Recent Fire History of Southern California - With Tim Chavez

Destructive Fires Are Not A New Thing in SoCal!

We just wrapped up an interview with my longtime friend and colleague, Tim Chavez, about the history of large, damaging Santa Ana wind-driven wildfires in Southern California. Some areas around Malibu have burned 5 times in the past 60 years! A summary of the interview and transcript are below.

Summary

Tim Chavez, a fire behavior analyst with 40 years of experience, discussed the unique challenges of Santa Ana fires in Southern California. He highlighted the importance of understanding fire behavior, the role of wind direction, and the impact of urban development on fire risk. Chavez emphasized the need for better structure hardening and vegetation management. He also noted the recurring nature of severe fires, citing historical examples from the 1970s to the present. The conversation also touched on the limitations of current fuels management and the necessity of adapting to climate change and prolonged droughts.

Transcript (made by robots, pardon errors…)

Zeke Lunder
All right, we’re streaming say something.

Tim Chavez
How’s it going? Zeke, all right. Hey, everyone

Zeke Lunder
here with Tim Chavez. Tim and I started working together in 1999 first big fire I worked on. Tim was there, and we’ve interviewed him elsewhere here on The Lookout, but Tim knows Southern California Fire about as well as anyone, and so we want to kind of just have a conversation about Santa Ana fires, how they how they operate, get me out here. I need to be on there twice, and some kind of historical context on on these things. So welcome, Tim, tell us. Tell us about your your story with fire in Southern California.

Tim Chavez
Well, I was born and grew up here. I worked for CAL FIRE for 40 years, except for two years of that I was on the ground firefighter. I’ve been to many, many, many fires on the California coast during Santa Ana time, and up and down the state. But yeah, things are different down here. And every few years we found out. We find out how different,

Zeke Lunder
and then tell us a little bit about your your career as a fire behavior analyst, and how you kind of came to be a fire behavior expert.

Tim Chavez
Well, I was always interested in fire behavior, and I mean, even from the time I grew up in an area that was very prone to fires in Beaumont along the I 10 freeway, always had big fires in the summer and had curiosity. Started volunteering when I was 16, and got hired as a seasonal firefighter at 18, right out of high school, and worked every summer since then, for either the Forest Service or Cal Fire and around 2000 I got an opportunity to go to the highest level of fire behavior training, which is s5 90. It’s taught every other year in Tucson, Arizona, and got qualified as a fire behavior analyst. And Cal Fire added a fire behavior analyst position to their teams. Shortly thereafter, their Incident Command teams, incident Incident Command teams. And so I occupied one of those positions for 18 years, something like that, and went to a lot of fires. And always have a curiosity, even when I’m not assigned to a fire, about what’s going on and how it’s developing and the the antecedent weather conditions and the resulting fire behavior and the fire perimeters, how they develop. So it’s just something I’m curious about always. And

Zeke Lunder
you went to college for fire science, didn’t you? Yeah,

Tim Chavez
I graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in a bachelor’s degree in fire management science, they called it. It was one of the few programs in the 80s that had anything to do with fire in their forestry program, I think it was Berkeley University of Montana and Colorado State. And had a really great experience. Worked with really, two really good professors there, Phil Omi and Rick Lavin, that their their their deal was 100% wildland fire, and we got to do a lot of neat stuff with prescribed burning and fire modeling. I was one of the original beta or alpha, actually, alpha testers of of the behave program. And I ran up, I ran the route the mill fire model, when it was punch cards, where you had to go and punch a stack of cards and give them to the guy at the little window and maybe wait a couple of days to get your results. So I’ve been, I’ve been doing that for a long time, too. And

Zeke Lunder
tell us a little bit about what the f band, the fire behavior analyst does on the team.

