The Fire Problem: Season One Introduction

[00:02:02] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Welcome to The Fire Problem, a podcast exploring the factors that have led to the increase in occurrence and intensity of wildfires in the state of California and around the world. The idea is to connect with experts to examine the causes and find ways to mitigate the severity of damages. Now that we don't have a fire season, we have a fire year. I'm your host, Jon-Barrett Ingels. When we started this project in August of 2024, we were focused on the fact that 18 of the 20 most destructive fires in California's history have happened in the last 25 years and 15 of them in the last 10 years.

Fires have become such a regular occurrence that if you're not directly affected by them, they tend to not occupy that much of your mind. In LA, the awe of seeing hillsides above Burbank, or in the San Gabriel Mountains, a glow with flames, or the charred remnants of a burn near the Getty Center, or in Bel Air, wears off fairly quickly as we move to our next order of business.

I was born and raised in Napa Valley, and in my time up there until the mid-90s, only one devastating fire made an impact on my consciousness. The Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills in 1991, which burned over 1,500 acres, destroying over 3,000 homes and killing 25 people. Friends of mine who had parents in the Napa Fire Department worried as their battalions were sent in for support. News footage of helicopter drops and destroyed houses and flames jumping across streets occupied our TV for a few days, and then it was over, and Napa was fine. It seemed like an anomaly. This wasn't a wildfire, it was homes in Oakland and Berkeley. Wildfire to me at that young age just meant a forest fire, the ones Smokey the Bear warned us about. Driving anywhere in the hills and mountains of Northern California, or into Oregon, you'd see the burn scars of forest fires, destructive for the wildlife, but they weren't coming into towns and cities. They weren't burning schools and homes and businesses, and if there were, it wasn't necessarily newsworthy and I didn't get to hear about it.

In 2001, I was personally affected by fire. Not a wildfire or urban conflagration, but a house fire, devastating and traumatic just the same. This was in Napa, in the Oak Knoll region. I had already moved down to LA when two of my best friends and I were traveling up and down the west coast making a movie inspired by the events of 9-11. We were exploring the fear, the panic, the patriotism, and the nationalism that flourished in the aftermath of the attacks. We used my friend's home in Oak Knoll as a base of operation. While we were shooting one of the final scenes of the movie in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, a fire started in his family home in the middle of the night. It spread so quickly, consuming the entire five-bedroom property, that the family barely had time to escape with their pajamas on. They lost everything. We lost everything we had filmed over four months. Every story, every location, every perfect happy accident, every hope that the project would lead to something and open doors and change our lives. But no one was hurt, thankfully. Even the dog, whose bark had alerted the family to the fire, made it out safely. Understanding the power and speed of fire. Understanding the feeling of loss, and the gratitude of survival, and the awareness that most stuff is just stuff and it can be replaced, but it doesn't take away from the trauma that was experienced. And also understanding how community can come together after a tragic event. That support from friends and family and strangers make a difference. All of that understanding, all of that experience, that's the reason I wanted to be a part of this project.

I was here in LA when the 2017 fires crept down the hills into Napa. The Tubbs fire to the west, Atlas fire to the east. I'd seen updates via phone videos taken by friends and posted on Facebook. It was the only way I could see what was lost and what was salvaged. Who was safe and who needed to evacuate. That next summer, my daughter and I drove up to Napa and saw the devastation in Santa Rosa from the Tubbs fire, which, at that time, was the most destructive fire in California's history, killing 22 people. More than 5,500 buildings were lost, including entire neighborhoods. I'd never seen destruction like that before. Like a bomb had leveled the town. Across the valley, burning simultaneously, was the Atlas fire, which destroyed 780 buildings and killed 6 people. These fires burned simultaneously with 12 others across Northern California in 2017, spreading our fire suppression resources thin.

One year later, the Camp fire took the top position of the most destructive and deadliest fires in California history. That fire destroyed over 18,000 buildings and killed 85 people as it decimated the town of Paradise, where my father grew up. My dad would tell me a story that the city of Paradise was won by a guy gambling in a dice game, and that he won the city with a “pair o' dice.” Fires in California had become a not-if-but-when scenario.

