Fire Siege of 2003

Fires

Date: October 21-November 4, 2003

Place: Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties, California

Result: 22 dead, 80,000 residents displaced, 3,500 homes destroyed, 743,000 acres burned; insurance losses estimated at $2 billion

Aseries of wildfires that first broke out on October 21, 2003, raged across the landscape in the vicinity of Los Angeles and San Diego in Southern California, collectively constituting the largest wildfire in California history. It came to be known as the Fire Siege of 2003.

The Wildfires. In all, at least 12 separate wildfires burned during this time period: the Verdale and Grand Prix Fires in Los Angeles County; the Old Fire in San Bernardino County; the Cedar, Paradise, Otay, and Roblar 2 Fires in San Diego County; the Piru and Simi Incident Fires in Ventura County; and the Pass, Mountain, and Wellman Fires in Riverside County.

The first of these fires, the Grand Prix Fire, broke out on October 21 in the San Bernardino National Forest. Officials suspected that it had been deliberately set. On October 25, the Cedar Fire, which would become the largest of these blazes, broke out around San Diego. It was known to have been caused by a lost hunter who fired a flare. There was also a major outbreak in the Simi Valley to the northwest of Los Angeles. The hot foehn winds, called Santa Ana winds, that sometimes blow across Southern California had begun on October 23. They whipped up all the fires and made firefighting extremely dangerous, resulting in the death of a Canadian firefighter whose position was overwhelmed by flames.

Although some 16,000 firefighters were deployed in an effort to stop the blazes, their efforts were largely ineffectual. Protecting life became more important than protecting property, as 3,500 homes were destroyed. The fires moved quickly, and notice to evacuate sometimes came too late. Of the 22 individuals killed by the fires, 10 had been trapped in their cars as they tried to flee the Cedar Fire.

On October 26, officials in San Diego advised residents not directly threatened by the fire to stay home because the quantity of ash in the air had reached dangerous levels. Indeed, the smoke plumes were so high that they were visible on the International Space Station at the height of the wildfires. Conditions in the atmosphere were so bad that it was necessary to close the Southern California Radar Approach Control facility near San Diego, disrupting air traffic throughout the nation. An NFL game between the San Diego Chargers and the Miami Dolphins, scheduled to take place in San Diego on October 27, had to be moved to Tempe, Arizona, because the Chargers’ regular stadium had been converted into an evacuation center.

A change in the weather on October 30 at last enabled fire officials to get control of the situation. The Santa Ana winds had died down on October 27, and light rain began to fall on October 30. By November 4, officials were at last able to get control of the fires. Although President George W. Bush and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the area on November 4, relatively little federal aid was available to cope with the destruction.

Factors in the Outbreak. Four factors played an important role in the outbreak of so many destructive wildfires within two weeks. They were topography, climate, vegetation, and demographics. All four played a role in creating a series of wildfires of unprecedented scale.

Los Angeles and San Diego Counties, located on the Pacific coast of Southern California, are fringed by the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains that separate the areas from the Mojave Desert directly to the east. The areas are effectively a bowl that ensures continuity of weather and vegetative conditions in the land so embraced. The eastern edges of this bowl have been declared national forests, the Cleveland and the San Bernardino National Forests, which effectively transfers the maintenance of the vegetation to the U.S. Forest Service. Even before European settlement of the area, it was subject to periodic wildfires, as determined by the government investigators who have been seeking to understand the causes of the Fire Siege of 2003.

Besides topography, the climate that prevails in this basin is highly conducive to wildfires. It is called a Mediterranean climate, with limited precipitation occurring largely in the winter and high temperatures and very dry conditions in the summer. Rainfall in the winter months (November to April) is normally around 20 inches (500 millimeters), but in the summertime (May to October) it is less than 5 inches (125 millimeters). Moreover, the area is prone to Santa Ana winds, especially in the fall, that can reach 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour), making firefighting both problematic and dangerous. The mountain ranges just inland concentrate these winds by funneling them through passes in the mountains.

The result of these two factors, topography and climate, is that most of the land does not produce trees but rather a semi-desert brush called chaparral, which is highly flammable. Of the area burned in the fires, only 5 percent had coniferous trees growing on it, the rest being covered in chaparral bushes. Such vegetation normally burns at intervals varying between 5 and 100 years; within 3 to 5 years of a burn, new chaparral growth appears and the cycle is repeated.

