Burn Plan Is Supported but Tumbleweeds Will Be Back

Agricultural legend has it that the Antelope Valley was the gateway through which tumbleweeds arrived in California decades ago.

Judging from the outcome of the Great Tumbleweed Debate held there Thursday, the pesky puffballs will still be rolling around the area for a long time.

County agricultural officials said they will stick with an unprecedented plan to burn up to 2,700 acres of tumbleweed-infested land in and near Lancaster and Palmdale. But they conceded that it is at best a short-term solution to this year’s bumper crop of tumbleweeds. They admitted that it may worsen the high desert’s erosion problems with blowing sand.

The decision by county agricultural officials to go ahead with the burning came after a 90-minute public hearing in Lancaster during which a county fire official said the burning won’t do much to stunt tumbleweed growth, an air quality official unenthusiastically called the plan “the lesser of two evils,” and residents couldn’t agree on what to do.

“This is a Catch-22 situation. We recognize there’s a problem with the tumbleweeds. We recognize if we remove the tumbleweeds we have an erosion problem. We recognize this a short-term solution,” county Agricultural Commissioner Leon Spaugy said.

Still, Spaugy said he will ask the County Board of Supervisors next Thursday for final approval to order tumbleweed removal on about 424 vacant and mostly privately owned parcels in the Antelope Valley, leaving owners the choice of doing it themselves or paying the county $100 to $150 an acre to do it.

Since most of the property owners live far away--some as far as the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Hawaii--county officials expect and want to do most of the work, so they can plant grass and furrow the land after burning to limit erosion caused by desert winds.

The Antelope Valley in the high desert has long had the county’s worst problems with tumbleweeds, although they are not native to the desert. But residents say the continuing drought and high winds this year seem to have worsened the situation, with tumbleweeds even trapping some people in their houses.

But County Fire Capt. Scott Franklin, the department’s vegetation management coordinator, was less than optimistic about the burning, saying tumbleweeds will grow back quickly. He said burning them will prevent the tumbleweeds from piling up against houses and creating a fire hazard.

“If we don’t, we’re going to have a huge conflagration. We’re talking apocalypse. You’re running out of time, quite frankly,” said the captain, who recalled that firefighters had to clear masses of tumbleweeds from the then-tiny towns of Lancaster and Palmdale in the 1950s.

Steven Jones, an enforcement supervisor with the Air Quality Management District, said his agency doesn’t like open burning and worries about the Antelope Valley’s sandstorms. But he reluctantly backed the burning. “Unfortunately, what’s happened here is we have a mess,” he said.

Local onion grower John Calandri argued that the county would be wasting “a ludicrous amount of money.” But Gailen Kyle, an alfalfa grower who filed the complaint that caused the county to look into the tumbleweed problems, scoffed at his neighbor, insisting that most of the weeds are growing on old onion fields.

University of California agricultural experts say legend has it that tumbleweed seeds first came to California in the early 1900s aboard railroad cars. The seeds were mixed with grain shipped to the Antelope Valley from the Midwest.