Lessons of Fires Burn Brightly in Aftermath : Recovery: Officials are still learning from difficulties and successes in fighting 1993 blazes, as homeowners rebuild and nature continues to rebound.

The ferocious wildfires of 1993 taught a harsh lesson, Ventura fire officials said last week: Their communication system was inadequate and their command staff too small.

One year after arson fires destroyed 59 homes and scorched 68,302 acres in the four populated corners of Ventura County, fire commanders are studying how they might better coordinate the use of out-of-county firefighter strike teams.

As nature mends the burned land and homeowners struggle to rebuild, fire officials also are looking for ways to avoid communications foul-ups that caused lost radio calls last year, said Ventura County Assistant Fire Chief Dave Festerling.

“One of the things we’re talking about is the need for advanced, or even satellite communications,” Festerling said. But satellite links are expensive, he said, and alternatives are few.

The lesson hit hard in the 38,152-acre Green Meadow fire near Thousand Oaks, he said.

While the 26,500-acre Steckel fire near Santa Paula and smaller blazes near Simi Valley and Ojai burned barns and unpopulated wild land, the Green Meadow fire took homes.

Just after 1 p.m. last Oct. 26, an arsonist lit thick, old brush near the Los Robles Golf Course. Fire roared from Green Meadow Avenue to the Pacific on the shoulders of blistering Santa Ana winds over the next 11 days, destroying 139 of the 147 buildings lost in Ventura County’s wildfires.

*

Deep canyons and sharp ridges in the Santa Monica Mountains cut off radio and cellular phone calls to firefighters for up to an hour. Sometimes calls were disrupted by firefighters in Malibu using the same frequency, Festerling said.

Sheriff’s helicopters shuttled three radio repeaters from ridge to ridge trying to bridge the gap.

But lost transmissions cost time and shaved down fire commanders’ strategic efficiency, Festerling said. “In the main part of the fire where we lost structures, it was tremendously hindering.”

Commanders also had trouble tracking hundreds of out-of-county fire engine strike teams. Teams and assignments were logged onto index cards--a system that eventually must be replaced with a computer, he said.

“In the first two days of the Green Meadow fire, we had back-orders of 20 to 40 firetrucks,” he said. “We were pulling them right off the road the minute they got here and putting them right on the fire to make some saves. When we have a total of 10 chief officers in the county that are command-oriented, you get real thin real quick.”

Many out-of-towners had no wildfire training, which further slowed progress against the flames, he said.

County fire officials are drafting a report for the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Festerling said, to offer potential solutions to these problems.

They also might buy computerized wildfire simulators to sharpen skills for commanders. They are even considering fitting firetrucks with mapping computers that will show each as a dot on a map screen at headquarters, or in the trucks themselves.

“There’s a lot of toys, a lot of things we’d want to look at,” he said. “Sometimes it’s like looking in the candy store window.”

To help, fire officials probably will try to pool money and resources with other Southern California departments.

*

But with a limited budget--thanks in part to the Board of Supervisors’ decision to rescind Proposition 172 funding that was earmarked for the department--hardware solutions will be hard to come by, Festerling said.

Festerling could not say if homes burned because of the communications gap or undertrained crews.

“The fact that communications were slow played a part, but I’m not sure that anything that could have been saved wasn’t saved,” he said. “Brush clearance is what saved homes in that case.”

Santa Paula rancher Dan Pinkerton swears by it.

Remembering the 1985 wildfire that consumed his orchards and a guest house, Pinkerton cleared all the brush from his 60-acre avocado ranch and replaced drip-irrigation systems with sprinklers. He and 20 relatives and friends handily defended the place against the fast-moving Steckel fire, he said.

“This time, they were a little more careful and really took a lot more precautions and didn’t rely on the Fire Department to help them,” Pinkerton, 47, said of his neighbors. “You just can’t say enough about getting brush away from structures and away from the orchards.”

Yet some Ventura County fire victims blamed firefighters for not doing more to save homes on well-cleared property.

Doors, floors and ceilings burned inside Shari and Craig Latta’s home on Miplomoc Road when the Green Meadow fire raced through.

A Culver City fire crew had declared the house a command post for the neighborhood, said Shari Latta, 42. Then they drained the Lattas’ water storage tanks to wet down the house and bailed out when things got too hot, she said.

“We were really angry,” Latta recalled.

*

After she took her two children, ages 7 and 11, and the family’s horses to safety, her husband and three friends beat out flames with burlap sacks soaked in trash cans they had filled earlier.

Repairing the $100,000 worth of damage has been a strain, she said. The family lived in a Thousand Oaks hotel for three months.

They had to fire a professional post-disaster company that did a poor job cleaning their smoke-damaged walls and then lost stored belongings ranging from sofa cushions to half the family crystal, she said.

“It would have been easier to have (the house) burn to the ground,” Latta said glumly.

Chris and Kathleen Schoon have not begun rebuilding their burned redwood-sided, tile-topped house on Yerba Buena Road.

They are renting a house on Pacific Coast Highway and painstakingly wading through county permits and insurance forms with a public adjuster.

“I’m not upset. I really didn’t think it would take this long,” said Kathleen Schoon, 33, an actress. “But I look up and down the coast and see a lot of houses that haven’t begun rebuilding or are just starting. It’s a long process, and a lot of people started too quickly and paid too much.”

*

Just across Yerba Buena Road, Mike and Susan Foos wasted no time in rebuilding their guest house--for $72,000, all covered by insurance--and moving in new tenants.

Bright splatters of melted aluminum still coat a stone wall nearby, flung there as the fire devoured the guest house and liquefied its sheet-metal roof.

But the main house survived, Mike Foos said, because he and three friends stayed inside when his wife and two children evacuated.

