I’m a thousand times more sympathetic than most to the need to keep a tight control on access to high fire areas during Santa Ana season. I live in a Topanga side canyon that hasn’t caught fire in 30 years. And one thing that’s a given about Southern California’s high chaparral-covered hills: eventually they burn. Thus I’m all for slamming down state and county park access during the worst Red Flag times. I do not want some fool who decides to sneak a cigarette while hiking to be able to incinerate my neighborhood.

By the same token, I figure it’s understandable that, after these last two go-rounds with Santa Ana-driven fires, the Malibu City Council would be a teensy bit jittery about allowing any overnight camping in the nearby public parks—particularly when it appears that the most recent Corral fire may have been set by drunk and stupid campers, albeit not legal ones.

But according to several accounts like this from the Malibu Surfside News, and this press release from The City Project, the proposal that will come up for discussion and possibly a vote today at the Malibu City Council meeting, will restrict public access to various pieces of public parkland in a way that seems neither appropriate nor legal.

Here’s some of what the City Project press release says:

The Malibu City Council …..will consider a local coastal program amendment and corollary amendments to the general plan that would prohibit all overnight camping in Malibu parks, and would eliminate public access to Ramirez Canyon Park. The public and Native Americans with ancestral ties to the area would be prohibited from access to public lands.

Both the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority and the City Project folks also note that, although the post fire concern is valid, overnight “cold” camping (no fires) in designated spots during non-Santa Ana months, should be permitted, and Malibu’s proposed restrictions have less to do with safety and more to do with NIMBY-driven urges to keep out the riff raff (read non-Malibu residents):

Malibu cynically seeks to invoke the recent fires as a justification for limiting public access. Since records have been kept in 1910, not a single wildfire can be traced to a developed campground. The Malibu Parks Public Access Enhancement Plan will actually decrease fire danger in the canyons.

Malibu would not exist but for taxpayers paying for public roads and police and fire protection. Malibu is not above state and federal laws.

Well, yeah.

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The California prison system has been in such bad shape in so many ways for such a long time, it’s almost shocking to find one element of the system that seems to be working. That element is the fire camps.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation runs 42 adult fire camps-–37 of them with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, five more with the LA County Fire Department. Upwards of 4,400 inmates work on 200 fire crews that log in three million person hours a year battling wildfires, and other emergencies. Several of those crews worked this past weekend’ to help contain the Corral fire in Malibu.

The fire camps seem to succeed on multiple levels. Their inmates are less likely to return to prison. Correctional officers like working in the camps. And, instead of costing the state of California more than $42,000 per offender per year, as is the case inside prison, fire camp’s per inmate price tag is around half that or less. Moreover, with the work they provide, the fire camp inmates actually save the state money—approximately $80 million a year. Not exactly chump change.

Ken Cox and Janette Cox (who are neither married nor related to each other) were two of the correctional officers who accompanied the firefighting crews from Camp Ishi in Northern California’s Tehama County, to the Malibu base camp. They both told me they are ardent fans of the program.


“The camps are the best system in the CDC,” said Ken. “The inmates get out a place like Ishi with real skills that they can take into the world after they’re released. We have guys who go out and get jobs as Hot Shots in the Federal system afterwards.”

Sergeant Dan Billeci, who also came with the crews from Camp Ishi, agreed. Even those who don’t pursue firefighting, he said, gain a sense that they can succeed at something, “which means they’re less likely to come back to the system”

Not everyone succeeds, of course. “A lot of guys come back to us,” said Ken. But fewer fire camp graduates stay stuck in the revolving door than the 70 percent who return to California’s prisons after they’re paroled.

Both Coxes also say that they like working at the fire camps, in part, because the relationships between correctional officers and inmates are far less adversarial then elsewhere in the corrections system. “In the camps they come and talk to us,” said Janette. “Whereas in prison,” said Ken, “they don’t because they’ll be seen as snitches if they talk to us to much.” And prisoners often need to talk, said Janette. “It’s healthier.”

