The Los Angeles times has a story that quotes the Fire Management Officer for the Angeles National Forest as saying they underestimated how many resources would be needed on the second day of the fire that has now burned 160,000 acres near Los Angeles.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
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 firecould 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.