Tim Chavez
Fire Behavior Analyst, the purpose of that position, being on the team is to advise operations and safety in conjunction with the incident meteorologists that we work side by side with about tactics and strategy and safety on the fire so we analyze the situation and provide feedback at meetings. You know what the planning. Meeting, and we give a briefing at the operational briefing, about what to watch out for, for the day, what areas we can be successful in, what areas we’re going to get smashed in. And, you know, keeping an eye on the conditions as they develop, and the seasonality of where we’re at and what this, what the fuels are like, and it’s basically, it’s a great job, because you spend all day focused on the fire, the weather and the fuels,

Zeke Lunder
trying to pull up the want to jump to kind of real time I was watching, when you’re talking about kind of tactics and stuff I was watching right before we got on. It looked like maybe they’re doing a firing operation on Palisades right now. And so I just wanted to kind of play that back and see i and see thought it could kind of segue into what we’re talking about here. This is looking from Topanga peak

Tim Chavez
and are now all we’re seeing is an ad for the New York Times. Oh man, dang. I don’t know what happened there. Okay,

Zeke Lunder
let me try again. Share Screen. There we go. Okay, so there is a tabanga Peak, and it looked here like right at sunset. Looks to me out here like, see that bringing it along road. Yep, yeah. It looks like they’re doing it sure does

Tim Chavez
like the wind at their back. They

Zeke Lunder
better hurry, yeah, so yeah, because I was wondering when we might start to see the wind shift onto the to the to be the onshore. You can see the dozers out here working too. Oh yeah, these cameras are so insane. Like to be able to see all this stuff happening.

Tim Chavez
It’s only gonna get better.

Zeke Lunder
Yeah. So, so back to kind of the role of the F band operationally. So you might be telling them, like, hey, you’ve got a window here of 36 hours before we get the onshore. So you should do your firing operation tomorrow night, not the night after that, right?

Tim Chavez
And we’re focused about, you know, focused on the whole fire. So, you know, like I said, certain areas of the fire you’re gonna have to wait for conditions of change, but other areas of the fire you can maneuver and be successful. So I mean, most operation section chiefs are pretty savvy fire behavior wise. They just need somebody to bounce their ideas off of. And you know, kind of decision support we’re not making the decisions as a fire behavior analyst. We’re just supporting them with data and our opinions. And there’s a real thing there between between the OP section chiefs and the fire behavior analysts about, you know, relationships and trust and all that and and that’s why having that position on a team is really important, because over time, you know multiple assignments. You get to you get to know the ops guys, you get to develop a relationship with them, and that increases your communication. And you know the trust level and all that is really important. It’s important in every phase of of, you know, the human deal of firefighting, but especially in those planning and decision making positions.

Zeke Lunder
Yeah, I’m just gonna bring up a different screen here. Go to the to the Google Earth, because in the Google Earth, folks that have just been kind of watching our earlier broadcast we’ve been talking about this so we’ve got, we’ve got the virus perimeter here, which is from this morning. Basically, give me a second to change my colors. I wish fibers just automatically colored the polygon, like, transparent red. So because every time I load fires, I’ve got to, like, make it red again. Google Earth, it’s like, and Google is so clunky, it takes like, 30 clicks. But we got the fire here, and we were talking about how it went to Franklin fire up in there too. I to

Tim Chavez
I think they do that so that their data packages, when they download them are so small, yeah,

Zeke Lunder
yeah. So we were just looking at kind of the perspective from the camera over here. I. And the fires kind of coming up, but this is the box they’ve been building for a couple days now.

So I was talking a bit earlier too about just how, you know, we rarely can go direct on fires in these types of train and that’s why we see like the dozer lines along the ridges and everything.

