Despite Drizzle, Threat of a Record Fire Season Looms After Dry Winter

It sounds more like a pool hustler than a weather phenomenon, but a variation of a Catalina eddy covered much of Orange County with dense drizzle Wednesday.

The weather didn’t hustle up enough rain, though, to delay the start of the annual fire season, as Orange County fire authorities declared nearly 180,000 acres of open land off-limits to hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts beginning at 8 a.m. Friday.

Wednesday’s thick haze and drizzle were expected to continue until this morning as a low-pressure system, stalled off the Baja coast in Mexico, pumped cool, moist air into coastal regions of Southern California, said Richard Stitt, a forecaster for the National Weather Service in San Diego.

A traditional Catalina eddy forms when winds swirl in from the northwest, drawing ocean moisture into the Los Angeles Basin, where it becomes trapped by the mountains. This week’s marine layer and dense drizzle resembled a Catalina eddy, Stitt said, but actually was spawned by a low-pressure system to the south.

“It looks like it will move a little bit then gradually weaken, and then a high-pressure system should push to the east,” he said. “You should start to see things letting up a bit [today].”

Despite wet roads during Wednesday’s morning commute, police reported no unusual numbers of traffic accidents.

Wednesday’s rain came after a dry winter that has officials concerned that summer wildfires statewide could outpace last year’s near-record fire season, said Rich Hawkins, acting chief of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service in Southern California.

The reason: Plants that normally are going through growth spurts now, and are full of moisture, have already begin to dry out.

“We will have more fires earlier in the season,” said Hawkins, whose territory includes Cleveland National Forest. “Normally we look at wind season, October and November, as the worst part, but in a year like this that starts with brush with an unusually low moisture content, we can have significant fires all season long.”

But Capt. Paul Hunter, spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority, said local fears aren’t as high.

“We’re no more [concerned] than we typically are,” he said. “We’re going to be just as prepared as we always are for the eventuality that something significant may hit Orange County.”

With the beginning of fire season, officials closed access to fire-risk areas north of Brea; south of the Riverside Freeway and west of Cleveland National Forest; south of Bonita Canyon and the San Diego Freeway to Laguna Canyon Road and the Newport Beach city line; and east of Laguna Canyon Road to Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park and the Laguna Beach city limits.

The closures do not affect Cleveland National Forest or county and state parks.

Fire season already has begun in San Diego, where fears of a rough season south of Interstate 8 are high after a winter that brought only 5 inches of rain, Hawkins said. Orange County had about 8 inches of rain over the winter, well below the 12-inch average.

In advance of fire season, federal authorities burned about 2,200 acres of dense brush in Cleveland National Forest this winter, about half of what was burned the previous year. All of the controlled burns were completed by the end of April, well before a controlled burn by the National Park Service near Los Alamos, N.M., ranged out of control 2 1/2 weeks ago and destroyed more than 250 homes.

A subsequent 30-day moratorium on controlled burns on federal land, which expires June 10, led officials to scrap an annual training exercise on Camp Pendleton for about 1,000 firefighters from Orange, Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside counties, Hawkins said. The program focuses on exposing rookie firefighters to their first wildfires and helping department leaders practice strategies.

“It’s the best possible training,” Hawkins said. “We felt badly that we had to cancel that.”

Hunter said Orange County firefighters were to have taken part, but he didn’t know how many were affected.

He said the Orange County Fire Authority conducted no controlled burns of its own this winter because the Fire Authority has not yet hired a vegetation manager--someone to map areas that need to be cleared--after a grant funding the job expired about a year ago.

The Fire Authority has since budgeted money for the position, but it has not been filled.

“Once that person gets on board, [we’ll] be able to go through and see if in fact we do need to do controlled burns,” Hunter said.

No controlled burns would be likely before next winter, he said.

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Times correspondent Louise Roug contributed to this report.