Search for Canyon Fire Safeguards

Here and there on the burnt cliffsides of Normal Heights, where San Diego’s most destructive fire fed on fuel from overgrown brush as it raced toward houses on the rim of the canyon, the first sprouts of plants are popping up among the ashes.

But the new growth is from the same kind of plants that fueled the blaze that ravaged 102 buildings five weeks ago. So residents, firefighters and plant experts are trying to find the best way to prevent destructive brush fires in the future.

“We learned the hard way this time,” said Donna Atwater, who is replacing the shake roof of her singed home on West Mountain View Drive. “It was so overgrown, it was outrageous. I didn’t even know what it looked like down there.”

Before the fire, native chaparral and imported eucalyptus had grown high enough behind some houses to help the flames leap from cliff to cliff in strong winds. Elsewhere, fire-resistant ice plant hugged the ground, sometimes providing an effective, if unattractive, buffer zone from the flames.

In other words, the vegetation in Normal Heights canyons was typical for San Diego.

With an eye toward developing a citywide model for canyonside fire control, members of the city’s Canyon Rim Fire Prevention Task Force are trying to untangle almost as many alternatives for replanting Normal Heights as there are different kinds of vegetation. Other interested parties, from fire officials to sprinkler salesmen, are offering their advice, but there is no consensus yet.

Some residents are waiting for a mandate from the task force, which is due to report to the San Diego City Council on Oct. 16. Others, impatient to protect their homes and un-blacken their backyards, are pushing ahead--adding ice plant, removing trees, or installing sprinkler systems.

“Naturally, we’re paranoid about it,” said Nancy Smith, who invited plant experts to a meeting for residents of her block this week. “That sense carries over from the first days after the fire. You do want to feel that you’re doing something.”

But several experts say the residents’ instinctive moves may not be the best ones--and that even the task force may not be able to come up with a solution to satisfy everyone.

“After a disaster, people go off in 40 different directions . . . with a lot of assumptions that aren’t borne out by sober examination of the facts,” said Wayne Tyson, a native vegetation advocate and former city park planner who said he drafted a canyonside fire prevention plan a decade ago. “It’s up to the intelligence and wisdom of the people in charge to separate the facts from the opinions.”

Mitch Beauchamp, who heads the task force subcommittee on shrublands management, says it’s a fact that either canyonside residents or city officials are going to have to be responsible for keeping the growth of brush under control in the future.

Of the residents, he said, “You have to tie a rope to yourself and walk down there. Or hire someone to do it.” But he added that only the city has the resources and organization to implement a uniform plan for the canyonsides.

Beauchamp, a botanical consultant and National City planning commissioner, also wants the San Diego Fire Department to institute a controlled burning program on the slopes, as is done in thinly populated areas of Los Angeles County, among other places.

But Fire Department officials say controlled burning is dangerous with houses so close.

Officials are concerned that if residents let the natural vegetation grow back, they will fail to keep it trimmed below the 18-inch height the Fire Department recommends. “This (trimming) is upmost in everyone’s minds right now,” said Fire Department spokesman Mel Young. “In a couple years it will fade away. That’s just the way people are . . . they don’t want to go in every year and trim the rascal back.”

Fire officials recommend that residents put in ice plant because its high water content can slow flames and lower a fire’s temperature. But several experts say a hot fire fueled by other sources can jump fields of ice plant, as the fire in Normal Heights often did. Excessive ice plant planting can also cause canyonside erosion.

“Many people would be very happy to plant ice plant all over the canyon,” said Patrick O’Connor, a landscape architect recruited by the San Diego chapter of the American Institute of Architects to help draft a plan for rebuilding and relandscaping the neighborhood. “I don’t think something like that is going to contribute to the image of Normal Heights . . . . The idea is to have the canyon revegetate in its natural state.”

The architects’ group was the first to distribute written proposals to residents after the fire, and many residents have been following the group’s recommendations in the absence of other comprehensive advice. Like the city Planning Department and the Fire Department, the architects suggested examining seedbeds to see what will grow back, clearing dead brush, using ice plant close to houses, and keeping all plants trimmed for at least 70 to 100 feet behind houses to create buffer zones with limited fuel for fires.

But O’Connor emphasized that the study was drafted “overnight.” The city task force may come up with more ambitious proposals to ensure that canyonsides are maintained uniformly, such as aerial seed drops, controlled burning or guidelines to be enforced citywide.

The architect’s recommendations also include a “wet zone” to be serviced by a sprinkler. But some experts said that, instead of slowing fires, the water may stimulate growth of plants that could fuel a future blaze.

Tyson said the best way to prevent large canyon fires from reaching houses on the rim is to plant foliage that will provide most of the fuel at the bottom of the canyon. Buffer zones and wet zones, he said, would not stop a fire that has been allowed to build strength naturally as it advances up a canyonside.

“Thirty feet or a hundred feet in a fire like Normal Heights is peanuts,” Tyson said. “Why go on making the same stupid mistake? From now on, let’s correct it.”