Down in L.A. and Southern California, we had the Thomas fire, the largest in Southern California's history, the Skirball fire burning along the 405 freeway, famous for images of cars driving near the Wall of Flames, the Woolsey fire, which destroyed over 1,600 structures and killed 3 people. Numerous other blazes choked the region with smoke and illuminated the night sky. In Orange County, where Past Forward Headquarters is located and where my producing partner raises his family, the freeway fire in Anaheim Hills in 2007 had the entire area under evacuation warning. And the Canyon II fire in 2017 forced his family to evacuate, having to decide what to bring, what to save in the limited time they had. The almost yearly exposure to smoke and poor air quality has intensified his once-dormant asthma, forcing him on a daily nebulizer treatment. And the annual destruction from fires continued.

In 2020, as the world was stuck in their homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the LNU Complex fire scorched the hills of Napa, threatening my hometown yet again with the seventh-largest wildfire in California's history. A month later, the Glass fire on the other side of the valley forced the evacuation of 70,000 people and destroyed homes, businesses, and wineries. The 2020 fires cost California winemakers around $2 billion, and not just from the burning of the fires. Most of that cost was from crops that were damaged from the smoke. In my other life, I work as a sommelier, and I had the opportunity to return to Napa after the fires in 2017 and in 2020 and taste wines from those vintages that had been tainted with smoke and couldn't be sold. I could taste the fire, the chimney, the ashtray. All of it had to be dumped. The residual effects and damages and costs of these fires don't always get the same attention as the destructive nature of the fires themselves. And it's not just California.

That same year, in 2020, my mother, who lives in Oregon, followed the news covering the destruction of the community of Detroit Lake during the Santiam fire, a fire that burned over 400,000 acres. Detroit Lake was her summer getaway, a place she and my stepfather would keep their boat and escape for a weekend of peace on the water. At the same time, the Alameda Drive fire in southern Oregon destroyed the town of Talent, a neighboring community of Ashland, a favorite stopover on my way up to my mom's.

If you live in the western United States, there is a high likelihood you have been directly or indirectly affected by wildfires. That is why we launched this series, to explore this phenomenon and connect with those who have studied fires, written about fires, raised funds to protect the land, fought the fires on the ground, face to flame, shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other firefighters doing their best to keep communities safe, and also connect with those who created technology to keep all of us aware of where the fire is, where it's moving to, and where we all need to be to remain safe.

Our first guest was John Vaillant, author of the book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, which examined the massive Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada in 2016 from the vantage point of those who survived it and those who fought the blaze. The fire forced the evacuation of almost 90,000 people and leveled the town of Fort McMurray. Our interview for the podcast was recorded on December 11th, 2024. Two days earlier, behind Pepperdine University, the Franklin fire ignited, growing to over 4,000 acres and destroying 20 structures. As I read John's book in preparation for the interview, reading about fires leaping from home to home, firefighters having to watch their own homes burn as they try to save others, families evacuating, not knowing if they are heading in the right direction away from the inferno. As I read, I was also watching live footage of people evacuating in Malibu, homes being threatened as fire crews battled the blaze. Vaillant's book, and our conversation, and what was happening in Malibu that day, and what was about to happen a month later here in LA, solidified not only the timely importance of this series, but also how little I knew and understood about the nature of fire.

[00:12:51] John Vaillant: If you're used to fires from the 90s in your region, and then you get a 21st century fire, it's going to blow your mind. And it is going to be hard to process because it is a real violation on the status quo that we all depend on. We all nurture a status quo of one kind or another based on our lived experience. And what nature is basically warning us to do is we need to get out of that box and imagine scenarios that have happened elsewhere on earth, but could now happen where we live.

[00:13:26] Jon-Barrett Ingels: One of the most fascinating things I learned from this episode, aside from the trauma and the heroism, was hearing about the 2005 Underwriters Laboratories experiment and learning about the concept of flashover. The experiment examined how our modern furniture and clothes and appliances, which are all made from petroleum products or partly made from petroleum products, increases the speed with which a home can be consumed, creating volatile gases inside that can incinerate a home in minutes. It made me think about how fast my friend's home was consumed while we were shooting that final scene and how fortunate everyone was to get out.

