‘Spy Plane’ Photos Help Spot Areas of Dieback

Photos of the mountains around the San Fernando Valley taken from a U-2 type “spy plane” at high altitude are helping firefighters find areas of dieback among wild vegetation that have increased the danger from brush fires, according to Los Angeles County Fire Department Capt. Scott Franklin.

“It looks like these are really going to do the job for us” as an aid to locating dead vegetation, Franklin said recently after inspecting a section of Topanga Canyon, equipped with infrared photos of the area. “These turned out even better than we expected.”

The photos were taken from an altitude of 60,000 feet on June 11 by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration ER-2 plane. The ER-2 is an “earth resources” model of the Lockheed TR1-A, an advanced version of the U-2 spy plane that U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers was flying when he was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.

Estimate of Acreage

The ER-2 gathered images of the Valley and the surrounding mountains on regular, infrared and heat-emission-sensitive film.

Franklin, a specialist in wild lands fire prevention and preventive burning of brushy areas, has been investigating the unusual dieback of mountain vegetation. He has estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 acres of vegetation has died, adding as much as a million tons of volatile dead wood to fuel brush fires.

“It looks like the dieback really correlates with these infrared pictures,” which were processed and delivered to county fire officials recently, he said.

Enlargements Needed

Franklin said he will ask NASA scientists at Moffett Field near San Jose to provide enlarged photos of some areas. Then researchers from the county Fire Department, U.S. Forest Service and state Department of Forestry will investigate an area where the dieback appears particularly severe.

The researchers will try to refine the relationship between the infrared reading and the condition of the vegetation for future use, “so we can precisely pinpoint all these areas all across the county,” Franklin said.

He said the Fire Department is particularly interested in mapping the dieback in areas where wild-land brush fires threaten suburban homes.

Future research may be aimed at determining how best to protect homes in that zone from the threat of the dieback, he said.

Franklin earlier had voiced fears that brush fires in the dead areas will burn faster and hotter than normal. In addition to the fire danger, hotter fires cause soil damage that aggravates erosion in the next rainstorm, he said.

Lake Sherwood Fire

The first major fire in an area of dieback was in the Lake Sherwood area in late June and early July. Dead brush blazed so hotly there that soil temperatures reached 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, Franklin said, “hot enough to break rocks” and about twice the soil temperature in a fire fueled by live brush.

Researchers suspect that the dieback is related to a lack of rain this year, after several rainy winters that encouraged wild brush to grow beyond its ability to survive a dry year.

Some researchers think air pollution may also be involved.