NEWPORT BEACH : Fire Chief Gets OK to Order Brush Clearing

The City Council on Monday night gave the fire chief authority to order about 100 residents in Corona del Mar to clean out dry and dead shrubbery in canyons behind their homes.

Fire Chief Timothy D. Riley said that several canyons and gullies in Newport Beach pose an “extreme fire hazard” and need to be pruned by property owners as soon as possible. The council voted 7 to 0 to allow Riley to take his fire prevention plan to the public.

Riley has scheduled a community meeting Tuesday to explain the best ways to comply with the order to minimize fire hazards in brush lands and canyons bordering residential areas.

The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. in the Oasis Senior Center in Corona del Mar.

On Monday, Riley showed aerial footage of five or six canyons that are full of vegetation and that could fuel wildfires, he said. Riley’s footage also showed how Corona del Mar narrowly escaped the devastating fires that turned hundreds of Laguna Beach homes to ashes.

“We were lucky,” he said.

Riley explained that the mouth of Buck Gully is near the spot where the brush fires were halted by Newport Beach and Los Angeles County firefighters who were aided by a fortunate shift in wind direction. He said that because of difficult access to the canyon, firefighters would not be able to stop a wildfire entering Upper Buck Gully near Newport Coast Drive until it reached the ocean.

Irvine Co. officials reported Monday that their crews have already begun clearing vegetation from Upper Buck Gully, near the Harbor View Homes South community. The city is also planning to step up its efforts to reduce the fire hazard in Mission Canyon, located near the Spyglass community.

He said that residents may each have to pay about $1,000 to have brush cleared properly.

In the past, most people who live on the rim of those two Corona del Mar canyons have been more concerned with maintaining an untouched canyon habitat than clearing out vegetation that poses a fire threat, Riley said. Many of the residents have back yards that stretch about 100 feet to the floor of the canyon and some have been properly clearing brush away for years while others have not.

George Parker, a resident who lives on the edge of Buck Gully, suggested that the best way to prevent fires is to clear most of the canyon of shrubbery and replace it with fire-resistant plants.