[00:05:13] Host: I want to get into that. You started with the United States Forest Service on a Hotshot crew. I want you to let our listeners know what that means to be on a Hotshot crew. It feels like the Delta Force of wild firefighters.

[00:05:30] Fennessy: It is. It still is. I didn't know much about Hotshot crews at the time either. I learned very quickly on the first run they put me on, around Devil's Gate Dam, where I got sick, and I got lost. I learned pretty quick that this was not a job for someone that wasn't fit. Although I played team sports in high school and well beyond, I don't know that I was completely prepared for the work in the heat and the travel, that sort of thing. I'd never really worked or done much outside of the LA area. Being on a crew that is not only responding throughout the state, but throughout the western US, that was really an adventure.

Hotshot crew, I was explaining this the other day to another writer, they're hand crews. In general, you have hand crews. These are the crews and they can be a variety of different sizes. They can be fuel mod crews that might be less than 10, Hotshot crews that are now generally up to about 25 when you include all the supervision. CAL FIRE, I believe staffs a 14-member hand crew. These are the individuals that are removing the vegetation, firefighters removing the vegetation in advance of the fire, or where the fire is stopped so that it cannot spread any further.

If you're working on the timber, might be as little as scraping the pine needles, two or three feet of scraping pine needles, but if it's up in the crowns, you might be falling trees and using bulldozers and those other things. I believe the first hotshot crews were established in 1949. They were a handful. They were part of money that was used to build the LA River. The Oak Grove Hotshots is the first crew I was on in 1978, was there out of Oak Grove, Del Rosa, out of San Bernardino, little Tonga. There weren't a lot of them. Chilao Hotshots up the Angeles Crest highway, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Many of them at the time were still very much Native American workers, and ultimately, transitioned from 20 persons to 30 persons and back to 20. Anyways, the job of a hand crew is removing that. The Hotshots are the ones that are put and given the most difficult assignments. That's true today because of the physical fitness level, because their training level, the way they're organized, with supervision and leadership and all that goes into that. They're certified at the beginning of the season, a lot more than it was back in the late '70s and '80s when I was on Hotshot crews. They are the ones of all hand crews that really are the elite, quite frankly.

[00:08:20] Host: You mentioned that a lot of the personnel that were on these lines were Native American back in the day. Was that because that was what was available for work, or was there that knowledge of land management that they brought to the work?

[00:08:38] Fennessy: I'd be speculating, but I believe it's probably a bit of both. The native crews were very, a lot of them, and there still are in the southwest region of the United States, we've used back in the '80s, and they're probably still around, crews made up of migrant field workers. People that are used to very hard work in very arduous conditions. You're right. I've met and worked with a lot of Native Americans over the years. Some that have passed that were superintendents and folks that led this, and they were very well-versed in fire behavior. How many came from the southwest of California, I don't know, but I feel like I was really blessed to be able to work alongside them and to learn so much from them at a young age.

[00:09:34] Host: When you switch to a municipal department, what are some of the unforeseen differences between being a firefighter for Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and a municipal firefighter?

[00:09:50] Fennessy: That's a really great question because there are very stark differences. You're right. I started on the Angeles, went to Los Padres, ended up as establishing with Anthony Escobar, the Kern Valley Hotshot crew, the first Hotshot crew the BLM ever had back in the mid-'80s, and went on to establish another crew in Apple Valley. Left as a superintendent there after the 1990 season. I loved what I was doing. I've shared this publicly in other places, for somebody that didn't have a lot of goals in life.

One of my first goals as an Oak Grove Hotshot, Chilao Hotshot was, "I want to run the saw. I want to be the guy running that tool up there that's making all that noise." That was my life's goal, and I got there. I found that it was one of the things that I was really good at. I was not a fantastic athlete. Yes, I played sports: baseball, football, basketball, my whole life and through high school, but I wouldn't-- maybe middle of the pack. Now here was something that I actually could do really well and better than most.

That helps build reputation and credibility. I was taken to be a new Hotshot crew foreman at Kern Valley. I was 24 years old. I look at 24-year-olds, even my own kids today, and go, "I wouldn't give my own kid 10 lives to be responsible for at that age. What were they thinking?" I got six, seven years on now. I'm running a module, that Hotshot crew, as a foreman. We didn't call them captains back then. Then really the motivation was, "Man, I want to run these crews. I want to be a superintendent."

