Outdoor Residential Landscape Burning Suspended Throughout County

Speaker 1: 00:00 In an effort to prevent wildfires. Outdoor residential burn permits in the county are suspended as of today official saying hotter, drier weather and a large amount of dead grass is raising the fire risk. Joining me to discuss the wildfire potential in the county is San Diego County fire authority. Chief Tony Meacham. Welcome chief. Thank it's pleasure to be here. It is predicted this summer will be cooler than last summer. How will that impact the potential for a wildfire? Speaker 2: 00:26 You know, it's kind of funny. I've been doing this 35 years and you know, for 35 years I've been saying we're going to have a terrible fire season, but we still have all of the conditions to have a, a serious fire season. We have still experiencing the six years of the drought. Most of our trees are dead, are brushes dead. And then this year with the rain we got a lot of grass and that's usually where our fire starts. So while it might be cooler, we still expect a fairly active summer Speaker 1: 00:49 and we've gotten a good amount of rain this season as you mentioned. Uh, and it seems to be sticking around. Does that help the situation at all? Speaker 2: 00:56 It does help us. Uh, it's, it's really pushed off kind of our peak burning for a few more weeks. Although even last week, one day after the rain, we had four fires down in south county for about 30 acres. So, uh, the fuels are ready to burn. And what we have to remember is about 80% of the brush in San Diego is dead. It's beyond its life cycle. So we could get 500 hundred inches of rain, but as soon as we get two weeks, a hot, dry, warm weather, we're going to be right back to the, to having fires every day. Speaker 1: 01:21 How likely is it that we could see an urban fire? Speaker 2: 01:24 You know, we have that potential every year and, and a, you know, call and stole San Diego cities, fire chief, him and I talk a lot. And, uh, you look at the amount of homes on, on these canyons in, throughout the city. Even while we may not have a really large fire, we have that potential for you know, a smaller 10 acre fire but maybe to destroy, you know, it doesn't home. So I think the threat is always there in San Diego County. Speaker 1: 01:44 So we've certainly got the potential, we've got more grass. There's, there's the potential for urban fires. How has the county addressing the potential for all these fires? Speaker 2: 01:52 Yeah, that's been a really exciting beer this year. First on the state side, the state legislature after what happened last year has been really active. There's almost a hundred bills in some form or fashion that are going to affect fire safety that we're working through. We also received a very significant budget augmentation to cal fire. So I'm getting an additional fire engine in the county and where we're really going both with the state and the county is starting to address the threat of wildfire before it occurs. Uh, and those are through mitigation. So I'm getting a full time fuels crew next week. The county of San Diego is going to give us another 1.5 million a year for pre fire activities. And I think that's really the long term answer is we have to change this kind of culture from we're going to put out every fire and fire's bad to the realization we're always going to have fires and so what are things that we can do to improve the survivability of our communities? Speaker 2: 02:41 And so what should county residents be doing? You know, I think there's three things that they can really do. Number one is understand the fire risk. If you live in a fire prone area, recognize that you have a risk and it really follows the ready set go program. We need people to do their defensible space that that hundred foot of clearance is probably the single greatest thing that a homeowner can do along with recognizing their threat and then have a plan. You know, when it's a hot dry Santa Ana wind day, that's probably the time in the morning that you want to take some steps, make sure all of your windows are closed, you have things ready to go if there's a fire and we ask you to evacuate and then really stay engaged in, in this kind of fire issue. You know, when we have fires that's kind of present in everybody's mind. And then six months later we, we try and talk about community preparedness and I and people don't want to prepare, but even with the public safety power shut offs that are, that are occurring, people need to think about having drinking water and food and backup power. Um, and those things are critically important for us. Speaker 1: 03:41 And as you said earlier, we had four fires in southern San Diego County last week. How quickly we're firefighters able to respond to those? Speaker 2: 03:48 Oh, we were there very quickly and we are responding to the first fire, no tie lakes road. And it was actually our, our fire engine that came across the second and the third fire. So