The only problem with the camps, according to the Coxes and Sergeant Billeci, is that most of them are rarely full. This is not, the officers say, for lack of applicants. “Lost of people want to come to the camps,” said Ken. But the bar for entry is set so high that many of those who might thrive in the firefighting program are prohibited entry.

In general, the rules are as follows; the applicants must be physically fit (sensible) and can have no history of arson (Duh!), or sex offenses (okay, good call). But even those in for low level drug offenses often don’t qualify if they have a violent or a gang crime somewhere in their pasts. Yet sometimes those with no violence in their past are kept out too. “The selection system is very inconsistent,” said Ken Cox.

Certainly appropriate caution must be used in choosing applicants for the fire camps. Everyone wants to protect the program. Yet, the officers suggested in the course of our conversation that, in a state with catastrophically overcrowded prisons, maybe we could design a more responsive selection criteria so that guys (and women) who might otherwise succeed aren’t routinely rejected.

Put another way, if we want to maximize the program’s potential to save money and rehabilitate lives, we need to open the fire camps’ doors a little wider.

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As we’ve all heard by now, it was the third blaze in Malibu this year, and the worst Malibu fire in a decade and a half —with 53 houses burning so quickly they may as well have made of cellophane, and another score badly damaged. We also know that due to the fact that an appropriately jittery Schwarzenegger ordered firefighters to Southern California early last week in advance of the Santa Anas, massive amounts of resources—both in terms of ground crews and equipment—arrived on the scene with remarkable speed.

Although there were all those homes the firefighters couldn’t save, once they were on site in full strength, they worked with well-coordinated precision, and got the upper hand on the flames before the day’s light began to bleach from the sky. As early as 3 pm on Saturday, the dark, roiling smoke that had characterized the fire’s earlier hours, had changed to hazy gray plumes. By Sunday evening, the fire was at 70 percent containment.


This latest local inferno was called the Corral fire, presumably because it started on a dirt road in Corral canyon, just north of Malibu. It must be challenging for those tasked with naming these fires to keep coming up with different monikers—as opposed to calling Saturday’s blaze….say….Malibu XXII.

I became aware of the fire at 6:30 a.m Saturday morning after I was startled out of a very pleasant sleep by a phone call from my neighbor, Rebecca, who told me that the nearby hills were once again burning. Whenever Malibu burns, we in Topanga Canyon get jumpy. We know from experience that if the wind starts blowing the wrong direction, we could easily be next. In 1993, for example, the fire started in Old Topanga Canyon, raced to Malibu faster than a man could run, then blew right back to us in a big and scary way.

But when, by 10:30 a.m. the flames appeared to be in no immediate danger of moving anywhere near to Topanga, I poured myself one more cup of coffee, packed my dog in the car, and drove to Malibu to chat up some firefighters.

The people who had come from all over California and beyond to battle our latest conflagration were, in their downtime, a friendly and talkative bunch. Here are a few of my notes—along with some photos I snapped while chatting. I’ve not quoted anyone by name, although only one person asked me not to. I figured there was no sense in taking a chance on…well….burning the people who were kind and courageous enough to do a very risky job in our behalf.

Here’s what they said:

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Now that the weather forecasters are predicting a whole new set of Santa Ana winds to kick up this week, perhaps it’s a good time to look at what we’ve learned from last month’s Santa Ana-driven fire storms.

According to a worrisome investigation that the AP released over the weekend, the answer appears to be: Nothing good.

After earlier investigations by the AP and others triggered a flood of criticism over the state’s allocation of air support and other firefighting resources, Governor Schwarzenegger and California fire officials angrily informed the press (and anyone else who’d listen) that the coordination between state, federal and local resources was “seamless.” And that any delays in getting the much-needed firefighting planes and helicopters to the blazes had mostly to do with high winds—plus, in a few cases, the unavoidable shortage of what are called “fire spotters,” specially-trained individuals who ride in the plane with the pilot and coordinate air drops.

Now, using the Public Records Act, the AP has gotten documents that show the governor and the relevant state officials are….what’s the word I’m looking for?….Oh, yeah…lying.

