Housing Puts Millions at Risk of Recurring Wildfires : Development: Some officials have downplayed the threat of blazes as the pressures of growth mount.

By DAN MORAIN

Nov. 11, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NIPINNAWASEE, Calif. — Harry Rees, a retired plumber from Orange County, fully believes what firefighters know and records confirm: Unlike cousin lightning, wildfire has a nasty habit of striking the same place twice.

Thirty years ago, before this Sierra foothill settlement was on most maps, a blaze dubbed the Harlow fire stormed across 20,000 mostly vacant acres in two hours. Today, Rees and 2,000 people live in Harlow’s path.

When fire does return, Rees figures, the Craftsman-like house he built for his retirement up a narrow road will be no more. “It scares the heck out of me,” Rees said, overlooking a steep canyon covered with dried-out pines and manzanita.

Seven million Californians now live next to wild lands like this, in new suburbs and retirement colonies built without much regard for the knowledge that recurring wildfires are the reason the countryside looks as it does.

Flames will come again, fire officials say, whether or not people and houses are in the way. If summer lightning does not provide the spark, some human will--making it only a matter of time until there is another catastrophe like the Oakland hills inferno, say the state’s fire experts.

In a daylong firestorm, 3,000 homes and apartments were destroyed in Oakland and Berkeley. That is 1,000 more than were lost to wildfire during the entire decade of the 1960s in California. With 25 dead and $1.5 billion in losses, the fire toll in Oakland approaches the havoc that would follow a large earthquake.

Firefighters point to scores of other populated places that are ready to burn at the drop of a match--in the canyons of Southern California, the brown hills ringing San Francisco Bay, and here in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Few areas in California grew in population as fast as the Sierra foothill counties. The foothill population has more than tripled in the last 20 years to 500,000. In the 1980s, six of the state’s 10 fastest-growing counties were here.

But under the pressure of growth, officials in this region as well as other parts of California have downplayed the threat of fire, and watered down regulations that would make rural developments more fire-safe.

In Tuolumne County, a pro-growth Board of Supervisors simply eliminated from the books a rating system that classified much of the county as an “extreme” fire hazard zone in 1980. That move allowed homes to be built in areas where construction had been restricted. Safety rules were tightened only after fires blackened 147,000 acres in 1987, planning director Jim Nuzum said.

“Laissez-faire attitudes of local officials encouraged development with minimal constraints” all over the Mother Lode area, Robert Irwin, a former U.S. Forest Service official, said in a study he prepared about the Stanislaus National Forest.

Building policies began to take more account of the fire threat by the late 1980s, said Irwin--also a former Tuolumne County planning commissioner--but “serious access and water-supply problems are still present.”

Over the last 80 years, 30 fires of 300 acres or more have burned almost all the land on which the boom towns of Archrock, Mi-Wuk and Twain Harte sit. “Small” fires of less than 300 acres are too numerous to count. But with so many people moving into the foothills, a 200-acre fire could destroy 200 homes.

“When you see this kind of population growth, it has got to scare you,” said Thomas James, a local U.S. Forest Service official. “People don’t know what a two-mile front of fire pushed by wind can do.”

To the south, in the foothills of eastern Madera County, barber Norman Elam recalls sitting on a ridge as a kid of 13, “scared to death” as the infamous Harlow fire consumed the settlement of Deadwood “in a matter of minutes.” By the time it was over, the fire 30 years ago blackened 44,000 acres, killed two people and razed more than 100 homes.

In the years since, the area has boomed. It lures retirees from California’s cities seeking a peaceful life, and has become a bedroom community for Fresno. The new, large subdivisions meet minimum fire-safety standards, despite having wooden roofs that often act like kindling.

Many more homes scattered on hillsides are part of no planned subdivision. Wells supply their water. In a fire, electricity will go out, so pumps that draw water will stop. Many people live in homes draped by canopies of wick-like trees.

“Has the lesson been lost? I guess we have to wait and see,” said Gary Gilbert, state forestry chief in the area.

When he bought his 40 acres in 1971, retiree Rees had no idea that a fire once scorched the canyon. But that probably would not have stopped him. The land was cheap, the countryside wooded, and the weather ideal.

