Orange County Register

Orange County’s native plants are dried out and ready to burn, and a U.S. Forest Service forecast says the region can expect four large fires between August and October — the current average, and the highest number in Southern California.

The dry conditions are stoking concern about Fourth of July revelry and the potential for errant fireworks. The Orange County Fire Authority is placing reserve firefighters on duty in places like the county’s eastern canyons for the holiday.

And the agency has again rolled one fire season into another, continuing the closure of some county open-space areas to the public for the third year in a row.

That still adds up to a “normal” fire season for Orange County and surrounding areas, according to the just-released seasonal outlook by the Forest Service’s predictive services group in Riverside.

“We are in our fourth year of drought, so we are still very, very dry,” said Bruce Risher, an intelligence officer with the Forest Service who specializes in fire and aviation management.

He cited a U.S. Drought Monitor prediction that the drought will worsen — “not only intensify, but actually to spread, to continue on and go down into the Mexican border.”

Still, he said, this year’s fire season won’t be another 2003, when wildfires whipped by Santa Ana winds killed 24 people and destroyed 3,700 homes in San Bernardino and San Diego counties.

“Obviously things are bad, but not so bad as to be that kind of devastation,” Risher said.

North O.C. a concern

 Orange County is finding, however, that “normal” can be pretty destructive. More than 30,000 acres burned, including 90 percent of Chino Hills State Park, in the Freeway Complex fire of 2008, a year also predicted to be normal.

The year before, the Santiago Fire — one of a string of large wildfires up and down the Southern California coast – burned more than 28,000 acres in Orange County and destroyed 15 homes.

 A “large” fire is typically 300 acres and up, Risher said, though some agencies consider 50 to 100 acre fires to be large.

This year, a big worry is northern Orange County, where grasses have sprouted on stretches of wild land laid bare by fire in recent years, said George Ewan, wildland fire defense planner for the Orange County Fire Authority.

“There’s a lot of grass and mustard weed there, real flashy fuel,” Ewan said. “It’s in a state that is easily going to be ignited, and will carry a fire.”

But south county isn’t out of the woods. There, a lack of fire in recent years has allowed fuel to build up.

“We’re very worried about that,” Ewan said. Many wild plants in south county “haven’t burned in awhile.”

Quick-dry landscape

Both Ewan and Risher expressed surprise at how quickly wild lands dried out this year.

“The fuels are already running to what we consider critical levels,” Ewan said.

Orange County’s native landscape is well adapted to summer dryness, surviving on minimal moisture until rains return in fall and winter; many plants fall dormant.

But already, their moisture content has dropped so low they might as well be kindling.

“They have a tendency to burn and act just like dead fuel,” Ewan said.

While dryness and drought are major factors, most large wildfires in Southern California are caused by people, either by accident or arson.

The Freeway Complex fire is believed to have been ignited by a catalytic converter on a car. In the case of the Santiago Fire, evidence showed it was deliberately set.

“Almost all are man-caused,” Risher said. “If we were just prevention-minded, we would cut those numbers down.”

Avoiding parking or driving over dry grass, for instance, could reduce the chance of hot catalytic converters igniting a blaze.

Stepping up enforcement

Prevention and law enforcement measures in national forests, along with volunteer fire watchers,  might also be helping to prevent arson.

“We’ve been a whole lot more successful at catching these people who set them on purpose,” he said. “We’re hoping that trend is going down.”

Each year, Forest Service officials provide a forecast of the fire season ahead, although no one can predict exactly when and where wildfire will strike.

And while summer can be dangerous, the worst months are October and November, when Santa Ana winds begin to kick up.

“Almost all the large fires we’ve had occurred in October,” Risher said.

The forecasts give a likely average number of large wildfires for different regions of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, based on a variety of factors. Orange County and surrounding areas have a four this year, and the region just to the north has a three.

The state’s central coastal mountain areas, burned in the Jesusita Fire, are marked “above normal,” because of dryness,  from August to October.

By the end of this month, Risher said, the forecasters might have a better idea of how the winds could shape up in the fall. El Nino, a periodic warming of water in the Pacific, might be stirring, but it is too soon to tell whether its influence will bring more moisture to Southern California.

Along with reserve firefighters on duty at fire stations in Emerald Bay, Modjeska Canyon and Silverado Canyon, the Orange County Fire Authority will man a second helicopter and two extra fire engines on July 4 and will have investigators on patrol, spokesman Greg McKeown said.

“If somebody lights a bottle rocket and sets a brush fire on a hillside, we want to get resources on that as quickly as possible,” McKeown said. “We’ll be ready to respond to any calls for illegal fireworks.”

The Orange County Fire Authority offers a fireworks safety summary, as well as a list of public fireworks displays in Orange County.

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