Yes, pilots were “hampered by strong winds,” reports the AP. But the brave, dedicated fire flyers went up anyway. They got a dozen air tankers and five state helicopters into the air to make more than 70 hours worth of firefighting missions the first day of the firestorm. Oct. 21.

Unfortunately, reports the AP, the planes that flew were only about half the tankers and helicopters that could have been fighting fires that day.

Twenty-eight of 52 aircraft the state was tracking for firefighting efforts remained grounded, and high winds were not listed as the reason. Rather, state officials had not requested them or they were being kept in other parts of the state in case fires broke out there.

This is not at all how it’s supposed to work. According to Sam Padilla, an LA County spokesman I spoke to a few weeks ago, the accepted protocol is to throw everything you have at a big fire to knock it down early. Then, if a second, a third and a fourth fire break out—as they did last month—you start passing resources around as urgency, and threat to structures, demands.

And, indeed, that’s what Los Angeles did on a county-wide level. The state, however, did not.

But, wait. It gets worse.

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Now no one begrudges the fact that, if you have more income, you get to buy more in the way of expensive stuff—like, say, limos, yachts, villas, Jackson Pollock paintings, and Lear jets. (Okay, we do begrudge it a little, but our better selves know that such wealth envy is….unbecoming.)

We also understand that when disasters strikes, the very wealthy generally have more resources: Better insurance, bigger bank accounts to tap for rebuilding, more minions to help carry the valuables out of the house and into the fleet of Hummers. That sort of thing. But, hey: C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Still, in most ways, disasters have been the great equalizers. An earthquake, a fire, a flood, tornado or hurricane will not examine your net worth or lack thereof before destroying your house. Should a force majeure arrive in your area, it’s an equal opportunity visitor. By the same token, the services available to help those suddenly facing the threat of natural disasters are pretty much the same for everybody. Firefighters, the coast guard, and other rescue workers don’t discriminate by class.

Or at least that’s the way it used to be.

In the coming issue of the Nation, Naomi Klein talks about how far the new Pay-to-Be-Saved ethic has evolved.

It seems that, post Katrina, a gaggle of entrepreneurial types quickly figured out that disaster services for the wealthy could be a profitable business. And companies like our very favorite pay-for-protection entrepreneurs, Blackwater, intend to get in on that profit.

Here are a couple of the relevant graphs from Klein’s article:
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And while we’re on the subject of rescue….. [SEE POST ABOVE]

My smart friend and commentator, Flavia Colgan, wrote this delightful column for the Philadelphia Daily News about what one can do to help California’s fire victims. She says she’s been getting a heartening response, even from as far away as her hometown of Philly, PA.

In the column she lists the following agencies that are collecting donations for fire victims:

American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund: 800-HELP-NOW or 800-257-7575 for Spanish speakers, .

Corporations and businesses interested in making in-kind donations may call 800-746-5463.

San Diego Food Bank: 866-350-3663

Goodwill Southern California: 888-4-GOODWILL

Salvation Army Southern California: 213-896-9160, www.salvationarmysocal.org.

Governor’s Office of Emergency Services: 800-750-2858

And for helping other species other than our own: Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: 888-SPCA-LA1

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I promise I’ll blog about a non-fire subject next time. But I figured the story below was an appropriate bookend to Thursday’s post, so couldn’t resist it.
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Our much-missed pal (and WLA guest blogger), Alan Mittelstaedt, has written his regular LA Sniper column over at LA City Beat about my friend and Topanga neighbor, Tony Morris.

(By the way, if you’re not reading Alan’s inspired dose of weekly snark, you’re cheating yourself.)

For more than a decade, Tony Morris has been trying to slap California’s lawmakers into wakefulness about the state’s under-preparedness for just the sort of fire-wrought disaster that this past week of hillside infernos has brought us. Finally, it seems, he’s having some success.

