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Firefighters and residents bracing for a dry summer
Downed limbs from winter pose risk
Driest point in August
By Oakley Brooks
Set against the backdrop of recent northern California fires, hillside residents and firefighters are crossing their fingers that they'll avoid a major conflagration this summer.
"We're way ahead of schedule when it comes to fire severity," said Chris Morgan, a fire prevention specialist with the California Department of Forestry's Santa Clara County unit.
Area fire specialists say the hot weather has contributed to unseasonably dry vegetation along the hillsides of Los Gatos and Saratoga.
Morgan says shrubs such as scrub oaks and manzanita had a strong growing season in the hills this winter due to alternating periods of rain and sunshine. But when the rainy season ended abruptly in April--Santa Clara County received only two inches of rain during April and May--vegetation began drying faster than the normal.
Morgan says recent moisture tests in the county indicate that brush will have reached its driest point in early August, an event that usual happens in September.
He and other state forestry officials say that dried-out grasses and downed limbs from winter snows at higher elevations also raise the fire risk this summer.
Early fires throughout the northern half of California, including the 4,000-acre fire near Susanville, pushed the state to fully staff its stations more than a month ahead of schedule. Saratoga Fire District Chief Ernie Kraule says he is prepared to boost staffing levels should conditions worsen locally this summer.
But fire specialists point out that much of the fate of hillside area lies in the ability of residents to protect themselves.
Both the Santa Clara County Fire Department and Saratoga Fire District sent out their annual letters reminding hillside homeowners to remove highly flammable dead branches and leaves lying within 30 feet of houses. The fire departments also urged residents to keep roofs clean of debris and overhanging branches.
"Every year you just keep at it with weed eating and major cleanups," said Dave Dolloff, who in lives in the Saratoga's hills and is chairman of the Firefighter and Citizen Task force. "It's an ongoing process."
It's a process that residents often don't keep up with, according to Santa Clara County Fire Captain Mike Evans. He says that firefighters are continually asking residents to prune back overgrown brush and trees on visits to neighborhoods. The response is only mixed. "Things tend to be forgotten," said Evans, who has worked at the county's West Valley station for 20 years.
Evans warns that each new home on the hillside spreads the areas' fire resources a little thinner by decreasing the ability of firefighters to save individual structures in a wildfire.
Dolloff estimates that there are now more than 130 houses on the hillside just south of Saratoga Village, and the number has far outgrown the water sources needed to fight a fire. He's pushing for each new home on the hill to have its own 46,000-gallon tank.
To date, Saratoga has never lost a house to fire in the hills. In recent years, low winds allowed firefighters to contain three small fires on the hillside. But Saratogans seem to believe that a major incident looms in the future; in the ongoing struggle involving the future of the Saratoga Fire District, residents have invoked the disastrous Oakland Hill's fire of October 1991 many times.
"We're scared," said Dolloff, whose task force is pushing for the district to contract with the county for fire service.
Residents in Los Gatos and its surrounding hillsides have watched their fears become a reality. Swirling winds drove the Lexington Reservoir fire in 1985 that claimed 13,000 acres and 30 structures. Four years ago, a branch fell on a power line several hundred yards above the Cats Restaurant and the ensuing fire burned dozens of acres and three homes.
This year, residents of both Los Gatos and Saratoga and fire protection agencies hope the weather will cooperate as fuel levels build. They want to avoid what the state calls "red flag" days--when 15- to 20-mph winds blow over a sustained period of time and the humidity levels in the air drop below 20%.
So far the long-term weather outlook doesn't look good.
"The dry, hot weather we've been having will probably be the trend throughout the summer," said Morgan, the state's fire prevention specialist.
On high-risk days, Morgan says even car exhaust can ignite a patch of dry grass. He wants area residents to have a little more common sense than the man who accidentally started the recent Susanville fire: he was conducting some target practice in the woods on a dry day.
For more fire condition information contact the California Department of Forestry in Morgan Hill at 408.779.2121 or log onto the department's website at www.fire.ca.gov.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
