On the Firing Line : Officials Expect a Blazing Summer and Brace for Major Battles

It can be lovely, the tall grass of early summer in the Orange County wild lands. It rustles gently in the wind, sometimes in waves, making the hills shimmer like gold in the proper light. It lulls most people and makes them think of the lazy days to come.

Tall grass makes Orange County Fire Department Capt. Dan Young’s nerves sizzle.

“Grass is the worst,” he said flatly. “It’s the flashy fuel. It’ll produce 8-to 10-foot flames that’ll kill a crew. In grass, a fire will actually move faster than you can move a firetruck, about 20 or 25 m.p.h. It’s awful.”

And it’s here this month, thanks to the “March Miracle.” The heavy rains of four months ago spurred the growth of thousands of acres of the grass in Orange County wild lands, mostly wild oats that has in a few weeks taken root, grown tall, died off, turned matchstick dry and given firefighters nightmares.

They’re getting a little sick of bringing it up each year, they say, because some listeners think they’re crying wolf. But firefighters throughout Southern California say that the summer fire season--the fifth of the continuing drought--could be the worst in a decade, perhaps in more than 20 years.

Their edginess is a result not only of the presence of the dry grass, but of the existence of a complex intermingling of worsening hazards that, taken together under the most inhospitable natural conditions, could result in explosive and cataclysmic open-range blazes.

But no one is simply waiting for something to happen. The Orange County Fire Department, like all other major firefighting organizations in Southern California, prepares for such potential disaster by knowing the enemy, fighting it months in advance while it sleeps, drumming up all the help possible along the way, crying a little wolf and, if the hills do suddenly explode, fighting the fire fast and smart and going home alive.

“We don’t just pull a magic plan off the shelf when a fire starts,” said Young. “You start in January by requiring fuel modification, by requiring brush clearance, by elimination of ignition sources like trees falling on electrical wires. Providing defensible space is the key.”

It almost sounds like a military operation and, to firefighters, it is. And it begins in the winter when the enemy is least aggressive.

“Today,” said Young in early June, “we have bulldozer operators working in Santa Ana Canyon and the Ortega Highway and inmate crews working in certain areas like Santiago Canyon improving fire roads so we can safely enter a remote area, put the fire out and survive. Also, the inmate crews are out there thinning the fuel. We don’t have to strip a hill clean, but we can modify it so that the dead fuel is sporadic, here and there.”

That modification can mean knocking down tall grass and weeds with powerful “weed whackers,” or it can mean what wild-land firefighters call a controlled or prescription burn. These burns are done in highly supervised conditions in the damp winter months, said Young, and are designed to remove not the live, moist vegetation, but the underlying dead, dry fuel that can act as a catalyst.

The idea, said Jon Anderson, the hazard-reduction supervisor for the Orange County Fire Department, is to duplicate artificially what in many parts of the world occurs naturally over time.

Fires are natural occurrences in wooded areas throughout the world, said Anderson, and indeed are necessary in many cases for forest growth. When fires burn dead vegetation, the heat often causes seed-bearing parts of plants to open and the seeds to scatter. The earth is not necessarily scorched, but cleared for new growth. If these fires occur at regular intervals, forests often thrive. Anderson called it “cleaning house.”

However, said Anderson, if no fires have occurred for decades, “you have pockets of new growth and old growth vegetation, and the more dead vegetation you have, the more potential for a fire to continue.”

Anderson, who can tell the fire history of a wild-land hillside at a glance, speaks of fires as though they have minds.

“A fire knows not to cross into a corridor that’s already been burned,” he said, pointing to a hillside near Modjeska Canyon. “If you have a 15-year-old fire here and a 10-year-old fire over there and a 30-year-old one there, it’ll go down the 30-year-old corridor.”

Through controlled burning, said Anderson, it is possible to make a 30-year-old corridor look as if it burned last year, which appears unattractive to a rampaging wild-land fire. A controlled burn, he added, also leaves live vegetation intact and growing, if sometimes slightly singed.

But clearing dead vegetation from more than 250,000 acres of Orange County wild land is impossible, particularly in a year such as this one, when nature seems to have conspired against the firefighter, Anderson said. While the March rains dampened the wild lands and encouraged new growth, much of that growth came in the form of grasses, which have now died.

“They’re usually a foot high in other years,” said Anderson. “Now they’re over our heads.”

Also, the night of Feb. 14, 1990, brought a crippling frost that killed off many hillside plants such as laurel sumacs. And, of course, the drought continues.

“You have to worry about the kind of fuel you have out there, the topography, the access you have to the fire and the weather,” said Anderson. “If one or more of those elements cooperates, you can probably catch the fire quickly. If all of them don’t, you probably can’t.”

The worst-case scenario: a week of Santa Ana winds, temperatures in the 90s or above, an abundance of oily vegetation, nearby houses with uncleared brush and an arsonist with a match.

Young explained that in the coming summer days, the firefighters will rely heavily on a number known as the fire index, which is a number between 0 and 81 that changes daily and is arrived at by computing predicted weather, fuel moisture, relative humidity and winds. That number, he said, “determines our level of dispatch, what we’ll send to a fire.”

Heat, said Young, affects some live vegetation by making it “sweat.” Eucalyptus, juniper and other oily plants begin to secrete at high temperatures--slightly more than 100 degrees--and not only create more thermal heat in the vicinity but offer a fire a more tempting source of fuel: the oils. Combine that with low humidity and Santa Ana winds, which suck moisture out of vegetation with frightening speed, and “it gets nasty fast,” said Young.