Tim Chavez
Yeah, there’s not too many ridges in that country that, I mean, if it’s, if it’s a if a dozer could go down the ridge, it’s probably had a dozer down it at one time or another. I mean, there’s some of those ridges that are so knife edge that not even a dozer can go down them, but with the kind of fire behavior that we had on, you know, Monday night and Tuesday you’re not going to be able to go direct on that, especially at the head, even at The flanks, even even if you had all the resources that you wanted, most everybody is doing evacuations or life, you know, safety type stuff. And unfortunately, on these fires in the early stages of the fire, nobody’s building line, because everybody’s doing, you know, life safety stuff, just like paradise,

Zeke Lunder
yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the whole like, you know, we’ve been talking a little offline, just about all the crazy politics, all the kind of just total horseshit that is playing game, just all that. And I thought it’d be useful just to kind of talk about the history of Santa Ana fires in Southern California, and just kind of take the big picture view to start and make Maybe, and maybe you can talk a little bit about, like, we’ll pull up some of the fires here in the last 30 years. And maybe you can talk a little bit about, like, I just was commenting, you know, how rare it is to, like, achieve anything during initial, the initial phases of the Santa Ana. And so I just thought, let’s, let’s just come up. Let’s, like, start with, like, the 1970s there you go. Okay, pick a fire. Tim,

Tim Chavez
so, this is, so, this is, you know, it’s such a it’s such a history repeating itself. Type situation I can think back to when I was a kid, you know, the 1970 fires. Um, in september of 1970 another, Santa Ana, wind event burned through 1000s of houses.

Zeke Lunder
It’s like panorama fire. No,

Tim Chavez
70, yeah, 80. This was, it was not Bel Air Brentwood, it was Malibu. I don’t need I don’t even remember what the fire name was, but Malibu area, clamp it. Clampett. Fire, I think okay. Or the right fire, there you go. Right. Fire, yeah. Cannon. Fire, yeah. All those fires were all burning at the same time resources. You know, back in those days, they didn’t have multi band radios. There was no cross communication. There was no this was pre fire scope days, everything was kind of territorial. So, you know, the city didn’t want the county on their land. The county didn’t want the city on their land. And you know, that kind of parochial stuff used to go on so, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because the fires would have got big anyway. And you can see that those fires burned from the 101, 118 corridor all the way to the ocean, just like even before that, in the 60s, the Bel Air Brentwood fire burned 1000s of homes on the front country of Los Angeles. And then, you know, yeah, what year was that? 6161

Zeke Lunder
it’s interesting. Too, that like 61 was the last time we had a big fire in this Palisades footprint.

Tim Chavez
Yeah. And, you know, the 1970 fires were so devastating and so widespread. I mean, all the way from from Kern County the rank and fire, all the way to San Diego County, to the Mexican border, the boulder fire and and and those fires down there that, you know, finally, some of the decision makers decided, well, we need to do some about this. And that’s what started fire scope, which initiated a lot of stuff. Simple stuff, like common communication, being able to talk to each other on the radio using common terminology. You know, calling, calling the different we call them ICS positions now, but they were, you know, everybody had their own fire line organization, and they called them different names, and the resources were called different things. And, you know, no wonder everything was chaos. So then after 70, you know, we had a kind of a lull for a little while. I don’t remember panorama fire was 1980 and I think there was also some fires in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1980 as well.

Zeke Lunder
Dayton Canyon fire. Yeah, there you go. 82

Tim Chavez
the one that I personally ones that I personally were on was in 93 and 96 we had a bunch of fires that burned through the same, you know, territory, Calabasas, old Topanga. You know the Great Pacific fuel break always holds no fire has ever spotted across the Catalina that I know about.

Zeke Lunder
And then, so as far as firefighting, there were less homes there, right? But there was, like, what? What was

Tim Chavez
all that? I think the, I think those, a lot of those homes are well established. Yeah, there might have been less but, but there’s been homes in this area for, you know, going back to the 30s, I think, and, and they’ve probably, you know, there’s probably places that have been rebuilt five or six times, wow, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Zeke Lunder
Well, then there’s a fire here that, like, it looks like it has the Calabasas. Is that, like, the same footprint, basically, as the Franklin

Tim Chavez
pretty much,

Zeke Lunder
like, see, here’s the Franklin fire. Wow, look at that. Yeah, that’s, that’s stupid. Oh my gosh, that’s it really interesting, yeah, huh? Okay, so that’s 96 to 2024 so that’s 28 years, yeah, 30 years. So what was it like firefighting? Then, you know, like, So, what’s different about this fire from those previous fires? About what’s different about the Palisades fire from, you know, the the old pan get fire.

