BURN POLICY FOR FORESTS COMING BACK : DECISION FOLLOWS RECENT COSTLY FIRES.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Daily News Staff Writer

Fighting the fire that roared last month through Castaic's mountain country cost the nation's taxpayers $7.6 million - about 15 times the cost of burning off the old brush in a controlled blaze.

And Smokey Bear is taking the heat not only for the expense, but the dozens of injuries to firefighters and the loss of watershed and wildlife habitat.

Smokey's plea to prevent forest fire has resulted in decades of dying undergrowth that have fueled the nation's worst forest fire season since 1957, U.S. Forest Service officials said.

Adding to the toll was the 21,500-acre blaze in the Angeles National Forest near Castaic that broke out Aug. 26 and burned for a week, and a 700-acre fire that started Sept. 1 near Wrightwood.

``Frankly, the problem is that Smokey Bear did too good a job suppressing fire,'' said Matt Mathes, a Forest Service spokesman. ``Part of the reason we're in the fix we're in is that we haven't let fire do its job in clearing out the old vegetation.''

With smoldering evidence that Smokey's campaign is backfiring, the government is planning an about-face in the way it manages fire on federal lands, said Mary Jo Lavin, national director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman have approved a policy of prescribed burns on forest land over the next decade, Lavin said.

Congress and the administration have agreed, increasing the budget this year for prescribed burns by 49 percent to $24 million for national forest land alone.

``There's a greater recognition now for the need for prescribed burning to reduce the amount of fuel,'' Lavin said. ``We feel the whole issue of our present policy is captured in a single wild-land fire concept. We're looking at using fire as an effective means of controlling fire.''

A prescribed burn is an intentional fire set by firefighters under controlled conditions. Such burns are scheduled with weather and other factors in mind. In the Angeles, prescribed burns would not be scheduled when inversion layers could trap smoke from the fire and decrease air quality or when high winds could spread the fire beyond control, Mathes said.

``It's a science of finding the right combination of temperature, humidity and wind,'' he said. ``You want the fire to burn, but you don't want it to be a holocaust.''

Studies show a need to burn 3 million acres of federal property each year for several years, a level the Forest Service expects to meet in the beginning of next century.

Scott Franklin is a retired Los Angeles County Fire Department captain and former chief of that agency's vegetation management program.

Franklin, who still works as a consultant in prescribing burns, called on the Forest Service to implement a burn program.

He estimated the cost of a prescribed burn at $25 an acre - about $537,000 for the Castaic fire. A planned burn, he said, also would reduce hazards to firefighters who braved triple-digit heat, erratic winds, bee stings and rattlesnakes in fighting the Castaic blaze that raged out of control for seven days.

Prescribed burns also limit other effects of fire - such as the closure of the Golden State Freeway (5) the day the Castaic fire broke out and the closure of the Castaic Lake Recreation Area during the Labor Day weekend.

``It's just a matter of allocating the funds,'' Franklin said. ``The way they're doing it now is the wrong approach. It's costing us millions and millions of dollars for suppression and those critical water sheds are just being burned out.''

Franklin suggests that region of the Angeles be burned under prescribed circumstances every 20 years or so to avoid wildfire and its unpredictable consequences.