IN THE THREE-PLUS DECADES that Frank Pinney has been chief of the Big Sur Fire Brigade, he has faced his fair share of harrowing situations with composure. He stared down three separate fires in three chimney-like canyons in the space of an hour during the Sur Fire of ’96. He’s taken a call telling him about a situation involving a flipped and leaking gasoline tanker straddling both lanes of Highway 1—beneath a power pole, next to the Loma Vista gas station—and calmly helped sort out the situation.

Pinney has felt what he calls “that dry taste in the back your mouth” more in a wildfire-scorched month than most humans will in a Lazy-Boy lifetime—and not so much as hiccupped. But now the old fire chief is nervous.

The current situation in Big Sur unnerves him. He describes the circumstances bluntly, calling them “as dangerous as any I’ve seen.”

A flare-up of factors has conspired to quicken Pinney’s pulse. This fall—always the busiest and most dangerous time of year for fire officials throughout the West—looks bad. Dry grasses and other low-lying forest growth have been piling up in coastal forests for years—their natural rhythm of purge and regeneration stymied by fire suppression and regulation. On top of that, an especially wet spring and dry summer have added more dry fuel than normal.

But the most unsettling element is the massive labyrinth of hardwood trees sitting dead and dying in the Big Sur forest, each tree a highly-flammable victim of an imported pathogen commonly known as sudden oak death.

Hundreds of thousands of these dead oaks now stand or lie atop dry brush, ready to help a fire jump to taller trees like redwoods and pines. This laddering effect is something firefighters fear, because once fires have “crowned” into the wind-charged, hard-to-reach treetops, they get famously difficult to deal with.

The chief has other reasons to be nervous. His minimal fleet of trucks and tankers is dangerously outdated, and during these driest and hottest months of the fire season, his mutual aid team of technologically superior firefighters like those at the National Forest Service is stretched thin across the West.

Pinney’s not alone in his trepidation. Steve Davis, fuel chief for the sweeping 1.9 million-acre Los Padres National Forest, can picture an even darker result from this short-tempered equation of dry weather and mounting fuels. “Sooner or later,” he says, “there may be an event that we can’t recover from.”

MANY LOCAL RESIDENTS find August, September and October to be some of the most glorious months to be alive in Monterey County—June gloom has dispersed, winter hasn’t yet descended, and the area’s adored Indian summer is at full strength. Local firefighters don’t share a love for these months, which they call fire season.

Fire officials don’t get to enjoy the warmth so much as they must feel the heat: grasses, brush, leaves and branches have had months to dry out. Rains are still unlikely for weeks. The forests almost crackle in anticipation of error, arson or lightening.

“It’s a crisis now. It just hasn’t become a political crisis because nobody’s been killed, nobody’s house has burned up, no roads have washed out.”

“This is the time of the year when we get stretched thin,” says Dennis King, who, as battalion chief for the state Department of Forest and Fire Protection, deploys units across the county. “It’s very hard to find time to get days off.”

As this story goes to press, five major fires are rampaging around parts of California—one in southern Los Padres National Forest, one up north in Shasta Trinity National Forest, another further north in Klamath National Forest and two in Yosemite National Park. Total acreage burned from these fires has already roared past a quarter of a million acres. They are also just the latest in 32 separate fires that have chewed their way through California forests in the last 90 days.

The most catastrophic burns in recent local history happened in the Indian summer months. The Kirk Complex fire (a complex being a series of fires that blend or receive one coordinated response) torched 87,000 acres of Los Padres in September and October 1999. The Rat Gorda Complex claimed 85,000 acres in July of 1985. Marble Cone incinerated 176,000 in August of 1977.

This season’s conditions are particularly volatile. “It’s especially dangerous at times like this,” says Cindy Nagai, CDF’s Carmel Highlands fire marshall for the last 16 years. “With the heavy rains this spring we had three different growing seasons—three crops of grass and vegetation. It was a big spring. People didn’t realize how much grass grew so fast.

“Now it’s been so long without rain. This year has been exceptionally bad because of the heat. We’ve been continually sending engines out. We’ve been called out earlier than normal and had longer extended campaign fires than in the past.”

