State's wildfire policy that overlooked SoCal is course correcting

At last month's meeting of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force in Redlands, director Patrick Wright remembered the group’s early days: “Candidly, when I started this job, we got an earful from Southern California.”

- BY NOAH HAGGERTY

JOSH EDELSON For The Times.

A FIREFIGHTER with Cal Fire works a prescribed burn near Hopland, Calif., in early June.

Gov. Gavin Newsom created the task force in 2021 and at the time, Southern California’s wildfire experts told Wright that he and other state leaders “didn’t understand Southern California was different. Its vegetation is different. Its fire risk is different.”

It’s true— the coastal chaparral native to much of Southern California is entirely different from the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra.

More than a century of humans attempting to suppress nearly every fire meant the low-intensity burns that northern forests relied on every five to 20 years to promote regeneration no longer came through to clear the understory. As trees and shrubs grew in, they fueled high-intensity fires that decimated both the forest and communities.

Meanwhile in Southern California, as humans settled into the wildlands, they lighted more fires. Discarded cigarettes, sparking cars, poorly managed campfires, utility equipment and arsonists lighted up hundreds or thousands of acres. Here, the native chaparral is adapted to fire coming every 30 to 130 years. The more frequent fires didn’t allow them to grow, make seeds and reproduce. Instead, what’s grown in places where chaparral used to be are flammable invasive grasses.

But when I moved to Southern California and started covering the wildfires devastating our communities, I had heard only the northern version of the story.

The fire problem in Northern California is more widely understood.

MYUNG J. CHUN Los Angeles Times

OFFICIALS watch crews cut fire breaks in Topanga as part of wildfire risk reduction on Oct. 8.