Hot Winds Fan Worries About Brush Fires

Warm, dry Santa Ana winds brought more parching weather to Southern California Friday, ratcheting up the brush fire hazard that will remain a threat until the arrival of the first rains of the season.

The high temperature at the downtown National Weather Service station on the USC campus was 93 degrees--12 degrees above the normal high for the date--and there were numerous readings at or near 100 degrees in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

Stacey Johnstone, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said it’s all the result of a classic Santa Ana condition: a dome of high-pressure air over the Great Basin spawning winds that heat and dry out by compression as they sweep down coastal canyons to the sea.

For firefighters, that parched feeling in the upper sinuses means one thing: It’s time to pack a “brush bag” containing extra clothes, a toothbrush and maybe a candy bar and get ready to move out into the rugged, chaparral-choked back country surrounding metropolitan Los Angeles.

“When I woke up this morning and went to my car, it was warm already, with no fog or clouds,” said Robert McGuire, of Los Angeles Fire Station 74 in Tujunga. “When it’s kind of warm and dry first thing in the morning, that’s a big clue that things have changed for the worst.”

Even though this year’s unusually cool months of June, July, August and September may be remembered as the summer that never was, Capt. Terry Waters of Station 74 cautioned that the fire season can continue well into late fall. All it takes is a few Santa Anas for the brush and dead leaves to turn into tinder, the stuff that fuels flames.

Station 74 should know. It is responsible for covering the largest brush area in the city of Los Angeles. Waters is a veteran of the monstrous Big Tujunga blaze more than 20 years ago--a firestorm that raged westward from the San Gabriel Mountains into the San Fernando Valley.

As the hours ticked by Friday, temperatures rose. By midafternoon, top readings included 100 degrees in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, 98 in Van Nuys and San Gabriel and 97 in Pasadena, Montebello and Long Beach.

Shortly before 3 p.m. Friday, the relative calm of Station 74 was punctuated by a 911 call: “Grass fire. Wentworth, La Canada Way, off Mary Bell Avenue.”

Protective turnout coats and helmets were grabbed as the firefighters swung aboard Engine 74 and the big truck thundered out of the station house.

Within 10 minutes, the small grass fire in a residential neighborhood was out.

“It’s very reassuring” said resident Ruth Stern of Shadow Hills, cell phone in hand. “I’m glad to know they got here that quickly.”

With similar weather forecast for today, the firefighters will remain on alert.

Johnstone said the current heat wave is not expected to break until Sunday, when a return of the normal onshore flow of cool, moist air from the Pacific is expected to drop temperatures to near normal levels.

Times staff writer Martha L. Willman contributed to this story.