Nationwide, more acreage has already burned this year than any year in recorded history. National Forest Service experts predict a similarly bad year for California. And, as Nagai points out, “The Santa Ana winds haven’t picked up [yet]—it’s only September.”

ITS BEAUTY IS MESMERIZING, its wrath, terrifying. Its warmth can mean survival; its mismanagement can mean death. But for all its paradoxes, fire is unarguably the way of nature.

Tom Francis, who as a CDF Division Chief in Forest Practice specializes in forest ecosystems, says small fires are good, because they get rid of brush that can later pile up and work like kindling at the base of trees.

“A nice cool ground fire removes the fuels which can spread the fire into the crowns before they get big enough to do that,” he says. “Redwood trees are fire resistant on their trunks, but not in their crowns.

“If the loose bark builds up without a fire at the base of a redwood, later it’s like lighting barbecue briquettes. If [fires] went through frequently, those fuels will be cleaned out.”

For centuries, forests evolved with occasional fires. In the last 60 years, wildfire suppression has interrupted the cycle of build-up and firey renewal. In addition to increasing the danger of a big fire, Fracis says, fire suppression chokes out plants that make a healthy forest.

“If dense, old-growth brush builds, nothing can get in there, including deer. It becomes basically a biological desert. Once you set back the brush, often you open it up to different plants and different animals species.”

Fire suppression is mandatory in order for local fire departments to meet their mission—protection of life and property. But suppression nevertheless prevents forests from finding their natural stasis. Fire officials know this well.

“The forest can protect itself by having fire burn rapidly through the understory,” says Pinney. As a result, a primary tool for fire prevention and forest management is controlled burning. But fire officials rarely get to use it.

“People don’t like the idea of fires by their stuff,” Pinney says, and that makes the first step for arranging a prescribed burn in an area like Big Sur difficult.

“With private landowners, we’re always trying to get authorization,” he says. “Not everybody is comfortable turning on a fire in a mosaic of wilderness.” He acknowledges that runaway controlled-burns, like a blaze in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 2000 which ultimately scorched 47,650 acres, haven’t inspired much confidence.

Should landowners agree to a burn, that’s just the beginning. A laundry list of appropriate and specific conditions—including everything from the fog level to the frog level—must be met before a burn can be undertaken.

The Burn Index, a sophisticated prediction of flame intensity for specific fuels under specific conditions, must be just right. Winds have to be perfect. Weather must align properly. Humidity needs to be high. The burn has to be cleared with the Air Quality Resource Board. Firebreaks need to be cut and standby resources need to be mobilized. Certain species and their migration patterns can even come into play.

Between the fears and the rules, little desired burning takes place. “The process is not all the way to paralyzing,” says Pinney, “but it certainly makes molasses flow fast.”

BETWEEN A RIDGE-POINT LOOKOUT called Buzzard’s Roost and the Big Sur River, a beautiful but haunting sight awaits the attentive eye. A noble, twisting tanoak stands tall in a clearing, reaching skyward with a pale trunk and a headdress of bleached, lifeless leaves.

It reaches toward a towering coast redwood, whose deep claret-red trunk and dark green needles contrast sharply with the ghostly contours and pale leaves of the oak. Because of a pathogen that has choked the life from the bone-dry oak—and the uniquely perilous fire situation it creates—the tanoak now threatens the towering redwood’s life.

This snag is not alone. In just the Big Sur region, hundreds of thousands of oaks stand dead or dying—or have already collapsed into the now-dry brush. The total count has been estimated at more than 1 million.

The murderous villain in this high-stakes eco-drama is mysterious, exotic and microscopic.

“Where sudden oak [death] came from and how it got here is speculative,” says UC Davis plant pathologist Dr. Dave Rizzo, a leading expert in the field.

Scientists can confirm that the spore Phytophthora ramorum is non-native. They also know it slipped into the US undetected, on ornamental plants, sometime in the 1980s. But they have not determined where it originated.

