Experts Fight Fire With Fire Using Controlled Burns

Capt. Scott Franklin stood on a blackened slope in Stone Canyon, which cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains between Sherman Oaks and Bel-Air, brushed soot from his uniform and described the devices he uses to set fires.

There is a “helitorch,” a helicopter that drips flaming napalm from a 55-gallon drum. A glorified “gum-ball machine” drops small spheres of explosive potassium permanganate. Franklin has even visited a San Fernando Valley laser manufacturer recently to examine a laser that can ignite dry brush from 100 feet away.

This was strange talk coming from a 31-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. But, six years ago, Franklin stopped fighting fires and started setting them.

As vegetation-management coordinator for Los Angeles County, Franklin is in charge of a growing program designed to fight fire with fire by using small, controlled blazes in dangerously dry or overgrown brush to prevent it from burning out of control.

Pressure to employ preventive measures such as controlled burns has increased as development has rapidly pushed farther up the hills and into the canyons around Los Angeles, Franklin said.

The overall goal, Franklin said, is to burn about 10,000 acres a year.

“If we can burn 350 acres and protect 9,000, then we’re way ahead of the game, both environmentally and from a cost-benefit standpoint,” Franklin said.

Most fire experts say that controlled burns make sense in theory, but, because the technique is relatively new, no hard data has been gathered to assess its effectiveness.

In coming months, a task force of officials from the state Department of Forests and the U.S. Forest Service will consult with Franklin and other officials in compiling the first comprehensive study of the technique and its consequences.

In recent weeks, Franklin has taken members of the study team on a tour of some county burns, including one in June at a 100-acre site in Stone Canyon.

Stone Canyon was the conduit through which--on a windy November morning 25 years ago--a brush fire that started in Sherman Oaks raced across Mulholland Drive into Bel-Air, destroying 484 of the 2,300 homes in its path.

Brush on about 18 acres below homes that line the east rim of the canyon was cleared by hand, hauled away from the homes, stacked and burned.

On June 30 and July 1, brush on 78 acres farther down the slope was ignited. Since then, the area has been carefully studied by Fire Department personnel and scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and UCLA. New growth greening the hillsides is being catalogued and measured.

When the rains return this fall, experiments will measure erosion and analyze changes in the runoff to the two reservoirs at the bottom of the canyon.

Franklin and others see several probable effects of intentionally set fires:

- The new, green growth of young chaparral that springs up after a fire burns less fiercely than mature stands of brush. Also, there is less fuel at any one time to burn.

- Wildlife seems to thrive after a controlled burn. Fire creates a “mosaic” of open areas green with new growth and mature clumps of brush, providing food and shelter for a variety of animals.

- By burning brush only at certain times of the year and under ideal weather conditions, the impact of smoke on Los Angeles’ air can be reduced.

- Controlled burning is calculated to be far cheaper than either bulldozing brush or clearing it by hand and is also many times cheaper than fighting a wildfire.

Bright Green Seedlings

On a burned hillside in Stone Canyon, Franklin crouched to photograph bright green seedlings sprouting out of the blackened soil.

“Look at this growth,” he exclaimed. “This is great. This is all ceanothus .”

Ceanothus, also called mountain lilac, is a woody, resinous shrub that is one of the dominant plants in the chaparral ecosystem. It is the focus of controlled burns.

When young and healthy, it is the firefighter’s friend, Franklin said, retaining moisture so that it does not burn with great intensity. But, after 15 years or so of growth, many of its branches die and it becomes “dynamite.”

A pound of ceanothus contains the same amount of fuel as a cup of gasoline, he said, and there are 20 to 40 tons of it on the average acre.