Northern California Wildfires Threatening Thousands Of Homes

Speaker 1: 00:00 The major fires in Northern and central California continue to explode in size. The L N U lightning complex and Napa and Sonoma counties has more than doubled in size since yesterday in all nearly 350,000 acres have burned as a loose ring of fires surrounds the Bay area, thousands of enforced to evacuate and the larger Bay area has been engulfed in smoke causing the air itself to become dangerous. Johnny Mae is Cal fire spokesman, Thomas chutes, and Thomas. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. We heard from governor Newsome yesterday that the major complex fires are a combination of these smaller fires. These hundreds of smaller fires caused by lightning strikes. Do firefighters have to use different techniques to fight these kinds of fires? Speaker 2: 00:50 Definitely, you know, operationally on the, on the ground, we're still fighting the fire the same way. Um, getting water out there, cutting line around it. But when you have hundreds of fires, every little fire, even if a fire is only a few acres, our goal is to keep it as small as possible so that it doesn't become a burden. And to do that, it draws resources from the ground and from the air. And, and so, um, really moving those resources around and, and trying to best prioritize these fires is, is a huge challenge for us. And, uh, we're, we're really, we're bringing in all the resources we can to try and help us with that. Speaker 1: 01:22 Have firefighters achieved any containment on these major fire complexes? Speaker 2: 01:27 Some of them, yes. You know, um, earlier, uh, the Apple fire was burning before we really saw a lot of the lightning strikes that fire's looking very good now, um, the, the river fire up in Monterey County is, is looking better. Um, the, the tricky part is a lot of times we'll get containment around the area where the fire started. Um, but it continues to grow in a certain area. And so, um, we slowly work our way around to, um, the head of the fire to ultimately try and stop it. But when we have conditions, when we have weather conditions, um, like we're having with these high temperatures, um, a lot of those areas, we're in a red flag warning. And so everything's kind of coming together to, to, um, really drive that fire. And that, that really, uh, that really hurts us when we're trying to build a containment line around the fire and it continues to push in certain directions. Right. Speaker 1: 02:16 Can you explain how this intense heat that we've been having? How does that affect the fire and how does that affect firefighting? Speaker 2: 02:23 A lot of these fields have already dried out over the past few months. You know, we haven't had any really good solid rains in a lot of these areas. So you have timber that that's already dead or dried out. You have the grasses that have already cured. You have the brush with where the fuel moistures are, are incredibly low. And so the fire is able to take advantage of that. And when you have the air temperatures that are very high, um, it's really able to make some significant runs. If you add that in with the topography on these areas where it's very rural, um, running up Hill fire can run up Hill very fast. It, it ends up preheating the, uh, the fuel in front of it, um, with the hot gases. And so all these, um, things kind of come together, you get a little bit of wind on it just to make things worse. And these fires are really able to, to grow very significantly as we saw last night, um, as these fires were really, uh, starting to take off and grow and acreage Speaker 1: 03:16 Has San Diego sent resources up North to help fight the fire. Speaker 2: 03:20 We have, you know, we we've obviously felt the temperatures down here. It's, it's very hot and sticky and miserable, but, um, we, we haven't had, uh, quite the same conditions that they have up there for one, our, our lightening activity was, was far less significant. We did have a fire start, uh, last week, um, up in the Warner Springs area. But, um, generally speaking, we haven't nearly seen them at Mount of a thunderstorm activity. So, um, we were able to send a lot of resources. San Diego is a very big unit. We have 40 stations. And so we were able to, to send up 27 engines to assist, um, the North with all their lightening fires to do that. We've had to bring on, um, a lot of extra help. So we've held all firefighters on duty. We've staffed up all the extra equipment. We have, um, extra crews, extra dozers to help, uh, help supplement to make sure San Diego is still covered in case we do get a fire. Cause, uh, we certainly do still have the potential down here to have a, a significant incident. Speaker 1: 04:17 Right. How severe would you say our risk of wildfire is right now? Speaker 2: 04:21 I'd say it's still a significant, um, you know, a day like today where the, the moisture is higher. There's a little bit higher humidity. The fire's not gonna run quite as severe as it would, um, potentially in the North or later on in this season. Um, but, but it is still significant. We have the, um, the potential, the CDs fires run in San Diego. We have a lot of the same conditions. We have very dry fuels out there. Um, we have, uh, the topography that, that works against us. And ultimately if, uh, if, if we get it in a certain area where we're not able to get a ton of resources on there, um, we're going to be competing with some of these other fires to get additional firefighting resources there. So, um, for us, it's, it's really imperative. We always try to keep them small and we do a very good job at doing that. Um, but, but ultimately, um, this, these next couple of weeks, it's going to be a imperative that we stop these fires small and don't, um, allow them to grow into large incidents because that's when it's going to be, um, uh, become quite the burden and quite the challenge trying to get resources down here. Speaker 1: 05:23 Okay. I've been speaking with Cal fire spokesman, Thomas chutes. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I appreciate it.