[00:14:12] John Vaillant: You know, it's a seamless transition for a wildfire coming out of the forest into the built environment, partly because so much of the modern home is actually petroleum-based. You know, we think of it as energy. We think of it as, again, a precursor for fabric and rubber and all kinds of stuff. But really, it is super flammable. At its base, it's made to burn. That's why we take it out of the ground. And you can turn it into a tar shingle. You can turn it into vinyl siding. You can turn it into a polyester coating for your sofa cushion. But at its base, it is super volatile. And you heat that stuff up. It burns like a refinery fire.

They take two rooms, firefighters, they took two 12 by 12 rooms and created living rooms in them. One in the legacy format, which is kind of grandma's house. So the furniture's made of wood. The carpet's made of wool. The sofa is upholstered with cotton and maybe stuffed with horsehair or kapok or cotton batting or something like that. These are organic products. And then they make a modern living room, which has a laminate floor, nylon rugs, nylon curtains, polyurethane stuffing in the sofa, all this kind of thing. They tip a candle over on the sofa in each room and they stand back. Very quickly, you know, the fire starts. The sofas start to burn. But very quickly in the modern room, the petroleum-based room, the smoke starts to get really black. And up until about two and a half minutes, you could probably put the fire out with a bucket of water or a small fire extinguisher. And then right around three minutes in the modern room, the petroleum room, the whole sofa's burning, the curtain behind it is burning. And then at three minutes and 20 seconds, the whole room bursts into flame. It explodes. And it explodes because the heat from that fire is causing all the other petroleum products around it, the rug, the rest of the cushions, the laminated furniture, to off-gas, to volatize. And we can't see the gases, but the fire can sense them. And that's fuel for the fire. So there's this moment when this kind of critical mass of petroleum vapor has built up in the room and then it explodes and then you have flashover. Meanwhile, in the legacy room, it's still just a sofa fire. You know, you and your six-year-old kid, I don't recommend this, but you and your six-year-old kid with a bucket of water could put the fire out. You could still control it. And the legacy room, the old-fashioned room, does not burn. It takes 25 minutes before it's burning with the same intensity achieved in three minutes and 20 seconds in the petroleum-based room. And frankly, that's the room most of us live in and sleep in, is a petroleum-based room.

[00:17:10] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Just a month later, in the lazy days of the post-holiday season, as everyone returned to their routines, I was finishing editing my conversation with John Vaillant. On January 5th, I received an alert notification on my phone for a Red Flag warning and High Wind event. And even though I was steeped in this world of fires and destruction with this podcast, with the books I was reading for upcoming interviews, those warnings didn't connect like they should have.

On the morning of January 7th, the wind rattled our windows as it howled through our carport. I received a video of a person fighting the wind to get to their car near the Rose Bowl Stadium here in Pasadena. It looked like that Buster Keaton film as he battled the storm. I went to work feeling the wind trying to lift my SUV on the highway, worried about our windows and branches and electricity. That afternoon we could smell the smoke in Beverly Hills, but I wasn't aware of what was happening in the Pacific Palisades until later. On my way home, I could see the smoke from my rear view, but I didn't know the extent. Once I got home, our TV began its non-stop duty of giving any and all information about what was happening out near the ocean.

Where we were, in Pasadena, it was the force of the wind knocking down wind chimes, shaking every window and doorframe that had my family concerned. That was until about 7.30 that evening, when we heard sirens racing by on their way to some destination near us, one after another after another, followed by helicopters. My wife knew something was happening in our area, and soon we all did. Reports of a spreading fire in Eaton Canyon and Altadena appeared on the news. News anchors jumping between footage of Palisades and Altadena as homes and businesses ignite from the ember cast. That began the recognition of, “I know that street.” “I know those houses.” “I know that gas station.” “I know that restaurant,” as they disappear into the flames and smoke. That night, evacuations were in place for residents east of Lake Avenue in Altadena and parts of Pasadena. An area I knew well. My daughter had gone to middle school at Eliott Middle a couple of years prior, right on Lake Avenue.

