Unidentified Boy Admits To Starting A Fire In California

LOS ANGELES - A boy playing with matches has confessed to starting a wildfire that destroyed 63 structures near Los Angeles, officials said on Tuesday.

The unidentified youngster, believed to be a preteen, was questioned by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department investigators on October 22, a day after the Buckweed fire started rampaging across 38,000 acres in the Santa Clarita area, 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

The boy "admitted that he had been playing with matches," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.

It was initially believed that downed power lines had started the fire.

The boy was sent home after confessing, and the District Attorney's office will consider whether to press charges.

The Buckweed fire was one of about two-dozen conflagrations that ravaged southern California last week, destroying 2,300 buildings, according to the California Office of Emergency Services. The fires have been responsible for 12 deaths and 78 injuries.

Arson or pyroterrorism is being blamed for a second blaze that has destroyed 15 homes in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, and a reward of $250,000 has been offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever started the fire.

$150,000 US reward for information on California Pyroterrorist

SAN DIEGO - As residents began sifting through the ashes of an estimated 1,800 destroyed homes, authorities intensified their investigations into the possibility that one or more of the major fires was started by pyroterrorist(s).

In Orange County, police continued their search for an individual suspected of lighting the Santiago fire, which burned more than a dozen homes and 100 square kilometres. They offered a $150,000 US reward for information leading to the capture of the pyroterrorist/arsonist.

In San Bernardino County, two men suspected of pyroterrorism were arrested for lighting small blazes as hot Santa Ana winds raged through the area earlier in the week. The two men face felony charges for trying to start a fire during a state emergency, which could add years to their sentences if convicted. Bail for one of the suspects has been set at $1 million, while the other man was denied bail.

"They will not get out of jail as long as I'm DA," said Mike Ramos, the district attorney in San Bernardino County.

With emotions still running high amid the devastation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a stern warning to anyone arrested on arson/terrorism charges.

"I think we want to get that message out there: Anyone that sets a fire is going to stay in prison for a long, long time," Schwarzenegger said.

Since the wildfires began last Sunday, more than 2,000 square kilometres of grassland have been scorched, from the U.S.-Mexico border north to Los Angeles.

By Friday morning, 9,000 firefighters reported big gains in containing the biggest fires in the San Diego area. The 800-square-kilometre Witch Creek fire, which devoured 1,060 homes alone, was 30 per cent contained. But it was still threatening the town of Julian, about 100 kilometres northeast of San Diego, because winds blowing in from the Pacific were pushing flames back inland.

The death toll across southern California reached 12 after the discovery of four charred bodies late Thursday at an immigrant camp east of San Diego.

As authorities began assessing fire damage that could exceed $1.6 billion US, complaints have begun to emerge about bureaucratic snags that delayed the deployment of airplanes to fight the blazes.

Schwarzenegger has adamantly rejected accusations that red tape was to blame for the loss of some homes. He said there were ample aircraft, but high winds early in the week made it impossible for many to fly.

"We did lose houses; we lost more houses than we should have lost. But you've got to think of it in a positive way: We saved thousands of houses," said Peter Brierty, the assistant fire chief in San Bernardino County.

A Martin Mars waterbomber, one of the largest forest-firefighting machines in the world, flew out of Lake Elsinor, Calif., early Friday afternoon loaded with 30,000 litres of water.

The first mission for the giant Second World War-era flying boat, which was sponsored by San Diego, was the 40,000-hectare Harris fire.

"The Mars is ideal for this type of work," said Port Alberni, B.C., businessman Wayne Coulson, the ship's owner.

"It can fly in low and slow and drop its water with precision. That's a key."

An estimated 500,000 to one million people were forced from their homes at the height of the fire danger on Wednesday. As many as 10,000 people sought refuge at the 50,000-seat Qualcomm Stadium, home to the NFL's San Diego Chargers.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders ordered the stadium closed at noon Friday, with the remaining 350 evacuees headed home or to other shelters.

Schwarzenegger joked that some evacuees told him "they have gained 10 pounds" since arriving at emergency facilities, which were mostly well stocked with food and supplies.

"What we have seen, as soon as the fires broke out, was really extraordinary. I think that the rest of the nation is looking at California as a model state," the governor said. "Unlike all the other disasters that we have had all over the country, this time I think everyone got their act together."