A few representative clips from Al’s column:

The 65-year-old Yale graduate nearly lost his own home in the Topanga fire in 1993. It turned the former NBC documentary producer and construction guy into a crusader to set up a national fleet of supertankers to bombard flames with water scooped up from the ocean or other body of water.

He and his grassroots group – Aerial Fire Protection Associates – took their spiel on the road and testified before one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s blue-ribbon panels on fire protection. A few months ago, the governor announced that the state would sign a three-year lease for one of the supertankers – a converted DC-10 that drops 12,000 gallons of water over a half-mile area in eight seconds. “Everybody’s amazed that he did it,” says Morris, who traveled around the state to get homeowners groups to bombard the governor with letters. “But that’s not the end of it. What you’re seeing now, the catastrophic fires, is inexcusable. It’s unbelievable. It’s a combination of all of the elements coming together at the same time. It’s the perfect firestorm. Global warming has produced a rise in the intensity and number of fires around the world.”

The special DC-10, known as Tanker 910, drops nearly 10 times as much water as the WW II-era turboprops. In the last few days, it has hopscotched the state dousing flames. But one jet tanker isn’t enough. The lease runs $5-million per year, plus $5,000-an-hour during fire-fighting. It’s a bargain, Morris says, and the company operates at a small profit. “You have to think about what you’re saving by putting these fires out.” By comparison, L.A. Unified recently got $600 million to build new schools it doesn’t need and the city announced a $150 million program to synchronize traffic signals that don’t make much of a difference.

(Here’s a rather cool video of the DC-10 dropping fire retardant, looking for all the world like a Godzilla-size, spawning salmon.)

For thirteen years, Tony has explained in informed and impassioned detail to nearly anybody who’d listen that investing in the right tools to knock down the fires early will save the state money (and homes and lives) in the long run. Finally, after the Griffith Park fire threatened precious pieces of the city’s heart, those with the power to say “yes” began to realize he’d been right all along.

UPDATE:

I just got off the phone with Tony, who called by sheer coincidence to let me know how things are going with him, which he does from time to time. He says he’s getting calls from a zillion media outlets— from Which Way LA to the New York Times. It was nice to hear his excitement. After 13 years he’s suddenly the right guy for the right moment, and, I hope, in terms of public policy at least, it’s not going to fade away with the ever-turning news cycles.

What he says is, with the right planes, we can have a tanker up and in the air within minutes—not hours—and just knock the fire down. He talked about the new generation of high tech air tankers that have a different level of maneuverability. The Russians, it seems, are way ahead of us in this regard with their BE-200 [check the video link; it’s another very cool one] No, they’re not cheap. But the damage wrought by the fires we’ve seen in the last four years is…how to put it?… a tad more expensive.

The approach to firefighting equipment in California has been, as my mother used to say, penny wise and pound foolish. (This is true of the US in general on the issue of firefighting. The Canadians simply roll their eyes at us.)

By the way, in case it wasn’t clear, for all these years, Tony’s done this work only as a man with a passion. He’s never been paid for any of it. And no, he’s not a trust fund baby. His wife works, and he writes free lance—as it leaves time for his excellent crusade.

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Now that many of the fires are contained, accusations and complaints are surfacing from Orange and San Diego counties that some of these disastrous fires of October were made worse by the fact that firefighters certain areas didn’t have adequate air support.

The way it works is, each county has its own fire-fighting air fleet. Then when a true disaster strikes, the county or city draws from the state fleet and, in some cases, beyond.

For the record, LA County’s fleet consists of three Sikorsky Firehawks, four Bell 412 helicopters, and another Bell Jet ranger.

This fire season, in addition to the copters it had in its own hanger, LA County Fire Department had access to a couple of Erickson Sky Cranes, a Super Scooper or two (leased from Quebec), and some other fixed-wing planes that swoop over and drop fire retardant. (The Daily News has a basic rundown of what was most recently being used.)

Over the past few days, these planes and ‘copters were bounced around between LA area fires, “depending upon where there were structures threatened,” LA County Fire spokes guy Sam Padilla told me.

