Quiet Fire Season Comes to End

Orange County is emerging from the 1998 fire season relatively unscathed, despite earlier predictions that El Nino would lead to fiery catastrophe.

The official fire season is due to end Monday in the county and throughout California, with fire officials expressing relief that the feared major conflagrations did not occur.

“This really has turned out to be a fairly anti-climatic year,” said Capt. Scott Brown, spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority, which saw only one serious blaze and no wildfire deaths in the county this year.

That trend was evident statewide, with both the number of fires and the acreage burned for 1998 totaling less than the five-year average, said Karen Terrill, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The department plans to announce the end of the state fire season Monday when its last three counties on alert--Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties--return to winter routines.

Fire season was declared closed more than a month ago in Northern California.

While fire officials worry that a warm, dry winter could mean a change of luck next year, they can relax as the seasonal rains begin.

For those Orange County residents who relish the outdoors, the declining fire risk means that many wild lands closed to the public in June because of potential fire hazards will be reopened Monday at 8 a.m.

“Everyone’s glad--the staff, the visitors, everyone,” said Luan Aubin, spokeswoman for Chino Hills State Park, where the park staff will reinstall fire rings next week so that people can enjoy campfires. Open fires were forbidden this summer and fall in the park because its rich stands of coastal sage scrub and chaparral become prime fire fuel when dried by summer heat.

The El Nino torrents last winter spurred enormous spring growth of grasses, chaparral, wild mustard and other vegetation across the hillsides of Southern California. As experts eyed the verdant wealth of plants, they worried it would be transformed into fire fuel.

But the same winter wetness may have helped fend off fire by boosting the moisture content of the plants, making it less susceptible to wildfire. In some instances, chaparral “didn’t burn as hot, and it wasn’t as fierce,” said Scott Harris, wildlife biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game. “That was one saving grace.”

Some summer hot spells were humid as well, making sparks less likely to flare into fires, said Terrill.

Widespread publicity about the fire threat may have made people more cautious, she added, spurring them to clear grasses from around their homes and to think more of the dangers of tossing a lighted cigarette from a car window or pull a hot car onto a grassy road right-of-way.

The season’s biggest fire blackened nearly 8,800 acres in the Santiago Canyon area in early September. Sparked by lightning, the fire jumped the Eastern toll road and threatened the Portola Hills area and Foothill Ranch, where flames came within 50 feet of homes.

But the homes were spared, in part because of modern, fire-conscious measures such as better building techniques, wide streets, ample water supplies and well-designed buffer zones.

“All those elements were in place and in essence were responsible for saving that community,” said Brown at the Fire Authority.

Wildlife was not as lucky, as the same fire raged through some of the county’s most ecologically rich areas. It scorched nearly a quarter of the proposed federal wildlife preserve at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and killed or drove away 94 California gnatcatchers, a rare songbird protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.

And Orange County firefighters mourned the death of Capt. Thomas Oscar Wall. Regularly stationed in Tustin, Wall suffered a fatal heart attack fighting an October wildfire in Riverside County.

Now, with the season nearly done, state firefighters will be shaving their staffs to winter levels, and sometimes using fewer engines and other resources to respond to fires.

But the lowered state of readiness may be short-lived.

Fire experts remain nervous about all that El Nino-nurtured underbrush, which could still ignite next year and send fires racing across the landscape.