Investigators Search Recycler for Clues to Baker Canyon Fire

With the blaze that burned 5,330 acres this week extinguished, a skeleton crew of firefighters looked for hot spots Thursday, while arson investigators searched the recycling business where the fire started to determine who was burning the copper wire that set off the Baker Canyon blaze.

About 170 firefighters searched the fire area, some in a helicopter using an infrared viewer to pick out hot spots. Ground crews used pickaxes, shovels and pickups armed with small water pumps to extinguish embers that could cause a resurgence of the blaze. The crew will remain at work through this morning, Brown said.

The fire, which drew more than 1,200 firefighters at its height, has cost more than $1.1 million to fight, said Herb Jewell, chief of the wild land fire defense section of the Orange County Fire Authority.

As the firefighters’ job approached its end, environmentalists were walking the blackened hills and canyons of eastern Orange County to determine the fire’s effects on precious wilderness areas where rare birds and butterflies lived.

Countless deer, mountain lions, foxes and other threatened species like the California gnatcatcher and the gray vireo live in the area.

Biologists said it is too early to know whether the burned area, which includes portions of the new and much-touted Nature Reserve of Orange County, would come quickly back to life. But they said they were hopeful that the fire had left the wildlife area unharmed. Some plant species in the area could be better off than before the blaze, which killed off vast stands of old growth and may allow new growth to arise.

Early estimates suggest that 500 to 1,200 acres burned in the reserve’s 20,000-acre central area, including the upper part of Hicks Canyon, said Trish Smith of the California Nature Conservancy, an advisor for the reserve.

The fire also burned a large expanse of Irvine Co. land, known as the North Ranch Policy Plan area, that environmentalists have fought to add to the reserve. The area is the last known spot in the county where the Quino checkerspot butterfly appeared. Although that sighting took place 30 years ago, the insect still might live there.

The once-common Quino was added this year to the federal list of endangered species.

“It’s very likely that the majority of the area that burned will respond very well. It’s likely to be a very good thing, with many of the plants and animals responding vigorously,” said Robin Wills, fire program manager for the conservancy, a nonprofit agency that aims to protect wild lands. “But we sort of reserve our judgment on whether or not the fire was ecologically sound, depending on what happens over the next couple of years.”

Wills said that since the burned zone lies next to other wild land areas, animal stocks in the charred region stand a good chance of quickly regenerating. The adjacent lands gave species a place to run, Wills said. In contrast, the 1993 Laguna Hills fire lay amid developed land, providing animals no safety hatch, he said.

While a fire every five to 20 years allows a new generation of plants to arise, in recent years more blazes have hit the Southland, making it difficult for local plant stocks to regain their numbers before they are wiped out again, Wills said.

“Plants don’t have enough time to complete their life cycles, to regenerate, to grow mature, to produce flowers and seeds, and then respond to the next fire,” he said.

That is changing the landscape.

“What’s happening in Southern California is that many of the places that were historically coastal sage shrub are being converted to grasslands, dominated by nonnative or introduced grass species,” Wills said.

The fire’s full impact on the Irvine Co., the county’s largest landholder, will not be known until the firm takes aerial photographs and studies them, said company spokesman Paul Kranhold. An exact tally of acres burned was not available Wednesday. Some charred land near Orange was earmarked for future Irvine Co. development, and those plans probably will not be changed, Kranhold said.

As firefighters mopped up Thursday, winds were down to their slowest since Santa Anas helped fan the flames when it started Monday night and Tuesday, although temperatures remained unseasonably hot and dry.

“We don’t anticipate the return of those high winds,” Brown said.