TheFoothillsForum

Sum it up in one word:

OIL

Santa Clara has many oil wells up there. Those guys (Santa Clara Fire Dept) FREAK out about the possibility of wells igniting.

Satellite Shows Wildfire's Burn Scar

The Station Fire has left a scar on Southern California's landscape.

As crews continue to battle the blaze in the Angeles National Forest, satellite imagery from NASA shows the extent of the damage. NASA's Aqua satellite reveals a brownish red scar that indicates the 160,000-acre burn area.

The satellite captured a false-color image of the region on Sept. 16. Infrared and visible light allowed scientists to show the contrast among burned and bare land, and vegetation.



Article on nbclosangeles.com

A small flare up in Big Tujunga Canyon a mile or so beyond the Little League fields was responded to by LAFD. Helicopter water drop was made and the incident was turned over to the Station Fire command.

Station fire's strength was miscalculated
Forest Service and L.A. County fire officials downsized the fight before the blaze intensified.

By Paul Pringle
September 27, 2009

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.

The Forest Service realized overnight that three helicopters would not be enough, and brought in two more later in the morning, Conklin said. More engine companies and ground crews were also summoned, but it would prove too late.

"We felt we had sufficient resources," Conklin said. "There's always that lesson. We'll always have that in the back of our minds."

On the second day of the blaze, which started Aug. 26, the county Fire Department lent the Forest Service a heli-tanker but denied its request for another smaller chopper. Chief Deputy John Tripp, the No. 2 official in the department, said he made that decision because he did not believe the fire was endangering neighborhoods near its suspected ignition point above La Cañada Flintridge, and because the county must hold on to some helicopters for other emergencies. Helicopters are often key to corralling wildfires early on.

"If there was a threat that morning to the community of La Cañada . . . we would have dispatched more helicopters," Tripp said.

In the future, he said, setting up a joint command with the Forest Service as soon as a fire breaks out -- including possibly at high elevations -- should make it easier for the agencies to muster each other's helicopters, engines and ground crews. Currently, joint commands are established only if a blaze presents an imminent threat to foothill communities.

"We have to be that much more robust in our response," Tripp said. "That's what, on a personal note, I have learned from this."

On the first day, the Forest Service expected that the Station fire could be controlled by the following afternoon, with no buildings lost and with minimal harm to the natural treasures of the San Gabriel Mountains, according to documents and officials.

By nightfall on Day Two, the fire was burning nearly unchecked into the forest, despite low winds. The conflagration would become the largest in the county's recorded history, blackening more than 160,000 acres of chaparral and centuries-old trees, destroying dozens of dwellings and killing two county firefighters who died when their truck fell off a mountain road.

The county department bolstered the Forest Service's first-day response in the belief that the fire imperiled county territory. The county sent five helicopters -- one a command ship that directs the drops -- five engines and four hand crews, officials said. Once it became clear that the fire was within the Forest Service's jurisdiction, the officials said, the county was required to await requests from the federal agency for help on subsequent days.

A veteran county fire official who took part in the first day's battle said he was disheartened that his department was not brought back at similar strength the next morning.

"There was a real window of opportunity that wasn't recognized or acted on," said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. "Every brush fire starts out small. Either you extinguish the damn thing or it goes a few days and you have a major disaster."

Full article in the LA Times

Wow. And ONE MONTH ago, yesterday, marks the anniversary of the beginning of the Station Fire. It is now 98% contained. It's been one whole month. Hard to fathom the proportion. Hard to imagine that something that started out as "just a little brush fire" turned into that enormous and devastating event

I remember hearing the first story on the news and it was reported, then, that officials expected to have the small brush fire out by morning.

At the CVCA meeting Aug. 26th someone who'd been at the fire came in late and said something like "we took care of it" about the fire that hadn't been given a name yet. Boy was he wrong!

I read somewhere that they don't expect to declare it completely contained until the first rains! They're leaving it at 98% containted.

Reading the article I felt somewhat positive that the fire officials quoted seem to have learned from this, and procedures seem to be changing accordingly. But I didn't lose my house, and those who did might not be comforted by someone learning their lesson.

This is no surprise to many of us who thought they didn't hit the fire hard enough the first day. Who is now going to be held responsible, if anyone, for this horrendous mistake that cost 2 firefighters their lives?

Station fire victims call for U.S. probe into Forest Service's response
Residents are critical of the agency's decision to scale back an attack on the blaze on the night before it began to burn out of control. Two firefighters were killed in the wildfire.

By Paul Pringle
September 29, 2009

Big Tujunga Canyon residents and others reeling from the Station fire called Monday for a federal investigation into what they termed a poor initial response to the deadly blaze by the U.S. Forest Service.

"It was beyond irresponsibility, beyond neglect," said Cindy Marie Pain, who lost her Big Tujunga Canyon home to the fire, which broke out in the Angeles National Forest on Aug. 26.

Pain and other residents said they were outraged by a Times article Sunday that reported the Forest Service had underestimated the danger posed by the fire and scaled back an attack on the flames the night before the blaze began to rage out of control.

