State Faces Threat of Sweeping Wildfires : Drought: Wilson urges quick legislative passage of $23.7-million bill to fund emergency firefighting.

Gov. Pete Wilson, citing the devastation to wildlands caused by the unforgiving drought and the record freeze last winter, warned Saturday that California faces the prospect of the “granddaddy of all fire seasons” this summer.

The millions of dead or dying water-starved trees coupled with the millions of acres of “freeze dried” vegetation have produced a dangerous “formula for combustion,” he said.

“All the wrong factors are coming together in just the right way to make this summer the granddaddy of all fire seasons,” Wilson warned in his weekly radio speech, in which he made a pitch for legislative passage of his $23.7-million appropriations bill for emergency firefighting.

“We should also keep in mind all the Smokey the Bear advice we learned as kids,” Wilson said, including thoroughly quenching campfires, keeping matches away from children and using fireworks safely. He also urged extra vigilence in spotting and reporting arsonists.

Last year, California suffered unprecedented loss of homes and other structures to fire when the drought was in only its fourth year. This summer, the state faces an even greater threat because the winter freeze statewide turned millions of acres of once lush vegetation into fire fuel.

Even the welcome downpour of March rains, which blunted the edge of the drought and helped keep some threatened trees alive, delivered a hazardous flip side.

“The precipitation brought up a grass crop virtually from one end of the state to the other and this grass is becoming straw and will conduct flames from dead tree to dead tree,” noted Department of Forestry spokeswoman Karen Terrill.

“We are looking at an extremely serious potential for wild-land fires--for big, fast-moving, flashy fires. The main concern we have is dead fuel,” Terrill said, asserting that the prospect for this summer appears as bad as, or worse than, the 1990 fire season.

Department officials have estimated that the five-year drought has killed 10 million trees, 10 times the usual total for a comparable period and most of it in spectacular forests of the Sierra Nevada. Foresters report that infestations of insects boring into drought-weakened trees have wiped out millions of acres of trees from Susanville in the north to near Fresno in the south.

“The southern Sierra is probably the hardest hit by the drought kill,” Terrill said, “and the farther south you go, the drier it is.”

She said that at Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, bark beetles have waged such a devastating attack that “we estimate about 80% to 90% of the trees are dead, primarily pine at the higher elevations.” Deadly infestations of beetles have also assaulted trees in other parts of the county as well as in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Wilson said his emergency appropriations bill, which has won approval by the Assembly and is pending in the Senate, would finance 600 additional temporary firefighters and buy extra equipment, including five attack airplanes.

Last year, the Department of Forestry spent about $270 million in direct and indirect costs for fire suppression, including $70 million from the state’s emergency reserve fund, Terrill said. She said the emergency reserve expenditures were about twice their normal amounts.