Tinder-Dry Brush Halts Preventive Burn-Offs

Efforts to create firebreaks to protect homeowners in Topanga Canyon, Calabasas, Hidden Hills and West Hills were abandoned Wednesday by city and county firefighters--because of brush-fire danger.

Officials of the Los Angeles city and county fire departments said dry weather and growing piles of dying chaparral have forced them to drop plans for controlled fires that would have thinned the brush in Chatsworth and Tarzana.

Both communities’ brushlands are considered “historic wildfire corridors,” where conflagrations have started, blackening thousands of acres between the San Fernando Valley and the ocean, authorities said.

“We’re extremely concerned that fires starting there will go straight to the beach,” said Valley Battalion Chief Robert MacMillan, who heads the city Fire Department’s firebreak program. “But we decided not to go ahead with the prescribed burns because it’s too dangerous.”

This year’s lack of rainfall has caused the brush to be unusually dry, MacMillan said. “It’s already as dry out there as it usually is in October or November.”

The use of carefully “prescribed” fires to create firebreaks by burning away heavy brush has evolved over the past five years to replace bulldozed firebreaks in local mountains. Environmentalists say such fires aid vegetation without causing erosion or land scars.

County Fire Capt. Scott Franklin, who is in charge of his department’s firebreaks’ work, said firefighters are responding to emergency brush-fire calls daily. Because of that, there are no standby crews available to oversee the burning of firebreaks, he said.

Moreover, fire officials said they were surprised about two weeks ago at how hard it proved to control their most recent prescribed burn on a fog-shrouded Santa Monica Mountains hillside. Bushes that should have barely burned flared into 30-foot flames, they said.

The Chatsworth firebreak was to have covered 100 acres in the Eagle Springs area at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. An arson-caused fire that erupted there five years ago destroyed two homes in Calabasas before being pushed by Santa Ana winds to Agoura Hills and Malibu.

A 480-acre firebreak south of Vanalden Avenue in the Tarzana area was supposed to help protect 10,000 homes in the Pacific Palisades area and 1,500 residences in Topanga Canyon, officials said.

Franklin said a fungus, identified by federal researchers as a microorganism called Botryosphaeria, is killing chaparral that was weakened by a drought four years ago.

“It’s lying there as dead fuel,” Franklin told reporters called to a news conference near Mulholland Drive and Stone Canyon, south of Sherman Oaks. “It’s more dangerous this year than ever before.”

Officials said they managed to start a 100-acre firebreak blaze last month in the Stone Canyon area, which was the path of a disastrous 1961 brush fire that destroyed more than 400 expensive Bel-Air area homes.

But weather conditions stalled plans this year to thin brush by burning 1,800 acres near neighborhoods in the Santa Clarita Valley, Franklin said. Also shelved was a proposed 300-acre firebreak project in the La Canada-Flintridge area.

Franklin said the only firebreak project left this year is one planned for a grassy hillside area along the Ventura Freeway between Calabasas and Agoura Hills.

The grass will be easy to control when slowly burned off. Left untended, however, it could serve as a fuse to ignite more dense brush south of the freeway, officials said.