It took me 13 years, and I got there, and then I got a call. I got a call from the City of San Diego who had taken a test. I'd take a test a year. I had uncles that were firefighters. They were always encouraging me to take a test, that this is not a job I could do forever. I think I was 32 when I finally left. 31, 32. I was pretty beat up and considered an old guy at that age. The other piece was that the federal government, it's true today, doesn't pay well. The benefits aren't very good. Most of us who did it, it wasn't necessarily for the money. We enjoyed what we were doing. We got a lot of satisfaction out of it. The travel and all the other things and the camaraderie, that was really the draw.

At the time, I was married. I had a son that was, I think, two or three years old. I was gone all the time, about eight months a year. There were no 14, 21 days, and then they cycle you back. You were gone, and they might rest you in place somewhere. We'd been through the '88 Yellowstone fires. We were gone for months at a time in the 1988. Those were tough years for us from '85 through about '90. Nothing like we're seeing today. We didn't have the relief that's built in today.

When they called, I went and met with my chief down in Riverside and said, "Look, I'm not sure I want to take this job. I love what I'm doing. I finally got here." When I was done talking, he said, "Listen, stop talking, and you need to pack up your stuff and head to San Diego." I didn't expect that reaction. It really felt like it was starting over, being someone that believes that nobody wants to hear what you've done, how you've done it. From a humility perspective go down there and tell them all I've done. I'm a new firefighter in an academy, or a recruit.

There were stark differences. The academy wasn't overly difficult physical fitness-wise, but I just got off a fire season, so I was in pretty good shape. EMS, patient medical, that was new for me. I was not an EMT, so I had to become an EMT. What I think drove me early on is I was always on Hotshot crews, not only for the hours you got, but then the adrenaline, the action. You want action, and you want to be on one of these crews. I want to be in the busiest fire stations now. I want to learn this new thing where we burn buildings and going into burning buildings and doing all this. This new job. I really viewed it as a career change, even though it was a fire service. That life was behind me. San Diego and the county obviously had fires, but my ICS qualifications and things meant nothing. At that point, I was a rookie firefighter. I wanted to really become good at that job. The hours off were incredible. Where I did, wasn't I used to, I never had any summers off before.

We had six days off in a row, then every other day for four days, and then four days off. It was incredible. The pay didn't pay as much as some fire departments, but it was a lot better than what I was making as a superintendent. One thing I also found, Jon, was that the work on the Hotshot crews, man, you're out there 24, 48 hours sometimes before relief. You go to these structure fires and you're throwing your SCBA on your air. Man, I would go through two or three bottles just busting my butt right on these fires.

People thought you were a hero because most folks would get through a bottle, and then they'd be taking a breather, maybe a second bottle. It was like, "Man, only 20 minutes had passed. Man, it's go, go, go." Man, I'm in there pulling roofs and doing all these things. I thought that was the gig, but it's not the gig for everybody. What you notice, it's the same people in that building once the fire has been knocked down, doing the hard work, pulling the ceilings, and doing all that stuff.

I think it really, and I shared this recently at the US Hotshots Association meeting they had a few weeks ago is, I think, not only early in life with my dad really working as hard then going into the field of being a Hotshot and then going to a fire department. The work ethic was built. My mentality was nobody's going to outwork me. They may be smarter, they may be stronger, they might be faster, but nobody's going to outwork me. That was always our attitude with the Hotshots. That really carried on through the rest of my career, even now. Now, there's people that will outwork me today, but not too many. I love it. When you love what you're doing, that's part of it.

[00:16:28] Host: Were you the guy for when departments were called to other counties, when conflagrations were happening, and they were bringing in these inter-agencies? Were you, because of your experience with forestry, one of the guys that would go, or how was that determined?

[00:16:52] Fennessy: No. Not early on. Say in 1990, I started the academy right after the fire season, so it was November, December, and nobody knew I had ICS qualification. This was a municipal city fire department. Even though they had some vegetation brush fire problems certainly in the county, and they have some exposure in the city, the main focus was municipal, downtown, structural firefighting. Like I said earlier, I didn't really speak much to anybody about what I used to do.

If people asked, I'd say, "Oh, it was wildland firefighting." If they wanted to know more, I might share more, but it was just one of those things that I always felt like just because you did something like that before, that didn't-- anyways, very humbled that way. In 1996, six years later, they broke some fires in California, some pretty significant fires. It was the first time ever there was an announcement. I was on duty. There was announcement that had anybody with ICS qualifications submit them to whomever, Battalion 1 or whatever, and there were assignments. I listed all my ICS qualifications and faxed them down to the battalion.

