Bobcat Fire’s spread tied to few resources, too much old growth
LOS ANGELES — A lack of firefighting resources in the hours after it was sparked allowed a fastmoving wildfire to make an unprecedented run through Southern California mountains and eventually find fuel in old-growth trees to become one of Los Angeles County’s largest fires ever, an official said Tuesday.
The Bobcat Fire has burned for more than two weeks and was still threatening more than 1,000 homes after scorching its way through brush and timber down into the Mojave Desert. It’s one of dozens of other major blazes across the West.
“This is a stubborn fire,” Angeles National Forest spokesman Andrew Mitchell said. Only about 100 firefighters were initially dispatched on Sept. 6 when the Bobcat Fire broke out and swiftly grew to about 200 acres, he said.
“To put that into perspective, normally for a fire that size we’d have at least double or triple that number of firefighters,” Mitchell said. At the time, many Southern California ground crews and a fleet of retardant- and waterdropping aircraft were assigned to multiple record-breaking blazes in the northern part of the state.
By the time staffing was ramped up, flames had found their way deep into inaccessible forest.
“A lot of that old growth hadn’t seen fire in 40 or 50 years. The fire had a lot of places to go,” Mitchell said. The blaze had more than doubled in size over the past week to 170 square miles.
Cheryl Poindexter lost her desert home.
“That fire came over the hill so hard and fast that I turned around and I barely got my eight dogs and my two parrots out,” Poindexter told ABC7. “You can see everything is ash.”
The Bobcat Fire was one of more than two dozen major wildfires burning across California, including five of the largest in state history.
Twenty-six people have been killed. Officials were investigating the death of a firefighter at another Southern California wildfire that erupted earlier this month from a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device used by a couple to reveal their baby’s gender.
Charles Morton, 39, died Sept. 17 while battling the El Dorado Fire in the San Bernardino National Forest east of Los Angeles.
Morton, was a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service and a squad boss with the Big Bear Interagency Hotshot Crew.
“Charlie is survived by his wife and daughter, his parents, two brothers, cousins, and friends. He’s loved and will be missed,“Morton’s family said in a statement.
More than 9,000 firefighters were battling large wildfires across Oregon and Washington.