Laguna officials point to fire mitigation efforts, mutual aid as keys to successful Rancho fire response
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Following a rapid response Monday afternoon to put out a brush fire allegedly started by a 13-year-old igniting illegal fireworks in Laguna Beach, city officials lauded the success of prior mitigation efforts taken and teamwork across multiple agencies.
The Rancho fire, which burned 4.6 acres on a hillside near the intersection of Morningside Drive and Rancho Laguna Road, had reached 95% containment as of Tuesday evening’s meeting of the City Council, where leaders of the community’s public safety departments gave a rundown of operations since the blaze broke out just after 2 p.m. on Monday.
“We’re very fortunate that there were no other active incidents going on in Southern California,” Fire Chief Niko King said. “It’s pretty unique to have an active vegetation fire threatening homes, put out those resource requests, and get every single resource request filled.”
When a social media video surfaced of a youth lighting a firework that wound up in the adjacent brush, community members notified authorities.
“They saw what occurred, and we were immediately receiving notifications and video that they saw what they believed was the start of the fire,” Police Chief Jeff Calvert said. “Our Laguna Beach police detectives, OCFA arson investigators, along with Laguna Beach fire department arson investigators all came together and worked to identify the suspect — unfortunately, a 13-year-old kid — and within 12 hours, authored and executed a search warrant and took him into custody.”
Police rangers also detained and questioned two additional minors. Both were determined to be witnesses to the incident, not suspects.
Orange County Juvenile Hall did not accept the suspect for booking, police said, citing an absence of injuries or immediate threat to structures. The Laguna Beach police department processed the suspect and released him to his parents.
City Manager Dave Kiff was among those attending Tuesday’s City Council meeting who expressed a feeling that the community “got off a little easy,” although fire mitigation efforts, including fuel modification via vegetation management and helicopter refilling tanks were contributing factors in addition to favorable weather conditions.
King said firefighters saw flame lengths that were approximately 50 feet tall on the steep slope. A fuel modification zone that aided in slowing the spread of the fire had recently been completed, city officials said.
“One of our fuel modification zones worked as it was supposed to,” King added. “The flames quickly died down, and it was about that time — probably only about seven or eight minutes into the incident — where the first helicopter resource arrived and made a water drop and put it perfectly where it was supposed to, protecting the properties. …
“The water district gets a lot of credit. They called me within just minutes after we reported the fire [and] said, ‘Chief, what do you need?’ They asked if we needed those HeloPods active. They had both of them in service, and we heard directly from the pilots about the 90-second turnaround time that they had to fill and return to the fire with five working helicopters.”
Councilman Bob Whalen noted air coverage has become essential in fighting wildfires and called on city staff to learn about how the county’s resources are deployed.
“We need to make sure that there’s always 24/7, 365 days a year air resources, at least some air resource capability in south Orange County,” he said.
Evacuation orders were issued for several neighborhoods, including residents at Baja Street, Katella Street, La Mirada Street and Summit Drive. An evacuation warning was also given to residents south of Del Mar in Arch Beach Heights.
A care and reception center was set up at the Laguna Beach Community and Susi Q Center. Sarah Lemonis, the city’s emergency operations coordinator, said it was staffed by members of the community services department and community emergency response team (CERT) volunteers.
Public information was distributed through several update videos, as well as via Nixle and AlertOC communications, Lemonis added. The messages included information regarding evacuations and road closures.
There was a push from the City Council dais for residents to sign up for local alerts. Whalen said a couple of people were given calls to let them know they had to evacuate.
“It’s still amazing to me how many people are not signed up for the Nixle alerts, the alerts you get from the city,” said Whalen. “There must have been 10 of them [Monday] afternoon between 2 and 5.”
Road closures helped navigate emergency vehicles toward the fire and facilitate evacuations. Inbound traffic from Dana Point was diverted at Crown Valley Parkway and southbound vehicles on Coast Highway were redirected from the downtown area onto Laguna Canyon Road.
The city distributed a media release on Wednesday morning declaring the Rancho fire had been 100% contained and all roads had been reopened.
“This is a terrifying incident for our community, but we’ve been preparing for this since [the devastating 2018 Paradise [fire] and putting together the wildland fire mitigation and fire safety subcommittee and really investing in our community on wildfire mitigation,” Calvert, the police chief, said. “We saw the results of that, and the team effort that I saw [on Monday] was nothing short of outstanding.
“Do we have room to improve? Of course, but we’ll take this. I told my team this was a test for us, and we’re going to get better from here, but our officers were on scene within minutes of this being reported, and they were immediately coordinating resources and asking for mutual aid.”
Other agencies that responded to the incident included Anaheim fire and rescue, Cal Fire, CERT, the Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Orange County and Los Angeles County fire departments, the Orange County Fire Authority, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, the Irvine police department, O.C. Parks, and the Laguna Beach County Water District.
Laguna Beach put forth its initial wildfire mitigation and fire safety plan in 2019. The city reestablished an ad hoc committee to focus on the plans in January as wildfires in the Los Angeles area renewed concerns among residents that more needed to be done.
“We have two refillable water stations on the ridge and soon to have a third one in South Laguna,” said Councilwoman Sue Kempf, who was appointed to serve on the committee along with Whalen. “It’s really a force multiplier. It really allowed us to get at that fire very, very quickly.
“Since 2019, when we did our fire mitigation and fire safety plan, we’ve spent about $25 million, and I think we’re going to spend another three to four [million dollars] this coming year, which is a drop in the bucket when you figure if we had a catastrophic fire here, we’re going to have a loss in the millions.”
Kempf added that the city is looking at technological solutions, including the use of artificial intelligence cameras and the installation of a traffic signal priority system to coordinate signaling across Coast Highway.
Hallie Jones, the newest member of the council, credited previous iterations of the governing body for making “hard choices at times.”
“The fuel modification program, specifically, that’s an expensive program, and it’s a controversial program,” Jones said. “They’re hard, nuanced decisions that this council makes, and we don’t always see the benefit of those decisions until a decade, 15 years later.
“I really want us to all take a moment and think about what happened [Monday], and what could have happened … if we didn’t have a council … that was brave enough and courageous enough to make some of these unpopular decisions that proved to be so critical and so important.”
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