crews ready

by Guy McCarthy

SAN BERNARDINO, Nov. 21, -- Winds gusting Wednesday in and below the Cajon Pass indicated why helicopter and tanker plane crews sit ready at airfields across Southern California.
Support staff included mechanics, fuel truck operators and retardant technicians. Their collective goal -- prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, federal aviation managers for the San Bernardino National Forest expressed confidence Wednesday in the county sheriff's aviation unit based at Rialto Municipal Airport.
"We have them on our call list," said Mike Dietrich, chief of fire and aviation management for the forest, which includes mountain communities in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. "If we can fly them, we will. They're on our list and they're a valuable asset. We recognize them."
Tom Inocencio, a forest aviation officer based at the federal tanker base at Norton Field, also made assurances that San Bernardino County sheriff's pilots are a valued resource.
"We work on a policy of the closest aircraft available will be called on," Inocencio said Wednesday morning in an interview at Norton Field. "It doesn't matter which agency is calling, or which agency has the aircraft. The closest available resources respond."
Dietrich and Inocencio made their comments in part as response to concerns veteran sheriff's pilots raised earlier this week in Rialto.

'INITIAL ATTACK'

At their hangar base near the foot of Cajon Pass on Monday, sheriff's Sgt. Paul Howe and Deputy Craig McConnell indicated that although their personnel and aircraft are federally certified to help fight fires, they often do not get the call -- even as fires burn close by and other aircraft are flying in from elsewhere.
Howe and McConnell frankly addressed a point of public safety that sometimes gets blurred when people discuss wind-driven fires in Southern California -- if the winds are blowing hard, there is a narrow window of opportunity to knock a fire down before it turns into a beast no amount of aircraft can control.
Inocencio praised sheriff's pilots for their contributions on previous fires.
"We're aware of their aircraft, and they have been instrumental on initial attack several times," Inocencio said. "They've done it. But their primary mission is law enforcement, and we try to respect that."
Dietrich said he is sensitive to all pilots' concerns when it comes to timely initial attack. But winds gusting higher than 60 mph grounded all aircraft at times during the Slide and Grass Valley fires last month, Dietrich said.
Authorities estimated those fires destroyed 450 homes in the San Bernardino mountains.

'COORDINATED'

"When we have 70 mph winds like we did on the Slide and Grass Valley fires, there were many aircraft we had to set down," Dietrich said. "Bottom line is we use all our aircraft when we can safely. And I think in San Bernardino and Riverside counties we're pretty darn well-coordinated."
Experience is a teacher. Local firefighters, pilots, law enforcement officers and volunteers have been tested several times in recent years when raging fires approached vulnerable communities on fire-prone edges of the foothills and forests.
Since October 2003, evacuation plans for thousands of imperiled residents have worked, thanks in part to multi-agency coordination of Mountain Area Safety Taskforce officials in both counties.
Getting people safely out of the way when fires get big is one thing. Fighting infernos of firestorm proportions is another.

SOMETIMES YOU CAN'T FLY

Inocencio, responding to some media reports that initial response to the wildfires last month was lacking, spoke from personal experience.
"The start of the fires on Oct. 21, I'd defy anybody to say we didn't have aircraft up," Inocencio said. "I was up there six and a half hours in an air attack on the Ranch Fire in L.A. county. We left here about 6:30 in the morning.
"We were unable to use any retardant planes that day at all because the winds were too erratic," Inocencio said. "Gusting 50 to 70 mph and sustained at least 40 mph."
Lt. Tom Hornsby, commander for the sheriff's aviation unit in Rialto, said his primary goal in all public safety situations is coordinating and maintaining positive relations with the agencies involved.
"We all have a depth and breadth of experience, but there are some problems that take years to understand," Hornsby said. "There are decisions that get made to this day that I do not understand. But the fire agencies are the experts when it comes to fighting fires, and I don't question them."
Federal and state fire officials are rightly cautious when it comes to firefighters' and pilots' safety because of the Esperanza Fire in October 2006, Hornsby said. Five Forest Service firefighters died trying to protect a home below Twin Pines in Riverside County. Authorities have charged a suspected arsonist with five counts of murder.
"They're working under the shadow of what happened a year ago," Hornsby said. "They don't want to get anybody hurt."

