O.C. Studies Deadly Fires’ Hard Lessons

Orange County fire officials know they were lucky to be spared the massive wildfires that swept through surrounding counties last fall. But they aren’t counting on luck to save them again.

Instead, the Orange County Fire Authority is working to improve defenses against a similar blaze.

Of particular concern are outlying, rural areas, so officials are seeking federal funds to more quickly develop detailed response plans for vulnerable communities.

They are also taking steps to improve the county’s radio communication system to avoid the breakdowns experienced by other agencies during the fires last year.

Their actions come after California’s worst wildfire season, in which hundreds of thousands of acres burned and two dozen people died. With a roster of veteran firefighters and a unified network of county and city fire departments, Orange County officials believe they are better prepared than most to defend against a major wildfire -- but they acknowledge that they are far from invulnerable.

Orange County Battalion Chief Mike Rohde said the fire authority does not have detailed response plans for such high-risk communities as Modjeska Canyon, Trabuco Canyon and the Tustin foothills, where thousands of families live in older houses built of flammable materials. The authority is rushing applications for about $250,000 in federal grants to fund the additional planning.

The money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency would enable the fire authority to expedite computerized projections of a fire’s trajectory and behavior in each area, Rohde said.

It would also allow fire officials to coordinate with other emergency response agencies to plan how each community would be evacuated and how crews would defend houses and attack the fires.

Without such plans, Rohde said, residents in these areas face risks similar to the 12 people who perished in San Diego’s isolated Wildcat Canyon.

“It makes having a plan in place for similar communities even more important than before,” Rohde said of the deaths.

With the grants, he said, the county would be able to implement the plans for all of its high-risk areas in one or two years; without them, it will take three to five years.

Fire Authority Chief Chip Prather praised such planning efforts for existing communities. He emphasized, however, that unless state and federal legislators tighten restrictions on the construction of houses in isolated wildlands susceptible to fires, the dangers will persist.

“Those areas are ripe for a disaster,” he said.

Also of concern, Prather said, are the incompatible radio frequencies used by fire departments around the state.

Orange County’s radio communication system would be compromised during a large fire that required outside assistance, he said. In San Diego, commanders from across the state lost crucial time as they struggled to communicate with each other.

Prather said he hopes the county would be able to use Los Angeles County’s new adapters that bridge radio frequencies. Orange County officials are studying a mutual aid agreement to determine whether the technology would be available to them during a major blaze.

If not, Prather said, purchasing the adapters would be a priority for the fire authority.

In the meantime, Prather said the county plans to buy more radios to add to an existing supply that would be distributed to firefighters arriving from other counties. But such a stopgap measure, he said, is imperfect.

“Basically, what we do is cope,” he said. “Inside the county we’re second to none, but when you start to bring in outside agencies, we have problems.”

Wanting to increase their chances of nabbing an arsonist or jumping on a fire before it gets out of control, Orange County officials launched a joint task force of firefighters and sheriff’s deputies while the San Diego fires burned.

The increased patrols in fire-prone areas represented a new level of cooperation between the two agencies, Prather said.

For Prather and his battalion chiefs, the loss of 4,300 buildings during the fires drove home the importance of enforcing building codes passed in the early 1980s that require brush clearance around homes and the use of fire-resistant building materials.

Houses built before then, however, are exempt from the laws and “all we can do is beg” property owners to clear brush and replace wood-shake roofs with fire-resistant materials, said Battalion Chief Marc Hawkins.

And while Hawkins agreed that the proposed planning and preparations are valuable, he cautioned that such efforts go only so far.

“The real world is, you make do with what you’ve got,” he said. “Sometimes the best pre-plan isn’t good enough for the worst-case scenario.

“It can happen here, no doubt about it. Only a fool would say it couldn’t.”