Los Alamos Fire Affects Controlled Burn Efforts

As a wildfire destroyed homes in New Mexico two weeks ago, Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Joe Lindaman was getting ready to set a fire in the Malibu Hills.

The manager of the county’s controlled burn program, Lindaman had 150 firefighters, seven fire engines, weather monitors and a helicopter crew on hand to burn eight acres of brush.

But that Tuesday morning the winds kicked up, and Lindaman predicted the gusts would eventually exceed 15 mph--the local threshold beyond which cancellation is required. He decided to call the whole thing off.

“We’re very cautious. It isn’t that difficult a decision to make when you have houses burning in New Mexico,” Lindaman said. “It’s pretty stressful to be responsible for organizing it.”

The Los Angeles County Fire Department expects to burn about 1,000 acres this year, part of a 20-year-old program that prescribes controlled burns to reduce fire damage later. But the Los Alamos fire, which started as a prescribed burn and ended up destroying more than 200 homes and at least 47,000 acres, has put local officials on the defensive. This week federal officials acknowledged that the National Park Service failed to follow proper safety procedures when setting the blaze.

While the federal government has ordered a 30-day moratorium on burns on federal lands, Los Angeles is moving ahead with its program--especially because this is one of the best and safest times of the year for such projects.

“We’ve been busy all week doing damage control, defending our program,” Lindaman said. “When you have people who are careless, we all take a black eye for it.”

While the department already has permission from landowners to light all the burns on this year’s schedule, the Los Alamos fire may make it a harder sell as firefighters try to garner community support for future controlled burns.

“Any time you burn around houses, there is fear,” Lindaman said. “With New Mexico fresh in their minds, it will be a big concern.”

The federal moratorium forced cancellation of a 350-acre prescribed burn in an area of the forest known as the Tanbark Flat, 6 miles north of San Dimas, said David Kerr, a division chief with the Fire Management Group for the Angeles National Forest. There had been plans to burn about 1,000 acres this year in the forest.

Kerr now must decide whether to seek permission to carry out the 350-acre burn despite the moratorium. May is considered one of the best months for burning because the brush and grass are not yet so dry that they increase fire risks.

“June is not a good month for burning,” Kerr said. “Once the grasses turn brown, it’s not advantageous to do a prescribed burn.”

Since the forest started lighting controlled fires in 1979, Kerr said, the fires have typically strayed from set borders by just a few acres. One prescribed burn, set in Fern Canyon, 2 miles north of La Canada Flintridge, jumped out of control and burned 80 acres more than planned in 1997. With the help of county firefighters, the blaze was contained.

“We had much stronger winds than what were predicted. You have a certain level of risk when you’re dealing a with a prescribed fire,” Kerr said. “You have to deal with what happens if you have a bad weather forecast.”

While there have been occasional reports of controlled burns getting out of control in surrounding counties, the only one to cause damage to homes in recent years was a 4,500-acre fire in June 1990 that burned eight homes in Corona. The fire started with a U.S. Forest Service prescribed burn.

Prescribed burning in the forest has paid off in the past, Kerr said. In October 1993, firefighters were able to stop the Kinneola fire in the Altadena area, which destroyed 126 homes, before it caused greater property damage, Kerr said. That 4,300-acre blaze, started by a transient who was trying to stay warm on a cool, windy night, was stopped, he said, because a large area had been cleared a year earlier by a prescribed burn.

On Thursday the Interior Department reported that the National Park Service lit its prescribed burn at the Bandelier National Monument on May 4 despite a warning that the another federal agency, the U.S. Forest Service, had stopped its own controlled burning in the area because of adverse weather conditions.

The Los Alamos burn was part of a stepped-up program of prescribed burning nationwide. After 14 firefighters were killed in a 1994 wildfire near Glenwood Springs, Colo., federal authorities set ambitious goals for prescribed burning nationwide. The concern was that too much dead brush was building up in wilderness areas, leading to fires that burn hotter and spread more quickly and over a wider area.

In 1996 federal plans called for burning 600,000 acres. By 2005, the U.S. Forest Service hopes to burn 3.5 million acres nationwide.

Kerr said the Angeles National Forest burning program actually decreased the amount of acreage burned in the 1990s, mostly because of budget constraints. Kerr said conducting a burn costs about $119 per acre.

As part of the planning, the county Fire Department’s Forestry Division completes a full environmental impact report, including a biological study of plant and animal life and an archeological survey. Over the years, discoveries of rare plants or endangered species at proposed sites have caused major delays.

“There are a lot of hurdles to be jumped to pull off a burn in this county,” said Herb Spitzer of the Forestry Division. “Any one of them can stop you.”

In Malibu, for example, Lindaman is working on a project called Cottontail. Started last year, the Cottontail burn is being executed in stages--usually about eight acres at a time. The point is to give firefighters a wide break in the brush between the Malibu hillsides and expensive homes lining the coast just south of Charmlee County Park.

Before the burning, the brush is cut back by hand crews, made up of state prison inmates or paid workers. Once cut, it is left to dry until weather conditions allow it to be burned.

Kerr said the fire in New Mexico was supposed to be a 1,000-acre controlled burn. In the Angeles National Forest, the maximum size of a burn is typically 350 to 400 acres. The size is kept smaller to limit smoke in surrounding communities.

Los Angeles County fires are nowhere near as big as the federal park burns--which can be several thousand acres in size.

“They are going in there like it’s World War II. They are just blowing everything away,” Lindaman said. “We’re doing this like it’s the Gulf War. It’s like surgery, in small little patches.”