Firefighting Study Makes Sense

Even if the San Fernando Valley weren’t baking in the August heat and wildfires weren’t burning in record numbers throughout the West, City Council member Cindy Miscikowski’s motion last week to review the city’s firefighting capability is a good one.

Miscikowski stops short of calling for the city to buy its own SuperScooper, the Canadian-built firefighting plane leased from Quebec by Los Angeles County for the last six fire seasons. The city in turn rents the county-leased SuperScoopers through a mutual-aid agreement, but as a “junior partner,” does not have priority should the county be fighting its own fires.

A group of Topanga Canyon residents, spooked by the fire in May that decimated Los Alamos, N.M., wants the county to buy rather than lease the water-scooping planes. The group points out that leasing the planes from September through November, typically the peak brush-fire season in Southern California, leaves Topanga Canyon and other high-risk areas vulnerable the rest of the year.

But the county Fire Department counters that purchasing the $22-million planes was never planned. And Miscikowski’s office says that the city would also not likely buy such an expensive aircraft, at least on its own.

But Miscikowski’s motion also calls for studying whether the city could get more for its money by partnering with the county and state--or, for that matter, with the federal government, which, after all, oversees the 150,000-acre national recreation area that runs through the Santa Monica Mountains.

The three city departments can weigh the dollars and cents of leasing versus buying. They can compare the SuperScooper’s advantages in speed and water-carrying capacity to the maneuverability--and lower price--of the rival Helitanker, a huge, water-dropping helicopter.

Those decisions can be made once the options are studied, as Miscikowski’s proposal prescribes. But we can almost guarantee right now that partnering with other governments in an area where jurisdictions overlap and abut makes financial as well as strategic sense, regardless of whether the decision is ultimately buy or lease, SuperScooper or Helitanker. Wildfires, after all, don’t distinguish between governmental boundaries.

All parties know that California, which already has a history of disastrous wildfires, is facing what climatologists say could be a 20-year drought. Now, not later, is the time to prepare.