California: 25,000-acre blaze was deliberately set

October 25th 2007:

ORANGE COUNTY, California - One of the larger fires in Southern California was deliberately started by someone with apparent knowledge of arson, a fire official said Thursday, suggesting that the person might have been capitalizing on wildfires to use pyroterrorism to hamper California's economy and kill more people.

The Santiago Fire in Orange County was started in two places along a little-traveled road, according to Chief Chip Prather of the county's fire authority.

The fire, which has burned more than 25,000 acres, was started in brush just off Santiago Canyon Road, not close to homes. It spread rapidly, indicating the arsonist had some knowledge of winds and other factors.

"It is a confirmed arson. There was evidence found at the scene. That is the purpose of our early declaration of it being an arson-caused fire," Prather said. He would not describe the evidence.

Prather said officials originally thought the fire had three points of origin instead of two.

The Santiago Fire's points of origin are considered crime scenes, said Jim Amornino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

The reward for information leading to an arrest has increased to $250,000 -- $50,000 each from the governor's office, the U.S. agency of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the FBI, Prather said. KFI radio has chipped in another $100,000, the sheriff's department said.

The state established a toll-free arson tip line at 800-540-7085. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said anyone convicted of arson would be dealt with harshly.

If a suspect is to be found, "it's going to be by a clue from the public," said county Sheriff Mike Corona.

About 1,100 firefighters were working on controlling the Santiago Fire, which has destroyed at least 22 structures, according to Orange County Fire Battalion Chief Kris Concepcion. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the fire was only 30 percent contained Thursday morning after being 50 percent contained the day before.

The motive of the Santiago Fire's arsonist was a mystery to Concepcion.

"That's the part that I really can't figure out, to tell you the truth," he told CNN. "That individual knew on Sunday when this fire started that we had, really, the perfect storm, if you will. We had the heavy Santa Ana winds, we had the low relative humidities, we had the high temperatures.

"And then for someone to even think about doing something as reprehensible as starting a fire where they knew the fire would grow as rapidly as it would -- traveling about three, 3½ miles in about an hour -- is just really absolutely unconscionable," he said.



The smaller Rosa Fire in Riverside County, 100 percent contained at 411 acres Thursday morning, was also probably arson, state officials said.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles Fire Department investigators are looking into whether a man who was arrested on suspicion of arson in the San Fernando Valley may have had a role in any of the ongoing blazes, an L.A. police spokeswoman said.

Catalino Pineda, 41, was arrested Wednesday, Officer Kate Lopez told CNN. Witnesses told police they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside in the West Hills area of San Fernando -- northwest of Los Angeles -- then walking away, Lopez said.

Pineda was already on probation for "making excessive false emergency reports" to police at the time of the arrest, Lopez said. His bail has been set at $75,000, she said.

The fire he allegedly set was brought under control, but now authorities want to find out if he had any role in the other wildfires.

In San Bernardino County, John Alfred Rund, 48, was arrested Tuesday evening and charged with setting a small fire along a rural roadside near Victorville.

Rund was to be arraigned Thursday morning in Victorville. He was being held in lieu of $750,000 bail.

The county's district attorney's office on Thursday also filed arson charges against Anthony Riperti, 47, of Redlands. A statement from the office did not say when or where Riperti is accused of setting a fire. He is being held on $250,000 bail and will be arraigned later Thursday.

The San Diego County Sheriff's Department also arrested an adult and a juvenile accused by an anonymous tipster of starting a fire in Vista in the northern part of the county. In a written statement, the sheriff's department identified the adult as Gorgonio Nava. The Vista Fire Department extinguished the blaze before it grew out of control, the statement said.

Investigators have determined that the Grass Valley Fire in San Bernardino County was not caused by arson, and a preliminary investigation into the cause of the 10,152-acre Slide Fire seems to indicate arson was not a factor, sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beaver said.

Greek fires may be treated as terrorism

Monday August 27, 2007:

A Greek prosecutor today ordered an investigation into whether arson attacks, which have been blamed for the worst forest fires in decades, could be considered terrorist acts.

The public order ministry said Dimitris Papangelopoulos, who is responsible for prosecuting terrorism and organised crime, ordered the investigation to determine "whether the crimes of arsonists and of arson attacks on forests carried out in the country during the summer of 2007" could come under Greece's anti-terrorism law.

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The investigation would also seek to identify those who were responsible, the statement said.