Tim Chavez
I suspect that that that area above, see a lot, a lot of this stuff depends on there. You know, there’s two really big, kind of fatal, random things that happen whenever we get these kind of offshore events. One is the orientation of the wind, because some sometimes the Santa Ana is more of a northerly component. Sometimes it’s more of an easterly component. Sometimes it’s in between and more northeasterly. So, so that’s really important, because when that initial push happens, you know, if that’s where the fire is going to push to is and there’s no stopping it. There’s no you could have all the engines and all the water in the world, and you are not going to stop it. The other thing is, is where the ignition happens. If the, you know, a perfect example is, is, is the campfire, if that ignition had not been in that exact same place without exact location, you know, Paradise might be still standing same with this fire, if that ignition had not been in that exact place, above Pacific Palisades with the wind perfectly oriented so that the the community is at The end of like a barrel of a gun. Pacific Palisades might still be standing, and that fire might have skipped right over it and went, you know, to the ocean. So, yeah,

Zeke Lunder
well, I think, I think we talked about, we’ve talked about that quite a bit in various conversations about there’s some things that are known about the Santa Anas that they come out of the north, they come out of the east. And so when you’ve got, like, a neighborhood that’s all the streets are oriented pretty much straight east and west, or there’s or, you know that that that makes a difference. Yeah, when the fire can just come in and like be aligned to go straight down a block, just blowing straight across.

Tim Chavez
When it becomes an urban fire storm, that orientation of the buildings becomes important, because those embers go right from one building to the next building to the next building when it when it starts spreading, building to building like that. You. You know, the BTU output of a fire like that is so tremendously far above what we experience in brush or even in timber, because of all the modern building materials, plastics, you know, all that stuff.

Zeke Lunder
You know, striking here, that alignment that you have, you know, here, right down the street, where the wind is coming straight down these canyons, and it just can go house to house to house, yeah, well, I think that’s a, you know, something that’s been coming up recently. It’s just that it’s really important to make that distinguish between a conflagration and a wildfire, and that when we talk about wildfire mitigation, that like things that we think about with wildfire mitigation, like defensible space, they don’t mean anything if your house is 10 feet away from your neighbor’s house and your neighbor’s house is on fire with no firefighters there,

Tim Chavez
and you have palm trees and junipers and Italian Cypress all around your house, and you have bark On the ground, you know, right up to your to your walls, and you don’t stand a chance. There’s just no there’s no mitigating. There’s nothing that an engine company can do to protect houses at that point, because once the ornamental once the palm trees and pine trees and eucalyptus and ornamental vegetation catches on fire. It’s over. You can’t do anything.

Zeke Lunder
Yeah. So, yeah. So this is one of those neighborhoods that we’re talking about. It’s just, you’ve got the pompous grass and the

Tim Chavez
Yeah, yeah, that’s a that’s a killer right there. And see those palms with all those dead fronds there. Each one of those fronds is gonna is going to atomize into a billion embers, and all those embers are gonna go downwind to the next house and to the next house. That pepper tree right there, same thing. All those leaves are gonna, are gonna volatilize, and now that each one of those leaves becomes an ember, it’s just, you know, there’s, there’s nothing.

Unknown Speaker
Is this the olive tree here?

Tim Chavez
I don’t know. Yeah, maybe, yeah, really oily. But, you know, the worst is, the worst is, is palms, pines, eucalyptus, Cypress, pepper, although those are the worst, and that is probably the most common tree you see, the closer You get to the coast,

Zeke Lunder
you know. And sorry, I’m drawing like, weird stuff here for no good reason.

