Fire - A Lesson for Wrightwood

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  This is so sad.  How does one house stand...when the others around it are burned to the ground?    

After the Bradbury Fire in the 1980's where this same thing happened, there was agood deal of research done as to why fire skipped some homes. There are many reasons this happens. First and foremost is appropriate clearance of vegetation and other fuels such as wood piles. Many, many people in mountain communities including Wrightwood still don't get this. Other factors include the type of siding on the house, single vs. double glazed windows, curtains on windows, doors and windows left open, small enough screening on attic and crawl space vents, boxed in eaves vs. open frame eaves. Type of roofing is of course still a major factor. There are lots of things people can do to give their home a fighting chance. Most people don't do them.

Fire - were we ready? Part 1
Officials: Efforts reduced impact
Selicia Kennedy-Ross, SB Sun Staff Writer
Article Launched: 10/27/2007 09:19:47 PM PDT

After the Old Fire raged through the San Bernardino Mountains destroying homes in mountain communities and in north San Bernardino, public agencies and homeowners vowed to work together to make sure such a tragedy would never happen again.

Now, four years later, it has.

As the Slide and Grass Valley fires continue to burn in the San Bernardino National Forest, federal and local fire officials contend they did everything they could and that the region was better prepared than ever before.

But what does better prepared mean?

Even as officials stand by what was done, it is a wait-and-see game before they can fully gauge whether it was enough.

The issue is one of accountability, from thinning the trees on federal forest land to the clearing of overgrown brush in homeowners' private yards.

Jeanne Wade Evans, forest supervisor for the San Bernardino National Forest, said the local mountain region was prepared.

"We've been preparing since 2003," Wade Evans said. "We are working on an assessment to specifically show how the (tree-thinning efforts) were instrumental in mitigating the Slide Fire's effects and saving homes."

Even before the Old Fire, efforts were being made to protect the forest, she said, due mostly to the Mountain Area Safety Task Force, a coalition of fire departments, public safety agencies, utility companies and volunteer fire-safe councils in San Bernardino County.

Government agencies that are part of the task force have used money from a $70 million Natural Resources Conservation Grant that was awarded in 2004 to remove bark-beetle-infested trees from private property and National Forest land near inhabited areas.

"You can never be prepared for 70- to 80-mile-an-hour winds," said David Stuart, executive director of the Blue Jay-based Rebuilding Mountain Hearts and Lives, a community group that came together after the Old Fire and helps residents navigate local permitting and rebuilding processes.

"The fire-safe council did their best, they did their job and various fire agencies did theirs," Stuart said. "This community was prepared, they knew what to do and they had defensible space around their homes."

Stuart said that those who didn't maintain their properties and clear brush were held accountable by their neighbors.

"Those who knew the seriousness of it, did it," Stuart said. "Those who didn't were being turned in and written up. Everything was done to prepare for it.

"Unfortunately, sometimes you have human beings who do not listen, but most of our neighborhood people listened."

Although clearing brush is a good start with the high winds and the way the local power lines are constructed, it is inevitable that such wildfires will happen again and again, said Ted Heyck, president of the Lake Arrowhead Community Services District board of directors.

The district provides water and sewer services to part of Lake Arrowhead and some surrounding areas.

"With all the development going on, this is fated to occur and occur as long as we have winds," Heyck said. "People have worked hard to keep things clear but the truth is, you can have your backyard clear but if a raging fire is coming through - what can you do?

Heyck also said he didn't feel the area was prepared for fires of the Slide and Grass Valley's magnitude.

"We had insufficient fire equipment and water supplies and resources," he said. "We had so much going on all over Southern California, we had inadequate manpower, people working two and three and four shifts.

"We're very vulnerable to these kind of disasters that we shouldn't be as vulnerable to."

Matt Mathes, regional spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in California, said the service also sent specialists from other forests to help local officials plan and put into place fuel-reduction work.

"A lot of good work was done on federal land and private land," Mathes said. "It was an unprecedented effort. We have already found that in several areas where fires burned around Lake Arrowhead, some of these areas that were thinned using this money did burn less intensely when the fire reached them.

"There's simply not as much fuel there but more importantly, it gave our firefighters a safe area to operate."

Firefighters also reported that in clusters of neighborhoods around Lake Arrowhead that were protected by fuel breaks, the homes were untouched.

Forest Service teams are gauging the effectiveness of the tree-thinning efforts, which Mathes notes are actually intended to handle moderate and severe fires.

