Strong Medicine for Wildfires

Orange County fire officials say that strict building regulations in that county, including a required buffer zone of fire-resistant plants around houses, helped block wildfires fanned by the intense heat wave earlier this month from reaching a number of homes. And in Riverside County, two blazes could have been much worse had not so many residents there heeded the warnings of fire officials and cleared brush from around their homes.

Both cases offer lessons for Los Angeles, where city firefighters and the City Council are poised to take steps to prevent the predictable fall brush fires from becoming an El Nino-fueled inferno. With a bumper crop of hillside vegetation, now tinder-dry, those fire prevention efforts should assume the highest priority.

City regulations already require property owners to clear brush within 200 feet of structures and 10 feet of roadways. The Fire Department has issued more than 20,000 brush clearance orders this year, but officials say about 8,000 lots remain overgrown.

When property owners fail to clear vegetation, the Fire Department will step in as it has in past years, dispatching contractors to do the job and then adding the cost, plus a $250 fee, to the owner’s property tax bill. L.A. County’s policy is almost identical. These policies are more than fair since the cost of brush clearance is trivial compared with the cost--in lives and money--of a destructive wildfire.

The Fire Department is now asking the council for an additional $4.5 million to pay for more inspectors, clearing equipment and contractors. The council, some of whose members have been critical of the department’s slow pace on this issue, is now studying that request. The matter should be considered expeditiously.

State law allows the city to go even further, permitting local governments to recoup the cost of fighting fires that spread from properties whose owners failed to clear brush. Councilman Hal Bernson introduced a motion last week calling on the city to avail itself of this law. That motion is pending.

These are stern steps, but the fire threat this year is real and grave.