And although there were homes and structures lost in LA County, as yet, there have been no big complaints that it was for lack of resources. The truth is, sometimes, in spite of everyone’s best efforts, the fire does what it wants.

Yet, Orange county fire authority chief Chip Prather has been widely quoted as saying that with the arson-started Santiago Canyon fire in particular, a lack of air support in the fire’s early stages made a crucial difference.

“If we had more air resources,” he said, “we would have been able to control this fire,” he said. “Instead we’ve been stuck in this initial attack mode on the ground where we hopscotch through neighborhoods as best we can trying to control things.”

Similar complaints are surfacing around San Diego’s destructive Harris fire.

So why didn’t the OC and SD have what they needed and LA did?


Out of curiosity, I called Orange County’s fire authority and asked what kind of air fleet the OC had. Angela, a very cheerful and sleep-deprived OCFA spokesperson told me, “Two helicopters.”

To make sure I hadn’t heard wrong I asked again. Two, she repeated, and they definitely aren’t Firehawks. “I wish!” she said.

Asked why OCFA didn’t get the additional resources they needed, Angela laughed dryly. “That’s the big question,” she said. “Let me know when you find out.”

Even now, she added, the efforts to control the still-burning fires are plagued by a lack of the Right Stuff.

So what’s the deal? Certainly the LA fires started sooner, so equipment came to us first. Plus we have a bigger fleet to begin with. But that doesn’t really explain the situation.

Fire resources are controlled in layers. First city, the county, then state, then—if a fire is big or nasty enough to be “federalized”—by region. And with each successive layer, there’s a formula for allocation.

In other words, determining what caused these resource short falls is a complicated business that will take time to sort correctly.

But for now we need to make sure we ask the right questions, and keep asking them.

POST SCRIPT: Here’s the LA Times write-up on the equipment that the State of California didn’t buy, since 2003, against the advice of its Blue Ribbon Fire Commission, all hand picked to make such recommendations.

I’ve heard from back door sources that the what the firefighters believed would have made all the difference in routing the 2003 SD fires before they got so tragically out of control—was early air support, specifically the super scoopers and the air cranes.

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Okay, I figure we all need a levity break today… as people deal with the fact that homes are lost, and as the accusations begin to fly fast-and-furiously as to who ought to be blamed for these catastrophic fires.

With that in mind, I offer the following odd anecdote from my friend Sooki Wheeland. Sooki works in the film industry and is also a fellow Topanga mom. Her house is closer to the Pacific Coast Highway than mine is. Thus if a fire came roaring up the canyon from Malibu, her number, so to speak, would have come up first.

On Monday,” she says, as the winds and the rumors grew ominous, she busied herself loading more of the requisite family photos and Important Papers into her family’s van, while her husband Ken drove up to the ridge that separates Topanga from Tuna Canyon in order to see what he could scope out about the status of the Malibu fire.

NOTE: It is a rule of thumb, if you’re potentially in a fire’s path, whatever you see on the TV news is either dead wrong or of little use when it comes to decision making so, in the absence of updates from the firefighters, such look-sees are often wise. (Plus, we lost TV reception in Topanga on day one of the fires.)

“We all felt the adrenaline of impending danger,” says Sooki, “and worried that clogged roads would impede our departure if we waited too long to evacuate.” On the other hand, they wondered if they’d be able to get back in if they left prematurely. “We had already heard that residents were having trouble with access.”

But as husband Ken, plus a neighbor pal, headed out to do fire reconnaissance, (both appropriately supplied with emergency radios and face masks), they rounded the corner on their home street only to have their access to Topanga Canyon Blvd. blocked by “the arrival of TWO stretch hummer limos, loaded with stressed hairdressers.”

It seemed that this double gaggle of very nervous-looking stylists had been scheduled for a “rejuvenating seminar” at the Topanga-located “Institute of Courage.”

The fact that fires were exploding all over Southern California and that Topanga might or might not burn, had evidently not dissuaded the hair people. They were scheduled for rejuvenation, and by gum they were going to get it.