SOME DAYS EASIER THAN OTHERS

On July 21, 2006, law enforcement, firefighters and pilots jumped on a fast-burning grass fire in Crafton Hills. Photos show how quickly deputies determined arson as the cause, while aircraft coordinated with ground crews to shut the fire down before it did any significant damage to property. Helicopter pilots in particular, including at least one sheriff's pilot, made the most of available water resources close at hand.
Three months later, on Oct. 26, 2006, the elements and ignition conspired to create the deadly Esperanza Fire. Blasting winds out of San Gorgonio Pass subsided slightly after the initial firestorm that killed the crew of Forest Service Engine 57 early that day. Video shows that helicopter pilots and tanker crews had stiff winds to deal with in a firefight that lasted overnight and dragged on for several days.

LAND USE ACCOUNTABILITY

Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at UC-Riverside's department of earth sciences, said firefighters and pilots in Southern California are sometimes tasked with the impossible.
"We have the resources, but the firefighters should not be accountable for the land use that takes place at the interface, where the homes meet the forests and the brush," Minnich said. "Maybe the people who live at the edges of these areas need to pay for their own firefighting."
Pilots and firefighters may be viewed as heroes by a vast number of homeowners, Minnich said. But the sobering fact is that homeowners' choices and local governments' land use decisions are the catalysts that increasingly and unfairly place the burden of protection on over-taxed public safety agencies.
"Yes, it's heroic what they may be doing," Minnich said. "But I'd rather see them using these resources in slower-moving fires at the interface, rather than fighting these wildfire blitzkriegs launched on us by fire suppression.
"If it's in open country, let it burn."

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San Bernardino County sheriff's aviation at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bX1LpZY6rY

Photos of Crafton Hills fire July 21, 2006
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKzPvqnHaIE

Video of Esperanza fire on Oct. 26, 2006
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obPSH3yt8Y

Red flag warning updated Friday morning 11/23/07 at
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/warnings.php?wfo=sgx&zone=CAZ255&pil=XXXRFWSGX&productType=Red+Flag+Warning

'reload san bernardino'

That's what a South Ops aviation dispatcher in Riverside calmly told tanker pilots working small fires in the San Bernardino National Forest six days ago. She used the phrase to indicate they should reload retardant at Norton Field in the city of San Bernardino.

On Friday, nature sent a similar message - reload sandbags and k-rail.

by Guy McCarthy

GREEN VALLEY LAKE, Nov. 30 -- Terry Droll reflected on the wind-driven Slide Fire that roared through town in late October, and
considered the steady rains pattering on the roof of his general store Friday morning.
Summing up the past six weeks or so, he stuck to the basics.
"We left about 45 minutes before the firefighters pulled out," Droll said, referring to the night of Oct. 22.
"Some of the firefighters up here are my friends and they knocked on my door about 9:15," Droll said. "I went outside and the winds were blowing 60 miles per hour. We were getting fireballs in the backyard."
The store and his home survived the flames. Droll said he evacuated for 12 days. Now he's preparing for the next potential problem, like so many other Southern Californians.
"The rain is a big concern, because of mudslides and debris flows," Droll said. "That's the next threat."

'THIS RAIN CAUGHT'EM'

Droll, 55, said he's been in Green Valley Lake seven years, long enough to learn some local history.
"This store was built in the '20s, the first commercial structure," Droll said, standing behind a counter where fliers for mountain community meetings were available. "This is the first time fire's come through town, ever."
Many of his neighbors have changed their flood insurance since the October fires, Droll said, gesturing uphill towards a slope behind his store. He brought out fire progression  maps, trying to show where post-fire erosion might be a problem.
"This rain here, I think it caught'em a little bit," Droll said. "They weren't expecting this much so soon. They do have plans to bring up k-rail and thousands of sandbags."
Residents of Green Valley Lake know that Burned Area Emergency Response teams have made their town a priority. Workers with heavy machinery had already built up a series of berms to control run-off at one end of the lake. But Droll said he and his neighbors still feel fairly self-reliant.
"We're in tune with nature up here," Droll said. "We call each other in the middle of the night. We know we're the red-headed stepchild on the mountain. Our tax base isn't big enough to compete with Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead."

VULNERABLE HOMES, WATER

In the east end of Green Valley Lake, some homes sat mid-hillside or at the bottom of slopes that were black and greasy in the rain Friday morning.
A few hardy residents worked in the rain with shovels, clearing drainage channels, but most of the town's roads and yards were empty.
Some people had set up low rows of sandbags above their homes. About 10 miles west, more erosion prevention measures were already in place near a Lake Arrowhead country club. Sections of concrete barriers known as k-rail lined vulnerable sections of several roads in and below neighborhoods that burned in the Grass Valley Fire.
The mountain scene close to lakeside burned areas seemed on the surface ideal for ducks. They paddled in the rain Friday morning on at least one of the man-made reservoirs that serve as centerpiece attractions in Green Valley Lake and Grass Valley. From a human perspective, the fog, cold and damp compounded the effect of so many blackened, hillside ruins.
Rivulets of rain water ran through ash, melted synthetic material, and black soil, forming foamy streams and small waterfalls as they descended, carrying sediment and particles of burned homes into the bodies of water. Authorities said more than 400 homes burned in the Slide and Grass Valley fires.