Once it arrived, Rizzo says, it wasn’t long before it was splashing though coastal forests. “Somebody, or many people, planted plants next to a forest,” he says, “and then it spread very well on its own without help.”

Its presence wasn’t noticed until the mid-‘90s, when tanoaks seemingly began to die en masse in Marin and Santa Cruz counties. When the tanoaks began to succumb to the pathogen after months of infection, the change was relatively sudden: their leaves faded from a healthy green to pale brown in just weeks, providing the inspiration behind P. ramorum’s common name. (Other oaks, like the black oak and the coastal live oak, are more resistant, often lasting five years or longer before dying off, or even surviving relatively intact.)

The same lush and wet conditions—like the last two consecutive springs that have accelerated the buildup of flammable grasses—also help the poison-enzyme-secreting fungi thrive. This has stacked more dead and dying oaks to the stockpile of grass and brush. “It is a water mold,” Rizzo says. “Its spore stage requires rain.”

Sudden oak death now haunts cool, moist ecosystems all the way up to Oregon, though Rizzo notes it’s currently most pervasive here in Big Sur. As the forests here become more afflicted, scientists scramble to learn more about the problem, forming cooperatives like the UC Berkeley-based California Oak Mortality Task Force, or the local group known as the Big Sur Ecosystem Management Project. They and others have identified more than 100 sudden oak death hosts, including key carriers like the bay laurel tree, which survives leaf infections but is proficient at spreading spores—often raining wind-blown droplets on the tanoak.

The tanoak, as the only identified host vulnerable to the pathogen’s non-lethal leaf disease and its lethal trunk disease, doesn’t fare well from there. The scars of its losing struggle are most visible in the dark reddish-black stains and oozing sores on the trunk, and the chandeliers of dead hanging leaves.

Still, little more is known about the alien microbe, including its big-picture consequences. It’s still unclear how the tanoak’s disappearance will affect the overall ecosystem of the forest, how the species that depend on its acorns and shelter will do without it, and even how to best track, let alone contain, the advance of the fungus that’s killing it.

“This is, unfortunately, one of the most remarkably broad, aggressive and complex introduced diseases of our modern times,” says Dr. Matteo Garbelotto of UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science.

Its effects on the forest’s ability to survive a wildfire could be similarly profound.

THE DRY GRASS WOULD BE the crumpled newspaper. The parched brush, branches and leaves, the kindling. The thousands upon thousands of dead and dying oaks, the hard-burning firewood. Steve Davis completes the analogy. “The forest,” he says, “would be the bonfire.”

Sidney Reade, Carmel Valley’s fire chief, explains further. “With sudden oak and everything else, we’re nervous there’s a lot of fuel out there in lots of layers,” she says. “When you build a fire and you really want it to burn, you layer it thick like this, so once it gets going it has lots of fuel.”

The forest now resembles a carefully built fire ready for a match, Pinney says. “The natural separation between low and high fuels is gone,” he says. “They now have a ladder between them. If the standing sudden oak help the canopy go, then you have a major problem.”

Los Padres’ Davis completes the scenario: “Once it crowns out, you’re into a different realm,” he says. “Winds are stronger and you have a flashy fuel there that starts easily and carries above the ground.”

Such a fire, burning hot and hard, and moving into crowns in multiple places, is dangerous to fight, and threatens civilians as well as firefighters, Davis says. History offers a hint of what could happen soon on a larger scale, now that sudden oak death has upped the fuel load.

“In 1971, the first Molera fires were followed by heavy rainfall that washed away part of post office and the River Inn,” he says. “This is very possible.

“We could have six square miles burn in four hours—that was a condition we had in the forest in the Marble Cone fire in Santa Lucia Creek in 1977. It could do that again.

“That severity, and that quickly, it’s easier to overrun people, trap people, and kill people. You could have that happen in a more populated area. When that happens it will be devastating—the potential loss of life, firefighters, police officers, not to mention the public.”

Davis says that without the correct prevention measures being taken, catastrophe is possible.

“With the right events,” he says, “we could be looking at the death of Big Sur.”

