Fire Safety

It's 8:30 on a Saturday night and Alan Higginbotham is getting ready to make his rounds. * At 47, Higginbotham knows more about L.A.'s night life than scenesters half his age. Topless joints, gay bars, grungy dives and shimmering ballrooms, "Higgy" hits them all, five or six a night. He parks right in front. Doormen part their velvet ropes. Owners give him carte blanche to wander their VIP rooms, but he usually just scans the crowd and heads for the exit.

Federal safety regulators have given the Chevrolet Volt an all-clear. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday that it did not identify a safety defect, concluding that the car does not pose any unusual risk of fire. In closing the book on its investigation into Volts catching on fire, NHTSA also issued new guidelines for how emergency personnel and tow truck operators should deal with electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids that have been damaged in severe accidents.

When guests book a hotel room, most ask about rates, beds and check-out time. Often neglected is the potentially life-saving question: Are the rooms equipped with sprinklers and smoke detectors? If this is a question you ask regularly, you greatly increase your chances of surviving a hotel blaze. When used in tandem, sprinklers and smoke detectors can prevent up to 90% of fire deaths, according to the U.S. Fire Administration, the fire safety branch of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Federal safety officials have launched a probe into whether the batteries in Chevrolet's Volt plug-in hybrid sedan are prone to fires. The probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was launched after a Volt caught fire following a crash test, General Motors Co. said. The agency will be looking at the safety of batteries from several makes of electric vehicles, according to the Associated Press. The Volt is designed to run off its batteries for about 40 miles.

Orange County wasn't born yesterday. But most of its high-rise hotels were born after 1974--the year that California adopted an ordinance mandating automatic sprinkler systems in new buildings taller than 75 feet. Therefore, the vast majority of high-rise hotels in the county are protected by sprinklers in every room.

A group of Riverside County residents who claim they needlessly lost their homes in the recent fires are teaming up with local developers to campaign for changes in federal laws designed to protect endangered animals and plants. About half a dozen burned-out families in the Winchester area of south Riverside County say their homes might have been saved if government officials had given them permission to clear the brush and build firebreaks around their property earlier this year.

I read "Firefighters Demand Safer Exits for Students" (May 17) with great interest. The article even prompted calls to the local fire department and the state fire marshal. Alas, the new law will do nothing to require correction of the unsafe situation my students and I face daily. I teach in a portable classroom with only one door and no windows. I think it's great that classroom windows will have to be equipped with "breakaway" grilles, but what about the countless students and teachers trapped in rooms with only one door and no windows?

Because of the recent articles by Amy Pyle, the real problems at Malibou Lakeside can no longer be ignored. Mr. Bendel's letter stated "safety cannot be compromised." Therefore, we challenge Randy Bendel and the MLHA to prove their concern for the fire safety of this community by working to: (1) stop the blockage of emergency equipment caused by cars of illegal tenants parked on the streets; (2) insist that single-family dwellings not be converted into illegal multiple units, creating over-population; (3)

A Wilshire district apartment fire has provided graphic proof of the life-saving nature of the heavy fire doors required off stairwells, smoke detectors and other safety devices. It was a tragic fire, to be sure, because one man died and dozens are living in temporary quarters. But the first firefighters on the scene at the N. Oxford Street building saw the blaze leaping out of the stairwell windows and thought that they could lose 20 or more people.

A fire safety program for families will be presented today at Adventure City, 1238 S. Beach Blvd., on the border of Anaheim and Stanton. Sponsored by the Anaheim Fire Department, the program is part of a campaign to reduce deaths and injuries due to fires, said Tabby Cato, Fire Department public information officer. Anaheim firefighters will be handing out brochures on fire safety, conducting demonstrations and exhibiting fire apparatus.

It's not a regulatory arm of the government, but try to find a gadget in your home that Underwriters Laboratories hasn't touched. Check under the computer mouse or the smoke alarm, beneath the light switch or on the TV cable, and the telltale "UL" stamp will be there. The marking means the device is unlikely to catch fire. And if you accidentally drive away from the gas station with the nozzle still in the tank, UL is the reason you don't haul away the entire pump and set the neighborhood ablaze.

Why does Malibu seem to erupt in flames every fall, while most of Los Angeles, which has its share of houses clinging to brushy hillsides, does not? The reason, according to a new study, is blowing in the wind. Researchers have developed the first high-resolution map of Santa Ana wind events, showing that the hot, dry blasts don't sweep uniformly across the Southland and that the danger of large, wind-whipped wildfires is therefore greater in some parts of the region than others.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called on the federal government Tuesday to authorize the U.S. Forest Service to deploy water-dropping helicopters at night and make greater use of local reinforcements to battle blazes like the deadly Station fire. Acting at the request of the county Fire Department, the board voted 5 to 0 to send letters to Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommending the policy changes for all fires in the Angeles National Forest. "We need to implement every possible measure to allow firefighters to do their work and put out fires," said Tony Bell, a spokesman for Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who introduced the letters.

Every morning for 19 days, Dave Jurasevich awoke on Mt. Wilson to sunrises darkened by smoke and ash. Every night, the superintendent of the Mt. Wilson Observatory slept at the site he hoped to protect. He was too worried to catch more than three or four hours of rest a night. When he did sleep, he bedded down on a mattress on the floor of a small office. He was usually hungry. Firefighters slept in the next room. Overhead, the night sky glowed hot as the Station fire raged closer.

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.

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.

Officials have been concerned for years that a massive fire could race up Mt. Wilson and burn vital communications towers and the historic observatory. In March, fire and forest officials met with representatives of Mt. Wilson's various groups to deliver a grim warning: Overgrown brush had not been cleared away in years, endangering the mountaintop in the event of a large blaze. The groups responded to the issue, forming the nonprofit Mt. Wilson Fire Safe Council and securing $200,000 in grants for fire prevention work.

You'd think that with half the state charred -- and wildfires seemingly getting worse every year -- a top priority in Sacramento would be to improve California's firefighting capability. But it hasn't even been on the Legislature's agenda. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, responding to the lobbying efforts of fire officials around the state, tried to hoist the topic back onto the negotiating table Wednesday. But "it's a heavy lift," acknowledged his spokesman, Matt David. The Legislature is frantically rushing toward a Friday adjournment of its regular session, already juggling some hot issues and not anxious to add another.