Insurance Worries Cancel Controlled Burns : Cuts in Coverage Force L. A., Orange Counties to Halt Elimination of Brush

The fire departments of Los Angeles and Orange counties have suspended controlled burning of brushlands, one of the chief weapons in their arsenal to prevent disastrous wildfires, because insurance coverage offered through the state government has been drastically reduced.

“We’re out of business,” Capt. Scott Franklin, the Los Angeles County Fire Department officer in charge of controlled burns, said Wednesday.

“This is a tremendous problem” from a standpoint of fire safety, he said. “We were just getting a handle on the wildfire situation” through a program of prescribed burns, he said, “and now I’ve got 10,000 acres ready to burn and we can’t do anything with them.”

The county Fire Department believes that the reduction in the state’s liability-insurance coverage, from $6 million to $500,000, “just puts the county in too vulnerable a position,” he said.

A Natural Firebreak

In controlled burns, firefighters surround patches of old, heavy, often dead brush--the kind that fuels the hottest, fastest-moving fires--and burn it away, usually working on a cool, foggy morning.

The burned-over acreage forms a natural firebreak. For several years afterward, the land grows young, green vegetation, which does not burn as fiercely.

Orange County Fire Department Battalion Chief Stan Matthews, head of the Wildland Management Program, said the Orange County department had suspended all controlled burns “until the county counsel, and the chief and everybody has an opportunity to look at how this is going to impact us.”

The Orange County controlled-burn program “is much smaller than the L. A. County program,” he said. “There is no severe short-term effect for us,” Matthews said, “But the long-term effect could be pretty serious back up in some of the brushy areas. We might have to go cut fire breaks with hand crews, which is a lot more expensive.”

In Ventura County, Battalion Chief George Lund said there were no controlled burns scheduled, and that the county Fire Department and county officials would decide whether to carry out burns on a case-by-case basis, “depending on whether we think the $500,000 insurance coverage is adequate for a given area.”

A state forestry official said his department had such a problem getting any insurance that it is preparing to ask the Legislature to allow the department to drop insurance coverage and be responsible for its own claims.

Previous Policy

In past years, the state purchased an insurance policy that covered the state and county governments and private landowners who gave county firefighters permission to burn on their land. The policy provided protection to pay claims if the fires burned out of control and damaged other property, such as nearby homes or farms.

This year, the state had trouble finding any insurance company that would write the policy, said Richard Clanton, head of the vegetation management program of the Department of Forestry.

The state paid a premium in the last fiscal year of $90,000, up from $40,000 three years ago, for $6 million in coverage from the Canadian Indemnity Co. of San Diego, he said. The department is now paying a $135,000 premium--50% more--for a four-month extension on the policy that provides only $500,000 in coverage, one-twelfth the previous amount, he said. In addition, he said, the deductible--the amount of damages not covered by insurance--was increased from $25,000 last year to $100,000.

The extension took effect July 1 and expires Nov. 1, he said.

By then, he said, “we’re hoping to get emergency legislation from the Legislature allowing us to go self-insured. We’re not sure yet how it would work, but we’d probably have to set up some sort of fund with our own money” from the department’s annual budget allocation.

Clanton attributed the changes to “turmoil in the insurance industry” because of financial losses. There have been only two serious “escapes” of controlled burns since the practice began in 1979, he said, neither of which burned any houses or other structures.

Most counties and the state have continued to conduct controlled burns since July 1, under the new insurance policy, Clanton said.

He said firefighters have identified 5 million acres of “state responsibility land”--forest or brush-covered watershed that does not fall in the limits of an incorporated city or national forest. The department tried to burn 80,000 acres a year of that, “which barely makes a dent,” he said.

Clanton, who is based in Sacramento, sympathized with officials in the southern counties suspending controlled burns, however, because of the higher property values there, he said. “A couple of Malibu homes could eat up a $500,00 policy awfully fast,” he commented.

Franklin said suspension of the Los Angeles County program “is going to cost us a lot of money in the long run.

“When we do a prescribed burn, we use five or six engine companies and maybe 10 camp crews, which cost less than $15,000 for 300 to 500 acres. A wildfire in the same place will need in excess of 50 engine companies, 30 crews, some bulldozers, three or four helicopters and three or four fixed-wing aircraft. It’s going to cost a quarter of a million dollars in the first 15 minutes, without even getting into the loss of people’s houses and things with no price tags, like people’s belongings they can’t replace.”

‘Our Only Prayer’

Franklin said he particularly wanted to burn alongside the Ventura Freeway in the western San Fernando Valley because fires that begin north of the freeway frequently jump the road and burn south into Malibu, where they do serious property damage. “This was our only prayer of stopping those things,” he said.

In the absence of controlled burning, he said, the Fire Department arranged with a rancher to bring in a herd of cattle to chew down the vegetation along the corridor.

“The cattle did a very good job,” he said.

In case the insurance impasse continues next year, he said, “I’m already talking to a shepherd about bringing in some sheep.”