I actually got assigned as a strike team leader for bulldozers. I was a bulldozer strike team leader and went to some big fire, and was gone for three weeks and came back. I got called into the operations chief's office. I got a call or a notice to go meet with him downtown. I was like, "I wonder what this is." That's usually not a good thing. He asked me, he says, "What did you do before you came on the job?" I shared with him, he goes, "We want you to get all those qualifications back. These things are important to us."

I was able to get all my ICS qualifications back. I was able to get assigned to a federal incident management team, and continue to build on some of the qualifications I was still working on. I was trying to become an air attack officer, and some of those things, and was able to do it. That, I think, was the big switch for the city because we started hiring then people that were in that business. They came with qualifications.

I'd been a strike team leader since 1985. I was hired in '90, but the deal was, "Hey, you're not a battalion chief. You can't be a strike team leader unless you're a battalion chief." I'm like, "All right, whatever. It's the way the game is played, or whatever." It was significantly different. It was great to be able to go out in some of these fires and see your old friends and buddies. At the same time, if you didn't know people, people would look at you and go, "San Diego City, what does this guy know? He's a division supervisor? He's going to tell us what to do?"

There was always that kind of proving yourself element. Now, somebody might say, "Oh, the guy was this, this, and this. He used to--" Reputation and credibility and all that meant something. It still does, but it was, you had your reputation to fall back on.

[00:20:04] Host: Now you've been in this leadership position both in San Diego and now Orange County. You were the Chief in San Diego, and it's been seven years now that you've been the Chief of Orange County Fire Authority. Over this time, how have you seen departments evolve as the wildfires in our state intensify in this season, fire season extends?

[00:20:31] Fennessy: Yes, evolve is a really great word because it has. In 2003, I was a captain right before I became a battalion chief, and we had the big firestorms throughout Southern California in 2003, the big fire, Cedar Fire, down in San Diego County. We'd never seen a fire grow that quickly and travel that fast. I don't think anybody had at the time. It burned from 20 miles away into the city neighborhoods. It was a 20-mile burn overnight. That's just unheard of. It was a significant Santa Ana, but nothing as significant as we just experienced with LA.

That really rocked our world. It caused a lot of change. I always look back in somewhat recent history, the 1970 fires caused a lot of change, a lot of destruction in 1970. Same sort of deal, Santa Ana wind-driven fires that started Firescope and ultimately created the ICS, Instant Command System, and all these things. A lot of things happened as a result in 1970. 2003 was very similar. There was a blue ribbon commission. Elected officials got involved. Thousands of homes had been burned. I don't know how many dozen lives were lost, but it was really our first big mega fire.

We started using words like “mega fire.” We never used that before. Every time you have one of these, it's like, man, we're never going to see another fire like that for 100 years. That was a 100-year fire. Until 2007, four years later, we have a repeat and have more large fires throughout Southern California. Wind-driven fires. We learned a lot of lessons from four years earlier. I think the fire service in general in California did better in 2007, but a refresh. Up until last January, a couple of months ago, I think this is really the change.

Give you an idea, in the late '70s, at least in through the '80s, you could almost set your watch on when fire season would start and end. By July 1, between June and July 1, you could figure, but by December 1, man, it was over. There was only one year that I can think of in about 15 of those early years where we stayed on through January because the rains hadn't come, but that was an anomaly. Now, the peak fire season's starting earlier as we've seen going later. Many are pointing towards climate change. I believe climate change is a factor. I don't think it's the only factor.

There's so much development that's gone on over the last 30, 40, 50 years, 10 years, whatever you want to look at. We've now built into these areas that are prone to fire. They're fire corridors. Prior to 2007, there were no codes. The codes that were developed after the 2007 fires and implemented in 2008 are actually pretty effective, but even utility-caused fires. That happened all the time. You had wooden poles on the side of the mountains, and the Santa Ana's would blow. It wasn't uncommon to have utility cause fires.

It grew up there in Altadena, right there in the foothills. There are fires all the time that were caused by down lines. What's changed? Not much, other than again, we're seeing that this destruction that we haven't seen before. There's been an evolution. I no longer believe that, "Hey, that's the last time," because that's what's being talked now. "Hey, look, we had 80, 100-mile-an-hour gust. We're never going to see that again." What? How many times do we keep saying that? I don't know if it'll be next year, I don't know if it'll be 10 year, but we're going to see that again. It's happened once.

[00:24:22] Host: We're going to do a little hypothetical walkthrough, worst case scenario fire. We'll say that the National Weather Service is suggesting red flag warnings in five or six days. At that point, just for red flag is typically high wind, high temperatures, low humidity. In this scenario, we haven't seen rain for a few months. What is the first step of preparation when this announcement is made?

