War Nearly Won, Crews Pull Out : Reaction: No lives were lost in blazes that scorched 69,000 acres in the county. Chief Lund has high praise for his department.

By DARYL KELLEY

Oct. 31, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Although short on manpower and equipment, Ventura County Fire Chief George E. Lund said Saturday that his department could hardly have performed better last week when faced with the county’s most destructive wild fires since 1970.

Firefighters succeeded in saving lives and property despite skeleton crews, too few fire engines and other problems, including slow response from Northern California and red tape that grounded two National Guard tanker planes, Lund said.

“I don’t know that we could have done anything any better given the circumstances and the resources,” Lund said. “There wouldn’t be anything we would do differently. Absolutely, we were ready.”

But when four Ventura County fires broke out over 22 hours Tuesday and Wednesday--and 10 more erupted throughout Southern California--complicated firefighting strategies were abandoned.

“We used the only tactic that was available to us,” Lund said. “We went into a defensive mode and tried to protect life and property. We were overwhelmed by the fire itself.”

Manpower and equipment desperately needed on Tuesday afternoon’s Thousand Oaks fire were drawn away by the other three blazes, even as strong winds pushed 100-foot columns of flame from Hidden Valley to Point Mugu before doubling back on homes in the rugged hills overlooking the ocean.

And many engines from Los Angeles and Orange counties were called back to defend their own counties.

So the skeleton crews that fanned out across the county had no choice but to fall back around structures and fight to save them, Lund said.

Crews were stretched so thin that in the crucial hillside firefights above Pacific Coast Highway there were only about 15 fire engines to protect about 100 homes, Lund said. Under normal circumstances, an engine would have been stationed at every threatened house, he said.

“In this defensive posture, we’re prioritizing what’s possible to save and what’s not,” he said. “We had firefighters actually driving by structures they knew they couldn’t save.”

By Saturday, 67 structures, including 43 houses and mobile homes, had been burned in the county’s worst series of fires in 23 years. About 69,000 acres had burned--not as many as in the giant Wheeler Gorge wilderness fire of 1985--but many more structures were lost this time.

Nine firefighters, one deputy sheriff and three residents had suffered minor injuries. But no lives had been lost, authorities stressed.

“You have to give credit,” county Fire Capt. Norman Plott said. “Considering the enormity of this fire, it’s amazing we have not lost any life. This is Saturday, and we’re not going to any funerals on Monday morning.”

Saturday, in fact, was a day of accounting, since all four local fires were either out or near containment, and Santa Ana winds are not expected to return until Tuesday.

On a political level, Lund said he hoped firefighters’ brave stands to save homes would prompt voters to approve Proposition 172 on Tuesday’s ballot. The measure would extend an existing one-half cent sales tax and could make up some of the $4 million his department lost in budget cuts.

On a practical level, authorities said the week’s test by fire had proved again some important lessons and pointed up areas where improvements are needed.

On a personal level, grateful homeowners were still praising firefighters’ efforts. Others, however, insisted that some out-of-county fire agencies not only failed to protect their homes but kept them from returning to hose embers after the firestorms passed.

And some ranchers were angry that sheriff’s deputies kept them from returning to their barns to save animals after the immediate threat of fire had passed.

Responding to such criticisms, Lund acknowledged that urban fire agencies are unfamiliar with wildfire tactics and deal with situations differently than his agency.

He also said his department should communicate much better with law enforcement on issues such as ranchers being allowed to rescue animals if there is no immediate danger.

“We get so caught up in firefighting we forget that law enforcement has a critical role,” he said. “We don’t keep them informed as we should.

“But I think the deputies did what they thought was right,” he added, “recognizing that people’s lives are more important than the livestock.”

Among the fires’ biggest lessons was the importance of the county’s stiff brush-clearing policies. The firestorms caused less damage than expected because brush was cleared to 100 feet from structures, homeowners acknowledged all week.

“I have to admit the reason we saved most of these homes was the excellent weed abatement the people did themselves,” Plott said.

A longstanding county prohibition of combustible wood shake roofs on new houses in high-hazard areas also kept structures from burning. Still needed, however, are requirements that wood-sided houses be banned from fire-prone areas or equipped with sprinklers, Lund said.

The fires revealed a chink in the statewide emergency response system.

Lund said a big early problem was getting departments in central and Northern California to quickly commit to sending fire engines.

Crews from Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Barbara counties responded almost immediately to calls for help after an arsonist set the Thousand Oaks fire.

“But when we had to go outside of Southern California, we had a very difficult time getting a commitment,” Lund said. “So it left us in limbo as far as effective planning. It took us six to eight hours to get confirmations . . . and that was a dilemma we’d never had before.”

Finally, late Wednesday, the first of 100 fire engines from the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills began to arrive. But by then, the worst of the destruction was over.

The fires also exposed a weakness in Ventura County’s emergency readiness, when two C-130 tanker planes at the state Air National Guard field near Oxnard failed to attack the fires until Thursday morning, nearly two days after flames were first spotted.

Lund refused to criticize state and federal officials for leaving the tankers on the ground during the firestorms that raced up nearby mountainsides from Pacific Coast Highway. He said he knew that a complicated protocol kept the planes from being launched until all 36 private tankers in the state were in action.

“It would have been nice if they could respond quicker,” he said. “In our case, it seems like they should have been available because we had requests that couldn’t be filled (by private tankers).”

But Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) attacked the “bureaucratic nightmare” that kept the planes on the ground and vowed to work to make sure future delays are avoided.

Even if the C-130s had flown, Lund said it is possible that they might not have been effective during the mountainside firestorms on Wednesday.

‘The wind was blowing so hard, it was laying down so heavy . . . it might have prevented them from doing anything to protect those homes,” he said. And the plumes of black smoke were so thick it’s doubtful pilots could have seen their targets, he said.

Lund said he thought that three private tankers dispatched from Goleta and Lancaster on Wednesday were able to work only the perimeters of the firestorms, not the centers where homes were being lost.

Turbulence from severe winds was also a problem during the first hours of the Thousand Oaks fire, Lund said. And that prevented helicopters and tankers from saving a house and mobile home on Rasnow Peak in Newbury Park, he said.

However, none of the glitches and tactical problems were of much importance compared with the challenge caused by last week’s combination of high winds, dry brush and 14 simultaneous wildfires, Lund said.

“We were taxed to the ultimate of our resources,” he said. “And our losses, compared to those throughout the region, I think were better than most.”