The next morning, all schools were cancelled. Work was cancelled. And we all woke up to the dark orange glow of the new reality. The fire had jumped to the other side of Lake Avenue and had been burning through entire neighborhoods. We were now under evacuation warning. Our street was littered with fallen trees and branches the size of cars. There was nothing I could do, except stay home and watch the news and try to monitor where the fire was moving. Bags were packed, essential documents, photo books from previous generations, computers. There was the challenge of trying to find what was necessary to evacuate with. But also, there was the understanding that at least we had the time to figure that out, while so many in Altadena didn't even know they were evacuating until their neighborhood was burning. We sat and waited for days until the evacuation warning was lifted, breathing God knows what chemicals in our poorly filtered building. I needed to release the first episode with John Valiant, but I didn't know if the timing was right or if it was too close to the trauma, until I heard about the fire tornadoes and the palisades. And it reminded me of John talking about how fire creates its own weather, and I remembered why we were making this program, to be a resource for those affected by wildfires.

[00:21:12] John Vaillant: These are really unfightable fires, and firefighters are learning this the hard way, and it is These systems, so a pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud system, is literally a stratospheric entity. These things are 45,000 feet tall, they turn like hurricanes turn, they generate their own wind, and this is all from the fire energy. This is not it mixing with a nearby storm. It's informed by high pressure systems and inflow winds and things like that, they happen often on uneven terrain. They build themselves from the energy and the heat in the fire.

[00:21:57] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Almost everyone I know here in LA was affected by those fires. My sister was evacuated in Hollywood when the Hollywood Hills fire broke out a day later. Friends lost their homes in Altadena and in Pacific Palisades. We have friends who didn't lose their home but couldn't return for almost a year from the smoke damage. My daughter's middle school lost half of its buildings, including the auditorium where she fell in love with acting by playing the villains in Jungle Book and Peter Pan, and also where she had her 8th grade graduation ceremony. The businesses that did survive slowed all over LA, and many had to shutter, including my restaurant. But on the flip side, on the positive, we got to see one of the largest cities in the country come together in support of those who lost everything. Which is always amazing in a time of trauma, how the true human spirit is revealed. And during this time, as I'm living through these fires, I'm reading another book about fires. This is Wildfire, by Nick Mott and Justin Angel. And I listened to their podcast, Fireline, from Montana Public Radio. And a week after the January fires here in LA were contained, we connected for a conversation.

[00:23:23] Nick Mott: There's a couple of scales here to talk about. One is our forests evolved with fire. So fire is a way that helps keep our forests healthy. At least fire at a natural historic scale. So if we're talking about a lower intensity burn in most cases, you know a lot of ponderosa pine forests in the country burned every 10 to 30 years. It all depends on elevation and tree type, ecosystem details, and all kinds of stuff. But forests historically burn pretty often. And when they burn, it opens up the forest, it can create wildlife habitat.

[00:23:52] Justin Angle: Fire is just immensely complex and managing it requires a lot of complex, thoughtful policy and a lot of agility. These are not things that institutions are known for.

[00:24:04] Jon-Barrett Ingels: I wanted to explore how we got to this place of exponential rates of occurrence and damage from these fires. And while climate change is at the forefront, just like with my conversation with John Vaillant, two other factors were covered in this conversation. The first was America's history with fire suppression. In the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service was created to protect our nation's forests. Most importantly, the resources they provide.

[00:24:34] Nick Mott: Fire became the bad guy. Fire became something that we should seek to destroy, stop, and control. And for many, many years, we were really good at it. Like we put out all kinds of fires. We came up with something called the 10 a.m. rule, which basically said, you know, this fire, if we find it on land, it's going to be out by 10 a.m. the next day.

[00:24:53] Justin Angle: And I would note that at this time, the United States Forest Service was in its sort of formative years and it was conceived and still exists within the United States Department of Agriculture. And so just thinking of that conception of the bureaucratic institution as part of the Department of Agriculture, implicit in that construction is the view that trees are a crop, a natural resource to be managed. So that sort of puts an institutional spin on this dedication to putting out any and all wildfire.

