NorCal braces for dry, dangerous fire season as SoCal faces typical conditions

Southern California’s top fire officials met behind closed doors in East Los Angeles Friday to discuss the outlook for this year’s peak fire season and how to coordinate the region’s world-class firefighters to keep communities safe.

At a press conference afterward, officials stressed that even though coastal Southern California is not expected to have an exceptionally dangerous fire season, they are doing everything they can to protect Californians. They urged residents to do the same.

“It is clear that wildfires are no longer solely a fire-service problem. They are an all-of-us problem,” said Orange County Fire Authority Interim Chief T.J. McGovern, standing in front of a suite of emergency response vehicles at L.A. County Fire Department’s headquarters. “They can only be mitigated by all of us working together.”

Coastal Southern California, which had the third-wettest season in record within the last 15 years, can expect a typical wildfire season, fire weather analysts predict. That’s in sharp contrast to Northern California, which saw a record-breaking March heat wave melt mountain snowpack early. Fire officials typically rely on the snowpack to keep vegetation green and moist into summer.

“The interesting thing about last year is that it was the southern half of the state that was significantly drier,” said Cal Fire Director Joe Tyler at a wildfire season outlook briefing last month. This year, he said, “we’re seeing that critical condition really spreading across Northern California.”

Coastal Southern California must still endure a particularly dry June before reaching typical conditions July through September — and even “typical” conditions remain dangerous, which is why officials urged Southern Californians Friday to remain vigilant.

A series of fires mid-May served as a warning shot for the region. The Sandy fire in Ventura County destroyed one home and damaged two more structures. The Santa Rosa Island fire burned through a third of the second-largest Channel island.

Officials at Friday’s Southern California meeting urged homeowners to do what they can to harden their homes against wildfire — including covering vents with mesh to prevent embers from entering the home and using multi-paned tempered windows that are less likely to shatter in extreme heat.

They also asked homeowners to maintain defensible space around homes by clearing dead vegetation in their yards, making sure there is space between shrubs and trees and creating a 5-foot buffer around homes with nothing combustible, including plants.

Homeowners should also make sure they’re signed up for evacuation alerts from their local fire department, the chiefs added, and should not hesitate to evacuate at the sight or smell of smoke — regardless of whether an official evacuation has been ordered.

As for their part, Southern California fire departments have been working to thin out hazardous vegetation surrounding communities and remain at the ready to respond to fires.

“We will show up. We show up every time, across every jurisdiction … That’s not a question,” said Los Angeles City Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore. However, without defensible space at individual homes, it is “very difficult for us to be able to combat those fires.”

The Los Angeles and Ventura county fire departments have been working to remove flammable vegetation surrounding communities in the Santa Monica Mountains with fire department crews, goats and prescribed fire. The U.S. Forest Service has been doing similar work in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The crews are working to create a network of vegetation-free pathways, called fuel breaks, that can slow fires and give firefighters strategic access to wildlands to combat blazes. They are also working to remove particularly flammable invasive grasses.

“As we share our preparation to defend communities and build wildfire resilience, it’s a call to action,” Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia said. “It’s now a shift to individual homeowners and communities to start leveraging some of that work that your agencies are doing.”

While this kind of landscape-wide work has significantly increased in the state over the past five years, California is running out of money to complete such projects.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service saw a decrease in how much work it could complete after the Trump administration significantly reduced the size of the service’s workforce.

Neither the state’s funding woes nor the shrinking of the federal workforce are expected to impact firefighting ability.

“It is absolutely as strong as ever,” Tyler said last month of the federal and state government’s ability to respond to fires.