Because both Los Angeles and San Diego are located at the sites of important seaports, they have experienced major population growth, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Further, that growth has been characterized by the expansion of housing into the open lands on the fringes of the city centers, creating what is called the intermix fire, one that occurs on land that is both wild and occupied. Between 1950 and 1990, 100 million people moved into this area. Between 1970 and 1980, counties that happened to adjoin wilderness areas increased their population by 13 percent; between 1980 and 1990, the increase was 24 percent. This explosive population growth has continued since 1990.

This exurban expansion took the form of wooden houses with wooden roofs, which are especially susceptible to fire. As population expanded into lands that had been occupied previously only by vegetation, the risk of fires being started expanded exponentially, even if they were not intended, as many of them were. Most of the fires in this great sequence of wildfires were attributed to arson, even though no one was caught.

Lessons of the Fire Siege. The Fire Siege of 2003 gave new fuel to a controversy that had been engaging land management agencies in the area for several decades: Were the fires the consequence of improper fire management, and could they have been prevented?

The fires provoked an intense debate among many officials as to the appropriate policy to follow in the Southern California region. The drought that characterized much of the western parts of the United States in the later decades of the twentieth century and that has lasted into the twenty-first century has made the question of fire control of vital concern, especially as the population of the western states continues to grow at a very rapid rate.

Early in the twentieth century, as the U.S. Forest Service took charge of many parts of the western United States with the creation of the national forests, the Forest Service became responsible for managing forest fires in the region as part of the obligation to maintain the forests in the areas that it controlled. Huge wildfires in the early years of the century, especially those that burned in many parts of the West in 1910, led the Forest Service to adopt a policy of fire suppression of all fires in the first hours in which they were detected.

The development of many new technologies during World War II, such as helicopters and large water balloons towed by airplanes, together with the substantial expansion of the road system in the national forests by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s, led the leaders of the Forest Service to believe that they had the situation under control. In the 1960’s, however, the development of the environmental movement, which advocated returning to the “natural” conditions prevailing before settlement and in particular to the creation of “wilderness” forests, led to a policy in which fires in wilderness areas were allowed to burn until they burned out. However, the devastating fire that broke out in Yellowstone National Park in 1988 led to a reevaluation of this policy. Efforts were made to combine “controlled burns” (fires deliberately set by government officials) in strategic locations with the idea that deliberately burning lands containing considerable burnable material would create patches that would lack the fuels to support large fires.

At the same time, government officials began to realize that a uniform policy throughout the entire country was not practicable. Crafting a policy specifically for the chaparral lands in the vicinity of the major California cities became a high priority. Specialists in the U.S. Geological Service and at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) began an intensive study of the history of fires in the region.

They discovered that fires recur on the topography and in the vegetation of the area every 30 to 40 years, although some particularly sensitive areas may burn more frequently. The rapid growth of the human population in the area has substantially raised the risk, because although many western fires are ignited by lightning, such events are rare in the Los Angeles-San Diego coastal area. Overwhelmingly, people are the cause, particularly fires that are deliberately set, and there is little likelihood that this situation will change in the future. They also realized that, although creating fire breaks may work in many areas, the very high flammability of the chaparral vegetation makes this an unworkable strategy in this area. The one advantage of periodic deliberate control of vegetation is that it can reduce the risk of soil loss that occurs after a fire.

Thought needs to be given by local officials to the pattern of human settlement and to the regulations that control it, such as zoning regulations. In addition, specific requirements governing exurban houses, such as nonflammable roofing and siding materials, can make it much easier to save houses in the path of a fire in this region. Basically, the chaparral region, given its topography and its climate, can be expected to burn at regular intervals, and there is not much that wildland fire officials can do about it. The best approach is to treat fires in this region as natural catastrophes much like earthquakes. Wildfire management would also benefit from the full development of evacuation plans, as moving people out of the path of danger must be given a very high priority.

Bibliography

California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. California Fire Siege 2003: The Story. Sacramento, Calif.: Author, 2003. Also at http://www.fire.ca.gov/php/fire‗er‗siege.php.

California Legislature. Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Services and Homeland Security. 2003 Historic Southern California Fires: An Assessment One Year Later. Sacramento, Calif.: Senate Publications, 2004.

Keeley, Jon E., and C. J. Fotheringham. “Historic Fire Regime in Southern California Shrublands.” Conservation Biology 15, no. 6 (December, 2001): 1536-1548.

Keeley, Jon E., C. J. Fotheringham, and Max A. Moritz. “Lessons from the October 2003 Wildfires in Southern California.” Journal of Forestry 102, no. 7 (October/November, 2004): 26-31.

Krauss, Erich. Wall of Flame: The Heroic Battle to Save Southern California. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

Pyne, Stephen J. World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.