[00:25:05] Fennessy: I think it is just that, the discussion, and really now we start to get early notice around 10 days out. We'll hear that, "Hey, it looks high pressure might be building and we could be looking at a Santa Ana sometime in the next week, 10 days." Okay, that's the first thing. Then at seven, nothing really happens, other than socializing that a bit. Then seven days out, the meteorologists have gotten really good. The confidence is pretty high on whether it's going to be a strong, a moderate, or a light Santa Ana.

That's not for sure either because I've seen a lot of them that were going to be minor or moderate that turned into extreme because as each day passes, confidence builds with those meteorologists. Within three to five days, you pretty well know what to expect. Most of us know where our historic fire corridors are, where the wind's going to blow. We've got weather stations set up in those quarters because history tells us that there's a pattern of fires in these areas.

One of the things we also will do about three days out is we'll start submitting through Cal OES a list of resources we want to have paid for to pre-position. We call it pre-position funding. This happened, Firescope developed the pre-positioning program after the 2017 and '18 fires, and so now there's $25 million available. The pool of money through Cal OES, there is a matrix you need to fill out. As it gets closer, the temperatures are going to be over this. You're scoring. If the score ends up at one point or higher, you're eligible for pre-position funding, which means agencies are going to stand up maybe another five engines. For us, it's a lot more than that, and helicopters and hand crews 24 hours. It's extending our bulldozers to 24 hours.

[00:27:09] Host: This is all CAL FIRE agencies or other--?

[00:27:14] Fennessy: These are the local government agencies. Our LA counties, ourselves. The way it's set up is each county has a coordinator, basically a mutual aid coordinator. I'm at for Orange County. It's done by vote of the fire departments within the county. Chief Maroney and LA County's responsible for LA County. Each county has one of these coordinators. These requests are funneled up to Cal OES for the funding approval. Even before there was funding available, when I was in San Diego and even here, it's like, man, if we know that we're looking at some significant fire weather, I'm standing up and most people are crews. I don't care if I'm getting paid for it or not.

I'd much rather stand in front of my city council and mayor or hear the board of directors and say, "Yes, I expended several hundreds of thousands of dollars and there was no fire," in preparation, as opposed to not and then trying to explain later, "Hey, you knew this weather was coming and you did nothing." It's a double-edged sword, but I err on the side of staff. It's great now that we get to get paid at least offset for some of those costs but the agencies that are only up staffing, because now they get reimbursed, I think that's a problem. I think that eventually will bite them.

[00:28:31] Host: In this day and age with the frequency and intensity of fires, is there already an assumption that there will be some level of a fire situation in those conditions?

[00:28:42] Fennessy: I think so. I know I do. I know we do. In fact, before Palisades, it's probably an hour, hour and a half, before that, myself, chief Crowley, Chief Maroney, and Chief Gardner in Ventura County had spoken and really half joking said, "Okay, who's going to be first?" Especially with the one in January. The warnings we were getting from the meteorologist, this was not going to be a usual, a strong Santa. This was going to be something very different if it materialized.

You could see when they showed the weather maps, the high pressure over the plateau states, and then the low pressure, when it gets really bad is when they start to squeeze up. It was something we hadn't seen in a long time. We were confident that we were going to have problems. As bad as it was in LA, I'm telling you, Jon, we're lucky because, man, it was blowing just as hard here. It was blowing that hard in Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino. We are so lucky we didn't have more than the fires that we had in LA.

[00:29:42] Host: In our hypothetical situation, you get an alert that something is ignited in Santiago Canyon. First of all, how are wildfires initially discovered? Is it citizen reporting or cameras?

[00:29:57] Fennessy: Yes, it can be a variety of ways. Here in Southern California, what I tell people is we don't really have a detection issue. Everybody's got a phone, there's airplanes, there's mountaintop cameras. There's so many ways now. There's satellites. We get discovery of fires pretty darn quick now. We've got AI, mixed in with these mountaintop cameras that can look through the haze and recognize smoke patterns. Crazy science stuff. We get notified really quickly. I think all of us in the counties here in Southern California, man, we don't mess around. It used to be, you'd send a handful of units, and if they saw smoke, then you'd send the balance.

Now, man, we send, on any report of any fire, we're sending aircraft, we're calling for the air tankers from CAL FIRE or engines, hand crews, both. We send a massive response until we determine otherwise that there's no fire or they need less, but the days of waiting until somebody got close, man, those days are over. These fires are spreading so quickly now that if we don't jump on them with everything we have right away, even on a "normal day," we need to be after these things. I think it's a public expectation as well.

