A helicopter carrying two of Southern California’s most influential politicians in the fight against wildfires flew over the Santa Monica Mountains, nine months after the region’s deadliest fires on record. Lined with jagged peaks, steep canyons slowly revealed themselves. The land was patchy and some areas were covered with native chaparral plants, dense green shrubs. Others were blackened and composed primarily of fire-ravaged soil where chaparral thrived. And for some, the land was covered in dead, golden grass that had been ravaged by fire years earlier.
Within this tapestry were only scattered homes and businesses and a few roads snaking through it. That’s Topanga. If fire roared through the canyon, the danger was painfully obvious even at a thousand feet.
“If there’s a problem on Main Street…” County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath says into her headset, speechless.
“Communities are trapped,” said California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, concluding his thoughts.
On the same mountain where the Palisades Fire started, supervisors and commissioners were monitoring about 675 acres of land in the state to prevent the next firestorm in the Santa Monica Mountains from burning down homes and killing residents.
Crews from the Los Angeles County Fire Department and the local land management agency, the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority, were cutting a miles-long network of fuel breaks north of Santa Monica between Topanga and Calabasas. In the spring, you want to run a prescribed burn during your break. Just northwest, on the other side of Calabasas, the Ventura County Fire Department deployed 500 goats and 100 sheep to graze non-native grasses that are prone to fire.
This is just a small portion of the work state leaders and local fire departments hope to accomplish one day, but the scale and speed of the effort is already worrying some ecology and fire experts.
(However, the goat has received near-universal praise.)
While many firefighters and fire officials support the installation of fuel rest areas to facilitate access to remote areas during firefighting efforts, fire ecologists warn that if not done carefully, fuel rest areas can inadvertently replace chaparral with flammable invasive grasses, making the landscape even more fire-prone.
But after last January’s Palisades fire, many state leaders and Santa Monica residents feel it’s better to act now, even if the plan is somewhat experimental, given that the mountains are almost certain to burn again soon.
In March, Gov. Gavin Newsom streamlined the approval process for these projects. Instead of seeking multiple permits through separate and time-consuming processes such as the California Environmental Quality Act, Coastal Act, Endangered Species Act, Native Plant Protection Act, etc., applicants can now submit their projects directly to the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Environmental Protection Agency, ensuring compliance with all relevant laws.
As a result, the state approved it in just a few months. In the past, it was not uncommon for projects to remain stalled for years awaiting various approvals.
April saw an early release of funds that California voters approved last November for these types of projects. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which received more than $31 million of that funding, donated just over $3 million to LA and Ventura County fire departments and the MRCA to complete the project.
On Oct. 8, Horvath and Crowfoot watched from a ridge northwest of Topanga as crews below operated a remote-controlled machine (named for its color and ability to navigate steep slopes) to chew through shrubs on the hillside. Some people used claws attached to the arms of bright red excavators to pull out plants.
The goal was to create a new fuel rest area on land that is one of the few areas in Santa Monica that hasn’t had a fire in the past seven years, said Drew Smith, assistant fire chief for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “All of our biggest vulnerabilities are here as we head into the fall.”
If left unchecked, chaparral burns, typically every 30 to 130 years, historically due to lightning strikes. However, as Westerners began to settle in the area, fires began to occur more frequently. For example, just one month before the Palisades Fire, Malibu Canyon now experiences a fire approximately every eight years.
As frequent fires suffocate the native chaparral ecosystem, fast-growing and highly flammable non-native grasses flourish, making it even more likely that a fallen tobacco or downed power line will start a catastrophic fire. Scientists call this death spiral the “death spiral,” but stopping it is not easy. And some experts worry it may be next to impossible to reverse that.
The state’s current approach to working with the California Wildfire Task Force is three-pronged.
The first is to minimize the death and destruction caused by monster fires should they occur.
Second: Techniques to prevent fires from starting in the first place, such as deploying on windy days.
Third: Create a network of fuel breaks.
Fuel interruptions are the most hotly debated, in part because fuel interruptions alone do little to stop wind-driven fires miles away.
But fire officials who have relied on refueling breaks during disasters argue they still serve an “important tactical role,” allowing crews to reach a fire, or a new ignition lit by embers, before it spreads into the community, Smith said.
But Dan Cooper, chief conservation biologist for the Santa Monica Mountains Resource Conservation District, said there is still little scientific evidence that fuel breaks are effective.
Fire ecologists also warn that fuel breaks need to be implemented strategically, as they can have a negative impact on ecosystems and, in the worst-case scenario, make more fires more likely. That raises concerns about the speed with which the state approves projects, they say.
Alexandra Shipherd, principal investigator at the Conservation Biology Institute and Southern California’s leading fire ecologist, noted that the fuel breaks the Santa Monica Mountains team is creating near Topanga appear to be cutting straight through healthy chaparral. If firefighters don’t maintain regular fuel breaks, flammable golden grass will re-grow instead of highly ignitable chaparral.
And the choices land managers make today can have significant consequences in the future. Firefighters and local conservationists are experimenting with ways to restore chaparral to grassy areas, but studies Seiferd has looked at show that once chaparral is gone, it rarely comes back.
For Cooper, the fundamental tension of living in Santa Monica in exchange for wildfire risk reduction is growing. People also move to places like Topanga because they love the chaparral-dotted landscape, backyard oak forests, and canyon privacy. But the same environment puts them at risk.
“What are we going to do with it? Pave Santa Monica? A lot of old firefighters want all of Santa Monica to be grass, because grass fires are easier to put out,” he said. “We need to learn how to live with fire. In a more sober way.”
