Fire Crews Mop Up as Officials Plan Wilderness Repair : Disaster: Teams hunt down and douse last hot spots. A firebreak is finally completed around the Green Meadow blaze, largest in Southern California.

Hand crews yanked smoldering tree stumps from wildfire sites around Ventura County and doused the last few embers Monday while forestry experts planned how to repair damage done to nearly 73,000 acres of wilderness by the massive firefighting effort.

While federal emergency management officials helped burned-out homeowners assess damages estimated at more than $7 million in the Green Meadow blaze alone, firefighters picked their way across the ashen fire sites making sure nothing would rekindle in the blustery Santa Ana winds forecast for Monday night and today.

By Monday afternoon, the wildfires near Santa Paula and Ojai were fully contained.

But it was not until Monday evening that firefighters had cut a firebreak of unburnable land almost completely around the largest of Southern California’s wildfires--the 42,644-acre Green Meadow blaze, which burned 41 houses and mobile homes and 25 other buildings.

“Containment means we’ve got like a little chain-link fence around it,” said engineer Alan Campbell, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department. “If it does flare up, we’re sure that it’ll be contained in the break we’ve maintained without any manpower watching it.”

Firefighters hunted for smoldering debris Monday around the edges of the rugged site in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Using mostly hand tools, they snuffed out the last few flames and unearthed brush buried by bulldozers that could still be hot enough to spark new fires.

The peak force of more than 2,000 firefighters, including some from as far away as Wyoming and Hawaii, had dwindled to about 1,035 at the Green Meadow site by Monday evening. More were expected to go home by this morning, Campbell said.

The next big task is to repair slopes where bulldozer tracks could worsen runoff from the winter rains and to reseed land where flames incinerated seeds that would have helped native brush to grow again, said Capt. Joe Sing of the California Department of Forestry.

“There’s sides of hills where the fire burned so hot that it’s burnt almost white,” Sing said. “In a scenario where there’s runoff, the best thing is to go in there and reseed.”

Rain will cause mudslides if the brush is not helped to grow thick enough to anchor the soil, he said.

Hand crews will shovel earth smooth where firebreaks were slashed as wide as four bulldozers, Sing said. Other bulldozers dragging huge steel claws behind them will break up fire-baked soil and ready it for seeding, he said.

The bulldozers also will help fertilize the land by plowing under some of the brush that was cut and tossed aside by firefighters during the battle, he said.

*

By noon Monday, the firefighting force at the 1,650-acre Wheel fire near Ojai in the Los Padres National Forest had dwindled from nearly 280 to only 42, as hand crews hiked over steep terrain mopping up and making sure the last embers were out, a forestry official said.

Land burned there will probably recover on its own because the 8-year-old brush--which grew after the 1985 Wheeler fire--did not burn nearly as hot as brush around Thousand Oaks that had not burned since the 1950s, said forestry spokesman Earl Clayton.

“The area that this one burned in may not need too much rehabilitation,” Clayton said.

Meantime, firefighters between Santa Paula and Ventura had fought the 26,500-acre Steckel fire to a standstill, declaring it fully contained by Monday noon.

They predict it will be out by 6 p.m. Wednesday night, said George Calloway, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

But firefighters there also patrolled the fire site’s edge looking for trouble spots. “They’re looking up to 300 feet within the perimeters of the fire, and working out any hot spots,” Calloway said.

Officials will keep nearly all the 1,190 firefighters who worked the Steckel fire nearby, he said.

“You have to look at the potential two days coming up with the wind,” Calloway said. “If they demobilize a great percentage of the equipment they have here, they may all of a sudden have to put in a new request for resources” if fire breaks out again, he said.

As Santa Ana winds rise today, police and firefighters will keep watch across Southern California for new fires--and especially for arsonists.

Arson was blamed for six fires around Southern California last week, including the one that blackened 1,800 acres in Simi Valley and Chatsworth--and the other three Ventura County fires.

No suspects have been arrested as yet in any of those blazes, and investigators fear that some may attempt to strike again today.

Volunteer citizen groups with portable radios were scheduled to join police and fire personnel in the patrolling effort, which begins today in the areas where brush is the thickest--and the fire danger the greatest. Fire units were being placed on “red-flag” alert.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which serves as the nation’s federal arson-investigation arm, is coordinating the investigative efforts of at least 35 agencies probing last week’s fires in Southern California.

And the FBI has sent copies of recent arson threat letters to the bureau’s central laboratory in Washington for fingerprint identification and development of personality profiles of the authors.

Fire officials disclosed last week that more than 30 letters threatening arson were received by various Southern California police and fire departments and citizens between Sept. 1 and the outbreak of the fires last week. The officials said they had no evidence that the letters were connected to any of last week’s fires.

*

Meanwhile, Gov. Pete Wilson signed an executive order Monday allowing 3,500 firefighters still working the wildfires to vote by provisional ballot from the field.

In Ventura County, elections chief Bruce Bradley said that at least one special polling place would be set up for on-duty firefighters at Arroyo Verde Park, command center for the Steckel fire. Others might be set up near the Ventura County Fairgrounds, which is a staging area for that fire, and Borchard Community Center, the base camp for the Green Meadow fire, Bradley said.

The firefighters could vote only on the seven statewide propositions, not local issues. Their votes would be returned to home counties and tallied at the same time as absentee ballots cast on Election Day, said Chief Deputy Secretary of State Tony Miller, whose office arranged the plan.

“We have had numerous telephone calls from persons based in fire camps expressing concern that they would be unable to vote (today) and that one particular measure, Prop. 172, could directly affect their jobs,” Miller said in a press release.

Proposition 172 would make permanent an existing half-cent sales tax and funnel the revenue to local governments to spend on public safety.

Times staff writers Daryl Kelley, Eric Malnic and John L. Mitchell contributed to this report.

Property Damage in the Thousand Oaks Fire The Green Meadow wildfire near Thousand Oaks destroyed 41 residences and scorched more than 42,000 acres. Acres burned: 42,644 Damage: 41 residences destroyed, and more than 25 barns, sheds and other buildings destroyed. Location of burned residences: Including: Rasnow Peak, Potrero Road, Yerba Buena Road, Carlisle Road, Cotharin Road, Hasler Road and Little Sycamore Canyon Road. Injuries: 17 firefighters, 1 deputy, 3 civilians and 2 Southern California Edison workers, all minor injuries. Firefighters: 1,035 on duty Monday. Preliminary damage assessment: At least $7 million. Cost of extinguishing fire: $5,547, 410. Source: Airborne Environmental Surveys