[00:25:24] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Historically we have fought fires at all costs, seeing them as a destructive force instead of a part of the natural cycle of forests. Many coniferous trees depend on the heat from fires to open their cones to seed.

[00:25:38] Nick Mott: You know, fires often historically are not just this big, massive blanket of burn. They burn in a mosaic pattern. So you'll have one patch that is heavily, that is burned intensively, another patch that is less burned, another patch that is not burned at all and creates this really diverse habitat type for species. Also it can allow wildflowers and berries and other stuff to take hold and grow. So there's this really important ecosystem role. And when we remove fire from the ecosystem, something else happens too, in that all this stuff grows up in between the trees. So many of these trees are evolved to be fire resilient, fire resistant, at least as they get old and big. But in between those big old trees, we get these smaller growths, what we can think of as fuel stuff that could literally fan the flames, fuel the flames, feed the flames. And you know, many forests across the country are overstocked with all this stuff that's a little more than kindling that can make fires burn bigger and more severely.

[00:26:36] Justin Angle: Many times if you go into a forest or a stand of Ponderosa, you can see some charring along the bark of these trees. It's meant to withstand periodic medium to low intensity wildfire. And that sort of wildfire would often burn that accumulated smaller brush and vegetation. And when you remove fire from the landscape, you know, that vegetation, as Nick mentioned, is allowed to grow and thrive. And as it grows and thrives, fire can take hold in a landscape like that. And because that vegetation is sort of filling that low to mid elevation, it can transport fire from the ground, from the grass level up into the canopy of the forest. And once the fire gets into the canopy, it's very hard to contain it.

[00:27:20] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Our indigenous tribes have a history of working with fire to revitalize forests, to corral game animals for hunting, to create healthy land for agriculture. All of this was stopped as the U.S. worked to suppress fires. We are only recently looking at how adding fire back to the ecosystem can help. But it's been an uphill battle.

[00:27:45] Nick Mott: It's important to point out that their work, this sort of cultural burning dates back millennia. But they were severed from it because of colonization. Like, as fire became a bad guy, we outlawed that sort of cultural burning. We did that, sometimes violently. There are documented reports of indigenous people being killed for starting these sorts of traditional prescribed fires.

[00:28:04] Justin Angle: We see the Forest Service is trying to do better. They're trying to introduce fire to the landscape. They're even talking about letting some fires burn when conditions allow for that. But it's really hard, right? There's a lot of risk in the system. They're under-resourced, as Nick mentioned, and it's just a hard thing to do.

[00:28:22] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Another factor leading to the increase of destruction from wildfires is where we live and how we live. About 30% of Californians live in what is called the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI, and more keep moving in. And, as I talked about with John Vaillant, the homes built next to forests can quickly become more fuel for the increasing fires. Nick and Justin discussed ways we can mitigate the damages as fires move from forests to communities.

[00:28:55] Nick Mott: When it goes into a community, the game has changed. So from a firefighting perspective, I think there's immediately a lot more on the line. You know, firefighters have talked about, like, there's just so much more emotion that goes into it. Like, we want to save this house if we can. At the same time, you have to make hard choices. You know, this house might, it might be clear, this house has a bunch of flammable stuff around it. It's going to burn. We got to pass it by.

[00:29:17] Justin Angle: It's a cheap and easy end of the spectrum, and we can do things like basic maintenance. We can clean our gutters. We can remove flammable debris from our roofs. We can trim back vegetation that hits our house. We can not store flammable stuff anywhere near our house or under our decks, for example. And there's a whole list of great actionable things at firewise.org is a great resource for this sort of stuff. And what we're describing here is this concept of the home ignition zone, right? The area around the house that presents all the vulnerabilities for fire. So you can deal with some of those close to your home with basic maintenance. It's going to take some effort. It's going to take some expense. It's going to take probably some market mechanisms, like, hey, if you want this house to be insured, you have to build it in a certain way. If you want to get a loan to finance this house, it's got to be built in a certain way with a certain design, with a certain set of materials. That's going to take some political will and some brute market force to make happen. But what an opportunity to sort of have it play out.