we were in, we were there on all three fires in under 10 minutes. Fires didn't burn really great. They were kind of a dirty early season burn. But, but the one the gasoline fired did about 30 acres, which uh, you know, a day after it rained, I think everybody kind of looked around and said, hey, as soon as soon as we get some warm sunny weather we're going to be busy. Speaker 1: 04:15 And how did that all, you know, how does the time impact getting the fire under control? Speaker 2: 04:20 Yeah, the sooner we get there, the, the greater influence we have when a fire is still small. And so, uh, kind of what you see as the damage or the size of our office is directly related to our response times. And between cal fire in the county, they've made tremendous improvements. I mean, I have 16 more fire engines in the back country now than we did five years ago. So our, our response times are down, you know, by minutes in a lot of areas of the county. So it does have an effect the earlier that we get there. And the other part with those response times, I think people forget about 85% of what we do is the pre hospital medical responses. So you know, minutes lead to cardiac survivability and prevention of brain death and all those sorts. It's really important that we get there. Quick, Speaker 1: 05:02 you mentioned that you all have more fire trucks. Talk to us a bit more about the tools that help firefighters quickly respond to wildfires. Speaker 2: 05:09 Yeah, I think it starts with the basic fire engine and we'll never move away from that. That is us getting there and and uh, putting hose on the ground and squirting water. Um, certainly our hand crews play a critical component of what we do and their role is to strip the brush between the fire, what's, what's burning and what's not burning it. So you know, really hard work with chainsaws and it really hasn't changed in a hundred years that we're still using axes and shovels to fight wildfire. And then certainly aircraft, you know, we use the aircraft, they don't put fires out, but they slow the advance of the fire to allow our, our ground troops to follow up. We've seen a tremendous improvement in the aircraft, both with the sheriff's program, San Diego gas and electric is bringing on an additional helicopter forest this summer. Um, and then we're really excited with cal fire. We're getting into the [inaudible] business. So a Ramona here locally is to have a c one 30. We will have one flying in and out of here this summer. And we're about two years out from our permanent new aircraft being here. Speaker 1: 06:04 Hmm. And what about the cameras in the back country? Do they play a large role in this too? Speaker 2: 06:08 Yeah, the cameras are a unbelievable, I'll tell you a short story. So last year we had the west fire that burned in July of last year, hot dry hundred and six degree day in east county. We had a fire down along the border until Zura. I was watching that from home. We got a nine one one call of a fire and Alpine. They immediately switched the cameras and within probably 15 seconds of the first nine one one call, we knew we had a bad fire in Alpine. So the aircraft that were already in the air, we diverted all that aircraft based on what we're seeing in, um, in the cameras. So they're very, very valuable tool. And our dispatch center is one of the control points. So we have the ability to, to kind of point tilt, tilt and zoom those cameras in to look at a fire. So it's a, it's a great tool and oftentimes, especially with Santa Ana's, we make it reports a three, four or five fires over the county coming in at once. And now through those cameras were able to decide, hey, this one in this area is going to be bad and we start reallocating resources. So we use them everyday. Speaker 1: 07:05 Mm. And what have firefighters and learned from the causes of the, the last big fires in California in terms of how to prevent the next big one from happening? Speaker 2: 07:14 Yeah, prevention is always on our mind. You know, you look at the last couple of major fires. So they were electrical in nature, the Thomas Fire, uh, the Santa Rosa fires. And certainly recently we just released the cause of the Campfire in paradise. We've done a tremendous job along with San Diego gas and electric here of a, of what they've done to harden their infrastructure. But our inspection program, we inspect literally every mile of their power system here in San Diego and we work together to mitigate those. And then a lot of it is education. I don't think people realize what can cause a fire mowing your lawn, a dry grass at two o'clock in the afternoon, we'll start a fire that probably wouldn't start a fire if you were doing and that it's seven 30 in the morning. So a lot of public education that we do. Speaker 1: 07:57 All right. I've been speaking to San Diego County fire authority chief Tony Meacham chief meet. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me in. Speaker 3: 08:05 Yeah.