Backbone of the fire fight - China Wall road

Catalina Island- China Wall fire crews working just after fire passed

Backbone of the fire fight - Los Angeles Times:


On a backbone of highway running above the steep Catalina Island canyon known as the China Wall, Los Angeles County fire crew foreman Mo Khazaal calls out to his crew of 10 state prison inmates scraping a fire break around a thick toyon berry bush.

"Keep your dime" -- stay 10 feet apart -- "look sharp. Everybody's eyes on the green," watch the green brush that hasn't yet burned.

The crew is from Mount Gleason Fire Camp 16, near Palmdale, made up of inmates serving short sentences for nonviolent crimes. Dressed in orange fire suits, they pick and hack at the brush, cutting a yard-wide line around a patch of fire.

To the north of the ridge, Catalina Island unfolds as it usually does: with hills of chaparral and scrub oak undulating under a sunny blue cloudless sky. To the south is a smog-brown cloud of hell, fueled by the hiss of unseen flames far below devouring that same chaparral and oak.

In the middle, along the road, stand Khazaal and his crew.

The plan of attack against the Catalina Island is easy to describe and hard to execute: it amounts to surrounding and beating down the flames.

But if that is to happen, it will be largely due to the work of crews like these, fighting fire defensively on rugged terrain, cutting fire lines, sacrificing some vegetation to save a lot.

"These crews are the backbone of the fight," said L.A. County Fire spokesman Scott Ross. "They're the frontline, infantry."

Around Catalina Island today, dozens of crews are working like this, battling small incendiary battles in an orchestrated war against the larger blaze.

Most of this crew is on its second fire season.

"They are firemen first, inmates second," Khazaal says. "They're the best of the best."

They are hard at work at the on one of the thousand mini-battles that go into defeating a mountain fire.

Up here above the China Wall, flames have jumped over the road from the charred canyon to the south. They have torched part of the toyon berry and thus threaten the untouched canyon to the north.

So Khazaal's crew works frantically to isolate the burning bush. Khazaal only hopes that it will burn it all -- a clean burn. A dirty burn -- one that leaves behind the bush's dry skeleton, ready to go up again -- is more dangerous.

For a time, the fire subsides. Khazaal's crew steps back and watches. But then Khazaal got his wish. A wind picks up, and the flames catch some dry brush and begin to rage over the toyon berry again.

"Most of the time we don't have water or hoses or anything," said Khazaal. The line's everything. That's how we fight fires."