At least 63 people have died in the fires. A blaze broke out today on the fringes of Athens, burning down a slope of Mount Ymittos and threatening a suburb of the capital.

Four planes, a helicopter and 15 trucks with 45 firefighters attended the fire as it burned through shrubs toward the suburb of Papagou. A pall of smoke hung over central Athens, and the smell of burning permeated the air.

Firefighters and planes from across Europe, backed by soldiers, police, officials and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, joined the fight yesterday against forest fires that have caused death and destruction across Greece over 48 hours.

Italy, France, Germany, Norway and Spain despatched aircraft and commandos to a nation that by last night appeared increasingly unable to combat the fires.

With authorities trying to stop two world heritage sites - Olympia and the fifth century BC theatre of Epidavros - being burned on the Peloponnese, officials did not rule out that hundreds of people could also be missing, having become victims of disorganisation and bungled evacuation plans.

Since the first fires broke out on Friday, the hardest hit area has been the southern peninsula - a popular destination for British holidaymakers - where high temperatures and gale force winds have fanned the flames.

"The damage is terrible, without precedent. We are doing everything we possibly can to help people, to save lives," said the acting interior minister, Spyros Flogaitis.

Over the weekend, television channels depicted harrowing scenes of people burned alive in their cars as they belatedly tried to flee the flames. On Saturday, police said they found the bodies of a mother and her four children who were incinerated when their home near Zacharo in the Peloponnese was engulfed by flames.

Despite the mass evacuation of villages, towns, hotels and resorts - thousands of tourists have been forced to camp on beaches - officials said many of the elderly and infirm were refusing to leave their homes.

"There are death notices everywhere," one local resident said. "Everyone knows someone who has lost a person to the fires."

A senior official in Olympia had expressed concerns over whether the ancient monument, the site of the first Olympic games, would escape the flames. By last night it appeared that attempts to keep the fire at bay had been successful: the fires scorched the yard of the museum, housing a number of famous classical sculptures, such as Hermes by Praxiteles, but planes, helicopters and scores of firefighters halted the advance.

"With self-sacrifice, firefighters fought 'trench battles' to rescue these sensitive and important sites," the public order minister, Byron Polydoras, told reporters.

The foreign intervention came less than a day after the country's prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, declared a state of emergency and appealed to the European Union for help. With an estimated 170 fires on 42 fronts and new ones erupting every hour, he said the situation was simply too much for Greece to cope with alone.

Yesterday, the French leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, offered Mr Karamanlis further aid after it emerged that two French tourists were among the casualties. Greece's foreign minister, Dora Bakoyiannis, said she expected 31 aircraft from 12 countries to arrive today.

Despite the overseas assistance, authorities remained pessimistic that the fires, which had intensified as they raged through six pine forests, would be brought under control soon. "The winds have fallen and that is helpful but this is a situation that cannot be confronted easily," said Nikos Diamantis, a spokesman for the firefighting force.

By last night about 500 conscripts had joined locals, often armed only with buckets and hose pipes, in the west, north and south of the country, as the fires spread to the island of Evia, killing at least six people there.

The tardy intervention of the army added to widespread condemnation of the government's handling of the catastrophe. Many criticised Mr Karamanlis, who this month called a snap election for September 16, of failing to do enough to prevent the outbreak of some 3,000 forest fires that have destroyed large parts of Greece this summer.

The ruling New Democrats have also been denounced for undermining the firefighting force, reorganised by the former Socialist government ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic games, by handing top jobs to inexperienced political appointees.

"This is nothing short of a national tragedy," said Giorgos Papandreou, Greece's main opposition leader, after visiting the Peloponnese. "The government has a lot to answer for."

Writing in the Sunday Vima, the columnist Rihardos Someritis said: "We had a beautiful country but we are increasingly losing it to fires, rubbish and the illegal buildings [built on land cleared by blazes]."

Yesterday, as fires continued to smoulder in the Hymettus range around Athens, the health ministry appealed to inhabitants to stay indoors and keep their windows shut because of the high density of ash in the air.

Wild fires across Greece are frequently blamed on arsonists working on behalf of developers intent on building on prime forest land. Mr Karamanlis said it was "too much of a coincidence" that so many of the blazes had erupted simultaneously and often in the dead of night. The government yesterday announced bounties of up to €1m (£680,000) for information that could lead to the arrest of arsonists.

