REGIONAL REPORT : Budget Cuts Begin to Hit Where It Hurts : Forests: Spending constraints have forced drastic reductions in the number of federally paid firefighters as autumn arrives and the fire season worsens.

When Santa Ana winds kick up in the fall, firefighters in the Angeles National Forest usually hang close to their fire stations, sniffing the wind, studying the horizon and getting ready for action.

“You wonder when the next fire is going to pop,” said Bob Serrato, supervisor of one of the U. S. Forest Service’s eight expert firefighting crews--dubbed Hotshots--in Southern California. “When it starts during those times, you know it’s going to be running fast.”

Southern California firefighting supervisors like Serrato always get a little antsy in the fall, but it’s worse than usual this year. At the start of what is usually a season of gusty northerly winds that can turn a spark in a patch of chaparral into a seething, multiacre blaze, almost half of the Forest Service’s California standing force of firefighters is being laid off because of budget constraints.

By Tuesday, the first day of the new federal fiscal year, the four national forests most susceptible to fast-moving autumn fires--all of them in Southern California--will have lost almost 500 temporary firefighters. Many of the temporary or seasonal workers are veteran firefighters who have worked for the Forest Service seven or eight months a year for five years or more.

In addition, Forest Service staffing cuts mean fewer firefighters will be available to operate engine units, helicopters and the water trucks that resupply the engines, federal fire managers say.

“It makes you feel very vulnerable,” said Serrato, who stands to lose 16 of the 20 people on his Dalton Hotshots, who operate out of a station in northern Glendora.

Forest Service administrators say the cuts are normal seasonal layoffs, enacted a month or two early. They acknowledge that those two months are the most volatile of the Southern California fire season, which usually runs from mid-May through November.

But they feel that shifts of both state and federal personnel can fill any gaps.

“We’ve got firefighters all over the place,” said Richard Henry, fire director for the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Division, which covers California, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. “We just have to move them in if we run short.”

But Forest Service analysts, using computer models and fire data collected over decades, estimate in in-house reports that up to 33,000 acres of forest land that could have been protected may be lost to runaway fires in the four national forests in Southern California this year.

The four national forests--the San Bernardino in San Bernardino and Riverside counties; the Cleveland in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties; Los Padres in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties, and the Angeles in Los Angeles County--are traditionally the largest in the number of acres burned and the amount of resources employed to protect them.

Some officials warn that the budget cuts also could spell danger for hillside and forest communities.

“You can just about guarantee that, if a fire starts in high Santa Ana winds, it will burn toward houses,” said John Hatcher, fire manager for the San Bernardino National Forest.

Under any circumstances, this year could be an especially hot one for firefighters in California. Five years of drought have left an accumulation of dry, combustible vegetation.

The State Department of Forestry estimates that there are 10 million dead trees in California forests and millions of acres of dry brush. Some Southern California areas, like those around Julian in San Diego County and Idyllwild in Riverside County, have been particularly hard hit by drought, said Department of Forestry spokeswoman Karen Terrill.

“On Mt. Palomar (in the Cleveland National Forest), 90% of the trees are dead,” she said.

The federal cutbacks have to do with a series of budgetary developments that primarily affect Southern California. First, the Forest Service lost about $6 million for fire management when state and federal administrators dissolved a 30-year-old agreement under which the Forest Service was paid to provide fire protection to state and private properties within the boundaries of the national forests.

A new arrangement, involving a complicated trade-off of fire coverage responsibilities, was negotiated to avoid having to transfer large amounts of funds between federal and state agencies, said Henry, of the Pacific Southwest Division.

“We’ve balanced out the acres that (each agency) covers so there are no drastic transfers of dollars,” he said.

The national forests also had to provide an extra $6 million for congressionally mandated pay raises in the Los Angeles area and for the court-ordered construction of separate facilities for new female firefighters, who were hired as a result of federal anti-discrimination litigation.

Although the Forest Service budget will ultimately cover those items, Henry said, the national forests will not get any extra money from the slow-moving budgetary pipeline for about three years.

Thus, though the budget for the federal fire program in California is actually expected to go up this year, in real terms it will be millions in the hole, fire managers say.

“What it means is that I’ve got a $7.5-million program and I’ve been given $5 million to pay for it,” Hatcher said.

Other fire managers had similar complaints. All in all, the Angeles and the Cleveland forests stand to lose about 150 temporary firefighters each, the San Bernardino about 100 and the Los Padres 75, fire managers say.

Henry insists that the staffing cutbacks will not affect the federal government’s ability to fight fires. Those estimates of thousands of acres lost to fire in the Southern California forests this year are long-range forecasts rather than short-range predictions, he said.

“All it says is that, under a given set of circumstances, this is what we could expect the losses to be,” he said. “They could be wrong.”

Increased losses are part of the overall equation that the Forest Service has to work with, Henry said. “If fewer people show up at a fire or if it takes longer to get there, yes, acres will burn up,” he said.

But a national network of cooperating agencies and fire departments is always ready to shift resources to large fires in the region, Henry said. Crews of prison inmates, state Department of Forestry firefighters and non-firefighting Forest Service personnel can be brought in to fight fires in Southern California, he said.

In case of a large, uncontrollable conflagration, the National Fire Center in Boise, Ida., could send hundreds of federal workers from the Bureau of Land Management, the National Parks Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal agencies, Henry said.

In addition, he said, those who were laid off could be rehired on the spot, until outbreaks are brought under control. When there are widespread fire conditions, Henry said, the Forest Service can tap a $150-million emergency firefighting fund for “severity” circumstances.

Because of continuing dry weather in Northern California and because of the prospects of Santa Ana conditions in the south, Henry said, the Forest Service expects to receive almost $700,000 from the fund over the next three weeks. The money will be used to staff extra fire engines, he said.

But national forest fire managers, who direct firefighting field operations, say they have been told that temporary firefighters will be kept on only if they are involved in fighting a blaze.

The fire managers also are skeptical about the ability of the national network to attack fast-moving local fires. “The trouble is they’re not available until after the fire starts,” said Tom Myall, fire manager of the Los Padres National Forest. “It’s all a matter of response time.”

“Initially, we’re going to have fewer resources to put out a fire,” added Tom Harbour, fire manager of the Angeles National Forest. “The reinforcements have to come from a lot farther away.”

While the Forest Service struggles to make ends meet, the state Department of Forestry is facing cutbacks of its own, potentially reducing the state’s firefighting capacity even further, said Terrill.

An appeal last June by Gov. Pete Wilson, asserting that California was facing the “granddaddy of all fire seasons,” won an allocation of $20 million for emergency firefighting. But Department of Forestry officials expect their budget for next year to be nibbled away during budgetary negotiations.

Meanwhile, negotiators seeking additional firefighting funds from both the state and federal governments say they have been undercut by the weather. Recent cool, humid summers have drastically reduced the average burn off--the Los Padres, which ordinarily would have lost 12,000 acres by now, has lost only 14--and the news about fires in the state has been mostly good.

“It’s ironic that we’re facing the worst (fire) threat the state has ever faced yet we may have the mildest fire season in history,” Terrill said.

If the worst should happen and the Angeles starts lighting up like a Kuwaiti oil field around mid-October, Serrato knows that more than half of his crew will have already departed.

Some of them will go elsewhere to look for other jobs.

But a few--like Mike Donahue, a tall, pale firefighter who has been coming out from Ohio regularly since 1987--will just wait.

“I’ll stick around a little while,” he said. “I have a feeling things are going to pop.”