Blazes Breathe New Life Into Fire Agencies

A year after the most disastrous firestorm in state history ripped through San Diego County, fire protection here has been improved in numerous incremental ways, but big-ticket efforts still face perennial hurdles: politics and money.

A variety of agencies have added equipment, such as fire engines, breathing gear for firefighters, hand-held radios and battery packs -- all of which were in short supply when the blaze struck.

A $23-million upgrade of the county’s emergency communications system was approved by the Board of Supervisors. During the fires, many engine companies were virtually incommunicado because the county’s system had become swamped.

Brush clearance programs have been enhanced to reduce the remaining supply of the tall, brittle weeds that provided the fuel that allowed the fire to explode across the county’s backcountry. In some isolated areas last fall, vast acreages of such brush had not been trimmed in more than a decade.

In San Diego, the fires prompted the City Council to ban highly combustible shake shingle roofs in new construction. Such bans are common in other parts of the state, but the issue had languished before the council for two decades without a decision.

By next spring there will be three firefighting helicopters in the county, including one paid for by local Indian tribes.

If there was one symbol of how ill-prepared the region was for the Cedar and Paradise fires, it was the fact that the city of San Diego did not have a firefighting helicopter. The rental agreement for a helicopter had been allowed to lapse just days before the fires erupted Oct. 25.

The Cedar and Paradise fires went on to kill 16 people, destroy 3,000 homes and scorch 300,000 acres.

Despite the improvements made in fire protection since that time, little progress has been made toward establishing a more regional approach to firefighting that would include local, state, federal, military and tribal firefighting agencies.

Overlapping authority among dozens of agencies remains a “large jigsaw puzzle,” according to the head of the county fire chiefs association.

The San Diego Fire Department, the largest in the county, still has fewer firefighters than most big-city departments, a fact not likely to change soon in a city facing the worst financial mess in its history. Fire officials acknowledge that much of the department’s gear is obsolete and inadequate, the result of decades of pinch-penny budgets.

“To borrow a phrase from the pension debacle, it’s hard to make much progress quickly after so many years of ‘under-funding’ the Fire Department,” said San Diego Councilman Michael Zucchet, a former lobbyist for the firefighters union.

The fires’ deadly march highlighted the county’s historic problems of overlapping jurisdictions, inadequate manpower in many districts, poor communications and the lack of a coordinated approach to fighting fires that raced through numerous communities.

In some rural areas, where homes cost $500,000 and more, much of the firefighting effort is left to volunteers who are summoned by pagers.

Even since the fires, elected officials have been reluctant to propose measures that run counter to the county’s political zeitgeist that preaches the virtues of local control and low taxes. On the March ballot, four of seven measures to increase taxes for fire protection failed.

In November, voters in the county’s sprawling backcountry will be asked whether they are willing to consolidate some or all of the 35 fire agencies in their region. But the vote is only advisory.

Without a more regional approach, fire protection in vulnerable rural areas will remain “fragmented and under-resourced,” Carlsbad Fire Chief Kevin Crawford, president of the San Diego County Fire Chiefs Assn., told a conference convened by the Board of Supervisors last week.

A task force headed by San Diego Fire Chief Jeff Bowman and San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender is expected this week to recommend greater regionalization and clearer responsibilities in the event of a major fire that spreads from one area to another.

Even with the $23-million improvement in the communications system, now being implemented, county agencies still will use a system that differs from those of state and federal agencies, making emergency communication tricky.

California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Chief Tim Turner, in charge of the agency’s southern region, was asked whether the state would someday have a communication system compatible with local agencies. “I see no progress in that direction,” he said.

One of the less tangible changes since last year’s firestorms: overcoming a pattern seen after other large blazes, when task forces recommended changes but little action was taken. Although the fires seem to have faded as a political issue, various officials have vowed to continue pushing for change.

Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Dianne Jacob, one of the harshest critics of the county’s fire protection system, said she was surprised at how much progress has been made.

“I think without question, the San Diego region is safer from fire than we were last October,” she said. “But we’ve got to do more.”

Councilman Zucchet said elected San Diego officials were no longer afraid to admit to voters that their neighborhoods were at risk from fire. Recently, for example, the city released a fire protection plan for the Mt. Soledad area west of Interstate 5, a neighborhood thick with brush and crisscrossed with narrow, winding streets.

“We’ve had a culture change,” Zucchet said. “Before last year, council members were afraid reports like that would make them look bad, and so often they were scuttled.”

Assistant Fire Chief Tracy Jarman told reporters recently that the department’s main problem remained “antiquated and obsolete” equipment. For many years, a comment that candid might have brought a scolding from the chief, under pressure from City Council members who preferred upbeat pronouncements, particularly in election years.

Bringing the San Diego department in line with other big-city departments “is a huge project that cannot be done overnight,” Jarman said.

The department had become so accustomed to tight budgets that it no longer bothered to make wish lists. When Bowman was hired from Anaheim in the months before the Cedar and Paradise fires, he was shocked at the San Diego department’s lack of resources. Among his first orders was a top-to-bottom review.

“For the first time, we’ve got a checklist of what we need,” said Augie Ghio, recently named the city’s homeland security director after two decades in the Fire Department.

Zucchet is cautiously optimistic that after the city devises a way to close the pension deficit, improvements in the Fire Department will be possible.

“I still hope we can actually expand the department instead of just sticking our finger in the dam, which is basically what we’ve done,” he said.

Many of the improvements in fire prevention do not involve adding firefighters or equipment.

The Sheriff’s Department has recruited Joan Embrey, a spokeswoman for the San Diego Zoo known for her appearances on “The Tonight Show,” to persuade horse owners to have evacuation plans for their animals.

When the fires erupted, deputies spent hours trying to help horse owners, many of whom had no trailers to move their animals to safety.

Criticized for not sounding evacuation orders soon enough, the Sheriff’s Department moved more quickly during fires this summer to order evacuations and spread the information to the local media.

Forestry officials have placed parts of the Cleveland National Forest, in eastern San Diego County, off-limits to the public during fire season. Dead trees are being removed from Palomar Mountain.

Helicopter pilots from the Navy and Marine Corps, trained in fighting fires on the area’s sprawling bases, have been certified to volunteer for off-base firefighting duty.

Still, there have been setbacks. The DC-4 air tanker owned by the U.S. Forest Service and stationed at Ramona Airport in northern San Diego County has been declared unfit for duty.

Relationships between city and county officials are often touchy on the issue of fire prevention. A public spat broke out over who would control the helicopters being purchased by the Board of Supervisors and the City Council.

And last week, city officials declined an invitation to send a representative to the fire update conference convened by Supervisor Jacob. If Fire Chief Bowman had attended, he could have been grilled by Supervisor Ron Roberts, who is running for mayor against incumbent Dick Murphy.