[00:30:19] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Two months after the Palisades and Eaton fires, I had the opportunity to connect with Chief Brian Fennessy of the Orange County Fire Authority to get a boots on the ground understanding of what goes into fighting these fires as they enter into our communities. Chief Fennessy grew up in Altadena. His childhood home was lost in the Eaton fire. He also started his career fighting wildfires in hotshot crews before moving into municipal departments.

[00:30:46] Chief Fennesy: The hotshots are the ones that are put and given the most difficult assignments. And that's true today. I mean, because of the physical fitness level, because of their training level, the way they're organized with supervision and leadership and all that goes into it, 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 a hotshot crews. But they are the ones of all hand crews that really are the elite, quite frankly.

But you know what I think drove me early on is I was always on hotshot crews, not only for the hours you got, but man, the adrenaline, the action, right? You want action and you want to be on one of these crews. So I want to be in the busiest fire stations now. I want to learn this new thing, right, where we're going into burning buildings and doing all these, this new job. And I really viewed it as a career change, even though it was the fire service. That life was kind of behind me.

[00:31:39] Jon-Barrett Ingels: We got to talking about what happens in real time when a wildfire breaks out. He discussed his role as chief and the mutual aid partnerships of Orange, L.A. and Ventura counties.

[00:31:52] Chief Fennessy: And right now there's an issue with the mutual aid system. It's the process or 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. And so you have fires like the one you saw, you know, the ones in L.A. After the 2018 Woolsey fire in Malibu, you know, 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, you know, 50 engines, whatever it was, the system couldn't provide them. Well, the reality is that between L.A. City, L.A. 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, right?

You pick up the phone. 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, right? And vice versa. You know, 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.

[00:33:24] Jon-Barrett Ingels: As these fires increase in frequency and intensity, Chief Fennessy and all firefighter’s jobs are to prepare and protect the community as best they can.

[00:33:34] Chief Fennessy: I'd much rather stand in front of my city council and mayor or hear the board of directors and say, yeah, I expended several hundred thousand 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.

You know, in 2003, I talked about those fires. It was literally knocking on doors on the bullhorn, run for your lives, blah, blah, blah. There's really good evacuation software out there that government agencies are using. I mean, really good. Right? Well, 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, well, wait a minute. We've created this thing where now people, there's an expectation that I'm OK until this thing tells me it's time to go. It's like, no.

[00:34:29] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Chief Fennessy sits on the board of a company called Watch Duty and connected us with their founder, John Mills. Watch Duty is an app notifying and providing updates on fires in the area of its users. As I mentioned during the Eaton fire, we were on evacuation warning, but it was challenging to get correct information in real time on where the fire was and where it was moving. Similarly, with the fires in Napa, I had to source information about the fire from social media posts. None of it was accurate or current. And all of this must be scary as hell when the flames enter your neighborhood and you have no reliable information. Watch Duty has reporters who work with fire stations to get the information to the users instantly. Everyone I knew here in L.A. began downloading the app during the Palisades and Eaton fires.

[00:35:21] John Mills: I think when we, when the fires first started, we had like maybe a hundred thousand users in L.A. and then it ended up with literally one in every four people in L.A. had Watch Duty within like two or three days. So we were obviously prepared for scale, but that, I think, you know, an order of magnitude bigger than we imagined it blowing up and somehow we were able to meet the moment.

[00:35:42] Jon-Barrett Ingels: I got to talk to John about how the app started and how vital it is for those of us living in the wildland-urban interface.

[00:35:50] John Mills: I think that what's interesting about Watch Duty is we built the obvious, right? It wasn't boil the ocean. It wasn't invent new things. It wasn't wait until the satellite showed up and did the whatever. We have to do something now and fire is fought with radios and shovels, right? Water when you have it, but oftentimes it's cutting breaks, man, in the middle of nowhere, you have no water. And so you realize how primitive of an operation firefighting is and honestly how primitive Watch Duty is by design. It is very easy to use. It is simple. It is clean. It is boring, like Craigslist. I just want it to be reliable and dependable and easy to understand and not so overly complicated that frankly people can't use it.

