I feel badly for all of you.

Outsiders talk about earthquakes and ask people in Southern California how they can live with the threat … and someday (tomorrow? next year? 50 years from now?), when that 8-point-something quake pops on the San Andreas Fault, it will, in fact, be a disaster of biblical proportions.

But for now, the biggest threat, the most overriding year-after-year concern in greater Los Angeles is wildfires.

By all accounts, this season’s fires, running riot right now, are wreaking destruction as significant as any in my lifetime.

An earthquake comes, it shakes for 10 seconds, and it’s over, for better or worse.

Wildfires fill much of the urban mass of a five-county area with a lingering, gnawing dread.

I’ve been through lots of these. Sometimes far too up-close and personal. At least twice, during the three decades I lived in the Inland Empire, there was a reasonable chance my house would go up in flames. In 1980, when the Panorama Fire burned down huge swaths of San Bernardino and was only a mile or so north of my house in Highland … and in 2003 when the Old Fire ravaged several mountain communities and then ate its way east along the foothills above San Bernardino and jumped Route 330 to East Highland, where I then lived, and when the flames were, again, no more than a mile from where my family lived.

Just last year, lingering fires in the mountains of San Bernardino turned the air almost unbreathable for a week, in the city, below, and deposited ash throughout the region.

This fire seems to be focused, so far, on the northern end of the San Fernando Valley and an area around Yorba Linda — where densely inhabited areas meet dry brush and scrubland and the Santa Ana-wind driven flames come leaping down the hills.

I am safely in Hong Kong, where the biggest weather concerns this time of year are about whether it will get too cold to wear shorts and T-shirts … and if the smog from the mainland will get a little too thick for comfort. (Typhoons are a big issue here, but in the summer.) I can read about the fires, but I can only empathize.

Certainly, I know the drill. The stir of the fall breeze, the spike in temperature, the sight of brown hills and all the dead vegetation clinging to them, the hot, dry air whipping into a frenzy, the acrid scent of smoke — and then the vigil of tracking, watching, guestimating where the flames will go and the grim calculus of figuring out whether that evacuation order is something you ought to heed.

Earthquakes? Sure, they can set your heart pounding at a moment’s notice.

But fire … that’s the annual disaster in SoCal, and the one that can mean days, weeks even, of a sort of choking, sickening dread. Godspeed, all of you. My condolences to those affected, and my best wishes that the Inland Empire gets to sit out this round of annual disaster.