Crews Battle Flames and the Elements

To the many who coast through the California fire season in the air-conditioned comfort of urban life, what happened Monday in the wilderness north of Azusa boiled down to this: A 1,375-acre brush fire in the forsaken middle of nowhere was brought under some semblance of control, two days after the blaze was apparently set by an arsonist.

But to those who spent the day on the roaring front lines, that account didn’t begin to reflect the miserable reality: A wall of fire. Rattlesnakes and scorpions. One-hundred-degree heat. Terrain so steep and rugged it’s hard to stand. Air so hot you dread your next breath. And then, as if Armageddon weren’t enough, hordes of crazed “meat bees,” swarming straight for your flesh.

All this in the name of a swatch of chaparral five miles from the nearest sign of humanity.

It’s a battle that is all guts and no glory, just one in a string of big fires that will punctuate the season, as they have every California summer. Some firefighters save babies in high-rises and salvage entire neighborhoods from calamity. This mostly is a fight on behalf of wildlife--of creosote bushes and coyote dens.

“We risk our life to protect Mother Nature,” said Jerzan Avalos, a 28-year-old fire crew member, watching smoke billow into the blank blue sky over the San Gabriel Canyon blaze.

“Bees, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes--we get the worst,” added his exhausted compatriot Rene Hernandez, 27, of San Diego. “This ain’t no Disneyland.”

The San Gabriel Canyon brush fire, which raged out of control for most of the weekend in a remote patch of rugged chaparral, was more than 60% contained by midday Monday, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Bruce Quintelier said. It was corralled just as a fresh blaze erupted miles away in Castaic, racing--at last count--across 8,000 acres of parched and uninhabited land.

The Angeles National Forest, where this fire was set Saturday, is on most days a place of stark majesty. California 39, which slices through the arid canyons north of Azusa, is renowned as a scenic route.

It is terrain that from a moving car appears merely picturesque. But here on the fire line, appearances don’t count for much. Nature shifts on you--now lovely, now deadly, now merely banal. The wind blows both betrayal and sweet respite. Ordinary-seeming people turn out to be troubled souls with something to prove to themselves, something that might be provable, they think, in a dry field with a lighted match.

Even the heroes are not always what they may seem: Only a fraction of those on the front lines are professional firefighters. The 885 people deployed against Monday’s fire, for example, included two busloads of federal employees from Florida who were anthropologists, engineers and bureaucrats by trade, but who were spending several weeks moonlighting with the U.S. Forest Service.

Another sizable contingent was made up of state prison inmates, deployed from work camps to do grunt work for the California Department of Forestry. Avalos and Hernandez both were members of a 12-man convict crew from the Bautista work camp in Riverside County.

Supervised by two forestry department fire captains, the dollar-an-hour convict crew has spent this summer shuttling from conflagration to conflagration, hacking fire lines, digging ditches, minding controlled burns, with little sleep and no days off. They started in on the San Gabriel Canyon fire Sunday around dusk after a week battling a Tulare County blaze.

Noon found them taking a breather after six hours of hard work, hunkering down by the bone-white boulders just off California 39. The air was as hot as a sauna, and smelled scorched. The men guzzled fruit juice as sweat ran in long rivulets down their faces.

They were celebrating: They had tossed a coin with another fire crew to determine who would scale a nearby hill and clear brush for a controlled burn, and they had won the toss.

But even the breaks were uncomfortable. It was 100 degrees and everyone was wearing triple layers of protective fire gear. Moreover, they were being divebombed by “meat bees.”

Actually, the creatures are a type of wasp that tend to go wild around brush fires. Some firefighters think the yellow uniforms incite them; others believe it’s the smoke.

“They just seem to tag onto you every chance you get,” said Capt. Ray Valenzuela, a 32-year veteran of the California Department of Forestry, and one of two supervisors of the inmate crew. Valenzuela said that last week a captain on the Tulare fire was bitten 18 times in a single encounter with a swarm.

Elsewhere on the fire line, the situation was even worse. One battalion chief had been stung on the throat; another had gotten it in the nose. On Saturday night, the crews said, one firefighter had to be airlifted after being stung in the mouth.

And if it wasn’t one critter, it was another: “The little bitty gnats were eating us alive,” said Isaac Canada, a forestry department veteran.

For this work, the professional firefighters said, they will get little reward beyond their paycheck and--maybe--an “attaboy.” Canada said that when he joined the profession four years ago, the danger-to-payoff ratio almost prompted him to quit.

“It was a call in the Chino Hills,” he recalled. “Everybody else was coming this way, and we were coming toward the fire. I was wondering if I could do this. I was wondering if I wanted to do this.” Suddenly, a tsunami of fire rolled onto the road and under his vehicle.

For reasons he can’t quite articulate, the moment galvanized his resolve. He stayed. Why? Because “someone has to put out the fire.”

* CASTAIC BRUSH FIRE: A blaze blamed on a teenage arsonist has consumed about 8,000 acres. A20