Rees is careful to clear brush, and he plans to put a sprinkler on his roof to slow down any fire. Still, when asked what chance his house would stand in a repeat of the Harlow fire, he says: “None. . . . If it ever catches fire we’ll jump in the car and take off.”

The Oakland hills fire was a striking case of fire returning. Major fires roared through the same hills in 1923 and 1970. Even before California’s brushlands and forests were dried out by the state’s worst modern-day drought, a 1985 report warned that “thousands” of homes were in danger in the Oakland hills.

“Those hills are covered in highly flammable Monterey pine, eucalyptus, live oak, California laurel, coyote brush, manzanita, annual oat grass and many other species of plants that could easily ignite and erupt into a fiery inferno, endangering thousands of intermingled and adjacent homes and other structures,” the California Department of Forestry report said.

Similar warnings have been sounded throughout the state. More often than not, they go unheeded, and as a result entire developments of homes have been built with no particular fire-safety plan in mind.

In Marin County, smoke from the Oakland fire was visible to residents of houses built on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. Residents there threatened to sue when the local Fire Department wanted to burn overgrown and dead vegetation. Five years later, thick brush has accumulated in a serious fire danger, said Robert Badaracco, an official of the water district that owns the mountain.

Another place cited by firefighters is steep Kilkare Canyon, outside the East Bay city of Fremont. There, 185 homes are built along a windy four-mile road that dead-ends, in the same steep terrain that marks the Oakland hills. Some homes date to the 1920s. Some are on the far side of private bridges so rickety that firetrucks cannot cross.

Mike Martin, a state forestry battalion chief, said Kilkare Canyon has been spared only by “fate . . . luck.”

“Kilkare is the tip of the iceberg,” Martin said. Get out a California atlas, he said, a deadly fire could strike wherever homes are built on hillsides. Martin is particularly concerned about the San Francisco peninsula, where hills are every bit as dry and steep as they are in Oakland.

In one affluent peninsula town, Los Altos Hills, residents were so enamored by the rustic look of wooden roofs that in 1984 they rescinded a ban on them. The next year, a blaze destroyed a dozen homes.

Regulations generally are tougher in Central and Southern California, where destructive wildfires are more common, and officials say people pay more heed to the threat. Los Angeles city and county banned wooden roofs in 1978, and fire inspectors can refer people who fail to clear brush for criminal prosecution, a hammer not available in most places.

But none of Southern California firefighters’ experience prepared them for the intensity of last year’s Santa Barbara fire, an example of the kind of fire that officials fear is bound to become more common. Pushed by a strong Sundowner wind off the coastal mountains, flames turned 458 homes into cinders within four hours. Losses totaled $500 million.

“We had run models. We had trained. We know about Sundowner winds,” said Donald Perry, deputy chief fire marshal of the county Fire Department. But the fire simply sped from roof to roof, tree to tree, faster than firetrucks can drive. “Your fire behavior models don’t prepare you for that,” Perry said.

Perry pointed to Mission Canyon, northeast of Santa Barbara, as typical of areas where last year’s fire could be replayed. Upward of 1,000 people live on a dead-end road too narrow for cars and trucks to pass one another.

“Whether we will be able to accomplish a simultaneous evacuation and deployment of resources is still to be determined,” Perry said.

In the ashes of the Oakland fire, some find cause for hope. The Legislature intends to take another stab at banning wood shake roofs, having failed twice in the 1980s in the face of the lobby that backs their use.

Also, the State Board of Forestry has announced that fire safety regulations for new developments in areas patrolled by the Department of Forestry will go into effect in January.

The regulations stem from legislation passed in 1987. In addition to the delay, the measures also do not go as far as once envisioned. A proposal that new homes in state-patrolled wild land areas have 2,500 gallons of water in storage was dropped because so many parts of the state lack sufficient water.

The new regulations require that subdivisions be built with firebreaks to limit the spread of flames, roads wide enough for fire engines to pass, and bridges strong enough to carry fire equipment.

Firefighters assume that their budgets to clear brush and buy new trucks will not rise soon. They could not hope to keep up with population growth. The answer lies in persuading local officials to tighten building requirements, and residents to pay more heed to the threat of fire, experts say.

The solution is “not more fire engines, it’s getting people involved,” said Bill Teie, a top California Department of Forestry official. “You can’t park a fire engine at every house.”