"Under these extreme conditions, no amount of thinning can fire-proof a community, but we feel the work we've done did make a difference," Mathes said. "Our initial indications are that thinning did save a lot of homes." He also said cooperation between public agencies and private landowners, however, is key.

"You need both. One by itself isn't going to help," Mathes said. "We can do all the thinning in the world on the forest but when you have fires throwing embers onto private property, the landowners have to do something."

Homeowners acted responsibly, he said. They moved wood piles away from their houses, cut trees down and cleared brush. Many also switched to metal or composition roof material.

"The homeowners got religion," Mathes said. "I heard a lot of chainsaws on private land and they took the lesson of 2003 seriously."

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Part 2

One program that was instrumental to the public-private partnership of forest-fire prevention work is the San Bernardino National Forest Association's federally funded reimbursement program, Forest Care.

Forest Care launched in June 2006 funded by $6 million of Forest Service money. It is open to mountain landowners who have lots smaller than five acres with 200 or more trees per acre standing on that land.

Under the program, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection forester will evaluate the owner's land. Property owners then choose their own contractor to clear away trees. Through Forest Care, 75 percent of tree-removal costs are reimbursed.

The average reimbursement is about $1,500.

So far, the program has paid out more than $200,000 to local land owners and has helped treat more than 200 properties, Wade Evans said.

Appointments with program managers are booked all the way through the end of November, she said.

The program is key because in protecting forest land, "you have to deal with the whole landscape, not just the public forest land," Wade Evans said.

Fire officials who were out on the fire lines this week made similar observations.

"It's really what the homeowner does that makes the difference," said Tom Kempton, a fire information officer whose normal job is as battalion chief with the Anchorage Fire Department.

The seeming randomness of the fire's destruction- many streets are full of apparently unscathed houses that stand next to charred ruins - is not really so random, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Forester Jason Meyer said.

On Brentwood Drive in Lake Arrowhead,one of the houses that survived the Grass Valley Fire is a monument to smart design, Meyer said. A bed of gravel surrounded the house, which also featured slate shingles (no wood shake there). And the place was swept clear of combustible pine needles.

The house wasn't completely free of damage, however. The windows facing a neighboring house that was destroyed were smashed open.

"It (the fire) probably superheated those windows to the point where it cracked the glass," Meyer said.

CDF spokesman Bill Peters said that since the Mountain Area Safety Task Force came together, its work has been a consistent effort.

"It was not a question of if there would be a fire, but when," Peters said. "We have removed over 1.5 million bark-beetle killed trees, we had property clearance, we understood the evacuation routes.

"We were as prepared as we were going to be."

County and CDF fire officials had been in property inspection mode when the fires struck, which Peters noted is "a year-round effort."

Fire officials were also diligent about ensuring the major routes through the mountains would remain clear, he said. The trees were removed so they wouldn't fall and block the roads.

Still some critics feel that fire officials could have done more.

Ruth Wenstrom, a former U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman, said she feels the area was ill-prepared for the Slide and Grass Valley fires.

Wenstrom contends that in spring 2006, federal forest officials were "telling everyone that everything was fine when they were cutting back staffing on fire crews from seven days a week to five, due to budget cuts."

Wenstrom said federal severity funding - emergency money used to keep firefighters on the payroll for an additional two weeks during hot spells beyond end of normal fire season - stopped in spring of 2006.

"Instead of 25 engines, we had maybe 20 on weekends and 15 on the weekdays," Wenstrom said.

Mathes, however, denies the charges, which he called ludicrous.

"We have absolutely been fully staffed no question," he said. "The San Bernardino Forest was fully staffed. They have more money and more engines than any other national forest in the nation."

Mathes said the federal agency was generously funded by Congress.

For the 2003 fiscal year, the San Bernardino National Forest received $7.4 million in federal funding for fuel reduction, or thinning the forest from bark beetle-infested trees. In 2004, that number rose to $17 million and in 2005, it jumped again to $28 million.

But in 2006, the number was cut on half to $14 million in 2006. A year later in 2007, it went up again to $19.4 million.

"The San Bernardino forest gets more money than any of the other 154 national forests nationwide for fuel reduction and they've been spending the money well," Mathes said.

Not until the fires are completely out will fire officials really be able to gauge how well those efforts worked, Peters said.

"There's no situation that will protect a house from every single fire scenario," he said.

Staff writers Matthew Wrye and Andrew Edwards contributed to this report.