Wilson Urges Enlarging Youth Corps to Fight Wildfires

Confronting potentially the “most severe” wildfire season in California history and handicapped by the loss of military firefighters to the Persian Gulf War, Gov. Pete Wilson on Friday proposed expanding the state’s youth conservation corps to help plug the gap.

“We have to plan for the contingency that some who have protected California as firefighters in the past will be in the deserts of Saudi Arabia dealing with the requirements of Desert Storm,” Wilson said in outlining his emergency plans to manage the fifth-straight year of drought.

Of 27,000 members of the California National Guard in California, 1,735 have been activated for Operation Desert Storm, Col. Roger Goodrich said.

Because fire respects no governmental boundaries, the U.S. Forest Service, whose jurisdiction covers 20 million of the 100 million acres in California, also is braced for a possibly explosive fire season.

“Unless the winter weather changes, there’s no question but that we are in for one of the most dangerous--if not the most dangerous--fire seasons in California history,” said a spokesman at the regional headquarters of the Forest Service in San Francisco.

Although the new governor did not disclose how many more people age 18 to 23 he had in mind for the 1,900-member California Conservation Corps, the organization’s director, Bud Sheble, said the augmentation “could be several hundred” depending on what the need is determined to be.

Additionally, the corps members would be assigned to the state Department of Fish and Game, which is trying to mitigate the severe effects of the drought on valuable but deteriorating fisheries, wildlife habitat, wetlands and various endangered species.

Funding for the additional corps members, who are called to help in cases of oil spills, earthquakes, floods and fires, would come from a proposed $100-million “drought-action” kitty Wilson wants for the emergency. Last month, he increased the state firefighting budget by $50 million.

A special task force of top-level officials told Wilson in a report that fire conditions in California wild lands are similar to, and in some areas worse than, those of the 1977 drought, the state’s worst in recent years. During that drought, 123,000 acres of state-protected lands were burned in addition to 200,000 acres of federal lands.

Officials of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection told the governor that they anticipate this year’s especially dehydrated conditions will create a fire season that “could be the most severe in recorded history.” The officials said they are preparing for “one of the worst fire seasons on record.”

Wilson, noting that members of the California National Guard and troops of the regular Army often are pressed into duty on major forest fires, said hostilities in the Persian Gulf had handed the state “an extraordinary loss of manpower.”

Officials of state and federal firefighting agencies said that although National Guard transport trucks, helicopters and airplanes that bomb fires with retardant are routinely used, deployment of regular Army troops to battle flames is a last resort.

Members of the guard in California provide chiefly support services such as transportation and are not trained as firefighters. However, it was learned that the guard is considering training about 1,000 members as firefighters to replace Army soldiers.