In Fighting Brush Fires, Failing to Follow Rules Can Mean Injury, Death : Tactics: Unlike structure blazes, every wildfire is different. Manuals describe ‘watch out’ situations.

Even before he received any details of Wednesday morning’s mishap in which four Los Angeles city firefighters were severely burned, Capt. Ted Menold felt as if he could almost piece the story together in his mind.

He had seen it so many times before, on paper.

Menold, commander of Sunland-Tujunga Fire Station 74 and a director of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, led the annual training of the San Fernando Valley’s firefighters in brush-fire strategy and tactics this year and in 1991.

In preparing for the nine-day exercise in which 800 firefighters received a day of instruction, Menold researched every California brush-fire death since 1953, when 15 perished in Mendocino National Forest.

The common denominators of the 64 deaths are reduced in firefighting manuals into a handful of “Situations That Shout, ‘Watch Out!’ ” and 10 standard rules that, Menold said, frequently “get violated and kill people.”

Among them: Stay out of topography such as a saddle between two peaks that can funnel wind and fire in a “chimney effect,” and never attack a fire from a higher position.

However, Menold said experienced firefighters must weigh the safety rules against the immediate conditions and their objectives.

*

“We can follow all 13 ‘watch out’ rules, and we can follow all 10 of the standard safety firefighting rules, but you’d never get any aggressive firefighting done,” he said. “There’s going to be times that we absolutely cannot follow them, or there’ll be times you follow them, but then the conditions change and you’re no longer following them.”

In fighting fires in structures, procedures are usually the same every time, but brush fires are never the same twice, he said.

In cool, moist spring weather, Menold said, he may aggressively fight a small brush fire, even sending his crews downhill toward it in violation of one of the 10 standard rules, knowing that the chance of a flare-up is negligible.

“I’ll fight a fire downhill in a second in May,” he said. “The danger of that is the mentality it might teach a young guy. This day, Oct. 27, 1993, you fight a fire downhill and you’re going to kill people.”

The main factor that worked against the firefighters of Engine 98--rapidly changing wind conditions--was an ingredient in every one of the deaths he researched, and one that can’t always be fully taken into account, Menold said.

In his training, Menold said, he referred to the fatal 1971 Romero Fire in Santa Barbara to illustrate the potential for disastrous weather changes during a Santa Ana condition.

The 16,000-acre fire was apparently contained at 7 p.m., when the coastal breeze came in, Menold said. The temperature had dropped to 66 degrees and the humidity rose to 68%.

Then the Santa Ana wind pushed back.

“In 15 minutes, the temperature rose to 92 degrees. Humidity dropped to 15%. Gale-force winds were pushing the fire. It overran a group of bulldozers and swampers. Result: four fatalities, one serious burn.”

“What is going through their minds when the conditions are changing?” he asked. “It should have been, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ There’s a little bit of a window of time when the conditions are changing.”

Other conditions that can get firefighters in trouble are spot fires, caused by winds that blow embers away from the main fire, igniting brush behind or below them.

“Probably our most dangerous thing is spot fires,” Menold said. “You get fires coming from a direction you didn’t expect it.”

The two most important rules to prepare for changing conditions are to have lookouts and maintain an escape route, Menold said.

And, on Menold’s list of fatalities, they are the two most often violated.

Some of the rules resonate chillingly with the reported circumstances of the early-morning flare-up in eastern Ventura County. That fire, suddenly changing direction about 5 a.m., moved up a ravine below the four men of Engine 98, sweeping over them as they huddled in their truck. A radio warning from another unit came only a minute before the fire reached them.

Two remain in critical condition and two in serious condition at the Sherman Oaks Burn Center.

The department will conduct a formal investigation of the incident. In the meantime, Menold said, it wouldn’t be fair to speculate on how the firefighters applied the rules.

He said he knew two of the injured men personally as “excellent, savvy” firefighters.

“I know that when it happens to a guy like that, conditions are such that it would probably happen to most guys out there, including myself,” Menold said.