NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

These unseasonably hot days of March remind Vic and me of last October, when fires raged in Orange County for nearly three weeks.

The flames finally were extinguished, but cleanup continues and problems remain.

An arsonist started the Santiago fire during Santa Ana winds on a Sunday afternoon last Oct. 21. Over the next three days, 19,000 acres burned, thousands of people were evacuated, and more than a dozen homes were destroyed.

Orange County didn’t suffer alone. Fires raged all over Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego. They were fueled by heavy growth from an El Niño year, followed by a rainy season that saw only two inches of rain. It was a recipe for disaster, and that’s what Southern California got.

With firefighting resources stretched beyond their limit, the fires spread unchecked. By Nov. 3, the Santiago fire had consumed huge areas in Limestone Canyon and Whiting Ranch Regional Parks, as well as a chunk of Cleveland National Forest. Fingers of flame scorched as far south as the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

The fire was not fully under control until the morning of Nov. 9, 19 days after it started. The devastation was awful. More than 28,000 acres burned. Twenty-two homes, 27 outbuildings and seven commercial buildings were damaged or destroyed.

Fortunately, President George W. Bush declared Orange County a disaster area long before the fire was contained.

This set into motion a sequence of events that allowed federal funding to be used for fire damage cleanup.

With no opportunity to assess the damage because the fires were still burning, the Orange County Conservation Corps and the Orange County Workforce Investment Board submitted a proposal to provide fire-cleanup jobs for difficult-to-employ, at-risk youth and young adults.

The federal grant was awarded within two days. While the fires were still burning, the corps kicked into high gear to hire more employees and supervisors.

The corps’ first priority was to work in Modjeska Canyon to protect the nationally recognized Helena Modjeska Historic House and Gardens from mudslides. While firefighters were able to save the house, some damage to the grounds did occur. Restoration of fencing and gardens will come later.

“We’ve been so busy cleaning up after mudslides that we haven’t been able to even start on the restoration work,” said Max Carter, executive director of the corps.

The corps has hired four new crews, which has kept me even busier than usual with orientation training of new corps members.

But even this influx of people really isn’t enough to keep up with repeated mudslides that have followed each of the many rainstorms this winter. Because the slides haven’t damaged any homes that I’m aware of, they haven’t made the news. But they happen on a regular basis.

I drove along Santiago Road last week to see the crews at work.

Milton Vanegas, the corps supervisor who oversees this project, noted that they’ve cleaned out one particular V-ditch three times already. V-ditches are concrete channels that funnel rain away from the roads and into streams.

The corps members shovel silt, sometimes as much as 3 feet deep, that has accumulated inside the channels since the last storm and put it into sandbags. The sandbags are then used to line and protect the channel from further siltation. But the hillsides keep on sliding.

“You should have seen this hill a few weeks ago,” Vanegas said. I stared at the bare hillside. It was nothing but exposed sandstone. “It was covered with dirt and all green. Now it’s all at the bottom of the ditch.”

He pointed to a V-ditch that was totally buried in mud.

“Sandbagging is hard work, but after a while it gets easy to dig up the dirt,” said Henry Dominguez, one of the corps crew leaders.

Milton Vanegas agreed about the difficulty of the work. “It’s hard work and some of the guys want to quit, but then people stop by and say ‘Thanks,’ ” he said. “None of these guys have ever been thanked by anyone before.”

A few words of thanks and praise go a long way toward keeping the corps members bent to the shovel. If you’d like to express your thanks to these hard-working kids, send Vic an e-mail, and we’ll forward it to the corps.

Vanegas drove off to get more hay bales. Supervisor Duke Nguyen took his crew and headed downslope into a small ravine. “Come on, guys, we’re going to be here all day.”

Without a single complaint, the corps members grabbed shovels and empty sandbags and set to work re-exposing the concrete channel. They worked down in the ravine, out of sight of the public that whizzed by on roads that are being kept clear only by dint of hard labor.

As I drove along Santiago Road and up Modjeska Canyon last week, I saw mile after mile of sandbags and straw bales. The corps members construct various types of dams out of these materials to slow and stop the mud while allowing the water to flow into the streams. But the rain keeps coming, the hills keep sliding and the corps members keep slogging away at the task.

The county of Orange sets the priorities for cleanup. Restoration can’t begin until all of the roads are protected and all of the ditches are cleared. With the end of rainy season approaching, that should be soon. Then will come the hard work of battling weeds.

Chaparral is adapted to survive fires. Indeed, where the fires didn’t burn too hotly, new growth already is sprouting from charred stumps of laurel sumac, white sage and prickly pear cactus. But the fires are coming too often in these times of warming climate, and the chaparral can’t recover sufficiently. The result will be what is called “type conversion.”

In the near future, we may see large areas that were once covered with native coastal sage scrub and chaparral be converted to non-native weedy grassland. When that happens, the native insects, birds and mammals often give way to other populations.

In the short time that Vic and I have lived in Orange County, we have seen a huge decline in burrowing owls, cactus wrens and loggerhead shrikes, among other species.

And this is how species go extinct. Not with a bang, but a whimper as habitat is slowly, inexorably and permanently lost.

Let’s hope the work of the Orange County Conservation Corps can help reverse this trend.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.