Yeah, I mean, it's really quite simple, which is the beauty of it. When a firehouse gets toned out, which is the term for page essentially in modern, well, I guess kids don't know what a pager is anymore. But when a notification goes to the, goes to the firehouse, we hear those signals. The minute they get toned out, we get toned out. So what'll happen is that we hear that signal, that analog to digital conversion happens where we hear those signals. We have computers that can monitor this stuff as well. We've built bots and all sorts of things that help us find these events. That gets dropped into Slack. So-and-so got toned out for this fire requesting engines, whatever it may be. And then anyone who is listening or available, volunteers and paid staff, about a little over 10 of them are paid staff. They volunteer, then that becomes their full-time job. They all turn their radios on and they start talking. “Fire in Coldwater Canyon, quarter acre rate of spread,” RP, which is the reporting party, says, you know, “half acre behind their house, moving up the hill,” or whatever.

[00:37:32] Jon-Barrett Ingels: I downloaded the app just like the majority of Angelenos. And one of the best features was the app notifies you when everything is contained. The relief, the breath, the release. God knows we all needed that.

[00:37:48] John Mills: Yeah. I mean, that's something that I wish the emergency alerting services would start to learn is that the de-escalation is also really important. And that's what we call it. We don't just send the alert and let you panic. We're listening there with you, right? Trying to understand what's going on, let people know what's getting under control. And that makes people feel better, right? It's a whole arc of like your heart rate goes up. This is near my house. That's my grandma's house. That's where I grew up. That's my school. That's freaking out. What we don't want you to do is turn to the news, who's not going to give you what you need or social media, who's going to spread misinformation. And randos are going to be telling you “Thoughts and prayers. My kid goes to school there,” and it's like, look, man, I feel for you. But like, that's not what I need in this moment. I actually need some clarity. And that's what we end up doing is giving clarity and peace of mind.

[00:38:37] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Watch Duty is now available in all 50 states, and I highly encourage everyone to download this incredible tool.

[00:38:44] John Mills: People need technology to help them. And I think that technologists are often overlooking everybody else. We're trying to build the next ride sharing app, the next food delivery service, the next AI, whatever. And you come out here and my neighbors and friends are like, man, I just want less fire and more water and my insurance not getting dropped and the power staying on. And like, they're just like, no one speaks to me, right? The longer I'm here, the more I understand the cognitive dissonance between the rural, I prefer the wild land people, and, and everybody else because they don't get help very often. That was really our goal when we started this thing is to help everybody else because as Thoreau says, “The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.” And we did a very good job distributing a product that like looks high tech, I guess, or feels high tech, but is actually usable by everybody.

[00:39:35] Jon-Barrett Ingels: The Fire Problem podcast is just beginning, and there is so much more for us to learn and share. We partnered with Trust for Public Land for this project to look at how conservation efforts and land buyback can help mitigate the severity of wildfires. We spoke with David Weinstein, Trust for Public Land’s Western Conservation Finance Director, working with local and state governments on how to implement legislative initiatives and ballot measures that create funding for land and water conservation and climate smart solutions. We also spoke with Hugh Coxe, Project Manager with Trust for Public Land, who identifies and manages land protection projects and leads their California Wildfire Resilience Program.

[00:40:21] David Weinstein: Obviously, climate change is pure and simple an existential threat. So not only does it affect the way in which TPL operates, it affects every single thing that we do. You know, I think as we are learning, this is definitely an all hands on deck approach. Every conservation organization, and I would argue every organization, every business, every human has their own lane in which they can work to do better on behalf of what we are facing to maintain, again, the crisis that we all face collectively.

We're finally getting to this place where fire ecology is becoming sophisticated enough that we understand that Trust for Public Land’s work can be on that preventative side to accomplish the mission that we have as an organization to help benefit the people we want to, which is all Americans and all visitors to America, and have the co-benefit of making sure that communities are adapted and ready for these catastrophic wildfires.

