THREE kilometres away, as seen through Bob Weirich's binoculars from the deck of his house in the back country north-east of San Diego, the flames danced, leered and lurched in the darkness, like some otherworldly cinematic effect.

The fire enveloped a ridge eight kilometres wide, an inferno with arms reaching 50-70 metres into the air. The vision was hellish and the air was fraught, laden with smoke, ash and glowing embers, driven forward at 120kmh.

"The wind was blowing so hard, it was almost indescribable," Mr Weirich said. "It was frightening, absolutely frightening. I was on the fire department for 30 years and I've never felt anything like that."

It was 4.30am, Monday. Then the power went out.

The experience of Mr Weirich and his wife, Patty van Wolvelaere, was told thousands of times over this week as southern California was seared by dozens of fast-moving and uncontrollable bushfires, stretching from north of Los Angeles to the Mexican border. They obliterated 1845 square kilometres of wilderness and suburbia, forcing as many as 300,000 people from their homes, causing at least nine deaths, destroying 1775 homes and leaving a damages bill that will exceed $US1 billion ($1.1 million).

For the best part of three days, no act of man could stop them: dense smoke and powerful, flukey winds kept helicopters and aerial water-tankers grounded. Witnesses told of embers blown through the air at 80kmh. TV images and photographs showed firemen dwarfed and puny before the walls of flame. In the one-sided, ages-old contest between man and nature, the tables were comprehensively turned.

"There are walls of flame 150-200 feet [46 metres-61 metres] high," said the Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders. "We can't let firefighters in front of it."

The fires have reignited arguments about global climate change, individual responsibility, and the question first posed 11 years ago: should Malibu burn?

The arguments will last far longer than the fires. By late on Thursday - five days after they began - authorities in San Diego felt confident enough to allow evacuated residents to return home.

With the two San Diego fires slowing, the most problematic was further north, in Orange County, where 1100 firemen and a fleet of 10 helicopters and four aerial tankers were trying to protect an affluent gated community of 750 homes. That fire was deliberately lit last Sunday evening, police say.

The prevailing attitude to arson in a week like this was illustrated in several ways. A reward of $US150,000 has been offered to catch the Orange County firestarter, while in the Los Angeles suburb of San Bernardino, police shot dead a suspected arsonist after he tried to flee in his car and rammed a police vehicle. Another man was being held on bail of $US750,000 after he was allegedly seen trying to start a fire near Lake Arrowhead, where 113 homes had already turned to ash.

The common element to the flames that drove out the celebrity residents of the Serra Retreat estate in Malibu's Sweetwater Canyon, home to Mel Gibson and Olivia Newton John, on Sunday morning and confronted Mr Weirich and Ms Wolvelaere less than 24 hours later was the Santa Ana wind.

The Santa Anas are the fierce, fabled winds of LA literature, born in the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah, and blown south-west over the Mojave Desert and through the passes and canyons of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains. They make the place hot again when summer is more than a month past.

"I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too," Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. "We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks … My only neighbour would not come out for days, and her husband roamed the place with a machete."

The Santa Anas absorb moisture and drive humidity levels down to the single digits. By comparison, the Mojave Desert's humidity level never drops below 25 per cent.

Raymond Chandler introduced them as "those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

And it did. Los Angeles and Southern California are in the grip of the worst drought in a century. Paradoxically, the open country, with its dramatic vistas of wind-funnelling mountains and canyons, is still carrying the dense, flammable undergrowth that flourished after the record-breaking winter rains of 2004-05.

"Southern California is an anomaly when it comes to wildfires," said Jon Keeley, a research ecologist at the University of California in Los Angeles. "We have the worst fire weather conditions of any part of the country, perhaps any part of the world."

The Los Angeles metropolitan area of 20 million people has spread deep and wide into this terrain; the Verdugos, the Hollywood Hills, the San Gabriels, the Santa Monicas and the San Bernardinos are all ribboned with line after line of houses. The home Mr Weirich built in 1981 is on a ridge, in the foothills of the Laguna Mountains.

Apart from the threat of the odd earthquake, the toll for being part of such dramatic topography is exacted as often as two or three times a decade.

Some of the same houses that were burned to the ground this week in San Diego County were levelled by another huge fire almost exactly four years ago. It claimed 23 lives and 2232 houses.

The very real trauma of evacuation and the emotional and financial devastation of a fire-destroyed house tend to make the longer view almost irrelevant. It can be said, however, that the residents of the 10th-largest city in the US can hold themselves at least a little responsible for the scope of this week's events.

Within months of the 2004 fire, San Diego city and county residents were asked to vote for a 2½ per cent sales tax increase on hotel rooms. The rise was budgeted to raise $US8 million, which would be spent on the short-handed and ill-equipped city fire department, and other emergency services. The vote failed.

"There was a lot of disappointment," said Ms van Wolvelaere, a member of the fire department since the early 1980s. In April 2006, Jeff Bowman, the highly regarded chief of the department resigned, citing the city's failure to provide financial support.

There was also the issue of the location of houses and estates in known firetraps. "We see development that's not compatible with the fire-prone nature of the environment," Dr Keeley said. "People have the belief in the West that people should be able to live wherever they want to live. In the prevailing climate, that attitude may have to change."

That there is change in the climate is part of the larger issue.

Tony Boatner, a fire operations chief, said the fire season in the west, now in its seventh year of drought, has been extended by more than two months, with seven of the worst 10 fire seasons in history happening since 1999.

The explanation, says Terry Tamminen, the former head of the Californian Environmental Protection Agency, is simple. A warming climate means mountain snowpacks melt earlier, while periods of extreme heat are extended. Carbon dioxide-saturated air weakens the prolific San Bernardino Mountain pine trees, leaving them unable to withstand the predations of bark beetles. Those trees die but remain upright, like "standing matchsticks", Mr Tamminen says in his new book, Lives Per Gallon.

A spark will set them off, and did, in October, 2003. Four years later, Malibu burned, and vast expanses of southern California as well.

The cost of fighting the fires may top $US100 million, while the price of repair will be above $US1 billion for an event that was an echo of many just like it, in years and decades past.

Which was why Mike Davis, author and professor of environmental and urban history at the University of California, Irvine, wondered whether it might be better to let Malibu burn, so that the history of this place, his home, might be better learned.

This time around Bob Weirich and Patty van Wolvelaere evacuated safely from their home. They were lucky. It was undamaged.