Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Wambaugh

Wambaugh isn’t doing poetry here; he’s doing cop math. The line has the blunt, procedural cadence of someone used to turning chaos into a report: 67 brush fires a year, multiply by a decade, call it “almost 700.” It’s not a statistician’s flourish so much as a novelist’s shortcut to urgency, a way to make repetition feel like inevitability. The near-round number matters: “almost 700” lands with the thud of accumulated negligence, implying a system that keeps meeting the same emergency and still treating it like an aberration.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how we narrate disaster. “Brush fires” sounds small, even quaint, until he yanks the euphemism into the real world: “incredibly dangerous,” “homes going down.” That phrasing is tellingly plain, almost tactile. “Going down” is what buildings do in war movies and riot footage; it recasts suburban fire loss as something closer to a siege than a seasonal inconvenience. He’s arguing against complacency built into language and routine: when a crisis arrives in installments, people file it under weather instead of warning.

Contextually, Wambaugh comes out of a career built on institutional close-up, where catastrophe is rarely a bolt from the blue and more often the predictable end of ignored patterns. The intent isn’t just to scare; it’s to force a moral recalculation: if it happens hundreds of times, it’s not bad luck. It’s policy, planning, and priorities catching fire.