'PUBLIC SAFETY FIRST'

Firefighters, flood control staff and road workers were out in force Friday, said county fire Division Chief Tim Wessel, who was stationed in the city of San Bernardino.
"The number one priority is protecting lives, and so far we're fine," Wessel said about 3:30 p.m. "County flood and county road have extra people out helping Caltrans with rock and mudslides in the mountains -- on the 18 in the Arctic Circle and on Highway 38 above Angelus Oaks.
"We are having a little flooding in the High Desert area, where some newer construction sites are getting their first real test," Wessel said. "We are having some erosion, but no serious property damage."
Wessel expressed empathy for regional neighbors in Orange County, where mandatory evacuations were ordered earlier Friday in Modjeska Canyon and other vulnerable canyon areas that burned in the Santiago Fire.  Wessel said that problems were not as severe here in San Bernardino County.
"At this time we are not having any major problems in the burned areas," Wessel said. "We do have rescue units available with swift-water rescue training, if necessary. So far, we're okay."

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U.S. Geological Survey study released Tuesday Dec. 4 warns that ash and soils from burned areas across Southern California may adversely affect water quality, human health and endangered species, in addition to posing debris-flow and flooding hazards. Scientists focused initial soil tests on burned home sites in the Grass Valley area near Lake Arrowhead.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1407/pdf/OF07-1407_508.pdf

Forecasters say rain or snow is possible later this week in the mountain burned areas.
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/warnings.php?wfo=sgx&zone=CAZ055&pil=XXXHWOSGX&productType=Hazardous+Weather+Outlook

idiot winds

by Guy McCarthy

SAN BERNARDINO, Dec. 6 -- Whatever the weather brings in the next few days, there will be plenty of people here afterward to clean up the mess.
No matter how much toxic burned material drains into Grass Valley and Green Valley lakes, the leaders of San Bernardino County and their network of experts will figure it out.
No matter how many rocks tumble onto mountain highways, how many wrecks tie up the freeways, or how much mud ends up on the streets, workers are ready.
In the meantime, the trials of the past seven weeks have again exposed the soft underbelly of laissez-faire land use planning across Southern California. The costs are being shared by taxpayers and some insurance policy holders nationwide. They deserve explanations.
Local, state and federal hearings have been conducted to try to find out what happened and when. Another list of recommendations will surely be trotted out, and many of them will be ignored -- again.
Nevertheless, quests for accountability may produce solutions to reduce impacts of the next disasters, whatever forms they take.

PROBLEM SOLVERS

With that in mind, perhaps there are a few lessons leaders across Southern California can learn from people here in San Bernardino County.
More than 25 years ago, a young firefighter named Jim Wilkins made a 60-minute documentary about the 1980 Panorama Fire and its aftermath, "San Bernardino Under Siege." The program aired several times on public television and has been used extensively as a training film. Hundreds of firefighters across Southern California have had their first view of urban firestorm conditions thanks to Wilkins' documentary.
This important historic record should now be required viewing for all decision-makers at the federal, state and local level -- anyone who has a vote in disaster-related matters in California -- because it shows that firefighters more than a quarter-century ago already knew about the factors that elected leaders and land use agencies are now forced to grapple with yet again. If leaders in Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and the Nation's Capital choose to ignore this piece of history, they are missing a significant part of the picture.
Wilkins lives in Wrightwood. The fire chief who cleared Wilkins to complete the documentary, Duane Mellinger, lives in north San Bernardino.

WIND MAPS

The chart pictured at the top of this post is from NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS WR-261, "Climate of Southern California," published in January 2000. It's a simple diagram based on at least a century of observation, showing where predictably strong winds blow through Southern California. Click on it to see detail.
Titled "Three main Santa Ana wind corridors into the Los Angeles basin," the image tells us what we already know. So what are we going to do about it?
It's not a stretch to suggest that known Santa Ana wind corridors should at the very least be included in local land use policy. The winds are so foreseeable they hardly qualify as a disaster.
In the San Gorgonio Pass, which NOAA refers to as Banning Pass, the winds are so strong and so consistent that scientists and investors figure it's lucrative to literally harvest the winds. The forest of spinning fans in one of the largest wind farms in the world is a landmark millions of motorists drive through every year.
How does it make sense to build homes in the same wind corridor? This is the same region where five Forest Service firefighters died trying to protect a vacant home above Cabazon in October 2006.
A suspected arsonist has been charged with five counts of murder in the firefighter deaths. Even if we could somehow kill all arsonists overnight, fires are still going to ignite in known Santa Ana wind corridors. Keep on building there if you want to. Expect insurance companies to take a dim view on claims in the future.
More detailed wind maps and studies are available. The author of several studies, Ivory Small, still works for NOAA in San Diego.

