There is always the chance that you will have fire between you and the burnt area, but the safest place to work a wildland fire is with "one foot in the black". With fire moving as fast as it is in SoCal, direct attack isn't realy possible. But if you can get to it, the black is still the safesty place to be.

Of course this isn't alway possible, when protecting structures and indirectly attacking a fire (building line ahead of an advancing front) but you setup LCES (lookouts, communication,. escape routes and safety zones) and keep a heads-up. Wildland firefighting is intrinsicly safer, it is typically a failure of putting in place LCES or ignoring the "18 watch outs" that get wildland firefighters in trouble.