Station Fire

A federal inspector general has launched an investigation and the Obama administration has invited Congress to order a broad inquiry into last summer's disastrous Station fire after learning that dispatch recordings had been withheld from a U.S. Forest Service review team. The telephone recordings, from the critical early hours of the blaze, also were withheld from The Times, which requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. The inspector general's probe will focus on why the several days of recordings were not provided to The Times or turned over to the Forest Service inquiry, which concluded that the agency's initial attack on the fire was proper.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office is seeking the public's help in identifying a woman whose remains were found last year in the Angeles National Forest after the Station fire. Coroner's officials this week released a composite sketch of the Jane Doe, who officials believe was a white or Latina woman between the ages of 20 and 40. The sketch was created using clay reconstruction technology. The woman's skull was found Dec. 26 in a burned-out area below Angeles Forest Highway two days after hikers in the same area discovered a male skull with an apparent bullet hole, officials said.

Just after first light, a tactical observation plane took off from its old military base in Hemet for an urgent mission above the cathedral peaks of the Angeles National Forest. The two-man crew had been deployed to direct an air assault on the few acres of brush still burning on Day 2 of last summer's Station fire, which had been nearly contained the evening before. As the crew prepared for the arrival of three or more air tankers, conditions appeared good for knocking the blaze down once and for all. Winds were calm, and the sun had yet to rise above the pine-crowned mountaintops to heat the thick carpet of chaparral where the fire had flared overnight.

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.

The U.S. Forest Service failed to fill an order for air tankers that its own commanders urgently requested for an assault on the disastrous Station fire before it began raging out of control, according to records and state officials -- a finding that rebuts months of assertions by the federal agency that it took every step to deploy the planes as quickly as possible. The state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said it could have made as many as four tankers available to the Forest Service on the fateful second morning of the blaze.

The head of the U.S. Forest Service told a Senate panel Wednesday that water-dropping helicopters would have been deployed during the critical first night of last summer's disastrous Station blaze if they had been available and that the agency is considering ending its decades-long ban on using federal firefighting aircraft after dark. Under sometimes pointed questioning by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell also defended the agency's handling of the fire the next morning, when a heavy aerial assault did not begin until several hours after daylight.

A U.S. Senate panel has scheduled a hearing next week on proposals to repeal a decades-old U.S. Forest Service policy that bars its firefighting aircraft from flying night missions, a prohibition that some say allowed last summer's disastrous Station blaze to rage out of control. Among those set to testify at the Wednesday session is U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), who has called for a congressional investigation into the response to the Station fire and asked lawmakers to require the Forest Service to reconsider its ban on night helicopter flights, which was imposed in the 1970s after a crash.

A group of former U.S. Forest Service officials is calling for a new and independent investigation into the agency's handling of last year's devastating Station fire, with many contending that an internal inquiry completed in November ignored critical missteps. That probe by the Forest Service's Washington, D.C., headquarters found no tactical errors in the initial attack on the fire. And in a key conclusion, it blamed hazardous terrain for the lack of a heavy air assault early on the fateful second day, when the blaze began to race through the Angeles National Forest.