OPINION
February 13, 2009
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.
REAL ESTATE
November 25, 2007 | Sam Byker, Special to The Times
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
August 29, 2009 | Alexandra Zavis, Ann M. Simmons and Rich Connell
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
August 31, 2009 | Jessica Garrison, Alexandra Zavis and Joe Mozingo
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
August 27, 2009 | Ann M. Simmons
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
July 24, 2009 | Mike Anton
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 1, 2009 | Scott Gold and Ari B. Bloomekatz
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
November 1, 2009 | Tony Perry
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 12, 2007 | Ashley Powers, Times Staff Writer
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 1, 2009 | Corina Knoll, Louis Sahagun and Rich Connell
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.