Fire on the mountain

A pall of ash-laden smoke hung heavy in the air this week as wildfires raged out of control throughout area foothill and mountain communities. The blaze claimed the lives of two Los Angeles County firefighters, injured six people, charred more than 140,000 acres of brush that hadn’t been cleared in decades, destroyed 62 homes and endangered 10,000 more, some as far away as Acton, 47 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

The “Station Fire” continued to burn out of control in the 650,000-acre Angeles National Forest Wednesday afternoon, only 22 percent contained.

While firefighters with LA County and local municipalities — including Glendale and Pasadena — valiantly battled the blaze, absent from the firefighting effort until this week were two Bombardier CL-145 Super Scooper planes that can carry up to 1,600 gallons of water and flame-retardant foam. LA County leases the planes from the Province of Quebec every year during the peak months of the fire season for about $3 million. The planes arrived at Van Nuys Airport on Sunday and weren’t in action until Monday.

Even so, officials were doubtful the fire would be contained this week.

“What makes this fire hard to fight is there has been no cooling trend overnight,” Pasadena Emergency Management Coordinator Lisa Derderian said Monday. “It is not wind-driven but fuel-driven, because a lot of the brush has not burned up there for 40 years, which makes it prime for a fire. We are talking about brush that is 15 to 20 feet in height, which leads to very extreme fire behavior with flames up to 80 feet high. This fire has a personality of its own.”

Temperatures in Altadena were expected to peak in the mid-90s this week, before cooling off to about 85 degrees on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.

Also not on the roster of emergency personnel responding to the Station Fire — raging through more than 200 square miles from Altadena to the home-pocked foothills north of Glendale — were National Guard personnel.

The National Guard has 2,500 soldiers and airmen trained in firefighting, but as of Wednesday the California Emergency Management Agency (CalEMA) had not asked for assistance, said National Guard spokesman John Guibord.
The state has not summoned any military or out-of-state fire agencies to assist with the battle, and incident commanders say they have what they need, CalEMA spokeswoman Lori Newquist said Monday.

“The resources they have are effective,” she said.

Good neighbors
Firefighters got the upper hand early on a fire that broke out Aug. 27 in the exclusive seaside community of Rancho Palos Verdes, where flames destroyed six homes and scorched 250 acres. But that, apparently, was the exception. On Aug. 26, the Station Fire had erupted in La Cañada Flintridge, where real estate is in the same top price range as Rancho Palos Verdes, and eventually grew.

The ever-broadening blaze provided spectacular if not terrifying nighttime views from the Colorado Street Bridge of a mountaintop ring of fire, with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, nestled into the base of the mountain, and the Rose Bowl, standing further in the foreground, perilously close to the blaze.

Soon after, the fire jumped into western Altadena, a shift signaled by a towering gray mushroom cloud hovering over the foothills that was clearly visible to awestruck pedestrians throughout Old Pasadena Friday afternoon.

Then, by Saturday, the flames had spread to La Cañada Flintridge’s western neighbor, Glendale, where school officials on Monday gave kids just getting back to school the day off due to extremely poor air quality. La Cañada Flintridge school officials did the same.

Pasadena City College started its classes on Monday. College officials said that students who missed classes because they were displaced by the fire would not lose their seats.

Students in the Pasadena Unified School District are set to return to class on Sept. 10. La Cañada High School was being used as an evacuation center, as Jackson Elementary School on Woodbury Road had been, though that site was closed Sunday evening after about 1,600 people in La Cañada Flintridge and West Altadena were evacuated.

“Everybody on my street had to leave,” said Zahra Strong, 29, who was evacuated from her home on Aralia Street in Altadena and traveled to Jackson Elementary School looking for help. “We just grabbed all our stuff. I have lived here all of my life. This is the first time I have ever been evacuated. I could feel the heat … The fire was close.”

Residents in Altadena north of Loma Alta Drive, between Lake and Lincoln avenues, were evacuated Saturday afternoon, although many people remained and watched the fire from their driveways.

“By far this was the worst fire we have ever encountered,” said Alice Wesson, both because of how fast it grew and how many communities were affected. “We watched the flames advance from my driveway and cheered the DC-10s dropping flame retardant with such precision.”