The Threat of Arson-Induced Forest Fires as a Future Terrorist Weapon of Mass Destruction

In 2006 Robert Arthur Baird of the United States Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting published an article titled "Pyro-Terrorism - The Threat of Arson-Induced Forest Fires as a Future Terrorist Weapon of Mass Destruction" in the journal "Studies in Conflict & Terrorism" in which he states that:

"The United States is at significant risk of a future pyro-terrorist attack - when terrorists unleash the latent energy in the nation's forests to achieve the effect of a weapon of mass destruction - the threat, must be defined America's vulnerabilities understood, and action taken to mitigate this danger to the United States."

This shows that the US military is starting to evaluate the potential threat of a "pyro-terrorist war" in which terrorists hiding in America could instigate a slew of forest fires, grass fires and even urban fires in cities in an attempt to overthrow the American economy and use up its military and fire-fighting resources and demonstrates a lack of people serving in both fire stations and the national guard across America.

We recommend reading his article if you can find it in your local library. It is Volume 29, Issue 5, dated June 2006.

Suspicious fires destroy forests in northern Lebanon

Oct 24, 2007, 16:08 GMT

Ehden, Lebanon - Wild fires raged across vast areas of forest in north Lebanon as choppers from nearby Cyprus helped combat the flames threatening population centres.

Civil defence rescuers said no casualties have been reported in the fires that broke out Tuesday evening and developed early Wednesday across the dry land after a long summer.

Lebanese army helicopters and Cypriot choppers worked throughout the day to help combat the blaze spreading to populated areas in the Ehden region.

According to an eyewitness some residents of the Ehden region slept outside their homes because the fires were close to their homes.

Police blocked traffic along the Zghorta-Ehden highway, which penetrates the region's forests and olive groves to avoid civilian casualties.

'We are carrying out a double mission, on the one hand we combat the forest fires and, on the other, we try to prevent the blaze from reaching population centres,' a civil defence worker said.

He attributed the fires to the dry land after a hot summer.

But Interior Minister Hassan Sabaa pointed an accusing finger at arsonists.

'The big question is: how did these fires start late at night and in areas that are not linked to the road network,' Sabaa told Voice of Lebanon radio.

'The fires we think from initial reports are intentional,' Sabaa added.

'God is the best firefighter,' said Fadi Mouawad a resident of Ehden.

In the Muslim villages of north Lebanon the elderly clergymen called for special 'rain prayers.'

Wild Fires have Swept across more than 6,000 acres of forest land earlier this month killing one person and injuring scores.

Italian planes were brought in the country to help put out the raging fires.

Pyroterrorism Definition

Source: Wikipedia

"Pyroterrorism" or "Pyro-Terrorism" is the act of setting fire to large amounts of land and/or property for political reasons, usually in a systematic or random approach in order to escape capture from authorities. The purpose of pyroterrorism is to destroy a particular country or region's local economy and kill innocent civilians in a way that prevents the would be arsonist from being easily identified or captured.

In ancient times pyroterrorism was used as a war tactic to raze crops and destroy an enemy's ability to feed themselves, thus weakening the foe. Some believe that pyroterrorism presents a very serious threat to the future of the United States.

The topic of pyroterrorism has received very little media attention except in countries like Australia, Lebanon, Greece and most recently in California in the United States.

The seriousness of the problem...

A lot of people don't think pyroterrorism is a serious threat. But take a look at this image from the FBI website which documents the financial damage from arson/pyroterrorism during the 2001 to 2006 period:

Forget nukes, worry about lighters and gasoline...

NATO and key members of the United Nations keep a very tight lid on nuclear technology. The chance of a terrorist organization actually capturing or developing nuclear technology and finding the materials needed to make it is actually extremely slim.

So slim it only happens in movies.

But in our modern era there is another way to cause widespread destruction and economic chaos:

PYROTERRORISM

And it is a far more dangerous threat to America and its allies. As demonstrated by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a country can deal with the loss of a city and will recover from the nuclear destruction of a city.


But pyroterrorism (or pyro-terrorism) presents a much more different threat because it can spread far beyond the reaches of a city's economy. It can raze forests, crops, livestock and force mass evacuations across whole states or provinces.

We can rebuild and fix cities like we did in New Orleans, but if a whole state is burnt to the ground we will have dramatically different consequences.

Can you imagine the deaths and economic devastation if a group of terrorists decided to burn all of the United States to the ground?