Instant Comfort

IRVINE REGIONAL PARK —  It won’t last long and will never show up on any maps, but this week there’s a new city in Orange County.

It is built around a parking lot at Irvine Regional Park, and, like Leisure World, is restricted to a certain clientele--in this case, firefighters. But there’s little leisure to be had.

To most Californians, wildfires evoke a series of images: walls of flames dwarfing firefighters; ashes falling like snow flurries; helicopters hauling buckets of water; and homeowners on alert with their garden hoses.

Few people see the mini-cities hastily erected nearby, single-purpose entities that exist as long as the fire does and serve as the launch point for the firefighting efforts. And the Baker Canyon fire’s instant city in some ways represented the epitome of portable culture, from the bank of five pay telephones to the 20-stall shower trailer to the 40 toilets.

Within hours of the fire’s start, equipment was rolling into Irvine Regional Park, filling the main parking lot with command vehicles, as other support trucks--hauling everything from food trailers to folding chairs--were assigned their own spots around the manicured grounds. The whole point of the mini-city is temporary comfort, giving firefighters a place to relax after spending up to 16 hours in the brush, and to create a seamless cluster of offices through which field commanders can order extra equipment and know it will get to where it’s needed.

More than 1,200 firefighters continued battling the blaze Wednesday in the hot canyons and mountainsides of eastern Orange County. By the afternoon, firefighters had established fire lines around 60% of the 5,330 acres burned and had extinguished about 15% of the blaze.

Fire Authority arson investigators had not cited anyone for starting the fire by Wednesday evening. The fire started near Black Star Canyon and Baker Canyon roads when someone set ablaze insulated copper wiring, apparently to salvage the wire for resale, fire officials said.

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The mini-city at Irvine Regional Park was tightly planned under formulas mapped out well in advance of the fires.

“It’s all preset formulas based on the size of the fire,” said Stan Matthews, a Tustin-based Orange County battalion chief who was in charge of logistics for this week’s wildfire.

Matthews was among the first to arrive at the Baker Canyon fire and made the call that there was more involved than a little brush fire. His call set in motion the county’s fire response procedures, which made him, as logistics chief, mayor of this little parking lot city.

“The fire went down about 12:30 a.m. [Tuesday],” Matthews said, ducking into the shade of a trailer filled with operations workers. “By 2:30 to 3:30 a.m. we started ordering equipment. We got everything set up by 5 p.m.”

Planning also includes fire prevention. But even best-laid plans can go awry.

A prescribed burn of 900 acres at the center of the fire was postponed in May and again this month because hot, dry weather conditions could have sent it out of control.

“If it’s too dry outside or it’s too hot or it’s too windy, those things all allow it to potentially not become a controlled fire,” said Herb Jewell, chief of the Wildland Fire Defense section of the Orange County Fire Authority.

The result, fire officials said, was that Baker Canyon was primed for the wildfire that whipped through the area this week.

Once there is a wildfire, fighting it is truly a war.

As Napoleon Bonaparte pointed out, an army travels on its stomach. Even if it’s an army of firefighters, a good meal also can be a morale booster, said state Department of Forestry Fire Capt. Ed McLain of Riverside, who was part of the kitchen crew preparing meals and doling out 24,000 bottles of water and 30,000 pounds of ice.

But it’s hard to feed an army if you don’t know how many to plan for. Imagine planning a backyard barbecue for five and having 28 show up.

“They had ordered food for 500, then the fire went to hell in a handbasket and they upped the estimate to 800,” McLain said.

The final head count for dinner Tuesday night: 2,800.

Donations from Boston Market and In-N-Out Burgers helped, but the galley truck still took a serious hit and food had to be reordered for Wednesday and today.

“We just cooked everything in the trailer,” said state Forestry Fire Capt. Sam Wattana of Riverside, who was in charge of feeding the brigades.

It’s not quite loaves and fishes, but everyone got fed.

Times staff writers Esther Schrader and David Reyes contributed to this story.