O.C. Firefighters Raise the ‘Red Flag’ in Winds : Warning: Strike teams on alert for trouble in arid hills and canyons on ‘most critical day of the year.’

Teams of firefighters fanned across the parched hills and canyons of Orange County Wednesday, as Santa Ana winds gusted to 69 m.p.h.--heightening the potential for a fire disaster.

The season’s first “red flag” warning was declared by the Orange County Fire Department, which automatically dispatched roving fire inspectors, ordered strike teams on standby near Irvine Lake and began assembling a brigade-size crew of firefighters and equipment.

“Today (Wednesday) is the most critical day of the year in terms of fire conditions,” said Orange County Fire Capt. Dan Young.

The critical conditions--caused by the combination of high winds, dry air and the effects of the five-year drought on vegetation--are expected to continue today. Young said the fire warning will remain in effect at least until 4 p.m.

Temperatures today are expected to be in the upper 60s to upper 70s, with northeast winds gusting to 30 m.p.h., said Stephen Burback, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times.

“There’s no rain in sight, and the humidity is very low. It’s very dry because of the northeast down-sloping winds that dry the air out,” Burback said.

The fear, Young said, is that the picturesque canyons of Orange County, where towering juniper and eucalyptus trees surround some of the region’s most sprawling homes, could catch fire and quickly become an inferno like this month’s Oakland hills fire that killed 24 people and destroyed 2,889 houses.

Even before the embers were cooling from the Oakland firestorm, fire officials here were singling out Lemon Heights, Cowan Heights, Orange Park Acres, Yorba Linda and other communities as “Oaklands waiting to happen,” Young said.

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

“We’re not talking about brush fires anymore,” said Young, whose department has sent damage-assessment teams to Santa Barbara, Glendale and Oakland during past blazes there. “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.

Young and other fire officials point to the newer, South County communities of Portola Hills and Rancho Santa Margarita as exceptions because their 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 rainfall significant enough 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 their plight.

“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 Crest de Ville community, 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.

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

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. The “March miracle,” a series of heavy rains, dampened hillsides and brought new green grasses. But much of that has died now.

In areas like Cowan Heights, as much as 70% of the wild vegetation on some southern slopes has died, Young said. The dead growth could act as a superhighway for wind-swept wildfires.

In the meantime, Young said, “all we can do is warn about the fire dangers. It’s the public that needs to take our warnings seriously.”

One of Callihan’s neighbors, Maud Whitney, whose Crest de Ville home survived the Gypsum fire intact, has heeded the warnings. Despite the cost, she has re-roofed her home with non-combustible material and had four eucalyptus trees cut down.

The fire “was a devastating experience,” she said. “When we came back into our neighborhood, we didn’t know if we had a home or not. Luckily, we did.”

But she now keeps a suitcase with spare clothes in the trunk of her car, just in case.