WATERSHEDS RULE

Testimony by Calfire Director Ruben Grijalva last week to a Department of Interior appropriations subcommittee uses the word "watershed" at least 17 times. Since the state is finally getting around to pounding the message home, here's a little perspective.
In April 129 years ago, a one-armed explorer named John Wesley Powell submitted to Congress a "Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States."
Wallace Stegner, one of the West's leading literary voices, wrote that Powell "proposed surveys and political divisions not by arbitrary boundaries but by drainage divides" -- "so that watershed and timber lands, foothill grazing lands, and valley irrigated lands could be managed intelligently without conflict."
There was too much common sense in a notion like that. In 1889 and 1890 the constitutional conventions of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming would not listen to Powell's pleas for rational thinking, Stegner wrote. That's one reason we have so many square edges in our Western state maps.
Watersheds are not shaped like geometric squares. They are the shape of the land we live in.
Watersheds form natural funnels for all the elements that make this fire-erosion country -- water, rocks, winds and flames. A watershed is a rockshed. A watershed is a windshed. A watershed is a fireshed.
Forest managers in the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit get it. They are already titling documents "Stewardship Fireshed Assessment."
It's not too late to learn a few tricks from Powell, Stegner and Tahoe foresters. That is why a regional board like the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority has more credibility on certain issues than any number of city and county government agencies.
Individual counties, especially San Bernardino where we are so familiar with the notion of watersheds, have already mapped these individual features. It is time to look harder at recognizing these basic geographic features for what they are -- natural political boundaries, the foundation and framework for whatever humans attempt to do within them.

MOUNTAINS NEED A HAIRCUT

The mountains also need somebody like the Rev. Al Sharpton to pound another simple message into the public consciousness.
"If a tree is brown, cut it down. If a tree is brown, cut it down."
That means cutting down up to 10 million sick, dead and dying trees in the San Bernardino National Forest alone. At roughly $100 a tree, no government agency is going to pay that bill. So what do we do? Sit on our hands and wait for the next big fire?
It's time to get creative. There are standing armies of restless teenagers in valley neighborhoods, yearning for action. Make one year of forestry service compulsory for all teens in Southern California. Under scientifically-trained forest crew bosses, this vast labor pool can chew through all the vulnerable standing fuel from Mount Baldy to Idyllwild, and beyond.
Prefer inmate crews? Go for it. Mobile wood-cutter camps are an affordable alternative to expensive prison buildings, and would help relieve inmate overcrowding so often cited by county officials. And don't forget to harness the recovering methamphetamine addict population. Former tweakers like the outdoors, too.
The only practical alternative to hand-cutting each and every dead tree is to light the forest on fire and let flames do the work. Pick your poison. We've already tried doing nothing for decades, and we can see the results.
If a tree is brown, cut it down.

NO MORE SUBSIDIES

If local voters, like so many residents of San Diego, don't want to pay for their own fire protection, that's fine. But they should not expect the state or federal government to step in to fill the void.
Pay your own way, or move out of fire country.
Taking the point further, if people want to live at elevations where they are within a mile of chaparral species, they should provide their own fire protection. Period. Nobody else should pay. Brush clearance in chaparral hills and vulnerable forests should be spelled out plain and simple -- anything less than 100 yards doesn't cut it. You want to live in it? Start cutting it. And pave that 100 yards with rock or asphalt.

'NEVER FORGET'

That's a phrase from memorial leaflets and websites about the crew of Forest Service Engine 57, who died Oct. 26, 2006 in the Esperanza Fire in Riverside County. One way to make sure people never forget is to put their photos on the cover of every land use and real estate handbook in Southern California.
That is what is really at stake here. Homeowners, investors, builders, and government officials who take fire protection for granted, placing the burden of protection on under-funded public safety agencies. Arsonists can light fires. But it takes nature to make a firestorm, and it takes property owners and land use agencies to build homes in wind corridors with known fire histories.
'Never forget.'

RESPECT YOUR ELDERS

The recorded history of San Bernardino County is relatively brief, but it rests on a foundation of people whose ancestors are still here -- Serrano, Cahuilla and particularly Yuhaviatam, the People of the Pines. If stewardship of mountain forests continues to prove too much for local, state and federal governments, the people who these lands belonged to in the first place may be willing to step up to the challenge.
Regardless of politics, the ancestors of Yuhaviatam and other tribes should be included in discussions of forest management in Southern California. Some of them can be found among the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians in north San Bernardino.

