Bringing the Danger of Fire Home to O.C. Neighborhoods

Dan Young is a captain with the Orange County Fire Department. With 22 years of experience, he has been on the front lines of some of the county’s worst fires and is now manager of the public information-education section of the 1,500-member department . He spoke with staff writer James Gomez.

Q. Does it worry you when the public is not as concerned about public safety as you would like?

A. I think the average person (believes) that a fire like Oakland or an earthquake is something they’re going to watch on TV and not experience. It’s difficult to get people to realize that it can literally happen to them.

Q. What are some of the more dangerous areas or communities?

A. We have a lot of areas that can be laid waste by a Santa Ana-driven fire. When you have a mix-up (an area of older houses with tall, overgrown vegetation and wood-shingle roofs) such as we’ve got in Orange Park Acres, Laguna Canyon, Cowan Heights, Lemon Heights, Peters Canyon area, Brea, Yorba Linda and in a dozen areas of Orange County, you can have major fires that will burn through these communities all the way to the Pacific Ocean. . . . The difference (between Oakland and Orange County) is the wind. We’ve not had a constant 30-m.p.h. Santa Ana wind for about four or five years. We’ve been pretty lucky.

Q. We’ve had a relatively fire-free summer, and now we have cooler fall weather. But is Orange County out of the woods for the year?

A. So far, we’ve been pretty successful. (But) all it takes is one bad day of weather. Oakland is the best example of that. A large percentage of dead fuel has been building for five or six years now. It’s not going to go away with a single storm. What we need is a season where it starts raining in September and we stop skiing in May because we’re just too tired of skiing all winter. That’s what we need to get back to. And, until we have a season like that, with a couple of storms a week for 10 weeks or 12 weeks, those conditions will remain the same.

Q. Do we have the equipment, the expertise and the manpower to effectively handle a major blaze such as the Oakland fire?

A. So far (this year) we’ve been successful in keeping the fires small. We had a 34-acre fire in Santiago Canyon last week, and we dumped everything on it. It never got out of hand. (But) when those fires get through, we give it everything we got and throw massive amounts of resources and energy into it. But the fact of the matter is, that in almost every case, those really big fires, like in Oakland, burn until the wind stops or it runs out of fuel. Maybe that’s a big dose of reality that we need to get a grip on. We got a fire that’s ripping through your neighborhood and burning hundreds of homes, and it is unrealistic in every aspect to expect that your fire department is going to stop that fire.

Q. Any last words for people interested in making their homes more fire-resistant?

A. Everyone has the same question after the Oakland fire. “Can it happen here?” The answer is “yes!” But immediately following that has to be the question: “Can it be prevented?” Yeah. It can be prevented. It’s a matter of having 1.8 million people in Orange County accept some responsibility for themselves. It doesn’t have to be a significant change of behavior. If each person, each resident, takes Saturday or Sunday morning and imagines what they’ve seen, imagine how their house and their neighborhood would look if it was raining fire, and asks: “Do I want to trim this tree? Do I want to clean the leaves off of my roof?” Make a couple of changes. You can do it before lunch and still watch the football game.