A Burning Issue: The LA Times Mischaracterizes Chaparral in Their Story On the Powerhouse Fire

Whenever there is a large-scale fire here in southern California, the press repeats the same narrative about our native flora that just continues a great deal of misunderstanding of our environment and our relationship to it.

            The Powerhouse fire, which has been burning in the Angeles National Forest since last week, is the subject of this story in the Los Angeles Times: Powerhouse fire: Old dry brush proved explosive. Among the descriptions of the chaparral in the story are the following sentences:

This old chaparral, with layer upon layer of dead growth underneath, has proved difficult to fight.

Chaparral tends to grow taller as it ages, collecting dead material below it.

Readers are left with the impression that chaparral builds up dead and highly flammable twigs and wood as it ages. This is not true. While dead twigs and leaves do fall from the canopy of a chaparral stand, creating a blanket of duff on the ground, most of the plants that comprise chaparral are actually evergreen. As someone who hikes around in chaparral country, I can attest that stands of chaparral that are decades old can be quite lush, with decomposing duff on the ground that is about as flammable as most other mulch.

            San Diego County, where I live, experienced huge wildfires in 2003 and 2007. If the thinking that is conveyed in this article were true, then the stands of chaparral that are 40, 60, or 100 years old would have been more likely to burn than younger stands of chaparral in these wildfires. This did not happen. As a matter of fact, GIS analysis that I did on the 2007 fires indicated that areas that had burned in 2003, only four years earlier, were actually more likely to burn than older flora.

            Before we had millions of people making their homes here, the chaparral had rare chances of being ignited. Thunderstorms are rare along the coast and foothills where chaparral grows. It is just unlikely that a lightning strike will start a fire among the chaparral. Unlike western forests, which are estimated to have, historically, experienced ground fires every seven to 20 years, chaparral may not burn for decades. Some stands of old growth chaparral are well over 100 years old.

But now add to the naturally occurring thunderstorms ignition from cigarettes, sparks from machinery, arson, and stray embers from barbeques. With the prevalence of nonnative grasses, which dry up early in spring and serve as tinder the rest of the year, you have a formula for lots of wildfires in southern California. That should have been the greater narrative of this LA Times story.

For a greater understanding of chaparral, visit the California Chaparral Institute's website.