Ending of inmate clearing
programs led to recent blazes

By Miriam Raftery
The Alpine Sun

     ALPINE — Before the 2003 Cedar Fire, San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors voted to close down five honor camps that once housed prisoners who cut firebreaks and cleared brush. Since then, supervisors have failed to heed a series of warnings and recommendations made by multiple government reports and experts to prevent future devastating fires, whistleblowers reveal.
     “The board was warned. Everyone was warned that by closing down the honor camps, nothing but catastrophic fires would happen. Places like Jamul and Rancho Bernardo in 2007, parts of Lakeside, Harbison Canyon and Scripps Ranch in 2003 and any other major urban areas never should have burned,” Robert Billburg, former probation officer in charge of work crews at the county honor camps, said in an exclusive interview.
     Billburg supplied documentation proving that multiple warnings were provided. A January 2001 San Diego Union-Tribune article stated that proposed closure of Camp West Fork, the last of five county-run, Back Country honor camps that formerly provided inmates to clear brush had “alarmed municipal officials.”
     But the Board, including current Supervisors Ron Roberts and Dianne Jacob, voted to close the last honor camp in 2002, more than a decade after the initial camp closures began.
     Billburg believes county government bears the lion’s share of blame for the devastating consequences of that decision.
     “It was the county that collapsed the master fire plan by pulling out their inmates from cutting brush,” he said. “I would say that 90 percent of the blame for this fire (the October 2007 fires) becoming a catastrophe is on the board of supervisors.”
     “Tens of thousands of work-crew days were never replaced,” he wrote, “as the board of supervisors has now successfully abdicated mostly all of the local responsibility for fire mitigation to the state.”
     In the camps’ heyday, 20 to 25 crews worked six days a week, he recalled. Running the camps cost about $3 million a year.
     “That’s dirt cheap. Arguably, it’s the best money you can spend in the criminal justice system,” he added.
George R. Dean, a correctional deputy probation officer who also supervised crews at county fire and honor camps, shares Billburg’s concern.
     “We were preventing fires. It takes about five camps to put out flare-ups.” Dean called closing the camps, “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard in my life, yet they closed them all with no backup.”
     An August 2003 report by the County Wildland Fire Task Force found that nearly half the vegetation in the county’s 1.35 million wildland acres was over 50 years old. That report warned that “almost 80 percent of the wildland areas in San Diego will burn explosively.”
     The report recommended that the county create firebreaks and adopt a fuel modification program. Two months later, the Cedar fire, worst in California history, joined with the Paradise and Otay fires to char 3,241 structures.
Sixteen people died in those blazes, which cost over $43 million in fire suppression alone, not including property loss or damage claims.
     After the October 2003 fires, Supervisor Jacob was quoted as saying, that firefighters and citizens did not complain when the last fire camp was closed. Closure saved the county $2.2 million a year, she added.
     “The camp’s population had dwindled to less than half its capacity and its operating costs were significant,” she said. “Had public safety leaders opposed the closure of Westfork, there is simply no way the board of supervisors would have unanimously agreed to this closure.”
     Dean disputed Jacob’s statement, “We did write letters, we did complain.”
     Jacob has previously blamed closures on declining crime rates and a drop in the number of inmates. Around 600 to 800 men would be needed to fully man five camps at half the cost of keeping them in jail, Billberg estimated.
     “We would cut firebreaks year-round,” recalled `Bear,’ a former honor camp prisoner who asked that his real name not be published. “The whole Back Country would be checker-boarded with the firebreaks on those ridges, Bear added. “Firebreaks served as roads for emergency vehicles. I was never in a fire that we couldn’t control, because you could always fall back to the next firebreak.”
     Prisoners were paid 75 cents a day to cut firebreaks, or $1.50 an hour during a fire, when Bear served time in the 60s.
     “We eagerly volunteered for the fires, because we got to get out and do something exciting,” he recalled. “It made us feel good. We were actually doing something that was worthwhile, even lifesaving.”
     During the decades when honor camps operated, only one wildfire, the 1970 Laguna blaze, burned beyond East County to the west. But after closure of the camps, brush grew largely unchecked.
     At least three other reports have warned that brush management is a key tool for minimizing spread of future firestorms in the San Diego region.
     These include the November 2003 San Diego County Fire Siege Fire Safety Report, the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Fire commission Report in April 2004, and the San Diego Regional Fire Prevention and Emergency Preparedness Task Force report in October 2004.
     The San Diego Regional Fire Prevention’s report in October 2004 made this damning assessment: “Past studies have shown that with property vegetation clearance and building construction, over 95 percent of structures threatened by wildland/urban interface would survive unharmed.”
     Although the city’s own code requires clearance of 590 acres of brush annually, this year funding for just 80 acres was allocated.
     The October 2007 wildfires burned over 350,000 acres, destroyed 1,400 homes and caused half a million residents county-wide to evacuate.
     After the Cedar Fire, the county did spend around $117 million to better prepare for future fires. That included purchase of two new helicopters and 20 firefighting vehicles, as well as $45 million to remove dead and diseased trees. The county also strengthened building codes, improved communications and made other improvements, Jacob observed.
     “But with fierce Santa Ana winds,” she added, “You can have had a fire truck in every driveway and it’s not going to stop the march of the fire.”
     Jacob added that after the recent fires, she has requested an investigation into whether county inmates can assist state crews to help clear brush.
     But to critics, such actions are too little, too late. “There is blood on our supervisors’ hands for the deaths in these fires,” Billburg charged.

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