them.

The steep slopes of Southern California's mountain ranges

form an ideal habitat for highly flammable brush vegetation called chaparral plants.

There's some common ones here.

This one is called chamise, it's the most abundant and flammable plant in Southern California.

Dotted around here is a lot of sage brush.

The unique thing about them isn't just that they've adapted well to a hot Mediterranean climate,

it's that over thousands and thousands of years they've evolved to live within

and benefit from a good fire.

They actually require it to stay healthy.

Chaparral plants contain oils and resins that actually promote fires,

and most contain seeds that won't germinate until after a fire.

Plants like these have evolved so that they're not destroyed by the flames.

Many of them have a large base or root crown like this.

The top of the plant burns but the root survives.

Within weeks, their crown has started to sprout and grow again,

and after about a year or so, it could be up to four feet tall.

South facing slopes become extremely hot and dry because they face directly into the sun.

As hot air rises, it preheats the vegetation above so the fires spread even faster.

The steep terrain accelerates the fires in other ways too.

Canyons funnel air currents and ridges increase the wind speed flowing over them.

Each year, the hot desert Santa Anna wind

acts like giant bellows, blowing westwards directly towards people's homes.

In 2003, they fanned the inferno into a ten-metre wall of flames,

blasting them faster than cars could drive to get away.

14,000 fire-fighters were called in from across the USA.

The fire raged for days.

Only when it reached the sea did it finally run out of fuel.

So why do people here continue to build in the fire belts?

Author Mike Davis has observed some very interesting attitudes.

People tend to have a schizophrenic attitude toward the landscape.

They regard the landscape as a benign, sunny, giving environment,

until something happens.

And then people tend to have an overreaction, a paranoia.

So here you have people living in an absolutely controlled environment.

Every aspect of their environment has been carefully planned and regulated and it's wholly artificial.

But right next to them is the chaparral covered hills.

You can live in a landscape like this for 30, 40, even 50 years before it burns,

but when it does burn you get catastrophic fires.

So the view from the backyard is looking at the equivalent of a lake full of gasoline or crude oil.

But it has the power to sweep away this entire development.

Are people in these communities surprised when wildfires burst up in their midst?

Well, probably with the exception of a few old-timers most people are hysterical.

They are always searching for anyone to blame.

Not in the location of the housing or the ecosystem. They want to see the hand of an arsonist

lurking in the trees or the bush, the maniac with his lighter in his hands.

Although it's almost immaterial whether there's an arsonist or not.

Given enough fuel mass, enough unburned chaparral, wildfire happens.

That's the message the landscape's trying to tell the suburbs.

It seems like those communities have to be told, "You can't do that."

But that's very much against the Californian mindset.

Well, of course it is.

Or rather it's against the culture of people who still want to imagine

they're living on the Jacksonian frontier, that they have this personal freedom

to ride their motorbikes or drive their four-wheel drives, to live in big homes.

Everything about this form of settlement is contradictory

and ironic and in my way of thinking, ultimately unsustainable.

After a while, what you end up with are dead bodies as a result of this.

It seems staggering to me that people have ignored these lessons for over 100 years.

Today, seven million people live amongst the chaparral.

The lure of somewhere beautiful is simply too tempting.

But if we can blame people, not nature, the threat seems somehow more controllable.

FLICKS THROUGH RADIO STATIONS

With over 500 miles of freeways in LA

you can't go anywhere without a car, which means only one thing.

HORNS TOOT

Heading back to LA, you realise why so many people head for the hills.

The traffic is terrible.

You have to admire the positive attitude of the people here.

But sometimes it's almost as if they feel they're invincible,

and there are signs of this way of thinking all over the place.

If building homes in a fire belt is an act of faith, then take a look at this.

This cathedral is built almost entirely of glass but it sits,

just like the rest of LA, alongside one of the world's most dangerous earthquake zones.

Nothing can really quite prepare you for this dazzling piece of religion turned showbiz.

Built in the 1980s, the Crystal Cathedral towers 12 storeys high

and is made from 12,000 glass panes.

Regardless of what you think about churches and religion,

there's no getting away from the fact that this is incredibly impressive.

I'm still not sure I'd rather be standing here in a big quake, though.

Remarkably, according to the cathedral's founder,

Reverend Robert Schuler, it's designed to be earthquake-proof.

The world's leading consultant on builders and architects

when it comes to earthquake-proofing structures

is a Christian, and he's been my guest here.

He said, "If you know an earthquake is coming, let me tell ya, run into the cathedral."

-That's courtesy.

-That's the safest building in all of California, barring none.