"When it's small, that's when you jump on it," said Bronwen Aker, a Vogel Flats resident who set up a website, http://www.angelesrising.org, for fire victims.

Her home was spared, but those of many of her neighbors were destroyed.

"A lot of residents are incredibly embittered about the way it was handled," Aker said.

Bob Kerstein, who lost a cabin and a house on gold-mining property that his family owns in the forest, said Congress should investigate the Forest Service's tactics.

"It's crazy what happened here," he said. "There are a lot of heroes in this -- the firefighters who were on the line. But the people who should be held accountable are the people who made the decision not to put the fire out in the 48 hours after it started."

Leo Grillo, an actor who runs an animal sanctuary that was threatened by the blaze, said any investigation should also examine the lack of a more aggressive air assault later in the fire, especially when it appeared to have flagged on Day Five.

"They had the golden opportunity to put it out and they didn't," he said.

The Times reported that the Forest Service had been confident that the fire was nearly contained on the first day, and the agency 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, documents and interviews show.

The Forest Service also prepared to go into mop-up mode with fewer firefighters on the ground, according to records and officials.

Early in the morning on the second day, the Forest Service realized that three helicopters would not be enough and summoned two more later in the morning, Angeles Forest Fire Chief David Conklin said. More engine companies and ground crews were also deployed, but it would prove too late.

On Day Two, the Los Angeles County Fire Department lent the Forest Service a heli-tanker but denied a request for another smaller chopper -- an action that residents say should be reviewed. Chief Deputy John Tripp, the No. 2 official in the county department, said he withheld the second aircraft because he did not believe the fire was endangering neighborhoods near its suspected ignition point above La Cañada Flintridge, and because the county must hold on to some helicopters for other emergencies.

The Station fire would become the largest in the county's recorded history, blackening more than 160,000 acres of the forest, destroying dozens of dwellings and killing two county firefighters who died when their truck fell off a mountain road.

Conklin and Tripp told The Times they probably will change their procedures so that the two agencies immediately stage a joint assault on any fire in the lower Angeles.

Several foothill residents have expressed suspicions that the Forest Service let the fire burn early on as a way to clear dry brush, and that the decision not to bring in more aircraft and firefighters for the second morning was based on cost concerns.

Forest Service officials have said both notions are false.

On Monday night, residents packed a Tujunga meeting hall to ask fire officials if more could have been done to save homes. The gathering became contentious at times.

Tripp said the county did the best it could without putting firefighters' lives in jeopardy.

"If anybody thinks we take this lightly, we don't," he said in an emotional voice.

But Rob Driscoll, whose Vogel Flats home burned, was not satisfied.

"We're angry and we need better answers than we've gotten tonight," Driscoll said.

LA Times article

from today's LA Times:

Before the Station fire, a cost-cutting memo

Three weeks ahead of the Station blaze, the Forest Service sought to limit the use of local firefighting resources.

By Paul Pringle

October 2, 2009

Three weeks before the deadly Station fire erupted, the U.S. Forest Service issued a cost-cutting order to reduce its use of state and local firefighters, documents and interviews show.

Reinforcements from Los Angeles County were scaled back early in the battle against the fire in the Angeles National Forest, and federal officials now say they are investigating the actions that allowed the blaze to rage out of control.
...

full story with a link to the memo: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 4029.story

In the long run, just think how much extra money was spent on this so-called cost saving!!

Today, the fire helicopter was out. So were several strike teams. Channel 7 reported that the Station Fire had a flare up in Big Tujunga Canyon. Somehow, I figured that out before the news report.

Did Feds Cause the Station-fire Disaster
Ugly allegations that fire officials reduced air support, tankers and backup crews

By Jill Stewart
Published on October 07, 2009 at 12:14pm

It’s been six weeks since the Station Fire roared out of control on a sweltering August weekend, but troubling stories grip the communities that edge the Angeles National Forest, where talk is of a mysterious but widely acknowledged pullback by fire crews, the odd lack of crucial water tankers and helicopters, and information screwups that left fire brass seemingly unaware that Big Tujunga Canyon had burned to the ground.

Community meetings, instead of dying out, are being held every few days, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich wants a congressional investigation, and jarring news reports by Paul Pringle at the Los Angeles Times increasingly suggest that major errors by fire officials helped to create the biggest fire in Los Angeles County history.

“I was at another meeting just last night, of the Vogel Flats survivors, where the ranger station and 30 of the 90 cabins burned,” says Mary Benson, a prominent activist in the foothills. “We haven’t gotten to the bottom of why it all burned, but it’s like friendly fire in a war, where everyone is covering their butts and not explaining their real roles in what occurred.”

Key questions have emerged, questions fire officials from Los Angeles city and county, CalFire, and the U.S. Forest Service all seem unprepared to answer about the arson-sparked blaze, which burned 240,000 acres and killed two firefighters:

. Are warring neighbors to blame for preventing a government-financed brush-clearing effort that months ago was supposed to remove acres of tinder-dry fuel from some areas that burned?