Others living close by were not subject to evacuation, but still kept an eye on the flames, which were easily visible from Pasadena.
“It came down to my house,” said former Pasadena Weekly ad representative Jake Belcher, who lives on Marigold Street. “We were about 400 yards out of the evacuation zone and I could see why they got those people out. It had definitely gotten unsafe. At one point, the smoke and bad air made it so bad that you had to wake up in the middle of the night and try to empty it out with fans. … It was so bright I could make shadow puppets on the side of my house.

“I was in La Cañada when it caught on fire a couple of years ago. This is the worst fire we have ever had. The people in the neighborhoods have been staying up to date using blogs and Twitter,” Belcher said.

Altadenablog, operated by Timothy Rutt, updated the status of the fire several times an hour last weekend, providing worried residents with much-needed information not available on CNN or other news stations, driving the site’s hit count up from roughly 800 to 15,000 on Monday.

“I think people are very concerned for their neighbors,” Rutt said. “They are looking for ways they can help. They are offering food for the displaced and offering to take in pets. The sharing of information shows what a great community we have.”

Stay tuned
On Wednesday, the fire was inching closer to the Mount Wilson Observatory, near communications towers broadcasting signals across the Southland. Crews had worked day and night to protect the facility from the fire’s destructive path, coating the complex with 750 pounds of fire-resistant foam Tuesday night. But officials were certain the danger had not passed. Late Monday afternoon, KCET-TV officials announced that the public television station could lose its signal if the towers were engulfed by flames. (See a related story
on page 8.)

FM radio station KRTH-101 announced that it might have to fall back on a 5,000-watt transmitter, which could limit the span of its signal. The fire also threatened to overrun cell phone towers on the mountain and disrupt service.

Fire crews were told to withdraw from Mount Wilson early Monday morning, Hal McAlister, the observatory’s director, wrote on the observatory’s Web site that day.

“They are still within close proximity for redeployment,” McAlister wrote at the time. “Thus, the good news is that the fire in the observatory’s vicinity seems to have diminished. The bad news is that there are no firefighters presently on the scene.”

The historic 40-acre observatory complex, at 5,715 feet above sea level, is home to the legendary 100-inch Hooker telescope, which helped Edwin Hubble discover that the universe was still expanding, which aided in the development of the Big Bang theory. Founded by George Ellery Hale in 1904, the observatory complex also includes solar towers that have collected nearly nine decades worth of information on the sun — the world’s longest-running collection of scientific data. The complex also houses research facilities for UCLA, USC and other institutions.

Recipe for disaster
The sight of towering flames roaring along rolling hillsides and toward homes and other structures no doubt left homeowners frightened and frazzled. But part of the strategy to halt the fire was to let it burn brush near homes while hoping for the weather to cooperate, as opposed to staving off the flames and risking slopes igniting in hotter, windier weather, said Larry Marinas, information officer and fire captain with El Dorado County Fire District.

“I can imagine that it would be unsettling to see a fire get fairly close to their houses, but we have very trained people watching the fire back down the hill,” Marinas said.

The Pasadena Humane Society had taken in about 330 pets from evacuated households from Glendale to Altadena by midday Monday, said agency spokeswoman Ricky Whitman. The shelter was filling up, but officials would not turn away any animals, she said.
“We will make space if we run out of room,” Whitman said.

Recent weather patterns, combined with the 10-year drought gripping the Southwest, set the stage for the Station Fire and
other conflagrations burning in the state, according to Bill Patzert, an eminent climatologist with Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The winter of 2006-07 was the driest in 132 years of record-keeping, leaving much of the forest a virtual tinder box. A high-pressure ridge set in last week, sending temperatures soaring and humidity dropping to dangerous levels, Patzert said.

“That’s definitely the recipe for disaster right there,” he said.

While unwelcomed by the public, fires play an important role in the life cycle of the forest and help maintain its diversity and — ironically — its health, Patzert said.

“When a National Forest doesn’t burn for 60 years, it’s not healthy for the ecosystem,” Patzert said. n

Editor Kevin Uhrich and Associate Editor Joe Piasecki contributed to this story.