Out of the Ashes : New Plants to Take Root in Fire’s Wake

The devastating arson fires that marched across Ventura County’s golden dry canyons last week leaving a wake of destroyed homes, charred grasslands and blackened sycamore groves also carried some positive news in terms of the future, ecologists say.

New plants will take root where old vegetation once blanketed the area. Seedlings that waited for decades just beneath the surface for their chance at life will be watered with winter rains and warmed into new sprouts by spring sun.

And an abundance of wildflowers will flourish next spring as the wild lands absorb the nutrients from the downed vegetation.

“This spring ought to be beautiful” in the Santa Monica Mountains, said Rose Rumball-Petre, natural resource specialist with the National Park Service. “In fact, we’ll begin to see green within a few weeks.”

Paul Edelman, staff ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy that manages thousands of acres scorched by last week’s Thousand Oaks fire, said some of the 200-year-old oaks and sycamores may take years to return to their pre-fire condition. But the other flora will be back better than before.

“In some ways, it’s a real treat for an ecologist because there is a whole seed bank in the soil waiting to come alive, and you don’t know how it will express itself,” he said. But he acknowledged that the fire was a drastic means to stimulate the growth. “It’s a bit too much,” he said.

Some residents whose homes were threatened by the fire considered that an understatement, saying they were angered by any talk of nature’s cycle, regrowth and the positive aspects of the fire’s destruction.

“This was not nature, this was a man-made fire,” said Michael Feinman, a Ventura County physician who could see flames from his Agoura home Wednesday. “You can accept what God gives you. But I don’t see this as anything other than man-made and calamitous.”

Wildfires, whether caused by arson or a lightning bolt, are as much a part of Southern California as earthquakes, said DeLoy Esplin, resources officer for the 1.9-million-acre Los Padres National Forest, where a fire near Ojai blackened about 1,600 acres last week.

“Wildfires are always going to be with us,” he said. “Just like hurricanes and tornadoes in other parts of the world.”

Nevertheless, Esplin acknowledged that the fire was catastrophic for people whose homes were destroyed. “People are part of the ecosystem too,” he said.

But it is those people whose homes were damaged who should take the greatest precautions to prevent catastrophe, he said. They should have land cleared around their homes and avoid the kinds of dense vegetation like trees and other brush near houses that ignite easily.

Those actions are needed ahead of time because it’s impossible to manage a wildfire when east winds are blowing.

“It’s like saying you can manage an earthquake. You can do a little damage control, but basically, you just have to wait for the weather to change,” Esplin said.

And regardless of the cause of the fire, the effect is the same for the forest.

“The plants don’t care how the fire was started,” he said. “Periodic burning is the natural state. But natural doesn’t necessarily mean good as far as people are concerned.”

And more devastation and damage could be ahead. The denuded hillsides now have no brush to stabilize them. If winter storms are heavy enough, they could trigger flooding, erosion and mudslides, Esplin said.

“The fire is only half the problem,” he said. “The absence of vegetation just magnifies the damage and intensity of a storm by five or 10 times.”

The county’s largest fire, the Green Meadow fire that started in Thousand Oaks, also scorched the edges of marshland in the county’s largest wildlife preserve at Point Mugu.

Although patches of the marshland burned, most of the habitat used by endangered birds that nest in the area was spared, said Ron Dow, environmental manager for the U.S. Navy base. And he believed none of the birds themselves were harmed.

“The Belding’s Savannah sparrow nests in the marsh, but they wouldn’t have nests now,” he said. “And the least terns are probably in Argentina right now.”

The Green Meadow fire concentrated mostly in the peaks and canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains. And although none of the land burned will be reseeded because that is now considered “ecologically incorrect,” the denuded slopes will get a helping hand from the hundreds of thousands of gallons of fire retardant dropped on the blaze, naturalists said.

The bright pink material contains the same two main ingredients as common back yard fertilizer, said George Roby, who retired as supervisor of the Angeles National Forest after 31 years with the U.S. Forest Service. Roby now works as a consultant for Monsanto Co., which manufactures the PHOS-CHEK that was used to suppress the fire.

The retardant is also chemically engineered to react with the plants to form carbon, which suppresses the fire and will not carry a flame, Roby said.

The material also reacts to form water, which causes a type of steaming effect after it is dropped on the plants, Roby said.

That is in contrast to the retardants used before the 1970s, which actually sterilized the land, Roby said. The rust-red flame retardants used then also carried a permanent dye, which left boulders and cliff faces defaced, he said.

The new formulation is still a bright pink color, which allows pilots to easily spot areas where the material has been dropped, then fades to earth colors within two to three weeks, he said.

“It’s quite an art and a science,” he said.

But the best science is that of nature’s rejuvenation, biologists said.

“We’ll see wildflowers that haven’t been seen in years,” Rumball-Petre said.