[00:31:16] Host: You mentioned CAL FIRE, but like our end-- I'm going to butcher the acronym, the Incident Command--

[00:31:30] Fennessy: Yes, the Incident Command System, ICS?

[00:31:32] Host: Right. That's connecting all the different departments.

[00:31:35] Fennessy: It is. You're talking about the mutual aid system?

[00:31:38] Host: Right. At what point of a fire is that mutual aid system activated?

[00:31:43] Fennessy: That's a great question, too, because we're having issues with that, too. When a fire starts, the way ICF is set up is, the first person at scene becomes the incident commander. It doesn't matter rank. The next ranking officer then assumes command until it gets to an appropriate level of command, usually a battalion chief or greater, depending on the complexity. The idea is to try to manage those fires with what you have on that first alarm. You've assigned this alarm or these resources because you believe you can handle a new start.

Once it becomes evident that probably not enough, we might call for a second alarm, which means we're sending more local staff after. At some point, as it continues to get bigger, we get beyond what we can here locally maintain in the county, so we've got to reach out. The way it works for the guy or gal on the ground, they're just asking for resources, "I need 10 more strike teams." That's 50 engines. "I need three more helicopters." They're just placing orders for what they need.

Once those orders go to a dispatch center, once the dispatch center gets to a point where we're drawdown, then in this case, they'll go to LA County, who manages a regional center. They'll send resources, but they'll start to pick resources from around the county. They will start to converge. Then as it gets bigger, that ring starts to expand much further, to a point where you could actually be now having resources run through the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise. They'll run everything out of South operations in Riverside until they can't, then they'll go to North Ops, which is-- so it just expands. You don't see it on the ground, you just start noticing resources coming from greater distances showing up.

[crosstalk]

[00:33:40] Host: Is that a size, or is it the conditions around it?

[00:33:46] Fennessy: Yes. It can be size and complexity. The good incident commanders are looking at sometimes a day, two days, three days, maybe even a week out, depending on how-- "What are we going to need?" All the logistics support that comes to, "You've got to feed these people now. You've got to water them. You've got to lodge them." You may be able to get a good 48 hours plus out of that initial burst, but you better have reinforcements coming to take over, especially if the fire is continuing to grow.

It's a pretty massive-- I mean, really, we here in Orange County, like everybody else, we could have resources coming from all over the United States. Air tankers coming from all over the west, should we need them, and it just builds upon itself. The biggest challenge we're having now, and you'll probably hear more about it, we're-- I chair the FIRESCOPE board of directors, and we're having a special meeting at the end of this month to push out our call to action, which is basically, we've identified as the California Fire Service, federal, state, and local, what our priorities are.

Right now, there's an issue with the mutual aid system. It's the process for the software for resource ordering and all that. It functions real well when you want to track resources. It functions real well when you need to get reimbursed at some point after the fire from whatever agreement you get, but what it doesn't do is get resources to you quickly. It's not, and so you have fires like the one you saw, the ones in LA. After the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Malibu, they lost many, many homes. The After-Action Review identified one of the causal effects is that when the IEC was asking for another 100 engines, 50 engines, whatever it was, the system couldn't provide them.

The reality is that between LA City, LA County, Orange County, Ventura County, we've got more resources here in these three counties than probably anywhere else in the state. We are so well-- and maybe in the world. Could I have sent another 20 engines knowing there were burning homes? Absolutely, but I never got a request for them. Could Ventura County? After that fire, the chiefs at the time, Terrazas, Osby, and Lorenzen, and myself, we got together and said, "Look, we can't let that happen again. If we've got actual houses burning, not just threatened-- man, we are losing homes, and potentially lives. I got 80 stations. You pick up the phone and you ask me for 40 engines, all I need to know is, where do you want them to go, and I will have them on the way right now,” which is 1950s, '60s, '70s technology, and vice versa. Those guys have a lot of resources because the whole idea is, if we don't get resources there quickly, in two to three hours, it's done. It's to the ocean, and we've lost all.

We don't have 48 hours to wait for 100 engines to show up. We, amongst us, can do that right now. Not popular with CAL FIRE, not popular with the US Forest Service and others that manage these mutual aid systems, the process, because they've got to go back after the fact and reconcile it. I feel poorly about it, but at the same time, we feel like we have a duty to our communities to put whatever resources we can on the road right now and--

[00:37:15] Host: Right, to protect life, yes.

[00:37:17] Fennessy: Yes. It's worked out really well for us, but it's not the right way to do business, though, either.