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land use

by Guy McCarthy

RIVERSIDE, Dec. 7 -- A task force of scientists, builders and elected leaders from across Southern California met Friday in a government building situated on a low spot next to the Santa Ana River.
Their goal -- to begin crafting a law that will help guide safer development on alluvial fans, the slopes of mountain sediment that comprise so much of the remaining lucrative land in 10 California counties.
Erosion experts and historians took turns evoking the Christmas 2003 post-fire debris flow deaths of 16 people north of San Bernardino, as well as other deadly and destructive flood events that have periodically plagued the region over the past 150 years.
"Post-fire flooding conditions remain elevated for up to five years after a wildfire and the cycle repeats with the next wildfire," the charter of the Alluvial Fan Task Force states. "Alluvial fans are part of a larger system with flood risks that extend beyond the boundaries of the fans."

BURNED WATERSHEDS

The timeliness of the meeting was underscored by reports that rain and flood watch warnings Friday kept a number of the most qualified experts away.
Not for fear of rising waters in the dam-controlled Santa Ana, but out of concern for thousands of residents who live in and below more than 750 square miles of watersheds that burned in October and November.
Officials from Orange and San Bernardino counties were notably absent. Though the storm systems crossing Southern California did not live up to dire forecasts, mandatory evacuations had been ordered in at least one canyon community in the Cleveland National Forest. Road crews and public safety agencies were also on alert in communities throughout the San Bernardino National Forest.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Task force members know they face a formidable challenge -- convincing local land use agencies and the residents they represent that yet another layer of regulation may be necessary to prevent foreseeable catastrophe.
The record-setting rain season of 2004-05 illustrated the costs of ignoring Southern California's flood history.
More than 1,800 homes in six counties were damaged or destroyed in storms that came more than a year after the devastating fires of October 2003, according to estimates compiled by the state Office of Emergency Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Even if does not rain again in Southern California for the next five years, land use will remain a topic of debate from Sacramento to the Nation's Capital. The firestorms of two recent Octobers, 2003 and 2007, killed more than 30 and destroyed more than 5,000 homes -- not counting related post-fire flood deaths and destruction.

VOICES OF THE PAST

Fire-and-flood costs in Southern California since October 2003 total more than 50 dead -- including six firefighter deaths -- and yet-to-be determined billions in emergency response, watershed damage, property losses, clean-up and rebuilding costs.
In San Bernardino County alone, the 2003 Old and Grand Prix fires and subsequent floods resulted in 22 deaths and cost an estimated $1.3 billion.
Dr. Kent Schofield, professor emeritus of history at Cal State San Bernardino and a founding member of the Water Resources Institute at CSUSB, compared photos from 1904 and 2007 to close his presentation to the Alluvial Fan Task Force on Friday.
Schofield presented two different views of north San Bernardino and the notch of Waterman Canyon, marked by the iconic hillside arrowhead that still serves as a symbol for San Bernardino County.
"Fortunately, there's not a great deal left to burn," Schofield said of the 2007 photo.
The same is true across great swathes of Southern California today. Like so many truisms in this disaster-prone region, each bit of good news comes with an equal dose of bad.

'THERE'S A PUBLIC INTEREST HERE'

More than 25 years ago a young firefighter named Jim Wilkins completed a 60-minute documentary titled "San Bernardino Under Siege." Filmed during and after the Panorama Fire of 1980, the documentary includes an example of how the mounting costs of California's recurring fire-flood cycle urged public officials to frankly assess what it means to society at large.
The words of CDF Chief Don Banghart ring as true today across Southern California as they did a quarter-century ago.
"So you hate to control people's very lives and tell them how to build their house and what to build it out of," Banghart said. "Or how long the cul-de-sac needs to be or how much water they have to have in their development.
"But I think we can see and everybody who does see much more clearly after the disaster -- one of this magnitude," Banghart said. "It's one of the few positive things that come out of it.
"I think people can clearly see there's a public interest here, and that government suffers," Banghart said. "You know there's a lot of money spent putting out a fire like this, or these fires. And we are affecting a whole bunch of people in ways that you know a lot of them can never really recover from that.
"And I think there's more than 'Just let people do what they like to do,' " Banghart said. "There's much more of a concern for 'Let's take a hand in this and do a little better job of comprehensive planning.' "

The next Alluvial Fan Task Force meeting is scheduled for Jan. 4. The location has yet to be determined.

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