It was devastating, but nothing new for the state. In the early 1990s, a series of fires - Old Topanga, Kinneloa, Laguna, Paint, Tunnel/Berkeley Hills and Harmony - together caused 30 fatalities and burned 4,907 structures and 52,422 acres.
That series of wildfires a decade ago spawned a report, Command During Catastrophic Interface Wildfires, which was published in 2004 and written by Michael Rohde, a battalion chief and 35-year veteran of the Orange County Fire Authority. The report is an influential set of best practices for how fires should be fought when numerous structures ignite quickly and simultaneously along the interface (i.e., boundary) between urban development and wild lands.
The report is as relevant to firefighting efforts today as it was four years ago when it was released.
Malibu, Calif., Oct. 23, 1996 -- A California Department of Forestry official watches the wildfire as it burns up a hillside.
Recognizing the Interface Wildfire
Seven experts were interviewed independently for the study. Each of them had developed similar practices over time, even though they hadn't recorded them in writing or verbally, Rohde said.The best practices that each expert applied in his unique locale and environment were published in Command During Catastrophic Interface Wildfires. Topics also include: how to recognize an interface wildfire, survive in that environment and achieve the best results.
There were 47 factors common among the six fires assessed in the study. They included:
- All fires occurred during critical fire weather patterns involving Santa Ana or other "foehn winds" - a down slope wind near a mountain range.
- Native chaparral shrubs, such as manzanita, chamise and ceanothus, were abundant in the fire areas and served as fuel for the flames.
- Multiple major fires occurred simultaneously in the surrounding region.
- Each fire began as a wildfire and transitioned into structures.
- The fires occurred following a wet winter that was preceded by multiple years of drought.
These interface fires exhibit group characteristics, Rohde said. "These fires are different than the normal day-to-day brushfire or interface fire," he said. "They pick up intensity, pace and a style all their own when they're going to go big - that set of characteristics was cataloged in my research; that's when you start to have the worst day of your life. But stand by - 42 more horrible things are going to happen."
Picking up the Pace
During the late-1990s fires, the initial locations of command posts were generally inadequate, according to the report. Command posts burned in three of the six fires that were studied. The inability to provide adequate and timely logistical support, including water and fuel, compromised the firefighting efforts."These events happen with speed and agility to the point that they outreach and outpace the ability of the firefighters to combat them and commanders to counter them," Rohde said.
In an everyday brushfire, command begins with Division A on the left and Division Z on the right, with the anticipation of putting a few other divisions in between. Odds are, Rohde said, additional resources will arrive in time to get the job done adequately, even if there's a rapidly evolving fire.
However, during interface wildfires, that strategy won't work.
"There aren't enough chiefs on duty, even regionally, to fill enough division-supervisor jobs to provide for quality, on-the-ground management of the fire, which automatically
throws your whole organization for a real loop," he said. Consequently safety, organizational control and target prioritization are compromised. The study also points out that during most huge, urban-interface losses in California, the loss is done within 12 hours, Rohde said.
"A lot of the time, it's over within six hours - and that's faster than we can get a lot of stuff there," he said. "You see the pictures with fire engines there by the hundreds parked in a staging area ready to go - but we need to find a way to get them there more quickly, to engage them more rapidly in the fire ground [and] to use them more efficiently in a regional fire siege."
Organization Is Key
In the aftermath of the same major fires, command organizations and experts identified successful methods and systems to help reduce firefighters' risk and increase organizational efficiency and accountability during catastrophic interface wildfires.Some of the methods are:
- preplanning for interface wildfire risks;
- using a specific approach within the incident command system (ICS) for major interface fires, and organizing by branches first rather than divisions;
- requiring the operations section chief and incident commander to communicate constantly during early incident development;
- providing offensive perimeter control and defensive structural protection activities simultaneously; and
- assigning firefighters to assist in initial situation and resource status tracking, incident communications, staging and other initial logistics functions.
"About 99 percent is a factor of setting up the ICS to getting good basis of command and delegation," said Inspector Sam Padilla of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. "Assigning individuals to certain parts of the fire to manage it correctly, to implement a plan, to get the communication lines open and, once again make sure everyone's on the same page - it's about 99 percent of it."
A fire's early phase can be chaotic, and the degree of chaos can depend on how many structures or people are threatened in the first few hours, said Gary Nelson, former assistant fire chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department and one of the many experts interviewed for Rohde's report.
"Almost no one can handle all the demands," he said. "So the stress of dealing with more than you can deal with, with the resources that you have on scene, is very stressful and can lead to some command breakdowns and more chaos."
However, eliminating disorganization from the command structure should start early on when using the ICS, he said. But be prepared for chaos on the ground, no matter what.
"The people in charge start making things a little bit better, and gradually over four to 24 hours, you get a complete organization in place," Nelson said. "Then you have a pretty good ability to use the resources in the most important places and can shift strategies and move resources with your strategy changes."
