Time to Kick Back and Bask in the Glow of a Controlled Blaze

Call them pyros with an artistic license to burn.

As smoke billowed gently from the slopes of Tapia Canyon, the firefighters cheered.

Odd for those who are supposed to devote their lives to battling blazes instead of being cheerleaders for tongues of flame. But this was different.

This was planned, directed and produced.

Why else would Capt. Don Pierpont and Battalion Chief Glenn Mutch, two of the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s finest, be sitting there in a pair of directors’ chairs, leaning back, sipping Gatorade and watching the brush fire with a calm eye for the aesthetic, like Oliver Stone and George Lucas in yellow firefighters’ jackets.

“That’s pretty,” Pierpont pronounced, his chair inches from the edge of a cliff with an E-ticket view.

“What, the way the fire’s going?” Mutch asked, without so much of a turn of his head. His sunglasses glistened in the heat.

A pause.

“Yeah,” Pierpont said, staring straight ahead.

Another pause.

“I like it.”

A stoic exchange, but there’s a certain Zen about controlled burns.

Lesson No. 1 about controlled burns, Pierpont said, is simple. “Fire is a natural part of the environment.”

Brush is going to burn eventually. It’s the only way that trees, brush and organic material are regenerated. So why fight it?

“Either we burn it when we want to burn it, or nature will burn it when nature wants,” Pierpont said. People don’t like nature’s timing because nature sometimes takes the fire right through their houses, he noted.

Pierpont has been the controlled-burn czar for almost three years. His radio code name is the enigmatic XR-1, a far cry from Torch 1, as his mentor was called.

“Folks just didn’t seem to think Torch was such a good name,” he said.

It takes a lot of planning and a small army to control a fire’s sheer ferocity. That’s why Pierpont and Mutch, from their directors’ chairs, orchestrated about 90 crew members scattered throughout the 80 acres of brush destined for mesquite heaven.

“It’s complex,” Pierpont said. “We’re not talking about some nut out here with a Bic.”

Of course not. A nut with a Bic would go to prison for doing what they were being paid to do.

Bulldozers flattened a fire line around the targeted area. Fire crews wearing yellow and orange-clad inmate crews from state and county prison camps paced the trails, carrying axes, packs and other equipment.

With a pop! one of the men shot a flare into the dry brush. Another pop! and another. A line of fire ripped along the main ridge in front of Mutch, Pierpont and other curious observers.

“Hoo yeah,” Pierpont said. Things were going well, very well.

“Division A, you’re going to want to take advantage of the winds and take out the dogleg,” he said into a hand-held radio. A few men dropped ignited diesel fuel onto the grass.

The fire broke the line, skipped into an unguarded area and tore down a hill. Pierpont barked out directions and minutes later a helicopter circled the hot spot once, turned and dropped 360 gallons of water.

“Oh, great, it put out the good fire too,” Mutch said, chuckling.

Flames renewed, Pierpont scanned the scene and relaxed. “You don’t have to jump up and down to command,” he said with a wry smile.

The firefighters had come prepared with sack lunches, melted chocolate cookies and an ice chest of cold soda. A proper brush fire is, after all, like a fine wine.

It needs its time.

As firefighters and technicians suspended their chatter to listen, the hundreds of snaps, crackles and creaks of the scattered small fires suddenly joined in a roar that sounded, ironically, like rushing water.

“When you get a fire like this really going, it sounds like a train or a jet engine,” Mutch said. Others nodded in stunned silence as the hills gave birth to a leashed inferno.

Firefighters sprayed two threatened oak trees with water from a pumper truck as protection. A rabbit scurried desperately from the brush.

“Sometimes on big, uncontrolled fires we have problems with rabbits catching fire and running through the brush and lighting it too,” Mutch said. “You’ve got to watch for them.

“Unfortunately, the rabbits usually don’t make it either.”

In a slow, controlled burn, though, most critters can make it out alive on their own. An exception this day was Bambi, as firefighters christened a fawn they rescued.

Andrew LaVigne sighted the little deer’s spots as it crouched among burning brush after its terrified mother bounded away. Like a movie hero, LaVigne picked it up and carried it to safety, its hoofs singed.

“Aaaaaaaawwwww,” his comrades chorused appreciatively, as wisps of smoke filtered up from the burned acres of grass.

By now, the hills lay bare, but the firefighters remained. “We baby-sit it through the night,” Pierpont said. “We don’t just walk away.”

As the last embers flickered, Mutch sat, contemplating the day’s work.

“Almost picture-perfect,” he said.