Brush Fires

Re " 'Stay and defend' will face scrutiny," Feb. 9 Just weeks after The Times wrote about California chiefs debating "stay and defend," possibly hundreds have died in Australia as a result of that very strategy. It is amazing to me that a few chiefs in California could forget one of the primary tenets of firefighting: Fire is unpredictable. Instead of fighting to increase fire protection and water supplies and advocating a moratorium on building in fire-prone areas, they chose to propose a "stay and defend" strategy for residents ill-prepared for it. In a way, they are lucky that Australia suffered such a catastrophe, because it probably saved that tragedy from occurring here, and it saved the California chiefs the shame of being responsible for a large loss of life.

Scott Garrett got the evacuation order at 6 a.m. on Oct. 22. His Lake Arrowhead home lay in the path of the Grass Valley fire, and flames would arrive within hours. Garrett rushed to his garage, where he kept 15 gallons of a flame-retardant spray called Safe-T-Guard. Using a garden sprayer, he applied the clear liquid to his 5,500-square-foot home's decks, eaves and wood siding. Though houses up and down Garrett's street burned in the blaze, his remained standing.

Scorching temperatures continued to stoke wildfires across Southern California on Friday, creating anxious moments in the mountains north and east of Los Angeles where thousands of residents fled flames that skipped through canyons, edging toward one neighborhood after another. More than 2,700 firefighters and a small air force of water-dropping planes and helicopters managed to stop the blazes before they swept into hillside housing tracts. But smoky air from the fires continued to create unhealthful conditions in parts of the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, disrupting schools, horseback riding programs and day camps near the fire areas.

The giant fire in Angeles National Forest continued its slow-motion rampage through the mountains Sunday, causing the deaths of two firefighters as it bore down on the semirural community of Acton and threatened to overrun Mt. Wilson. The two firefighters were killed when they drove off the side of a treacherous road in the Mt. Gleason area, south of Acton, around 2:30 p.m., said Los Angeles County Deputy Fire Chief Mike Bryant. He did not release their names or other details. "This accident is tragic," Bryant said, choking up as he spoke Sunday evening.

The exhilaration was palpable as Adam and Candy Kessler arrived Wednesday at their freshly built residence in Sylmar's Oakridge Mobile Home Park -- he driving a U-Haul van filled with the couple's furniture and personal belongings, she following in a car. With them they also brought a resolve to help resettle a tight-knit community that was largely destroyed in last autumn's wildfires. "We're very excited," said Candy Kessler as she prepared to enter the yellow manufactured home they ordered to replace the one lost in November's Sayre fire.

He's a war hero who became a media mogul, celebrity pitchman, pop icon and philanthropist. He's so famous he was given his own ZIP Code, 20252, to handle the fan mail. He is 65 years old but has no intention of retiring. In fact, he looks fitter than ever. Working outdoors with a shovel will do that. Smokey Bear was born in August 1944, sired by a committee of ad men and government bureaucrats hoping to safeguard a key war material: wood.

Reporting from Los Angeles and The Angeles National Forest -- Everything that has made the Angeles National Forest wildfire so fierce and intractable -- extreme heat, treacherous terrain, bone-dry conditions left by years of drought -- seems to have converged on the lonely hilltop where Ted Hall and Arnie Quinones died. Hidden in the forest, high above the Antelope Valley to the north and Los Angeles to the south, the hilltop is a hostile place now. By Monday, the flames had reduced the bluffs in every direction to a blackened moonscape, interrupted only by boulders, plumes of smoke and downed power lines draped like bunting from the gnarled limbs of charred trees.

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. has agreed to pay the state $14.3 million to settle accusations that shoddy maintenance led to downed power lines, igniting the devastating 2007 brush fires in northern San Diego County that destroyed more than 1,500 homes.But the tentative settlement, announced Friday by the utility company and the Consumer Protection and Safety Division of the Public Utilities Commission, does not end the dispute over power line maintenance and its link to brush fires.

She had forgotten her white-gold senior class ring and quinceanera video but had pocketed mascara and a cellphone charger before flames chased her from Santa Catalina Island. But as dawn began to loom Friday, 18-year-old Daisy Saldana began to catalog things that were tougher to grasp: whether the 2 a.m. ferry had docked in Long Beach with her boyfriend on board, whether her childhood home in Avalon was torched.

A voracious 6-day-old wildfire that has destroyed more than 50 buildings and churned through more than 105,000 acres of mountainous brush showed only small signs of slowing Monday, and fire officials offered little hope of containment as long as hot, dry conditions continued. The Station fire, the largest of several burning in the state, was plowing through dense hillside vegetation along the San Gabriel Mountains, cutting a remarkable swath that extended from Altadena into the high desert.

Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives hope three jewel-encrusted rings and a gold necklace found near the skulls of a man and woman in the Angeles National Forest after the Station fire will help identify the deceased and reveal more about how they died. The skulls were found Dec. 24 and Dec. 26 in the burned-out area below Angeles Forest Highway, near mile marker 19. "It appears that there was some trauma to at least one of the skulls," Det. John Duncan said. The trauma to the male skull could be a bullet hole, investigators said.

Nancy Gjerset was finished sifting through the ashes for the day when the young woman stopped on Big Tujunga Canyon Road and offered a strange compliment. "She said, 'I hope you'll forgive me, but this is absolutely stunning,' " Gjerset recalled. That is hardly the way Gjerset looks at the ghostly, blackened trees around her and at the ghastly, charred foundation of her home of nearly 40 years that lies at her feet. The house burned to the ground Aug. 29. It was one of about 90 dwellings destroyed by the Station fire, the massive wildfire that killed two county firefighters and burned 250 square miles of Angeles National Forest.

A human skull with a bullet hole in it has been found in the Angeles National Forest. Two hikers came across it Thursday evening on a hillside that had been burned in the Station fire. Homicide detectives are overseeing the investigation but don't yet know how long the skull was there, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Whitmore. "It appears to be burned," Whitmore said. The Station fire, which started Aug. 26, burned 250 square miles of forest.

The U.S. Forest Service is reviewing its practice of not flying firefighting helicopters at night, in an apparent response to criticism of how the agency handled the early hours of the huge Station fire. At the urging of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the Board of Supervisors last week called on the federal government to authorize deployment of water-dropping choppers after dark to battle fires in the Angeles National Forest, where the Station blaze began to spread on its first night.

More than a month ago, the Station fire was fully contained by firefighters. But on Mt. Wilson, it doesn't look that way. Dave Jurasevich has looked out the window of the Mt. Wilson Observatory and spotted several plumes of smoke in recent weeks since the worst fire in Los Angeles County history was declared contained. "We don't see a lot of fire, but we see smoke -- and where there's smoke, there's fire, obviously," said Jurasevich, the superintendent at the observatory, which was evacuated twice during the Station fire.

For the Rev. Greg Hughes, it was a case of a resolute community of faith rising up from the ashes. "We were burned down, but fired up as a people," said Hughes, senior pastor at Malibu Presbyterian Church. "We don't have a scarcity mind set, 'woe is us' or whatever. We're still out having fun, living life and finding joy in our faith." The 300-member congregation marked a milestone Sunday, as worshipers celebrated services in an interim sanctuary on the hill above the Pacific for the first time since their landmark sanctuary burned to the ground in the 2007 Malibu wildfires.

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. has agreed to pay the state $14.3 million to settle accusations that shoddy maintenance led to downed power lines, igniting the devastating 2007 brush fires in northern San Diego County that destroyed more than 1,500 homes.But the tentative settlement, announced Friday by the utility company and the Consumer Protection and Safety Division of the Public Utilities Commission, does not end the dispute over power line maintenance and its link to brush fires.

Fire crews gained the upper hand Wednesday against brush fires in Santa Barbara County and Los Angeles, authorities said. A Lompoc-area blaze charred 300 acres near Vandenberg Air Force Base before firefighters had it 50% contained Wednesday evening, according to Capt. David Sadecki of the Santa Barbara County Fire Department. Meanwhile, in Griffith Park firefighters took about an hour to extinguish a five-acre blaze that was reported at 3:24 p.m., authorities said. A red-flag warning has been issued for mountain areas, where dry winds and low humidity were expected.

The U.S. Forest Service has launched an internal inquiry into the agency's attack on the deadly Station fire, an operation that was scaled back the night before the blaze began to burn out of control. "With the significant loss of life, and impacts to the local community, we must determine the effectiveness of our efforts," Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell said in a written statement Wednesday. Tidwell said he would ask other agencies to participate in the review. But the Forest Service has declined to release detailed information about its response to the suspected arson fire, citing in part an ongoing homicide investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department into the deaths of two firefighters whose truck fell off a mountain road.

U.S. Forest Service officials underestimated the threat posed by the deadly Station fire and scaled back their attack on the blaze the night before it began to rage out of control, records and interviews show. In response to Times inquiries, officials for the Forest Service and Los Angeles County Fire Department said they probably will change their procedures so that the two agencies immediately stage a joint assault on any fire in the lower Angeles National Forest. Angeles Forest Fire Chief David Conklin said his staff was confident that the Station fire had been "fairly well contained" on the first day, so it decided that evening to order just three water-dropping helicopters to hit the blaze shortly after dawn on its second day -- down from five on Day One -- and prepared to go into mop-up mode with fewer firefighters on the ground.