(No, although I’d seen the sign, I had no idea what the Institute of Courage was either until I Googled it this morning after Sooki emailed me the story. You too can become similarly informed if you click on the link.)

How the hell the duo of mega limos got past the Highway Patrol people is a question that no doubt some other intrepid reporter will want to investigate.

No word at….um…press time whether the hairdressers stayed for smoke-haunted spiritual renewal… or not.

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POST SCRIPT: I was checking the National Weather Service a few minutes ago, to see what the coming days held in terms of heat and wind, I found that the NOAA people actually have a designation for what we see overhead, complete with a nice little smoke-billowy graphic.

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My longtime close friend, writer John Leone, lives in the city of Del Mar, near San Diego. Tuesday morning, he wrote the following essay and sent it out to a list of friends, myself among them:

THE DAY OF THE DEVILS

John Leone

Rancho Santa Fe
Del Mar
Oct 23, 2007

45 houses burnt to the ground in Rancho Santa Fe, California’s most exclusive suburb, last night and this morning. The rich inhabitants escaped yesterday after a mandatory evacuation order.

My maids Ana Maria and Ana Luisa, who occupy servants’ quarters in Rancho Santa Fe, spent the night with three of their children in my guest bedrooms and downstairs. Their husbands had returned to Mexico to attend to extensive fire damage in Baja California.

California Highway Patrolmen came across an encampment of indocumentados running from the flames in McGonnigle Canyon, crossing an unfinished segment of CA Highway 56, according to radio reports. The group were camping in the billowing smoke on an unopened stretch of the highway. The Mexican workers told the CHP that they had become separated from a group three times their size, who were trying to simultaneously escape the conflagration and avoid detection. They had no idea what had happened to their compas. “It’s the Day of the Devils,” said one man in Spanish.

The biggest and most destructive of all the fires, the Witch Creek fire, after burning 600 homes in Rancho Bernardo, has ramped like a flaming caterpillar into this most exclusive area and is burning down the Del Dios Highway towards Via de la Valle and Del Mar, where some 5000 people spent the night under mandatory evacuation orders at the Del Mar Race Track.

My friend Bill Brooks’ 86-year-old mother was told by police to leave her Del Mar home and dutifully reported to the race track. She spent the night in the ash and respiratory danger zone instead of comfortably at home. But she has a very nice place to return to, which the nursing home and hospital patients, evacuated by the thousands, do not. Many sat out all night in the open under the smoke.

The works of man are resisted everywhere by Nature, and most of the destruction until now has taken place in new developments, in suburban cul-de-sacs, once chaparral which used to have natural yearly burn-offs. It is the equivalent of building in hurricane zones.

The flames continue to consume the lavish homes of the extremely rich and flush out the extremely poor who serve them from the ravines and arroyos in which they hide from la migra. “The flames are climbing over the ridges,” says a woman in Elfin Forest, an Encinitas suburb abutting Rancho. “We can see them on three sides. The poor Mexicans are walking along the roads. It’s like a war scene.”

The ashen air makes breathing difficult. The firestorm has a peculiar inevitability as it marches towards the west and the coastline, devouring fantastically expensive real estate, making the unthinkable come true. This has never happened before, not in the history of the state. Natives say it’s because of development, the cause of most ailments in the state. The average cost of the homes destroyed in Rancho Bernardo is over a million dollars,
and in Rancho Santa Fe many times that.

The malevolence of the fire makes one imagine purposeful violence against these places, and the helpless refugees evoke imagery familiar to all from war documentaries, but they’re not being shown on television, because these poor souls are not movie mavens or big shots or anything except desperate human beings with nowhere to go, fearful of the authorities who are helping the rich all around them.

FIRE UPDATE #1:

For those of you following Rebel Girl’s Santiago Fire evacuation saga, as of 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, she reports that, according to a neighbor who managed to get back in to Modjeska Canyon, her house is still standing, and the sprinklers she and her huz managed to get up on the structure’s roof, are still up there and sprinkling away.

Photo of the burning mountainside in Rancho Bernardo by Genero Molina/LA Times

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