Yeah, it’s all, you know, you come and look at this stuff after the fact in in the Google Earth, and there’s like, it gives you the willies.

Tim Chavez
What do you always say? Zeke, plan on it happening.

Zeke Lunder
Yeah, yeah. So that brings us to kind of that. Do you want to let’s do us get through a few more decades here.

Tim Chavez
Yeah, so the 90s, like I said, 9396 big fires in this area. Again, 2007 2008 big fires in this area. Again, I mean, and then 2000 I 1018 the Wolsey,

Zeke Lunder
right? So here’s the 2000s

Tim Chavez
and now and now. So, I mean, you look at a fire history map of almost anywhere in Southern California, not just the Malibus, not just the Santa Monica Mountains, anywhere south of the tahas. And it’s rare to find a place that hasn’t had fire repeatedly. Look

Zeke Lunder
at that. There’s another fire there that’s got the exact same footprint as the Franklin the Canyon fire 2000 Yeah, burn the same three.

Tim Chavez
That’s three in that same footprint.

Zeke Lunder
Wow. Since when? Let’s just go back here. It was 90s, 80s, 90s and 2000s 80s,

Tim Chavez
90s, 2000s and now 2020s,

Zeke Lunder
yeah, and 70s and 70s. So that’s why they say Malibus all is burning. And 50s. So 50s, 70s, eight. 90s, 2000s 2010, there’s a little one there. And you

Tim Chavez
think, you think, the Malibu, you know, the front country, the coast, facing hills. They’re above Malibu and above Pacific Palisades. You think, oh, they get the fog every day, so that, you know, honestly, there’s only a few days every year where you were, where these fuels on this mountain can support fire, and that’s always in the fall. And guess what? That’s always during the Santa Ana event.

Zeke Lunder
And that’s kind of like a funnel point there, right from the San Fernando Valley, like right through this gap. Yeah,

Tim Chavez
yeah. And the gaps are the worst I if we, if we did a fluid dynamics analysis of that area right there, we’d probably see that, that there’s a, there’s an acceleration point where the winds accelerate right through that, right through that gap, and make, you know, they used to call them fire sheds. I don’t know if they still do or not, but yeah, that was a big thing. That was a big thing a few years back was fire sheds. These are, these are classic fire sheds.

Zeke Lunder
Okay, so then we got, also, we got the San Diego County phenomenon,

Tim Chavez
talking about we could do the same, we could do the same analysis in, yeah, Western, Western San Diego County, the Orange County, front country, the coastal plain, The mountains above San Bernardino. I mean, it’s just constant. So

Zeke Lunder
how come? How come? Do you think it is that every time this happens, it’s kind of this, like unprecedented disaster that never was on anyone’s radar, and

Tim Chavez
we got to find somebody to blame, right? I think that’s just human nature. Zeke, I think, you know, like, like the, you know, it’s just like an earthquake, right? When’s the last time we had a strong earthquake in Southern California? I guarantee you, everybody has forgotten all their preparedness stuff. You know, it, it’s, it’s like a lot of, a lot of misfortune that be befalls humans. They, they have a short memory and forget about it, and think, as as time goes by, they think, oh, that won’t happen again. And it happens again and happens again. The other thing is, human. You know, human lives are pretty short, so for somebody to experience this two or three times is pretty rare. All

Zeke Lunder
right, so here’s the area. This is the Altadena fire area, the fire area, canaloa

Tim Chavez
fire, I guarantee you, for almost that same footprint, 93

Zeke Lunder
okay, yeah, so we’ve got a fire there in the in the 60s, kind of right up against canalo mesa. Yeah, we got 70s, 90s, 2000s of Station Fire. And then now this one,

Tim Chavez
the bobcat, was right there, just to the west or to the east.

