U.S. Cuts Firefighters in Southland’s Forests : Budget: Hundreds are laid off at height of season. Officials say smaller crews will respond and stations will overlap coverage.

At the height of Southern California’s fire season, hundreds of seasonal firefighters are being laid off in the region’s national forests because of federal belt tightening.

More than 130 temporary firefighters--who typically are hired to beef up crews from May to November--were laid off this week in the Angeles National Forest, as the start of the fiscal year forced forest officials to plan for an expected $2-million budget cut, officials said.

Ironically, said Angeles fire management officer Tom Harbour, most of those firefighters were called back Monday to be on call as lower-paid “emergency” crews because the weather conditions were so fire-prone in the forest, which abuts Los Angeles County suburbs from Glendora to Tujunga.

In the San Bernardino National Forest, about 120 temporary firefighters were laid off, and similar layoffs were reported in the Los Padres and Cleveland National Forests. In general, officials said, the layoffs mean that engine companies will respond to fires with three-person rather than five-person crews. In addition, they said, fire stations will no longer operate seven days a week but will cover the forests on an overlapping five-day-a-week schedule.

They added that U.S. Forest Service firefighters will rely more heavily on help from municipal and county fire departments.

Harbour and others said the staffing reduction carries an inherent increase in risk. The 1993 Altadena fire, which started on county land at the edge of the Angeles National Forest and spread into the national forest, ultimately followed shifting winds into the foothill communities of the San Gabriel Valley, causing more than $60 million in damages.

“The key in wild-land forest management, as we say, is ‘Hit ‘em hard and keep ‘em small,’ ” Harbour said. “If you hit a fire hard at the beginning, it won’t become a danger to anyone but the firefighters. It’s when a fire escapes that it causes problems. . . . And as far as what’s going to happen with fires escaping, well, that’s going to be a crapshoot now.”

In Washington, Forest Service officials blamed a lack of planning at the national forest level for the sudden personnel cuts. Harry Croft, assistant director for planning in the service’s fire and aviation department, said the supervisors at the regional and forest level are given substantial discretion over how their appropriations are spent, and the firefighting budget for California’s national forests is only about 1% smaller this year than last.

Southern California forests have some of the biggest budgets in the Forest Service, Croft said. But, he said, a substantial amount of their funding year after year has been frittered away by high administrative and overhead costs, such as support staff and high rents. He said higher-ups in Washington have warned them to curb their overhead costs, “but a lot of the line officers have either been in denial or reluctant to look at the issue.”

Harbour and others dispute this claim, saying the real problem stems from budget tightening at the federal level, increases in the cost of leasing firefighting equipment, changes in the way federal money has been spread among California’s national forests by the Forest Service’s regional office in San Francisco and, especially, a change in the rules regarding use of a special emergency fire fund.

Russ Johnson, deputy forest fire management officer for the San Bernardino National Forest, said that in past years, Forest Service firefighters--particularly in fire-prone Southern California--have been able to dip into that fund to offset shortages in their federal allotments.

“But in 1994, we had some really large fires in Idaho and Montana, and the cost of fighting them kind of broke the bank,” Johnson said.

“With that, and the whole trend toward downsizing the federal budget, there’s just been much more scrutiny . . . and a lot of things we used to charge [to that fund], we can’t charge any more.”

In any case, officials said, the bottom line is that there will be a smaller first-response team at the front lines of forest fires this year.

“The timing of this whole thing is what makes it, um, interesting,” said Jim Youngson, public information officer for the Los Padres National Forest, which abuts Santa Barbara and Ojai and which laid off 50 temporary firefighters this week. “And when I say interesting, I’m putting it mildly.”