Station Fire

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.

Federal forester Steve Bear stood on a fire-stripped slope of the San Gabriel Mountains last week, trying to find just one pine sapling, any sapling, pushing through the bright green bedspread of vegetation. It would give him hope after a year of disappointment. Last April, U.S. Forest Service crews planted nearly a million pine and fir trees to try to reclaim land scorched clean by the devastating Station fire. Most of them shriveled up and died within months, as skeptics had predicted.

Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives hope to question a man who was spotted tending a small fire in the vicinity of the Station fire almost one week before that deadly blaze erupted in the Angeles National Forest. At a news conference Monday, homicide detectives requested the public's help in locating a 25-year-old homeless man who was caught "feeding" a small, uncontrolled fire in the early afternoon of Aug. 20 -- six days before the start of the devastating Station fire. The man, Babatunsin Olukunle, a Nigerian national, was reportedly caught tending a fire near mile marker 36 of the Angeles Crest Highway.

A federal inquiry has concluded that the U.S. Forest Service failed to make use of all the aircraft that might have been available during the critical early hours of the 2009 Station fire, but the findings left unanswered key questions of why the planes and helicopters were not deployed. The report Friday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, also said that the Forest Service should clarify its policies on using aircraft and ground crews from local and state agencies.

Federal forester Steve Bear stood on a fire-stripped slope of the San Gabriel Mountains last week, trying to find just one pine sapling, any sapling, pushing through the bright green bedspread of vegetation. It would give him hope after a year of disappointment. Last April, U.S. Forest Service crews planted nearly a million pine and fir trees to try to reclaim land scorched clean by the devastating Station fire. Most of them shriveled up and died within months, as skeptics had predicted.

When the rain started to fall, Janet Blake started to worry. From the picture window of her home, she could see the stream that was once her street become a torrent of stones, branches and mud. The fire was easier, she thought; that was only six days of worry. The possibility of the mountain sliding down upon her is indefinite. Her husband, Brian Hodge, worked in the other room, and Cooper, their yellow lab, stood beside her, his tail merrily striking the ornaments on the Christmas tree.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other authorities held them up as examples of irresponsible behavior. They were the butt of jokes. But one of the two Big Tujunga Canyon residents who jumped into a hot tub to escape the raging Station fire says they are being unfairly judged. Julius Goff, who suffered serious burns, told The Times that he did not ignore a mandatory evacuation order but instead stayed behind to warn 10 neighbors who did not receive the order to leave. By the time he reached his own house, with plans to get his housemate and get out, the fire had surrounded them.

For months, Glendale's Deukmejian Wilderness Park has been closed to the public, first because its hillsides were scorched in last year's Station fire and then because winter storms eroded portions of the park and filled it with mud and debris. Just in time for the first day of summer, however, the "park closed" barrier was covered with a handwritten sign declaring it "open." Area residents have anxiously awaited the reopening of the park, which saw nearly all of its 709 acres blackened during the Station fire.

Nearly three months after the Station fire blazed through the foothills and canyons above Los Angeles, killing two firefighters and scorching 160,577 acres, investigators say they don't have the necessary evidence to arrest anyone for setting the fatal fire. Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide detectives have questioned a man who already has been charged with setting a smaller blaze in the Angeles National Forest days before the Station fire broke out. But authorities say they have been unable to connect Babatunsin Olukunle, 25, to the fire.

A panel of local House members led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D- Burbank) will examine the battle against last year's Station fire at a public meeting next month in Pasadena. Among those scheduled to address the panel are top officials of the U.S. Forest Service and Los Angeles County Fire Department. Schiff called for a congressional inquiry after The Times reported that the Forest Service misjudged the threat posed by the fire and scaled back its assault at the end of the first day. The next morning, aircraft that the agency's commander ordered did not reach the blaze until about two hours after the appointed time.

Though gathering La Nina conditions should foreshadow a dry winter in Southern California, the forecast was belied by rainstorms that swept the Los Angeles region Sunday, flooding streets and sending motorists sliding and colliding on muddy and rain-slicked roads. By midday, parts of Los Angeles County had accumulated between half an inch and 1.5 inches of rain, and the showers continued. Streets flooded in Hancock Park, the northbound 405 Freeway near Mulholland Drive was covered in mud, and California Highway Patrol officers were busy chasing fender-benders throughout the day. In one case, a big rig slid off the 118 Freeway in Pacoima and crashed onto the surface streets below, hitting a power pole and overturning.