[00:37:23] Host: Going back to our hypotheticals, you're mentioning now this weather has not been in your favor, and the wind has picked up, and ember cast has created spot fires, and we're getting closer to structures. At what point are neighborhoods evacuated?

[00:37:43] Fennessy: Hopefully, early enough. It's hard to say because each incident is a little bit different. Something like, I would imagine, with Palisades or even Eaton, I would expect those notices to go out pretty quickly. The way it generally works is the fire departments determine which neighborhoods or communities need to be evacuated and then law enforcement pulls the trigger on it. They're the ones that are responsible. Law enforcement is responsible for evacuations.

Now, most counties have emergency managers that run emergency operation centers, and a lot of times the software and the pushing the information out on evacuations comes through those EOCs. Here in Orange County, it's the sheriff. In LA County, I believe it's the sheriff. Generally, these are law enforcement things. We say we got the easy part. We say, "These are the neighborhoods you need to evacuate," and then they have to actually go out and do it. I would imagine that happened pretty quickly in both those places, but you know what's really interesting, Jon, to talk about a modern-day phenomenon that we're just starting to realize, is that, in 2003, I talked about those fires.

We didn't have anything like that. It was literally knocking on doors, on the bullhorn, "Run for your lives, blah, blah, blah." Now, there's some really good evacuation software out there that government agencies are using. Really good. Now, people, and I've heard it a number of times from people at Palisades and some of the people I know up in Altadena, is they saw the fire that night. They saw it getting closer, "But my phone didn't tell me to evacuate." It's like, "Wait a minute." We've created this thing where now people, there's an expectation that--

[00:39:30] Host: Right, they're dependent.

[00:39:32] Fennessy: "I'm okay until this thing tells me it's time to go," and it's like, "No. If you think you have to go, or you may need to go--" That's the other thing. You talk to people. It's like, "Yes, I went out my front yard. It looked, I don't know, an hour, maybe two hours away. 20 minutes later, it's here." I think it surprises, the speed. The spread of these fires are surprising community members. Then you get something like I was sharing with my brother, that don't evacuate, that figure, "Hey, I'm going to defend my own home," until it gets scary, until it gets hot, windy in those embers, and now they're thinking, "Ooh, maybe this was a mistake."

Now they've got to go, "Now we've got to devote time and resources to getting them to safety and not suppressing the fire." If the fire dead gets suppressed, that's a lower priority. We see that, but I think one of the big issues we're going to be talking about and figuring out how we message to our community is that, don't wait for that phone to tell you it's time to go, you've been evacuated. People become dependent on them now, and I don't think any of us really ever expected that.

[00:40:36] Host: There's this messaging of leave and leave your doors open, so anybody who's fighting this fire has access to, but it's a really hard thing if you're walking away with just whatever you could carry.

[00:40:54] Fennessy: I'll probably get in trouble for it, but I don't subscribe to people leaving their doors unlocked. Listen, we're the fire department. If we need to get in, trust me, we can get in. I told you I was up in Altadena, and I actually had to force entry into the house next door to my brother's to try to find something wet to put out, because, otherwise, my brother's house was going to burn if this house didn't burn. I was out there prepping. It's not difficult to force a door or something like that if you need to get in. For me, I'd be more comfortable with that as opposed to later looters, or somebody else getting in there. Firefighters can get into your home if they need to get into your home.

[00:41:36] Host: Now, once we get into a situation like Palisades, or the Eaton fire in Altadena, and these communities, and structures are burning at that rate, when we're dealing with airdrop, what are the regulations of airdrops of either water or phos-chek on structures on neighborhoods?

[00:41:57] Fennessy: It is generally something that's not very successful. It's not something we necessarily teach. One of the other issues that-- We've had Lahaina now. We've had the Marshall Fire in Colorado that burned, another house-to-house event. That's happening more and more, and this was in the extremist obviously in Palisades, in Eaton. When they start burning structure to structure like that, this is no longer a wildland fire. Once it leaves the wildland area and gets into the homes or the businesses, and now fire is spreading via structure to structure, that's what we call an urban conflagration.

Different methods of fighting those fires. You have the wildland fire up in the mountain. We do what we normally do. Now we've got this urban conflagration. We haven't invested a lot of time and training into those stopping urban congregations, because it's a new thing for us.

