12 State Prisoners on Way to Battle Fire Hurt in Truck Crash

A dozen state prisoners were injured Friday afternoon--two of them seriously when a truck overturned in the Saugus area while carrying them to fight a brush fire, the California Highway Patrol reported.

In the meantime, two potentially dangerous Southern California blazes were contained and the battles against larger fires to the north entered what officials hoped were their final stages.

The CHP said the Los Angeles County firefighter driving the truck told officers he lost his brakes while heading south on San Francisquito Road and attempted to slow the vehicle by steering up a side slope.

The driver, identified by a county fire spokesman only as S. Lawrence, was not injured. But his 12 passengers were, the CHP said. All were inmates of a San Francisquito Canyon fire camp.

Taken Out by Copters

Los Angeles County sheriff’s and Fire Department helicopters transported the injured to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia and Holy Cross Hospital in Mission Hills for treatment. Only one man was hospitalized. He reportedly had abdominal injuries.

It was believed the men had been on their way to help mop up the 300-acre brush fire that forced the temporary evacuation of a mobile home park near Newhall on Thursday.

In the Idyllwild area of Riverside County’s San Jacinto Mountains, the U.S. Forest Service said it had a line around a 200 acre timber fire east of Lake Hemet and expected full control by 6 p.m. today.

That lightning-caused fire had forced the evacuation of 400 Girl Scouts from Camp Joe Scherman late Thursday. A forest service spokeswoman said the young campers were simply sent home to the San Diego area for the weekend. Residents of about 200 cabins in the Trail’s End sector were allowed to return home. No structures were damaged.

San Bernardino National Forest Chief Dispatcher Albert Solorio said that if the fire had not been stopped on Friday, it could have spread through the wilderness area and do greater damage than the recent Cabazon blaze, which blackened 20,000 acres near Palm Springs.

Devil’s Canyon Fire

Also contained late Friday was the initially worrisome Devil’s Canyon fire in a remote area of the Angeles National Forest, 12 miles north of Monrovia.

Because of the almost perpendicular terrain and general inaccessibility of that region of the San Gabriel Mountains, the smoldering 35-acre fire was fought mostly from the air by Air National Guardsmen.

The small contingent of ground troops who did manage to get into the fire discovered that the blaze had started from an errant campfire, a forest service information officer said.

The huge Ventura-Santa Barbara counties arson fire that raged over 95,000 acres and threatened both Ojai and Carpinteria was expected to be fully contained Sunday morning. Heavy backfiring was done by crews on Friday.

A lightning storm made several hundred strikes in the hills near Bishop on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, but crews quickly stamped out small fires before they could become big ones.

With the army of firefighters battling more than 400 wildfires throughout several Western states grown to more than 16,000--the largest number in the 30 years records have been kept--the Pentagon announced in Washington that 650 Army and Air National Guard members had been thrown into the effort.

Troops on Alert

In addition, the 6th Army had 1,000 troops on alert in the event they were needed.

Bill Bishop of the Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Ida., said the fatigue factor among fire crews after two weeks of raging fires was high. He observed that the weather pattern was favoring the crews for the time being, but “we have a long fire season ahead of us.”

U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block said the “outlook continues to be grim.”

In the Los Gatos area south of San Jose, most of the 4,500 people evacuated from the path of the arson-set Lexington Reservoir blaze were allowed to return to their homes along the ridges on the east side of California 17. The fire was said to be 60% contained after destroying at least 60 homes and cabins and burning nearly 14,000 acres of brush.

Flaming blobs of a napalm-like substance were dropped from a helicopter to start a backfire that prevented the main blaze from reaching radio and television towers on Mt. Loma Prieta.

South of Big Sur in Monterey County, the same damp, cool weather that was keeping the Rat Creek and Gorda fires from spreading was bringing fog that made it hard for 1,700 firefighters to set backfires necessary to rein them in. Those fires, with a third extinguished early in the week, had destroyed 23,600 acres and burned at least two homes.

To the east, also in Monterey County, another 1,125 firefighters still struggled in fog and drizzle to contain the 38,000-acre Jolon fire near King City.

Only one fire remained out of control in northern Nevada, where 40 lightning-caused blazes had been rampaging for a week across 300,000 acres.