. Did U.S. Forest Service bureaucrats from the Obama administration, during the crucial early hours, cut the use of reinforcement firefighters from nearby cities and CalFire in order to save money?

. Why did fire officials at a media center at Hansen Dam continue to report to journalists that La Crescenta was the battleground, several hours after the fire had leapt into an entirely different watershed and burned poorly defended Big Tujunga Canyon to the ground?

. Was a ground crew–versus–air crew pissing match partly to blame for the failure of officials to put down the fire early with sufficient tanker and helicopter drops?

Residents from Altadena, to the east, to the highly activist community of Sunland, to the west, are sharing one particularly ugly, and unproven, rumor that a radio transmission was overheard in which a fire official stated, “Just pull back and let it burn.”

But there are no hard answers yet, and Tony Bell, spokesman for Antonovich, who represents the areas that burned, says that even forming the right questions is difficult. “There’s paranoia, but a lot of legitimate beefs,” Bell says. “Folks in Quartz Hill and Juniper Hills did not get the reverse-911 call from the sheriff to evacuate. Why not? Were the fire break crews sufficient? We don’t think so. Where was the aircraft? And communications? We had no idea where the fire was going, jumping from San Gabriel Valley to Big Tujunga to Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita Valley.”

In fact, there’s been so much bad press that normally readily available fire officials are hard to reach. At meetings intended to debrief the public, any mistaken statement by a county or federal fire official is now seen as possible subterfuge instead of an honest error.

“Some of the key people involved are refusing to talk because they’d lose their jobs” for making critical comments, particularly about the extreme shortage of Super Scooper water tankers, says Tony Morris, an advocate for dramatically increasing the air fleet in California to match firefighting capabilities in Italy and France.

Says Morris: “During the worst of the Station fire, an [aircraft firm] I know was called to come in to drop on the fire. Then the work shift changed and the new fire official in charge that hour said, “No, I want you at 4 p.m. instead. ...’ But by 4 p.m., it was too smoky — and too late.”

Antonovich’s office is asking the local California congressional delegation to look into the actions taken and roles played by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and Forest Service in the initial stages, when experts say the Station fire could have been easily extinguished by tankers and helicopters dropping water and retardant. Antonovich also wants legislation that would designate the Los Angeles County Fire Department, not the Forest Service, the lead agency in local forest fires that threaten dwellings and heavily settled hillside towns.

For now, says activist Benson, “I could make a lot of nasty and smart-ass remarks about what happened here, but it would only be conjecture on my part. We simply cannot explain very simple questions, like, Why wasn’t there air support? It would behoove the Forest Service to come clean if they did in fact decide not to ask for backup.”

Article on laweekly.com

The Station Fire was officially contained at 7PM on Friday, October 16, 2009. Wow.
http://inciweb.org/incident/1856

Transient arrested in fire probe

By THOMAS WATKINS (AP)

LOS ANGELES — A homeless man was arrested and charged with arson for starting a tiny blaze near the spot where a gigantic wildfire erupted in August and went on to kill two firefighters, homicide detectives said Monday.

Babatunsin Olukunle, 25, is the strongest lead to date in the arson investigation stemming from a fire that destroyed 89 homes, burned 250 square miles of national forest and killed two firefighters when their truck plunged off a road. It was one of the largest fires in Southern California history.

The Nigerian man was arrested Thursday and charged Monday with one felony count of recklessly causing a fire. Authorities said he started a fire that charred an area about the size of a table top on Aug. 20 and was quickly extinguished by two U.S. Forest Service workers who happened to be passing and spotted smoke.

The small fire burned off the side of the Angeles Crest Highway, a mountain road northeast of Los Angeles. Six days later and six miles down the same road, the devastating Station Fire broke out.

Authorities stopped short of calling Olukunle a suspect in the fire, though Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Liam Gallagher said he was the "best lead."

"I can't put him as a suspect, we don't have enough evidence at this time," Gallagher said.

Olukunle was due to be arraigned later Monday. It was not clear if he had been assigned an attorney.

Stan Goldman, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said it appeared that the homicide detectives investigating Station Fire considered Olukunle to be a person of interest in that blaze.

"Why would homicide be interested in investigating someone for starting a fire in which no one died, " Goldman said. "There is no point in them going out to arrest someone unless they think he is involved in a homicide."

The two Forest Service workers who put out the small blaze saw Olukunle walking into the forest and away from the fire. He was a familiar sight to users of the road and had been seen pushing a cart filled with recyclables up the steep road.

He was arrested in Lancaster when two patrol deputies spotted him walking down a street carrying a bag of aluminum cans.

Olukunle, who dropped out of the University of California, Davis, in 2004, told detectives he'd been sleeping in the mountains.

"He seems rational, understands everything," Gallagher said. "He's quite articulate and appears smart, he just has gone to a different lifestyle."

Detectives questioned Olukunle about the Station Fire but Gallagher said he would not give any details about what was discussed.

His family emigrated from Nigeria in 1999.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD9BEF8D00