There's a lot of discussion about it. I had a lot of questions from, not just the media, but some of my board directors and others about dropping on structures. Same with when you're dropping in the vegetation. The intent is to slow the fire down enough to get the firefighters on the ground in there. It's not to extinguish. Sometimes the water drops or the retardant will extinguish, but that's never the intent. The intent is to, especially with the retardant as you're laying it out in advance of the fire, so when the fire gets there, it retards its spread. That's it.

It hangs up on the leaves, and it's got chemicals that-- Even when it's dry, it works, or when you're dropping that large of volume of water or even retardant on homes, you're putting those folks in the ground potentially in a lot of danger. You could have wires coming down. You could have parts of the house coming down, limbs, and those things. There have been quite a few wildland firefighters in recent years that were killed because of low air tanker drops, snapped a snag or a tree, or something goes into somebody on the ground, and so you're not going to generally put the fire out.

Are we going to lay retardant and water in people's backyards, and those sorts of things so that we are retarding the fire when it gets the structures? Absolutely. Does some of it drift and you end up with pink houses? Yes. When the wind's blowing really strong, very difficult to hit your target. They left that retardant out of that airplane, or the helicopter drops that water. You've seen it on TV. It's gone.

[00:44:27] Host: It's blowing in the wind.

[00:44:28] Fennessy: It's gone. Dropping on structures is not a strategy or tactic that you'll see people, you won't go to a planning meeting they go, "Look, if it gets really bad, start dropping on the structures," that won't happen. Again, because there's a lot of hazards that come with it. What are you really doing? If the wind's blowing that hard, those embers are still traveling downwind, but every case is different.

There may be a situation where somebody says, "Man, we've got to knock this house down to keep the embers from blowing downwind. To your question, it's not a strategy or a tactic that is something that is routinely done. Can it be done? Can it work in some places? Sure, like anything else, but it's generally not. If it's blowing that hard, we're losing that many structures. There's not a lot we're going to be able to do anyways.

[00:45:17] Host: Let's look towards the end of this hypothetical. What determines containment, and at what percentage of containment do you personally take that sigh of relief?

[00:45:31] Fennessy: It has changed over the years. You talk about an evolution. When I worked in the '70s, '80s into the '90s, and maybe even to this current century, containment largely meant you had fire line around the thing. Fire line could be a street, could be anything, like we talked about with the hand crews, mineral soil, whatever it was. You had the fire lined that was contained. Not necessarily controlled, because there can still be a lot of heat within that fire, and until that heat gets creased and mopped up and all that other stuff, then you get control.

You don't hear that used very often anymore. In fact, I haven't heard in a long time, and so containment is really changed. I will share with you honestly. Many times it has nothing to do with the line that's around the fire. It has to do with a trajectory of when we're going to be walking away from that fire. The question is, why? It sounds like it's an indiscriminate number, and it is. I've been in meetings where they've looked around, "Okay, everybody good with 20%." There was no math.

There was no map, and they mapped out, because what they're looking at is the agreements and the funding, especially if you're getting federal funding through a management assistant agreement through FEMA. There's a number of different agreements that depending on the deal apply. Once that fire is declared contained, funding stops. The federal funding especially stops, and so really it's a misnomer. You'll see fires stay at 80%, 90% weeks after that fire. When that fire's not going anywhere, it's been out.

Unfortunately, I think that's something the fire service needs to do is we need to find another way of describing what the fire is, because I think it's really misleading. You may have seen that during these last fires. They're calling it 40%, 30%. There wasn't a smoke coming off this thing, but they knew they will get the teams, and others knew they were going to be there and have resources assigned for a long time. Containment now, they'll inch their way out to 100% to when they can stop the funding.

[00:47:41] Host: It really wasn't until after the rains came that we got to 100%.

[00:47:46] Fennessy: For me, philosophically, it's not transparent. Let's tell the people what it is, and let's tell the people when we're not concerned about fire spreading anymore. How we want to call that. Maybe we call that controlled and it's not contained, but those are discussions that we're going to have at Firescope, because more and more people are figuring that out and we're getting more questions. "Why are you guys saying it's only 50% contained? It hasn't spread in two weeks?" A lot of people don't want you to know that, maybe. I don't know.

[00:48:20] Host: Chief, we can't stop red flag days from coming. We can't stop these winds. They've always been here. We can't bring more rain, but what can we do as a state or as a municipality, or as the entire western region of the country to prepare for these fires or not allow them to become conflagrations?

[00:48:49] Fennessy: I ask myself the same thing. After all these years, it's been 47 years, I still consider myself a wildland firefighter. Our focus now has to be on the built environment. We've been focusing, when I say "we", I mean the fire service has been focusing a lot on the landscapes. You've seen millions, if not billions of dollars, coming from the feds in the states to treat the fuels in our mountains and rural areas. We're seeing a lot of prescribed fire.

