Fire threat and brush clearance in San Diego (PDF)
Posted on 12/30/2007 9:19:35 AM PST by NormsRevenge
A few months before the October wildfires barreled though Rancho Bernardo, San Diego firefighters left notices throughout the neighborhood urging people to trim brush from the canyon rims near their homes.
But Fire-Rescue Department inspectors never followed up to make sure the job had been done. In fact, it had been years since the city of San Diego had sent fire marshals into the area to see that brush had been removed.
As residents of the North County neighborhood slept through the early-morning darkness of Oct. 22, the Witch Creek and Guejito fires were gaining momentum. At 5 a.m., whipped by 60-mph winds, they roared into Rancho Bernardo through the San Pasqual Valley and began climbing the sides of canyons toward the homes.
The flames barely touched the two-story house on Cloudesly Drive where Mark Coast and his family live. Coast had taken the firefighters' warning seriously and cleared a 100-foot barrier between his property and the canyon.
The house next door, however, became one of 365 destroyed in Rancho Bernardo that day. Fire shot through a thicket of brush growing just a few yards away.
Nobody can say for sure that the toll in Rancho Bernardo would have been lower if more brush had been cleared. What is certain is that for more than a decade, city officials had known that 16,000 acres of wild land in San Diego were so thick with brush that they had become a huge fire hazard.
Much of that wild land is nestled in the chain of canyons that stretches from rural areas into the heart of urban San Diego. The canyons provide breathtaking views of sometimes lush, sometimes scruffy ecosystems populated by native plants and animals.
But the vast expanse of scrub and trees also forms a fuel-laden pathway that could bring wild-land fires into densely populated neighborhoods such as San Carlos, North Park and Bay Terraces.
Maintaining the canyons has long bedeviled politicians, residents, environmentalists and those who study fire. Clear too much of the native vegetation and more flammable, non-native plants might move in. Clear too little and an important firefighting tool is eliminated.
For San Diego city officials, that dilemma has taken a back seat to a bigger problem: They don't have enough money to fund a comprehensive brush management program, just as they don't have enough money to repair city streets or replace older sewer pipes.
That was painfully clear in a city report issued three months after the October 2003 Cedar fire burned 321 homes in the San Diego communities of Scripps Ranch and Tierrasanta.
A deputy city manager told the City Council it would cost at least $4.4 million a year to adequately tackle the brush problem. That same year, voters rejected two initiatives that would have provided more money for fire engines, new stations and perhaps brush management.
In 2005, Jeff Bowman, then San Diego's fire chief, said the city needed to clear 590 acres each year, not 70 as it had been doing for more than a decade. But there was no money to expand the effort and little hope of finding the funds, he conceded.
(front end excerpt)
Put your faith in the nanny state and get burned. Literally.
I’ve been taking the lessons learned in San Diego very seriously this fall. We’ve removed about 50 ugly dying oaks near the forest, the views have improved, and I can sell them for firewood. It feels good to see all that scrubby stuff gone.
I think it is amazing they got the fliers out. Then DO IT. You want the firefighters to REMIND you? and check on you? That would mean that MY tax money would pay someone to remind YOU to clear your brush. Pretty soon we’ll be paying people to remind others to wipe their hind ends.
Whhhuuuttt?
You actually want services to go along with the salary, health care bennies and pensions that you're paying your local fire marshals?
Silly taxpayer!
I agree completely.
I agree with the sentiment, up to a point.
Try building a visible structure on "your" property without bothering to get "permission" from your local government and see how fast a swarm of officialdom shows up...
I don’t know where you’re located but in San Diego we run a very lean (too lean, some fear) fire dept. We’re often criticized as being “too cheap” because we refuse to authorize tax increases at the ballot box.
You miss that those departments, different from the fire dept., are revenue generating bureaucrats with no other purpose.
The fire department reports to the city government. You may want to look to the government and not the fire service for the reasons why follow up wasn’t carried out by the fire department.
In fact, my position is that as time goes on, the government will be sucking up more and more [static] tax dollars just to pay salaries, health benefits and pensions.
No services for you! [The Service Nazi]
The fire department in this instance (and in most other instances) is like the IT department in most companies.
Management (or the local government leaders) can stand around saying: "Well, IT (or the fire department) doesn't produce any revenue, so what are they doing for the cash we're giving them?"
In this case, a number of revenue-producing (property tax) structures burned to the ground. An inspection by the fire marshals would have secured the revenue from most of these places. As with IT, the marginalized "product" from the fire department was worth its weight (and more) in tax dollars.
I'm sure the local government would like to continue to collect the same property tax from the burned-out owners, but we haven't quite gotten to that point yet.
Yet. ;-)
It's been inaccurately framed previously as evil environmentalists preventing homeowners from clearing brush.
The key is fuel management and fire-resistant construction practices. Fuel management needs to be both a governmental and a personal obligation. And, it’s going to be costly to make up for the last twenty years of neglect. But first, we have to find a way to get the guys who say, ‘you can’t cut that bush, there’s a gnatcatcher living in it’ on board. Rotsa Ruck with that.
Those are all newer subdivisions. Wood-shake roofs have been banned around here since the BelAir fire of the fifties.
Oak, eh?
Too bad I don’t have a truck up to the task.. Do you deliver? ;-)
I burn a lot of wood ..
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.