The firefighters respond accordingly. When the relative humidity dips below 12%, Santa Ana winds become constant at 25 m.p.h. and temperatures exceed 90 degrees, the Orange County Fire Department goes to red-flag alert. This means, said Young, “that we now need to get out there and physically be ahead of the fire. We can’t wait for a 911 call. We have fire engines out in the wild-land areas patrolling and educating people. We want to catch the folks who are burning leaves even though they don’t think it’s a problem.

“All our four-wheels are out patrolling, all our engines are out there. We know the potential is there. We’ll call overtime people to man additional fire equipment and we’ll have pre-staged strike teams loaded and ready. And we haven’t even had a fire yet.

“If you can hold it down to a few acres, hitting it hard and hitting it fast, you can be OK. Otherwise, it moves so fast . . . . “

The fastest of the fast is the grass fire, which also makes it the most dangerous, said Anderson. It can catch fire almost instantly. Entire acres can explode in flames in the blink of an eye. As this primary fuel burns, it raises the air temperature of the area, causing the thicker dead vegetation to become more susceptible to ignition. When the larger dead fuel ignites, it causes the live vegetation above it to sweat and eventually, suddenly burst into flames. Firefighters call it a “ladder” effect.

And, said Anderson, just because plants are green does not mean they won’t burn.

“If things get hot enough,” he said, “anything will burn.”

Including houses. Residents in rural and semi-rural areas of the county have been advised by the Orange County Fire Department that they must clear combustible brush away from their houses to a distance of 50 feet, 20 more feet than previously required. Also, they have been encouraged to plant drought-resistant plants, such as succulents, close to the house to create a natural firebreak, to clear away all combustible material from the house and to install spark-arresters on chimneys.

In some cases, if homeowners have not complied with the regulations, the department has hired private contractors to clear away the brush and the cost appears on the homeowner’s tax bill.

“We cannot allow an individual resident to endanger the rest of his community,” said Young.

However, the March rains thwarted many such efforts. In some instances, grasses had already been cleared but, because of the new moisture, immediately grew back. They are now dead and again in need of clearing.

All of this has given firefighters in Southern California an uncomfortable amount of food for thought. Last year’s fire season didn’t officially end until Jan. 25, making it the longest since 1939, said Young. And this year the fire season was opened on May 15 by all fire agencies in Southern California, the first time those departments have all opened the season on the same day.

Those departments--the U.S. Forest Service, the Office of Emergency Services, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Los Angeles City Fire Department and county fire departments from Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara and Orange counties--make up a coalition called Firescope, an acronym for firefighting resources of Southern California organized for potential emergencies. The coalition, which offers mutual support in the event of larger wild-land fires, was organized in 1970 after the devastating brush fires that scorched the Southland that year.

But even the most tightly organized plans, including multi-agency coordination, firebombing aircraft, beefed-up personnel rosters, fire-watchers, brush-clearers and hundreds of hours of what-if sessions among chiefs can be sorely tested when the dry winds rise.

“We’re really concerned this year,” said Young, “but in a historical perspective we’ve been very successful in Orange County. We haven’t lost any homes in wild-land fires in the county in almost 10 years.

“If we weren’t doing all these things, though, none of it would matter with fire, because the fire would go through everything right to the Pacific and you’d have spot fires in Avalon. That’s the running joke: without fire prevention efforts it could start out by Prado Dam and head straight for the Pacific.

“If we get a couple of days of 40-m.p.h.-plus Santa Ana winds with gusts up to 60 and 70, we are in significant trouble. It’s all but impossible to create a safe environment in those conditions. The south-facing slopes have 60% to 70% dead fuels, we can’t remove it all, and the ‘March Miracle’ just interconnected all of it. As soon as we have temperatures exceeding 90, we’ve got a problem. I see everything lining up to be just the same sort of thing as the 1970 fires.

“Nothing would make me happier than to get three or four out-of-nowhere tropical storms this summer. I’d just stand out there with my shirt off and say, ‘This is fabulous!’ But I’m saying that it’s not going to happen. We’ve got a terrible season coming.”

* BATTLING FIRES: There are two principal rules in wild-land firefighting: Be successful, but survive. E3

The Threat of Fire

The optimum fire hazard conditions include these fuel sources: High, dry grass; dry, dead vegetation; live, oily vegetation; areas that have not burned in 30 or more years, which results in an enormous accumulation of vegetation fuel

Other factors that create fire hazard conditions: weather: High temperatures, low humidity, strong winds; nearby houses with uncleared brush

Red flag alert weather conditions can vary but typically occur when: Temperatures exceed 90 degrees; relative humidity is below 12%; Santa Ana winds are at a constant 25 m.p.h.

MAJOR FIRES IN RECENT HISTORY

ACRES AREA OF FIRE DATE BURNED 1) Paseo Grande area 1967 48,639 2) El Toro 1970 615 3) Trabuco Canyon 1970 2,700 4) Grundy area 1975 1,710 5) San Clemente 1976 2,560 6) Soquel area 1978 5,600 7) Ortega Highway 1979 750 8) Emerald Canyon 1979 550 9) Owl area 1980 14,873 10) Carbon Canyon 1980 8,260 11) Indian Truck Trail 1980 28,200 12) Gypsum Canyon 1982 16,800 13) Modjeska Canyon 1984 1,101 14) Coal Canyon 1984 475 15) Telegraph Canyon 1985 1,400 16) Green River area 1985 750 17) Silverado Canyon 1987 5,000 18) Ortega Highway area 1988 2,384 19) Carbon Canyon 1990 6,640 20) Chino Hills 1990 6,927

Source: O.C. Fire Department’s Wildland Hazard Reduction Section