[00:41:20] Hugh Coxe: I think generally the literature that I've seen suggests that the changes are that you get spikier spikes. So the droughts are longer and more unforgiving. And then the wet years, by the same token, are wetter and last longer. And both of those can work to increase fire hazard. On wet years, we get a lot of vegetation very quickly. And then if it swings back to a hot, dry summer, all that vegetation dries up and is fuel.

As we were finishing up some of that work, we became more and more involved in discussions around wildfire resilience, and realized that what we didn't have here was a specific lens to think about, okay, how does wildfire and wildfire mitigation and prevention play a role in thinking about where do we want to be focused, where do we want to put our priorities, where do we want to invest our time and our money to get the most out of that.

[00:42:23] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Through all of these conversations and my research and my personal experience with it, it is the community response and the resilience in the face of horrific destruction, as well as the dedication of every firefighter and first responder who puts their lives on the line under unimaginable conditions, that gives me hope.

[00:42:44] John Mills: I like to tell people we didn't name it Fire Duty or Fire Watch on purpose. It's not about fire, right? It's actually about humans on Watch Duty, right? It is about citizens and your neighbors helping neighbors.

[00:42:55] Nick Mott: There are existing organizations in a lot of communities that are prone to wildfire, hundreds of them across the country that have a lot of expertise and institutional knowledge about how to better work on your home. So if you're somebody that's living in a fire prone area, I highly encourage you to find out more about your local community organizing, if there's groups around you that could help you get more resources or learn more about how to live more resiliently with fire.

[00:43:19] David Weinstein: We see the world through the eyes of people, no matter where they are, and no matter what their context or circumstance is. We want to hear from community and figure out how to make their hometowns and counties and cities and states more livable, more walkable. We have a mission to make sure that every American is within a 10 minute walk of a park, a trail, a green space, an open space.

[00:43:44] Justin Angle: This is a collective action problem, like homes are often quite close together, right? And you can do a lot to protect your own home, but if your neighbor's house goes up in flames, that doesn't do you much good, because once a house in a community goes up in flames, that's a tremendous source of risk and fuel. The fire can spread from that tremendously quickly. So a single home is only as safe as the homes around it. So we need to get entire neighborhoods to embrace this notion of the home ignition zone and get communities to collectively take these actions to make themselves more resilient to wildfire as well. And that's tricky to get people to coordinate.

[00:44:21] John Vaillant: And there's some great firefighters in Australia. There's some great firefighters in Western Canada. But I would say the real brain trust and the most, the leading edge of fire response and climate based fire response was probably be in California.

[00:44:39] Chief Fennessy: Now man, we send on any report of any fire, we're sending aircraft, we're calling for the air tankers from Cal Fire, we're 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, you know, wait 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 quote unquote normal day, you know, we need to be after these things. I think it's a public expectation as well.

[00:45:12] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Fires like these create a mix of emotion. I drove my daughter through the remnants of Altadena to see where her school auditorium once stood, where the store she and her friends would go to after school used to be, or my favorite restaurant to visit after one of her plays no longer exists. She cried for the memories. I cried for the devastation as block after block of homes were leveled. But I also felt proud when I saw fire trucks from Napa and Calistoga here to fight the Eaton fire. And when I saw truck after truck from all over the state drive by my house on their way home after the fire was contained, I stood and I waved and cried.

As we enter into 2026, a rain-soaked holiday here in the West may lead to increased vegetation come spring and early summer. And if no more rain comes and that vegetation dries out, we may see another catastrophic fire season. It is not if, but when. Be prepared, stay informed, and be aware. The Fire Problem will return with more in-depth conversations, with more questions, with more stories, and hopefully with more understanding. Use this episode as an introduction to what we are doing and listen to the full conversations and read the transcripts and share them.

We'd like to thank John Valiant and Penguin Random House, Nick Mott and Justin Angle and Bloomsbury Publishing, Chief Brian Fennessy and the Orange County Fire Authority, John Mills and the entire team at Watch Duty, and David Weinstein, Hugh Cox, and the Trust for Public Land. The Fire Problem is produced by Past Forward and Chapman University. To learn more about these issues and to hear the full interviews, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.