A lot of money is going towards that. When you have one of these events like this, there's not a fuel break in the world it's going to stop. There's not a 12-lane, 15-lane freeway that's going to stop the embers and whatnot. This has been really a wake-up, I think, for a lot of us here. Lahaina was smaller in scale, but people are quick to point out. That's different. You know what it's not really that different than what we experienced here: high winds, low humidities, the fire to go.

We have to do better at preparing what we call the built environment. When it now gets into our communities, it's no longer a wildland fire and it's an urban conflagration. About that, the best way the people that we're going to be able to help and the people are going to be able to see their homes survive is through this hardening, whether it's a changing of a non-combustible roof, double pane with attic vents. I was asked the other day, "If you had to do one thing, what would you do?"

Would be attic vents because so many of these fires, those little embers get up in that attic, and once it runs the attic, you're done. Especially in these fires, where a fire like that today, you'd have four or five engines, two trucks, two battalion chiefs, and these conflagrations, you have none of that. You might be lucky to have an engine. An engine's not going to be able to do anything to put that fire out in your attic. They're going to choose to find something that's maybe less involved, where they might have some success, and your home's going to burn.

Now the structures that have been built since 2008, when the wildland fire codes were established, we're seeing them survive in greater percentages than the 99 or 98-- whatever the other percentage of the homes are out there. It's easy for us to be able to apply codes to new developments, but what do you do about all the homes that are out there today? People on fixed incomes. People can't afford to change their roofs or to do all these things. In our opinion, the government's got to make available, whether it be through tax incentives, grants, something.

If you wanted to harden all your homes in your neighborhood, there ought to be a place you can go to write a grant or do whatever to get your community hardened. You're going to hear a lot about Zone Zero that's coming out. Science is showing us, and there are places that are doing the burnings of structures and ember cast, a lot of science going into this that are showing, I think it's like you stand a 57% better chance of your home surviving if you have nothing combustible within zero to 5 feet of your home, all the way around your home. They're showing that that's true, but people want to put hedges outside their windows, they want a potted plant there. They want to put the wood chips--[crosstalk]

[00:52:18] Host: You want that cypress tree?

[00:52:19] Fennessy: Yes, and fences are notorious. Fences and garbage cans are notorious for burning down homes because the embers get in them, or the fire just travels down the fence and then up into your eaves. Metal fences, and then goes to wood, getting your trash cans out. We're finding things like sheds, the shed in your backyard, just by turning the sheds so that the opening, the front door is not pointed at the home, that actually helps. Because when you see sheds burn, of course, it's all coming out of there. We've got to educate the communities, and we've got to be able to provide, we the government, opportunities for people to harden their homes.

In contrast, you got Eaton fire, at least on the east side of Altadena, your larger homes much better distances between homes. Yes, pine trees and everything else, but then you look at West Altadena, where there's more dense, and that's where you saw much more house-to-house in Palisades, very little distance. What science is telling us is the preferred distance is 30 feet or more. There are a lot of communities. The developers have built these things, there's not 30 feet between them. Once a house catches fire, that radiant heat, whether or not there's ember cast, you're going to catch the houses next to you, then across the street.

We've really got to invest in not only training and how to operate better in an urban congregation fire. We need to provide resources to the community so they can start hardening their homes. We need to, I won't say shift, we still need money and things done on the landscape, vegetation removal, prescribed fire, all that stuff needs to happen, but we need to really turn and focus on, what do we do for our communities? Because we're seeing fires, and you live in Pasadena. That fire at Eaton fire, I'm still blown away at how far it traveled, house to house.

I've been doing this a long time, I've never seen anything like that. It just blows my mind. My wife-- I live in San Clemente. We live six doors down from Camp Pendleton. We're up on the hill, and since we moved there, I've told her, "We've got nothing to worry about. Those houses on the edge of the Camp, man. I'd be worried if I were them. They've done nothing and blah, blah, blah. We're fine." Now, I've told her, "I don't know if we're fine anymore. I'm serious." After watching Eaton, I'm like, "Man, I'm not so sure anymore that we're fine." That fire wasn't supposed to do what it did, but under the extreme winds that they were under it, it's just amazing how far that thing burned down into Altadena, Pasadena. Incredible.

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[00:55:00] Host: We'd like to thank Chief Brian Fennessy and the Orange County Fire Authority. The Fire Problem is produced by Past Forward and Chapman University. To learn more about these issues, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.

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