One of the biggest issues with shooting at the Fox Ranch was its 20-mile distance from the studio. Shooting there came with the built-in cost of schlepping crew members, actors and equipment. But there was another, far more serious consideration: brush fires. In a 2000 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Alan Alda recalled a particularly hairy close call. Per Alda:
“We had to be evacuated from [The Fox Ranch] once because of a fire that didn’t, that time, hit the set. But we had to get out because they said, ‘If you don’t get out now, when it comes through, it’s gonna come through at forty miles an hour.’ And you can’t get down the road that fast, you know, even in trucks because there’s winding country roads.”
“M*A*S*H” almost completed its 11-season run without incident, but in a stroke of remarkable bad luck, a fire swept through the ranch while they were shooting the two-hour finale and destroyed the 4077th’s encampment. It was a potentially devastating blow, but the producers rolled with the punches and wrote the fire into the show.