The firestorm roared around them. It blackened the sky, blew one man’s truck down a hill and set the house’s wooden decks ablaze, he said.

But once it was past, they went out and doused the decks with water from garbage cans. With a little paint, the house looks like new.

“Not a biggie,” said Foos, 36, a tow service operator and 14-year resident of the rugged valley below Boney Mountain. “I don’t even think about it, to tell you the truth. . . . I think people make more out of the fire than they should.”

Nearby, the house Marvin Bell built 35 years ago still stands because, he said, he hosed it down all day before leaving, just ahead of the fire.

“I was going around here like Donald Duck on the warpath,” Bell, 73, a retired construction supervisor, said with a chuckle. “All the neighbors, they tucked their tails and hauled ass. . . . I stayed here till the last minute.”

But the fire destroyed a huge trailer he had filled with his furniture while redecorating. And it spread across the valley below, devouring his entire beekeeping operation--60 colonies--and leaving him little more than a honeycomb centrifuge and 700 pounds of honey stored in his garage to remember it by.

*

He spurned the $51,000 low-interest loan he was offered to set back up because it was too small to put him back in business. Sadly, he added, “I’m going broker every day.”

Firefighters never came to his door, he complained. He was left to face the fire alone.

Firefighters could only do so much to stop the fire, said Festerling, who called it the worst he had seen since the 1978 Kanan fire burned from the Ventura Freeway to the sea.

Yet compared to devastating fire losses in Los Angeles and Orange counties, relatively little property burned in Ventura County.

That, said Ventura County Fire Marshal Kevin Nestor, was because the fires raged across sparsely populated wild land--and because the county’s tough weed-abatement program worked.

The Ventura County Fire Protection District orders property owners to clear brush for 100 feet around buildings. Private contractors clear scofflaw properties by order of the Fire Department, which then tacks the cost on to the landowners’ county tax bills.

Along sinewy Yerba Buena and Cotharin roads, where two hungry fire fronts converged on mountainside dwellings, three or four times as many homes would have been lost without strict weed control, Nestor said.

“The defensible space we provided through weed abatement saved numerous homes,” said Nestor, who commanded firefighters there.

Nature itself had no such defense against the flames.

On the contrary, naturalists said, the fire helped long dormant native plants by clearing away dense, 30-year-old chaparral that had choked them.

*

In the Green Meadow fire zone, two rare types of tulip-sized lilies rebounded.

Plummer’s Mariposa lily, listed as rare and endangered, and the Catalina Mariposa lily bloomed in abundance in the region’s parks. They thrived especially at the National Park Service’s Circle X Ranch, said Rick Burgess, a Thousand Oaks city planner and board member of the local branch of the California Native Plant Society.

“Circle X was in fact the best display I’ve ever seen in my life,” Burgess said. “The combination of yellow, lilac and purple was just beautiful.”

Unobstructed sunlight and rich nutrients in the ashy soil sped the plants’ rapid growth after the fire. But these vivid displays will be overgrown again, he said, by dominant chaparral plants such as laurel sumac, ceanothus, manzanita and scrub oak.

Plants known as fire followers actually require fire’s heat to burst their tough seed jackets. The Green Meadow blaze spurred germination of several breeds of poppies and phacelias--purple and blue flowers that blanketed the hillsides in spring and now spread a soft fuzz of dried flowers along the trails there.

Plants like mustard have also rebounded, much to the chagrin of naturalists who want non-native plants removed. In the stunning La Jolla Valley grasslands in Point Mugu State Park, mustard grew nearly 12 feet tall this past spring.

“It gets a head start on everything else,” explained Milt McAuley, author of “Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains,” on a recent walking tour of Point Mugu. “This year there was no competition. It won’t get quite so high next year.”

*

Now dried, mustard stands in tall stalks on the valley floor, hindering native grasses such as stipa. Slender, blackened sticks, mostly the burned remains of laurel sumac, cover hillsides. Some remains may still be there 25 years from now, McAuley said.

Erosion was a main concern.

Small stones pour off the hillsides and onto the trails without the chaparral to hold them in place, he said. Deep ruts wear in the hillsides from rain runoff. Carefully laid rock steps get pushed aside by the onslaught of water. Whole trails could be washed away.

But the situation in the parks has proved less disastrous than McAuley and others feared. Soil samples showed the ground was rich with seed, and new growth came in quickly.

Almost all the burned area was left alone to recover. About 30 acres in Newbury Park were reseeded with native grasses by the city of Thousand Oaks and the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency to protect homes below from mudslides.

McAuley pointed to a hillside above the trail where crumbling rocks and dirt were dotted with spiky green plants.

“That’s California sagebrush,” he said. “You can see how it’s stabilizing this bank. And there’s some buckwheat doing the same. . . . That’ll be a nice forest in five years.”

The wildfires also burned many trees, including coast live oaks and valley oaks.

Thick bark protects valley oaks from fire, said George Moore, a member of the native plant society who is the tree consultant for the city of Thousand Oaks. Flames rush through the grasslands where they grow, and leaves on both oak breeds grow high enough to avoid the fire’s full force, he said.

“I don’t think these trees get to be 200 years old without going through a few fires,” Moore said. “But there could be some oak trees irreparably damaged from the fires. It’s too soon to tell.”

*

And still, one year later, arson investigators say they have no idea who started it all.

“Arson’s one of the few crimes that’s committed in the presence of no one,” said investigator Bill Hager, of the county Fire Department. “A robber’s got to rob somebody, but with arson, there’s very few witnesses.”

As hot, dry winds gather in the east again this season, he said, Ventura County residents should watch out for arsonists. They should try to remember details of any fire, jotting down license numbers and descriptions of people who go where they don’t belong.

“In order for us to do our job better, we need the public to keep their eyes open,” Hager said. “Without their help, we can’t solve them.”