Fire Officials Worry About ‘Oaklands’ : Orange County: They say localities with narrow, winding roads, wood-shingled roofs and hillside brush creeping toward homes are ‘designed for disaster.’

In the picturesque canyons of Orange County, where towering juniper and eucalyptus trees surround some of the region’s most sprawling homes, residents enjoy their slice of paradise.

But these communities, with narrow, winding roads, wood-shingled roofs and hillside brush creeping toward homes, are “designed for disaster,” county fire officials warn.

Even before the embers were cooling from last week’s firestorm in the Oakland hills 400 miles to the north, fire officials here were singling out Lemon Heights, Cowan Heights, Orange Park Acres, Yorba Linda and other communities “all over Orange County” as “Oaklands waiting to happen,” said Orange County Fire Capt. Dan Young.

“We’re not talking about brush fires anymore,” said Young, whose department has sent damage assessment teams to Santa Barbara, Glendale and Oakland. “You’re talking about fires that run from shake roof to shake roof. Older, wooded communities that have those same conditions such as Villa Park, North Tustin, Orange Park Acres and others are potential Oaklands,” he said.

Because of the five-year drought, fire officials have dubbed 1991 as potentially Orange County’s worst brush fire season. In addition, the fall Santa Ana wind season, which brings nasty, dry, desert-like winds, is here.

Young and other fire officials point to the newer, South County communities of Portola Hills and Rancho Santa Margarita as the exceptions because tract homes were built in accordance with new requirements for non-combustible roofs and 100-foot firebreaks around the perimeters of the developments.

“You’re not going to get a raging fire in those new communities,” Young said. “It will just not occur.”

In Lemon Heights, homes sit in roughly the same corridor where the Paseo Grande Fire, the largest in Orange County history, roared through on Oct. 29, 1967, wiping out 66 homes and scorching 50,000 acres.

Although more than two decades have passed, the thick, wooded area, though aesthetically pleasing, is considered more dangerous now because there are more homes and ornamental vegetation is “bigger, thicker and more dense,” said Jon Anderson, hazard-reduction supervisor for the County Fire Department.

“You go down there today and sit on a ridge top. What do you notice? With few exceptions, trees (growing) right up against homes, and there are still a lot of wood-shingled roofs,” Anderson said.

Yet even if homeowners install non-combustible roofs and create firebreaks around their houses, conditions created by the drought may make firefighting efforts futile if an out-of-control fire breaks through and creates an inferno, such as in Oakland.

“Let’s face it, there’s little you can do when the heat inside these fires burns sidewalks and melts metal. It doesn’t matter if you put in drought-resistant plants; a fire looks for more fuel to burn and, as it’s burning, it’s evaporating the moisture of the fuel in front of it. If it’s dead vegetation or if you have had drought years, then it takes less energy to evaporate that moisture and set it on fire,” Anderson said.

Saturday’s spattering of rainfall provided some temporary relief, Young said, but not enough. And today’s forecast of a slight chance of rain is not expected to bring a significant amount of rainfall to alter the fire conditions.

“We had enough rain to make it a little safer until Wednesday,” Young said. “The problem is that the conditions that lead to those like Oakland’s were conditioned over six years.”

Young said Orange County needs “enough storms and significant rainfall to produce new growth,” which would inhibit a large fire.

Bill Callihan, 52, who lives in the gated community of Crest de Ville in Orange, lost his $500,000 ridgeline home in the Oct. 9, 1982, Gypsum Canyon fire. He knows the emotions that ran through the minds of the Oakland fire victims. As he sat in his living room last week watching news broadcasts of flames gutting whole neighborhoods, Callihan sympathized with the victims.

“It was exactly like the fire we had up here,” Callihan said. “We had a Santa Ana wind and we could see the fire out in the mountain, probably about 10 to 20 miles away. (But) the wind changed direction, and it came toward us. No one had time to prepare.”

The fire destroyed 17 homes, including 12 in the gated community of Crest de Ville, where Callihan has since rebuilt his home with a non-combustible roof.

“We had a refrigerator and a deep freezer. When we returned to our home it was just ashes. Only the chimney was standing. We found globs where the refrigerator was,” Callihan said.

Brea Fire Capt. Paul Bartley recalled trying to save Callihan’s neighborhood: “They had open gas lines burning through, windows breaking, and so many embers flying, that it was raining fires. The fire was moving so fast, we had to decide which houses to let go and which to save.”

Fire officials point to myths about what homeowners should and shouldn’t do. Rule No. 1, Young said, is evacuate when a police officer or firefighter tells you to. Also, use common sense.

“You probably saw television footage in Oakland of long lines of abandoned cars, all facing downhill. They were trying to escape. But a question we firefighters ask is, with everybody racing to get out, how do you get a big, 50,000-pound firetruck up into the area to fight the fire?” Young said.

Callihan said that before he was ordered to evacuate, he and his neighbors climbed on their roofs with garden hoses. But Young said that reduces vital water pressure. In one fire, residents at the bottom of a hill had turned on their water sprinklers and garden hoses, robbing the system of vital water pressure for firefighters battling the blaze on top of the hill, he said.

“You also have to remember that when firefighters roll down your street in a truck, their first duty is to protect life first. So they see half a dozen people watering their roofs, and they jump down from the truck and go over and try coaxing the people down instead of fighting the fire. This jeopardizes the safety of the neighborhood,” Young said.

“What most people don’t realize is that even fire hoses which pump out 350 gallons of water per minute do not accomplish that much in an inferno. By contrast, these garden hoses put out only about 12 gallons per minute. You have to remember we’re all using the same water system,” he said.