Hills Are Green Again, but Brush Fire Threat Remains

The dried-out brush crunched in telltale snaps under Jay Lopez’s footsteps as he and his partner wended their way through Pico Canyon.

Under the chaparral lay the makings of this summer’s fires.

“The plant looks nice and green, but if you look into it, there are all sorts of dead materials,” said Lopez, a forester with Los Angeles County Fire Department’s forestry division. “When it comes down to it, everything burns.”

Pushing aside the light-green flowering branches of chamise, a low-lying brush, he found fuel: clusters of brittle twigs that disintegrated under gentle pressure.

During six years of drought, fire officials throughout Los Angeles County have warned Southern Californians of the potential for brush fires that would bring hell to earth, particularly in the arid Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains.

The heavy winter rains may have ended the drought, but the fire threat remains above the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. And in some ways, the rains only make it worse.

“I don’t like to cry wolf; I don’t like to tell people that this will be the worst fire season ever,” said Chief Paul Rippens of the forestry division. “I sort of joke with our people that this will be the 13th annual worst fire season ever.”

It’s not the rain in the winter that counts, fire officials point out, it’s the egg-frying heat, the throat-parching Santa Ana winds and the low, nosebleed-inducing humidity during brush fire season that can turn Southern California into a thousand points of light.

The same green grass that now offers postcard-perfect views of undulating hills also dries out faster than most plants, and when it does, it will act as a fire’s best friend, the wick to light the surrounding brush, burning quickly and spreading the fire even faster.

It also takes more than one good rainy season for brush to recover from years of drought, fire officials said. Beneath every live bush still lurks dead fuel waiting for a spark.

Some of that dead brush was produced in the last decade by “die-back,” a brush-killing fungus that invaded Southern California in 1983 and spread throughout the region’s hillsides. That spread has been minimal in the last two years, Rippens said, although researchers have not positively identified what caused it to flourish initially.

But will Southern California ever get a break from fire anxiety?

“I don’t believe we will ever see a situation where we don’t have a fire hazard as we go into the summer months,” said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Steve Valenzuela.

In 1981, the Fire Department instituted a program of measuring the amount of moisture in brush of various fire-prone locations. Initially, the sites were somewhat removed from houses, particularly in the Saugus and Castaic areas. But now, houses have encroached on some test areas.

“It creates a little heavier fire condition for us, having homes in the way,” Rippens said. “It means there are more things we have to protect.”

At the Pico Canyon site recently, Lopez and his partner, forestry technician George Randar, could see a checkerboard of gray and red roofs just across a narrow street from the testing site. There was nothing there just a few years ago. But instead of expressing dismay at seeing another set of potential brush fire victims, Lopez smiles.

“That’s what I like to see,” he said.

Yes, they were houses, but with a key difference in design: The houses had enclosed eaves, double-pane windows, stucco exteriors, chimneys equipped with spark arresters, and a 100-foot clearance around each building. The roofs were various composites, not highly flammable wood shingles.

“That’s heaven for us,” Lopez said.

Meanwhile, Randar set to work, cutting about 100 three-inch reddish twigs, their light-green flesh still showing signs of growth. These samples are taken to the forestry division’s laboratory in Pacoima for moisture testing.

There, they are weighed and then dried out in an electric oven for 16 hours. The samples are then weighed again to determine how much moisture was lost. Fire Department foresters take samples from 17 sites around the county every two weeks to chart the moisture content of brush.

The moisture content is measured as a percentage of the weight of the dried-out twigs. For example, if 100 grams is placed in the oven and the dried-out remains weigh only 25 grams, then the moisture content, 75 grams, is 300%.

In the first half of the year, if the weight of the moisture lost is as low as 120% of the weight of the dried-out samples--and grass surrounding the brush is dead or cured--the fire season has officially begun.

Tests done last week show a moisture content of 165%, a sharp drop, fire officials said, from readings of just two weeks before that showed a 198% moisture content.

Last year, the fire season began May 20, and while this year appears to be following a similar pattern, no one knows for sure when it will open.

“It all depends on the weather. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Rippens said. “If we get a normal fog that comes in May and June, it could hold things off for awhile.”