Not So Golden State by Char Miller

Author:Char Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595347831
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2016-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Lesson Learned?

Angelenos cannot stop talking about the 2009 Station Fire. With reason: when an arsonist ignited it on August 26, no one could know that it would continue to burn until mid-October; that it would kill two valiant firefighters, torch upwards of one hundred structures, and consume 160,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest, blackening much of the San Gabriel Mountains. Or that it would become the largest fire to date in Los Angeles County, and the most costly.

Its aftermath has been as incendiary. Even as firefighters struggled to gain control of the blaze, even as its thick, dark smoke still churned skyward, creating its own microclimate, criticism erupted. Why had it taken so long for the Forest Service to gain traction in the fight? What decisions had led to the grounding of the federal agency’s air fleet in the crucial first night of the fire? Why, homeowners wondered, had they lost their homes—was it a result of command-and-control failures? And were communication glitches the reason two Los Angeles County firefighters lost their lives on Mount Gleason?

The questions continued to pile up in the ensuing years and the local media continued to pile on. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Pasadena) proved particularly persistent in his inquiries, holding a number of well-covered public hearings locally and in Washington, DC, that probed the Forest Service’s responses to the fire and its postfire analyses of what went wrong; he demanded a Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector-General accounting of the federal land-management agency’s actions and inactions, a 2011 report that neither exonerated nor excoriated the Forest Service. Schiff was also indefatigable in his calls for the agency to update its policies governing nighttime flying operations (which it has done; unlike 2009, under certain conditions fire-retardant-carrying fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters now may stay airborne after dark).

Schiff’s prevailing hypothesis, which the Los Angeles Times and a host of other media outfits mirrored, was that Forest Service incident commanders immediately should have thrown all mechanical and human resources at the Station Fire; had they done so, he predicted, the conflagration would not have blown up to such immense, terrifying, and deadly proportions.

The fact that this fire blew up had to be someone’s fault, and the blame for it lay squarely on the shoulders of the federal agency.

Although such after-the-fact interrogations are as critical as they are routinized, and Representative Schiff did what an engaged and responsible public official should do on behalf of his constituency, some troubling consequences grew out of these inquiries and complicated the future fire management on the public lands. These ramifications, however unintended, must also be acknowledged if we are to have a full and accurate understanding of the Station Fire’s impact on firefighting policy.

Recall, for example, what happened the next summer when a trio of small fires popped up in Kern and Los Angeles Counties. No sooner had the Bull, West, and Crown blazed forth in late July 2010 than CalFire (the state agency), the Forest Service, and local fire departments rushed as

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