Federal Agency Faulted in Fires

San Bernardino fire officials say their efforts to battle the October wildfires were hampered because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delayed for years their request for controlled burns.

The city in 1995 received funding from the federal government to burn areas of heavy brush along the city’s border with the San Bernardino National Forest. It took seven years for the Fish and Wildlife Service to conclude that the burns would not jeopardize rare animals and plants. That decision came a few months before the Old fire destroyed hundreds of homes. When the fire hit, the city was preparing public hearings on the controlled burn.

Fish and Wildlife officials in the Carlsbad office acknowledge that they took too long to process the city’s permit, saying some former employees may have dragged their feet because they opposed controlled burns. But they also accused the city of causing some of the delays by submitting incomplete applications.

“I’ll certainly shoulder some blame for lack of responsiveness,” said Carlsbad Field Supervisor Jim Bartel. “But we’re not alone.”

San Bernardino fire officials have raised the issue of the permit delays as they assess the origins of the wildfires. Firefighters say they will never know for sure whether prescribed burns would have made a difference in controlling the Old fire.

But areas they had picked to burn -- a hilly patch about two miles east of Interstate 215 and an area less than a mile from the origin of the Old fire -- became fuel for the wildfire in its early stages. Fire officials had identified the areas as likely places where a major wildfire could spread.

The prescribed burns “would’ve given us more of a chance, more time to possibly stop the fire from moving west toward Devore and the Cajon Pass area,” said Fire Capt. Paul Drasil. “There would’ve been shorter flame lengths coming off the hill, maybe not as much heat generated hitting the palm trees and houses.”

This is not the first time firefighters have encountered resistance to planned burns. In August, the General Accounting Office found that 56% of federal fuel reduction projects never happened, often due to lack of funds. In this report, Los Padres National Forest officials complained that Fish and Wildlife was a particular obstacle, delaying their projects for months while examining the burns’ effect on endangered species.

On Oct. 24, just hours before the Southern California wildfires began to rage out of control, the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied a state application for $430 million to clear dead trees from fire-prone areas. The letter came six months after the governor’s office warned the agency that the state considered the dead trees an immediate threat to lives and property.

But FEMA had set aside about $10 million for fire prevention in the wake of the 1993 fires in Alta Loma, Laguna Hills and Malibu.

The city of San Bernardino applied for these funds, beginning in 1994 to put together a proposal to burn private, city and federal land along its northern border. In some areas, brush had grown 6 feet high; it was potential fuel for flames that could reach as high as 15 feet, requiring airplanes or bulldozers to control.

Such flames would threaten the growing number of houses in the area.

In 1995, city firefighters secured $315,000 from FEMA and $105,000 from the city’s budget to handle the burns.

Because some of the land was home to animals such as the coastal California gnatcatcher and plants such as Nevin’s barberry, the city had to seek approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agencies began meetings in 1996 to define the scope of the project, officials said.

Rare Species a Concern

The agencies and environmental consultants hired by FEMA and the city went back and forth for seven years, working to clarify the fires’ footprints, assess the possible effects on a number of rare species and set a schedule for the burns.

In e-mails and letters, firefighters, Forest Service officials and their consultants expressed frustration at what they considered foot-dragging by Fish and Wildlife.

“The meeting we just held with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

He added that the level of detail that Fish and Wildlife required seemed unnecessary and imposed burdensome time and cost on the project.

City firefighters said they had been frustrated by the growing list of Fish and Wildlife concerns. “New people kept coming up with new concerns: new plant species or new vegetation,” Drasil said.

While the parties were negotiating, several fires, including the Devil’s fire in 2001, swept through the sites.

The sides eventually narrowed the burns to six plots on 1,260 acres between California Highway 18 and Interstate 215. Fish and Wildlife began formally examining the project in 2002 and reported this April that burns would not jeopardize wildlife.

At this point, city firefighters had just $150,000 left. They were prepared to move forward with two when the Old fire started and wiped out the areas where the burns were to be set.

Members of the San Bernardino unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection expressed similar frustrations at their effort to conduct controlled burns nearby. They wrangled for four years over proposed burns in Devore, Yucaipa and Phelan, and northeast and northwest of Silverwood Lake.

In June 2001, Fish and Wildlife approved three of the state’s proposed five burns, putting two on hold because biologists had just discovered endangered Arroyo toads in those areas. By September of that year, the state forestry project had spent about $200,000 on meetings and studies. CDF officials said they were fed up with sparring with Fish and Wildlife. They withdrew their proposal and returned the rest of the money.

“We were spending a lot of dollars ... and our success rate was not very good,” said CDF Deputy Chief Dave Neff. “We thought, ‘Let’s move on to other areas where we are not engaging U.S. Fish and Wildlife.’ ”

About 50% of areas the CDF wanted to burn were consumed by the October fires.

Admitting Mistake

Officials at Fish and Wildlife said their office could have been more cooperative in both cases.

“There were some folks in here caught up to some degree in the philosophical debate,” said Bartel, the Carlsbad field supervisor. “But that should not be our concern.... Our focus is and continues to be the effect on endangered species.”

Rapid employee turnover -- five times the rate for other federal government offices -- and one of the heaviest workloads in the nation contributed to the delays, Bartel said. But he also said the fire agencies hadn’t provided enough specifics about their plans, which aggravated the delays.

The Carlsbad office was criticized in a 2001 audit by the U.S. General Accounting Office for consistent unexplained delays in processing applications. The audit said the delays had been caused by staff shortages and a poor system for tracking applications.

Even if the burns had been carried out, not everyone is convinced they would have halted the Old fire flames.

“If you look at San Diego County, the biggest fire had prescription burns in the middle of that” area, said Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who often opposes controlled burns. “You get those Santa Ana winds, and the age of fuels is not a big determinant on where the fire is going to go.”

But Keeley said the controlled burns proposed by San Bernardino might have protected some houses on the fringes of the forest.

The state forestry agency and city firefighters pointed to the value of prescribed burns in the 1999 fire in Ventura County.

The wildfire in the Upper Ojai Valley destroyed just one home and a barn because it ran into areas where most of the fuel had been removed, firefighters said. And that was with Santa Ana winds blowing from 25 to 70 mph.