ALL TOLD, THE OLD FIRE CHIEF has reason to be nervous. Frank Pinney’s volunteer Big Sur Brigade outfit is a first-to-respond operation that keeps fires in check until the National Forest Service or other reinforcements arrive and take over command. But this season, like most, local Forest Service firefighters range as far off as Idaho, Arizona and Texas.

“The most nervous I get is when the resources begin to get dispersed throughout the West,” he says, “and we would need the air tanker or helicopter to help knock a sudden oak fire down, and it’s not [available]. Then we’d be hamstrung.”

The Brigade’s gear doesn’t inspire much hope. Their 1977 International engine seems a better fit at a vintage car show than a firehouse, though it doesn’t look out of place next to the Brigade’s 1983 Chevy water tender.

Brigade Capt. Preston Sult, a 30-year Big Sur resident, is charmingly cavalier about the state of their vehicles. “God protects drunks, fools and volunteer firefighters, right?” he asks. “We’ve had mechanical difficulties, and been really fortunate—it’s been inconvenient, but no deaths.”

But the group is earnest about their upgrade needs, having initiated a matching grant drive to raise the roughly $1 million needed to replace the 25-to-30-year-old hand-me-downs they currently drive into life-threatening fires.

And while Pinney and company endeavor to refurbish their fleet, other actions are underway to mitigate the daunting hazard hatched by sudden oak death and other conditions. They range from common sense to quarantine.

The Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station and the California Oak Mortality Task Force (COMTF) have initiated a community response called the Big Sur Sudden Oak Death Management Project. Through the program, landowners meet with University of California researchers to test experimental treatments, including eco-friendly phosphate sprays and selective tree removals.

“It’s kind of a whole-forest look at what people can do to slow spread and protect high-risk tanoak from disease while research continues to plug along,” says COMTF’s Katie Palmieri.

Meanwhile, the 14 California counties with wildland P. ramorum outbreaks have been quarantined, and gardeners and people living on the urban-wildland interface are being enlisted to consult available resources for information on limiting the disease.

On the fire side of the equation, other efforts are also taking place. Chief Davis just doesn’t think it’s enough.

“The area is screaming for more proactive prevention,” he says. “It’s very easy to do it, it’s just the will. There is a need for supplemental funding because of sudden oak.

“It’s a crisis now. It just hasn’t become a political crisis because nobody’s been killed, nobody’s house has burned up, no roads have washed out.”

Given the complications surrounding controlled burns, the preventative engineering that is taking place involves road clearances, property management and—most daunting—fuel clean-up.

The wildland fire-fighting groups won’t begin to attack the fuel situation until fire season has been quenched by late fall rains. In the meantime, the Monterey Fire Safe Council, a coalition of land managers formed to “mobilize Californians to protects their homes, communities and environment from wildfires,” has grants in process to start clearing the dead oaks.

The local resources to help reduce fire risk (and sudden oak death) are out there:

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California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
Comprehensive guide to fire dangers and a link to local firehouses.
fire.ca.gov

333-2600 Monterey Fire Safe Council
Great info hub for easily making properties fire safe.
firesafemonterey.org

California Oak Mortality Task Force
Full of tools to learn about and defend against the disease.
(510) 847-5482
suddenoakdeath.org

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“We just need to knock down as many Sudden Oaks as we can in the most dangerous parts,” Fire Safe Council rep Bob Sayre says. “They’re like big Roman candles.”

While education and enforcement are also part of the effort, hands-on engineering remains most critical, says the Sudden Oak Task Force’s Palmieri.

“If everyone works together,” she says, “those areas with the highest fire risk can be greatly improved.”

Others aren’t so optimistic. Brigade Capt. Sult has lived in Big Sur for almost 30 years. He’s seen sudden oak death arrive in Big Sur and flourish. He’s fought fires for 19 years with Frank Pinney. And he’s nervous, like the chief.

“The fuel-clearing won’t be enough,” he says. “I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a fire. It’s the normal human thing: We talk about it and we talk about it, then something nasty happens and we do something. For the average person, it doesn’t really affect them, but if there’s a big fire, they’ll be screaming, ‘Why didn’t we do something?’”