Haystack Fires Needle Rural Authorities

It may not rank up there with Jack the Ripper or who shot JFK, but the case of the mysterious Imperial County haystack fires is driving Sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Hall bananas.

Since the hot June evening in 1990 when somebody torched a bunch of bales near Holtville and got this whole thing started, Hall has logged 82 haystack fires in this desert corner of California, where cattle is king but alfalfa is a close second.

Unlike the fluffy hay piles in pastoral paintings and fairy tales, these ill-fated stacks are gigantic--as big as a farmhouse and usually worth a lot more. In all, flames have consumed at least $1.2 million worth of hay and cost the cash-strapped county thousands more in staff hours devoted to fighting and solving the blazes.

Hall, a cowboy-booted fellow with a generous girth, confesses that the hay blazes have him stumped. He has organized posses of farmhands to patrol the fields, conducted massive stakeouts with volunteers on moonless nights, and collected an odd bundle of evidence--a shoe print, a stolen battery and a cigar.

But ask him for answers and the plain-spoken lawman can only supply theories: Some fires were probably set by farmers seeking to collect insurance payoffs at a time when the hay market is poor; a few were started by teen-agers partying carelessly amid the bales, and most were the work of “a wacko cruising our county with a cigarette lighter.”

“About the only solid thing I can tell you at this point,” Hall said glumly as he watched a tall stack smolder near El Centro recently, “is that they’re all fires and they’re all hay.”

Such talk is small comfort for hay growers who have been rousted at midnight to watch their stacks go up in smoke. Farmers are by necessity a patient breed, seasoned by the vagaries of weather, crop-eating bugs and the other unpredictable aspects of agricultural life. But after 19 months, these fires are getting a bit old.

“They’re a bad deal, a real pain,” said Jack Hannon, who has coaxed an annual hay crop from Brawley’s sunbaked soil for 49 years. Hannon lost 250 tons of “darn good” alfalfa in a fire last fall, and, although the hay was insured and he was compensated for its market value, he is still steaming.

“With the deductible and all, you always end up losing money,” said Hannon, whose neighbor up the road got hit by “the arsonist” the same night. “And all these losses make our insurance rates go up. . . . I just wish they’d catch this guy.”

Hall shares the feeling. Whatever their origin, the peculiar blazes have become an irksome burden on the sheriff’s force. Imperial County’s ailing economy--wounded most recently by an infestation of destructive whiteflies--has forced the department to get by with 10 fewer deputies to patrol the 5,000-square-mile territory. Out of 52, Hall points out, “10 is a big bite.”

All the while, growth in El Centro, the county seat, is bringing with it a rise in violent crimes, from rapes and murders to gang- and drug-related shootings.

“I’ve got more serious things to worry about,” Hall said, “but these fires, they really gnaw at you. They’re causing me great grief.”

While haystack fires are far from an oddity in rural areas, a streak like this one is extremely rare, according to CalFarm Insurance Co., which has paid more than $500,000 to fulfill claims from about 20 Imperial Valley fires.

“It’s a very highly unusual situation and we consider it a severe problem,” said Craig Thomson, CalFarm’s vice president of underwriting. “We’ve never had any situation like this in the state of California . . . in more than 30 years.”

The Imperial Valley, which devotes 200,000 acres to a hay crop that was valued at $207 million in 1990, is particularly vulnerable to the fires, Thomson said, because of its remoteness and sparse population. Moreover, because of its dry climate, the valley is used as a storage site for many hay buyers, making the large haystacks about as ubiquitous here as pickup trucks.

“There are so many haystacks in this valley that you simply can’t hope to baby-sit all of them,” Hall said. “One day I drove from here to the bottom of the hill (a distance of about 13 miles) and I counted 1,000 haystacks. They’re everywhere!”

A decade or so ago, a similar--but much shorter--string of haystack fires lit up the night sky. Investigators arrested and charged a volunteer fireman, but he committed suicide before the case was concluded.

The first haystack in the current episode went up in flames June 16, 1990, at 8:20 in the evening along a road near the quiet town of Holtville. The loss was relatively modest--$12,500.

Since then, Hall and Detective Dave Yaryan have filled a thick red binder with police reports, photographs and other miscellany. Each blaze is also entered on a table-sized chart made of butcher paper, with columns for “number of bales lost” and “evidence, if any.” Usually there is no evidence to enter on the chart.

Determining a motive--another way to catch the arsonist--is difficult in these cases, said Yaryan, who does the day-to-day legwork.

“I ask myself: ‘Why would an arsonist want to set a haystack on fire?’ ” the detective said. “Haystack fires all look alike. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. They’re really boring.”

Initially, Hall said, he believed that the culprit was “somebody who was mad and was setting the fires to get even.” Maybe it was a laid-off worker or a farmer with a grudge against a neighbor.

Then, as the price of hay tumbled 40% and the whitefly began hurting crop yields and spawning an unsightly mold, the sergeant began to wonder if farmers were setting the fires to collect insurance settlements, particularly on haystacks of poor quality.

That thought has crossed the minds of CalFarm Insurance executives, but Thomson said “so far it’s just a theory.” Nonetheless, CalFarm this month will send an arson expert to El Centro to join the investigation.

Jim Kuhn, who has lost $300,000 worth of hay in five fires, has tried to safeguard his crop and place his workers on alert. Now, the Seeley grower is watching and waiting, “looking forward to the day that the punk who’s doing this vandalism gets caught.”

As for Hall, he keeps plugging along:

“One day, we’ll get a break and catch this guy. But until then, we just keep putting ‘em out and marking ‘em down.”