On a sweltering morning deep in the San Gabriel Mountains, Katie VinZant donned work gloves and boots, hoisted a pickax and began bashing alien species. The 31-year-old botanist enjoys a Sunday in the Angeles National Forest as much as the next person. But when it comes to weeds that have colonized and multiplied since the 2009 Station fire, she's a terminator. Slender and trim in a T-shirt, grubby pants and tattered straw sombrero, VinZant swiped the sweat stinging her eyes.

One of the nation's most ambitious wildlife reintroduction efforts has suffered a setback with the deaths of 104 mountain yellow-legged frogs that had been rescued from the fire-stripped San Gabriel Mountains in 2009, authorities said Tuesday. The federally endangered frogs, which recently metamorphosed from the tadpole stage, died in captive breeding tanks over the last several weeks at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. "We have two frogs left. We're trying to determine exactly what happened," said Scott Barton, director of the zoo, which is highly regarded for amphibian husbandry.

As nature goes, the Hahamongna basin is not pristine. The wide, sandy arroyo, bounded by oak woodlands, sits just north of Devil's Gate Dam on the border of Pasadena, Altadena and La Cañada Flintridge. A gravel operation there, closed decades ago, has left scars on the landscape, and a Frisbee golf course threads in and out of the oaks. Noise from the 210 Freeway on the south end and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the north is ever-present. And if all that weren't enough, the Environmental Protection Agency has declared this part of the Arroyo Seco a Superfund site because of groundwater contamination by JPL, which once dumped solvents and rocket fuel in the area.

A car plunged off Angeles Crest Highway on Saturday afternoon, killing an occupant in what was at least the fourth fatal solo-vehicle crash since the highway reopened, the California Highway Patrol reported. A stretch of the steep, winding route through the San Gabriel Mountains was closed from January 2010 to June of this year for repair of road damage caused by heavy rain that washed debris from slopes denuded by the Station fire. Three fatal accidents — one involving a motorcycle and the other two solo car crashes — occurred on the highway during the first three weeks after it reopened, and CHP officers blamed all three deaths on excessive speed.

A section of California Highway 2 between La Cañada Flintridge and Angeles Forest Highway will reopen Friday, according to California Department of Transportation spokesman Patrick Chandler. Angeles Crest Highway has been closed since Jan. 17, 2010, when heavy rain fell in the Station fire burn area and washed away three major sections of pavement through the Angeles National Forest. Caltrans had planned to reopen the road in December 2010, Chandler said, but record rainfall that month and in January 2011 brought down so much debris and water that the runoff overwhelmed a culvert and washed out a slope, necessitating further repairs and delays.

Acting on a request by California lawmakers, the investigative arm of Congress has agreed to conduct a broad inquiry into the U.S. Forest Service's handling of last year's devastating Station fire, officials said Wednesday. The state's two U.S. senators and several House members last month urged the Government Accountability Office to examine the Forest Service's decisions and tactics in the fire fight, including its use of aircraft and whether enough was done to protect homes that burned in Big Tujunga Canyon.

The Gold Creek Ranch edges the Angeles National Forest north of Sunland, a 160-acre estate with high hills and open fields, where a 3-foot-tall wooden statue of Buddha rests under an oak tree and residents do yoga on flat rocks next to yucca plants. "It's a spiritual place," says Nicholas Bowrin, 47, who has been staying at the ranch for a little over two years. The ranch's owner, 77-year-old Jack Johnson, said the "property is my life." "I'm 23 miles from Hollywood and Vine right now, but I'm at the end of the world," Johnson said Thursday afternoon at the ranch, after fire licked at the private retreat.

Delays on a federal proposal to add night-flying aircraft to the U.S. Forest Service's firefighting fleet are "unacceptable" and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack should push for more timely studies, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a bluntly worded letter this week. It's been more than a year since U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell promised in a congressional hearing that his agency would study whether it was cost-efficient and safe to use helicopters after nightfall to fight wildfires.

The U.S. Forest Service on Monday will reopen popular picnic areas, hiking trails and campgrounds across 98,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest that had been closed since the Station fire scorched the San Gabriel Mountains nearly two years ago. The reopening could not come soon enough for Tyler Wallace, a 32-year-old engineer and avid hiker, who was forced to seek another adventure Sunday when a forest ranger said Wallace would not be able...