Controversial plan aims to reduce future wildfire risk

Animals and machines are part of prevention effort

- BY NOAH HAGGERTY

Photographs by MYUNG J. CHUN Los Angeles Times WADE CROWFOOT, top, records video during an aerial tour. Above, a fire crew walks in the Santa Monica Mountains in Topanga during a risk reduction project.

Nine months after one of the worst fires the region has seen in recorded history, some parts of the Santa Monica Mountains are covered in thick, green and shrubby native chaparral plants; others are blackened, mostly fire-stricken earth where chaparral used to thrive; and still others are blanketed by bone-dry golden grasses where the land had years ago been choked out by fire.

Amid this tapestry is a scattering of homes and businesses with only a handful of roads snaking out: Topanga. The dangers, should a fire roar down the canyon, were painfully clear at a thousand feet to public officials viewing the area from a helicopter last week.

"If there are any issues on the boulevard ..." County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said into her headset, trailing off.

"The community is trapped," said Wade Crowfoot, California secretary for natural resources, finishing the thought.

Over the same mountains where the Palisades fire roared, the state is working on a nearly 675-acre flagship project to stop the next firestorm in the Santa Monica Mountains from devouring homes and killing residents.

Crews from the Los Angeles County Fire Department and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a local land management agency, were cutting a miles-long web of fuel breaks in the northern Santa Monicas between Topanga and Calabasas. In the spring, they hope to perform a prescribed burn along the break. Just northwest, on the other side of Calabasas, the Ventura County Fire Department deployed 500 goats and 100 sheep to eat acres of invasive grasses that are prone to conflagration.