This piece of the puzzle needs more work, Nelson added. "I think we can do a better job of teaching command officers to change strategies and assign resources in a more balanced way to have a stronger offense," he said. "One of the errors I've seen on many fires is when a significant number of structures are threatened, some commanders abandon all offense - and when you abandon offense, that generally means more structures are threatened downstream."
To help change these response methods in the future, a series of classes was developed for wildfire curriculum. "I've been an instructor over the years, and my experiences in those classes are there's not enough emphasis on balanced strategies and balanced resource management," Nelson said. "I would look at those classes as a way of adding more of that kind of training,
and there are simulator exercises that force the young people coming up through the system to have to deal with that stress and maintain composure while they're doing that."
Lessons Taught
Though the study has been in the public eye for four years, little has been done to remedy the deficiencies the report called out."What can we do to address these deficiencies that we have identified?" Rohde asked. "Some of these things, some of the standard features or characteristics of these fires, are organizational or human factors. How can we work on those?"
Specifically Rohde mentioned working on providing automation of command and control systems, automated satellite recovery of positioning and place of resources, and computer data management of resource allocation.
"How do we overcome those obstacles to give us greater ability to deal with and respond to these things and start to whittle away some of these problems?" Rohde asked.
Fortunately Rohde's study is working its way into wildfire training and command and control classes.
"We need to teach this to commanders who might experience these things one, two, three or four times in a career - or maybe once in a lifetime," he said. "You know, how do you achieve best results in your community, in your setting, when you're finally at that fire and you've never seen this thing before? And we know that, from history, before you can amass a lot of fire trucks, before you can get an incident management team here, you are going to go through all these bad things. How do you negotiate these bad things and do the best job you possibly can for you, your people and the people you serve?"
Rohde's study is a blueprint for how to meet these challenges, and he said it's been widely accepted - so widely accepted, in fact, that it's caught him by surprise.
"We've taught the lessons learned from the paper to many incident management teams, both federal and state level, throughout the western United States, Canada and Australia. We're talking to the Italian and Greek governments about some of these lessons learned now and how we can do training for them."
Now Rohde and his experts are focusing on the 2007 Southern California wildfires to see if the lessons are still true and if there are any more lessons they can add to the list. Because they're just now beginning to assess those wildfires and the response to them, Rohde said no new lessons learned have been discovered. Until the new report is released, the 2004 report remains useful and practical.
"I think the most profound thing is that there's great value in these studies to capture information and share that with future incident commanders," Rohde said, "so they can get ahead of the power curve a little bit and not have to experience it all through the school of hard knocks."
Increasing Intensity
The global warming debate is ongoing, but whether it's man-made or natural climate change - or a combination of both - it's real, and wildfires are doing more damage as a result of drier forest conditions and abundant fuel. Therefore, Rohde's wildfire study is even more pertinent."My opinion is that the increasing intensity and frequency of fire in the landscape is definitely a feature of climate change; most people believe that today," Rohde said. "Now whether you're a global warming guy, or this is a result of human intervention or not, or this is a cyclical thing - there's still a lot of debate. People I respect on both sides of that fence can argue that, but the fact is, everybody agrees - 'Wow, look what's going on with fires. They
are much more dangerous today than they've ever been during my lifetime.'
Padilla said humans are expanding communities and neighborhoods into urban interface - the hills, foothills and wilderness. "So when we did have wildfires out there, it wasn't impacting us," he said. "But now that we are expanding our neighborhoods and places we want to live, that's why you see such a huge interface - this combination of fire coming in threatening these homes and schools because we are expanding into that area."
Bill Clayton, former division chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, agreed and added that he thinks the fires grow larger because many of the fire resources, such as fire engines, are sent to protect houses. This is what people protect first - life, property and valuable resources, in that order, he said.
"So we take massive amounts of fire engines and put them toward saving the houses," Clayton added. "When you're protecting homes, which is a very good thing to do, you're defensive. You're not offensive. And then those resources are not being used to put out the perimeter of the fire to stop it from spreading. The demands of populations have basically overpowered what we have as a relative firefighter gets a fire balance."
Nelson said it appears that the intensity of fires is growing. "And at the same time, the climate is changing," he said. "But in California and some of the other Western states, it's the amount of dead fuel because dead fuel creates more intense fires."
Rohde said both frequency and intensity are increasing.
"We are having these catastrophic, huge landscape fires with acres that are three, four and five times larger than anything that occurred when I was a rookie firefighter. They are happening with greater frequency, with intensities that have never been witnessed before by any firefighter alive today," he said. "Those kinds of experiences were only being predicted at the turn of 2000, but now we're starting to live them. It's my opinion that we're probably headed for an episode that's even much worse than what we are seeing today."