That symbolises what, at the heart, a true Christian should become.

The prayer is, "Lord, make my life a mirror to reflect your love to all I meet,

"and a window for your light to shine through."

So can you, through prayer, avert natural disaster?

-Is that possible?

-I don't really...

I can't say yes, but I'm not sure that that's the right answer.

But all I can say is I went through disaster when our farm home was the centre of a tornado.

We escaped with our lives but everything, all of the animals,

all of the buildings, all of the crops in the fields were sucked up and we never saw a hair of it again.

And you never look at what you've lost.

-You always look at what you have left.

-It's that positive outlook.

Absolutely. You know, what's the option? What's the alternative?

Absolutely. I just wonder if people in Los Angeles that have very strong Christian beliefs,

I'm curious as to whether they're praying against earthquakes or what?

Oh, I don't know. I never pray against earthquakes because I have no control over them.

And I don't think God's in the business of creating them and launching them.

If he is, that's his business, and I'm not gonna try to defend him.

At first glance this would seem to be the ultimate image of Californian trust in God.

It's designed to withstand a major seismic shake. But to be honest,

if you were at all worried about earthquakes,

you wouldn't choose to build everything in glass.

Instead, this seems to cry out a very different kind of statement.

It seems to shout out a triumphal message of invulnerability,

a confident defiance in the face of disaster.

'To me, it does seem like a brazen symbol of the Californian belief that man can conquer nature.'

Maybe he can.

But time will tell.

For the end of my journey, I'm heading back to the mother of all make-believe,

home of the disaster movie itself - Hollywood.

In my travels, I've come across plenty of different ways in which

people escape from the reality of geological disasters.

They misjudge the odds, they forget history all too quickly, they blame humans for natural occurrences.

But I have to say that there's something weird

about escaping the reality of geological disasters through the Hollywood fantasy of disasters.

Here at Universal Studios, they've actually turned the whole disaster-movie experience

into a ride which you can relive again and again.

'I'm meeting up with James Ulmer, author and movie journalist,

'who knows all about the blurring of fact and fiction on the silver screen.'

Universal fantasy - this is what we do.

-ANNOUNCER:

-'We're taking you into the heart of this set,

'stopping the train to allow you to take some amazing pictures.

'Have your cameras ready.'

Why is Hollywood fascinated by the disaster movie?

Here we are at the War Of The Worlds set.

Tom Cruise in this movie plays a character

who is an emotional cripple, OK? Who is healed by disaster, OK?

And the only way he can rescue his family is to go through disaster and come out the other end.

Americans like to see that because we are so desensitised to everything around us,

especially in California, where we all go around in SUVs.

We amputate our legs because we drive a car, the SUVs are like huge tanks.

We celebrate the whole idea of...

being so desensitised to the world.

It's not that the disaster films make us less sensitive.

Oh, God, no. The movies follow life.

I don't think they push us toward anything.

But I think they do celebrate the fact that we're cutting ourselves off

and the only way that we can feel anything is to be tilted in a tram and going into the pond.

He's a bit tamer these days, I think.

Yeah, Plexiglas.

Plexiglas.

One of the things about disaster films is that no matter how big the disaster and how awful it is,

society pulls together in the end.

So it creates social cohesion.

Absolutely. If you talk to people who lived through the riots in Los Angeles,

which were in 1994, you'd think, "Oh, my God, it was horrible.

"There were floods, fires, people were burning down the buildings."

Most of the people who lived through that, and I was one of them, it was our favourite time to be in LA.

It was the only time where people drew together

and found a common cause and could really relate to each other on a individual basis.

The idea that, you know, there's a whole industry built around this

is something that I think just helps us cope with it.

RUMBLING

What was that? You're very calm.

-I am...

-You seem very calm.

-This is what I mean. I'm completely jaded to this.

-You're used to this, is it, in California?

In California, unless you have...

That was a 4.2 earthquake. Unless you have a six-point earthquake, you know, I give a seismic yawn.

So is it only really movies that make Californians sit up and take notice?

Maybe the land of make-believe is the only way they can acknowledge the risks around them.

At least, until the next catastrophe.

The geology, gold and then the oil, has shaped the Californian mindset,

which, I have to say, I really admire.

It's free thinking, optimistic and adventurous.

Because of the Californian geology, you can live the American dream.

If you're successful, you can have whatever you want.

But it seems to me that it's just a cultural illusion.

Because that same geology can turn the dream into a nightmare.

It's the same story all round the Pacific Rim.

If you can't suffer the downsides, you can't enjoy the benefits.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2006

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