THE SOUTHLAND FIRESTORM: HOLDING THE LINE : Growing Migration to Fire-Prone Areas Fans Concern : Development: Experts see repetition of Malibu and Laguna Beach disasters as suburbs push farther into the wilds. Homes complicates firefighters’ job, they say.

Dry grass, hot winds and oily brush have fed wildfires in Southern California since prehistoric times. But as the latest fires in the Santa Monica Mountains amply demonstrate, the increasing presence of homes in fire-prone territory can be a recipe for disaster.

To wild-land fire experts, the devastation from the blazes that swept down on Malibu this week--and Laguna Beach last week--is destined to be repeated as suburbia spreads farther into hills and brush lands.

“We are more and more concerned as more and more people are moving into the wild lands,” said Dan Lang, chief of emergency operations for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Fifteen or 20 years ago, there might have been only vegetation there. Today, lots and lots of structures are exposed. The damage potential is much greater than it used to be.”

A classic example of the trend, fire and planning officials say, can be found in the corridor of growing suburbs at the western end of Los Angeles County that includes Calabasas, Westlake Village and Agoura Hills--parts of which were threatened by the recent blazes.

The population in that corridor is more than 55,000, nearly triple what it was in 1970, according to the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Department. Much of that growth has been in canyons and mountain valleys that were thoroughly rural two decades ago.

Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency, flew over that region Thursday in a helicopter to view fire damage. He was struck, he said, by the number of houses that have been constructed recently on isolated ridges and hilltops, some of which burned this week.

Particularly thought-provoking, he said, was flying over Lilac Lane in the Santa Susana Knolls area of Ventura County, near where four Los Angeles city firefighters were badly burned last week by flames that engulfed their truck. Those firefighters were trying to protect a residential neighborhood that did not exist a generation ago.

The blazes “raise very, very serious public policy problems” about growth in the hilly areas, Edmiston said. A related issue is the existence of a state-required insurance pool that allows homeowners in risky areas to obtain coverage at reasonable rates, he said.

“We have decided (that) allowing people to live in these mountains in remote areas is a desirable objective,” Edmiston said. “I’m saying, maybe we should rethink that. Not with a heavy hand, but in a more thoughtful way.”

After the disastrous fire that killed 25 people in the Oakland and Berkeley hills in 1991, officials estimated that 7 million people in California lived on the margin where towns and suburbia meet brush lands with a history of fire.

A recent study by the state Department of Finance projected population increases of 40% by 2005 in some farming and foothill counties in the Central Valley and along the coastal range. Much of it would be in grasslands, scrub areas or up against forests.

U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt last week suggested local controls on building in such untamed areas as a way to minimize fire hazards. “All over the West, people are moving into the woods to live,” Babbitt said after visiting burned-out sections of Altadena. “Firefighting is getting more expensive, more hazardous.”

The addition of houses to those rural landscapes, state fire official Lang and others lamented, has made it harder to use time-proven techniques against brush fires. The presence of new houses prevents firefighters from setting backfires that create firebreaks.

And efforts must be expended on saving immediately threatened houses, rather than tackling the firestorm. That puts other homes in danger as the larger blaze moves on.

“That diverts some of our people, fire engines and aircraft that otherwise could be used to fight the main body of the fire itself,” said Matt Mathes, spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in California.

Mathes said he understands the boom in hillside and foothill development, both in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada region. “People are trying to get to a quiet, more placid place,” he said. “They all want to live in a natural setting. But they too often forget that fire is a natural part of that setting.”

Improved firefighting technology is not the answer, said David Reider, an official at the Lassen National Forest in Northern California. “If anything, these fires in Malibu prove you could throw in every fighter in the world and still can’t stop it,” he said.

The real problem, Reider emphasized, is that “a lot of people are moving into the woods. They are taking their urban lifestyle with them, in a landscape that is a giant match waiting to happen. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”

The lure to the hills is unmistakable despite the obvious risk, said Charles Hotchkiss, chairman of the Urban and Regional Planning Department at Cal Poly Pomona. “When there’s not a fire, they are wonderful places to live,” he said.

In the wake of the devastating Oakland Hills blaze, tougher building codes have been passed or proposed in fire zones around the state. Those often require flame-resistant building materials, sprinklers, limits on vegetation and wider streets to allow emergency equipment access.

The changes, of course, raise building costs and trigger opposition from property owners and the construction industry. Any proposals to ban construction in fire-prone regions would start a political firestorm, experts say.

“The political ramifications of doing something that drastic are really so big, I don’t think there is the will to do anything like that,” said a state legislative consultant who requested anonymity. “You’d have builders running around crazy. And you are not going to stop people from wanting to live in canyon areas.”

Lang agreed, saying, “People don’t want to be told by government you have to do this and have to do that.” But he added that firefighters’ lives must be considered in those decisions. “Our only message is: ‘If you are going to build there, do it in such a way that it will survive a wildfire and we don’t have to commit firefighters up there to protect your house.’ ”

Recent debate over the future of the Malibou Lake community in the hills west of Calabasas exemplifies the difficulties in balancing growth and fire safety, participants say. Los Angeles County Fire Department officials warned of extreme danger in the community that began as a collection of rustic summer cabins and has only one access road. But some homeowners feared that proposed safety rules might result in too much construction and traffic. Owners of vacant property complained about higher construction costs.

“It’s an extremely contentious issue,” said Joel Bellman, press deputy to county Supervisor Edmund Edelman, who represents the area. An interim plan passed in January puts limits on the size of houses and requires sprinklers and additional off-street parking.

William Fulton, an urban planner who is editor of the Ventura-based California Planning and Development Report, said that the recent fires should make people more wary of building in the hills.

“It does seem to me that the problem you run into is this conflict between the need to protect areas that are believed to be hazardous and the property rights questions,” he said. Local governments are reluctant to ban construction so they stress safety codes and other mitigations instead, he added.

But watching the Calabasas/Malibu fires on television made Fulton say: “Sometimes you can have all the precautions and all the mitigations and it’s still the wrong thing in the wrong place.”