By Andrew Silva
San Bernardino County Sun (California)
Copyright 2006 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Please leave. Please.
Fire officials fear that many mountain residents won’t heed that advice the next time an evacuation order is given.
“The Old Fire was three years ago, and people have forgotten,” said Allison Stewart, a district ranger for the San Bernardino National Forest.
As the area heads into another potentially dangerous fire season, officials hope residents haven’t become complacent. The U.S. Forest Service just bumped the fire danger from moderate to high.
A 425-acre blaze started by fireworks Thursday ripped through the Reche Canyon area of Grand Terrace and prompted the evacuation of 200 homes. The blaze was contained Friday.
The Old Fire in October 2003 torched more than 90,000 acres and destroyed roughly 1,000 homes in the Del Rosa area of north San Bernardino and in the mountains.
Although many there returned to find only smoking foundations and chimneys where their homes had stood, the vast majority went back up the hill after 10 days of sleeping in a hangar at San Bernardino International Airport, or staying with friends and family, to find their homes perfectly intact.
“I wouldn’t leave again,” said Javier Aguilar, 25, of Crestline. “It’s unnecessary. It’s already burned once.”
That’s a common sentiment in the mountains and is almost 180 degrees from the feelings of residents three years ago.
Because the extreme fire danger had been so obvious in 2002 and 2003, residents were ready to go when the evacuation order came.
Hundreds of thousands of pine trees — killed by a combination of tree overpopulation, a record drought and bark-beetle infestation — covered vast swaths of the mountains in an incongruous shade of brown.
Thanks to extensive planning and a prepared population, as many as 80,000 people filed down the north side of the mountain when the order to go was given.
No one was killed by fire in the Old Fire. In comparison, the Cedar Fire in San Diego County, which burned at the same time as the Old Fire, killed 14 people.
The almost-complete evacuation during the Old Fire left firefighters free to concentrate on battling the fierce blaze instead of worrying about saving lives.
“It was a combination of well-executed plans and heightened public awareness,” said Mike Dietrich, fire chief for the San Bernardino National Forest.
Despite the devastation, firefighters might have been too successful for their own good. With the exception of the small community of Cedar Glen near Lake Arrowhead, which saw about 300 homes and cabins incinerated, most mountain residents returned quickly to life as normal.
“There’s quite a bit of apathy,” said Rimforest resident Gerald Newcombe, president of the Arrowhead Communities Fire Safe Council, one of the grass-roots groups formed as the bark-beetle crisis escalated before the Old Fire. “We don’t have nearly the turnout at meetings we used to.”
He cited several possible reasons.
“We’ve had a big fire. We had rains. We’ve had trees removed,” he said.
He worried people don’t understand how a big fire can behave.
“It doesn’t come up the hill slowly so you can use your garden hose to protect your house,” he said. “When a fire comes in, it comes like a freight train. The people who stayed were lucky. The reason firefighters did so well in the Old Fire is because they didn’t have to worry about residents.”
Efforts to make the forest safer and healthier started a few years before the Old Fire and continue today.
The U.S. Forest Service, San Bernardino County, Southern California Edison and other agencies continue cutting down dead trees and removing thick underbrush.
With the help of Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., more than $70 million was directed toward thinning the overgrown forest.
Lake Arrowhead, which had the worst tree mortality in the forest, looks much different now, with open areas where thick forest had stood only a few years ago.
There is still a ton of work to do.
On Friday, Forest Service employees Beth Nabors and David Kotlarski were tramping across an overgrown 29-acre site alongside Crest Forest Drive between Crestline and Lake Arrowhead scouting for a fuel-reduction project.
The site shows the classic dangers facing the mountain, with dry flashy grasses, woody debris on the ground and small trees touching the understory of larger trees. Those constitute the so-called ladder fuels that can carry a small fire into the crowns of trees where it can explode into an unstoppable inferno.
The Forest Service has treated 5,000 acres this year and plans to do more than 8,000 acres. That doesn’t count the work being done on private land.
“It’s a hazardous situation,” Nabors said, pointing to the thick carpet of weeds on the ground.
Prescribed burns are a common way to reduce fuel loads in the forest, but in the most urbanized forest in the country, fires create too much smoke, are too close to homes, and can become a major threat if they get loose.
That means chain saws, chippers, bulldozers and helicopters have to be used, which is far more expensive and labor-intensive.
“We’re trying to turn back the clock to presuppression days,” Kotlarski said.
Before the forest was so densely populated with people, small fires would frequently move through patches of forest. With the arrival of people, those fires have to be put out, which has allowed the fuel load to reach dense and dangerous proportions.
And in a study published in Science Express last week, researchers found an even more important factor, namely that warmer temperatures in the past 30 years have led to longer and more dangerous fire seasons. Whether that’s a direct result of global warming or just a natural cycle s open for debate.
“I don’t care what the weather is doing, we have fuels that need treating,” said Stewart, the district ranger.
Residents are required to clear a defensible space around their homes, and officials said most seem to be doing that.
But creating a healthy forest and then maintaining it is a lifelong commitment, not unlike painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
And that’s also up to residents to keep pressure on elected officials to keep the momentum going.
“What we have is a forest that’s still overstocked, and a lot of dead volume out in the forest,” said Bob Sommer, a vegetation specialist with the San Bernardino National Forest. “There’s so much more fuel, it’s harder to put out the fire.”
And officials hope residents will understand that it’s still dangerous.
Phil Melcic, 60, sitting outside a Crestline real-estate office, responded “Why would we?” when asked if he would evacuate next time.
He said he worried most about “the nuts” - the Old Fire and the devastating 1980 Panorama Fire were set by arsonists.
“I won’t go next time. I have a generator . . . It’s burned enough. I think we’re OK for a while,” he said.