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Palomar Mountain
State Park's scenic and historic fire lookout tower will be lifting
its shutters again this spring and starting its fourth year of
renewed vigilance for wildfires near and far. It will also welcome
park visitors to climb its stairs and visit with the working lookout
volunteers. Boucher Hill Lookout was built for the California
Division of Forestry in 1948 and was staffed by their lookouts for
35 years. The tower's location on the west side of Palomar Mountain
gave its lookouts commanding views over Valley Center, Pala Valley,
Pauma Valley, a large portion of the La Jolla Indian Reservation and
north San Diego County all the way to the coastline. Boucher Hill
was boarded-up in 1983, but in 2013, enough volunteers were found to
staff the new tower for 40 percent of its first fire season. Robust
recruiting continued, and in 2014 and 2015, Boucher Hill Tower was
staffed virtually every day from May through Thanksgiving.
Lookout duties
involve scanning the entire area of view with binoculars at least
every 15 minutes. When a small plume of smoke is noticed, the
volunteer sights a 1920's-era device on it to determine its compass
angle, or azimuth, from the tower. The smoke's distance from the
tower is then calculated using maps, photos, and lists of known
landmarks. The volunteer then radios Cleveland National Forest
dispatchers and provides the azimuth, distance, and other
information. The dispatcher inputs that data into a computer that
calculates and displays where the fire is burning so that
firefighters can be sent to the location. The reporting process
takes only a few minutes, as the object is to get firefighters on
scene before the fire has a chance to grow into one of the major
catastrophes that San Diego County and Palomar Mountain have
experienced in recent memory.
The lookouts also
serve as eyes and ears for the state park and the forest service.
They monitor radio channels for both agencies, and communicate with
forest service and park staff daily. The lookouts are also weather
reporters by providing instrument readings and weather changes to
dispatchers and firefighters, to aid in the prediction of fire
behavior.
During the last two
seasons, the Boucher Hill volunteers spotted and reported over one
hundred columns of smoke, from nearby on Palomar Mountain, to the
City of San Diego, to the coastal foothills, and north into
Riverside and Orange counties. They also recorded 77 lightning
strikes. Lightning is often the cause of wildfires. Lookout
volunteers record the locations where lightning hits the ground, and
those locations are carefully watched for days after the storm
departs in case shifting winds blow smoldering embers into brush or
timber fires. The volunteer lookouts also stayed busy entertaining
park visitors, logging 8,800 tours in 2014, and 7,800 in 2015.
New volunteers will
undergo training during early May and will be in full service by the
middle of the month, staffing the Boucher Hill Lookout tower every
day until winter weather reduces the likelihood
and spread of wild land fires. |