Zeke Lunder
So how come more of these fires haven’t come down into the urban areas,

Tim Chavez
in the on the on this Pasadena foot hill area? Oh, I think,

Zeke Lunder
like, do you think? Do you think if the Palisades fire hadn’t been burning that the Eden fire, they might have had enough resources to keep it out of the city.

Tim Chavez
I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think it would have mattered. I think I’m not sure about this what I’m about to say, but I think it’s less common to have that straight downslope this. This fire was very much affected by a mountain wave, where there was strong the meteorologists call it a hydraulic jump, where you get the air actually bounces, and if it happens to bounce right at that Foothill boundary, that’s when you get those gusts 100 and that’s what was happening that night when the eaten fire took off.

Zeke Lunder
Okay, so the winds were coming basically from the left here, from left to right, left to right, and they were seriously and they’re kind of like bouncing. They’re going boring, bouncing right here. Yep. Because the fire started here and raced back up hill. I was kind of surprised how hard it pushed up, but it is so steep. There

Tim Chavez
I was too. But that’s the thing, that’s the mountain. Way phenomena is it’s it’s cyclical, like it’ll happen and then it backside, it relaxes, and then it happens again, and then it relaxes. So I don’t really have a lot of bases to make. Make that opinion, but that’s what it looks like to me. Got it?

Zeke Lunder
You seem, I think we were talking about the this, where the let’s talk, let’s throw this up here. Here’s this the Altadena.

Tim Chavez
Oh, imagery. That Max our image. Yeah, devastating. I saw that. I saw this this afternoon, and it kind of made me sick to my stomach. Well,

Zeke Lunder
we don’t have to look at it. I think that’s one of those things about this business, like you can have to know when to look away, right? Like we don’t want, okay. I mean, look at

Tim Chavez
that, unbelievable.

Zeke Lunder
So, so let’s talk a little bit about what that means for mitigation, right? Like, I think a lot about, like, in a lot of the places I work, I often think about like this, this edge being the kind of the critical spot where a wildland fire transitions to being a conflagration. But you’re like, you’re saying that as soon as you burn up one palm tree and you’ve got embers that are going a quarter mile or whatever, like, there is no edge, right? The fire, like, the fire just kind of sprinkles itself across the entire landscape. So, like, what do you know? We have all these things we think about for, like the Sierra foothills, or other places where it’s not experiencing such severe conditions, somewhere like Quincy, you know, or you know, where you’re not in line of a big, crazy east wind. It’s more your typical, you know, shingle town or something, you know, where we invented this fuel break concept of, you know that you can cause a fire to drop to the ground, and it won’t be yet, torching and sending hammers that are broken like problem fire behavior

Tim Chavez
the Ponderosa way, right? Yeah.

Zeke Lunder
And then, and that, that whole model falls short. And so this, there’s this whole kind of, we’ve got this orthodoxy of how you manage fuels that you put in fuel breaks and you remove ladder fuels and everything else. But how do you really apply vegetation management towards mitigating fire threats in these places with such extreme, low frequency, high severity events.

Tim Chavez
I’m not I’m not saying that fuels management is a waste of money or a waste of time. It’s important still, but, but I think we would be miles ahead, or money ahead, for sure, if we would invest in structure hardening, if we invested as much money in structure hardening and landscape you know, ornamental vegetation landscaping. We if we focused on ornamental vegetation landscaping as much as we focused on fuels management and building construction standards, I think we would be money ahead.

Zeke Lunder
And so what do you see with, you know, with the slate being wiped clean like this, with this whole neighborhood being starting over, what do you think we should do differently with the rebuild?

Tim Chavez
Well, I think chapter seven of the building code is pretty good. The current building codes are pretty good. But again, the the slow creep of

people planting palm trees or people planting ornamental vegetation that’s flammable, you know, we it’s the American way to, you know, if you own property, you can do with it whatever you want. But I I think in these areas, we kind of need to have, we need to have, I know, I know there will never be like HOA standards that we can tell people, Hey, you can’t plant that tree. But that’s where, that’s kind of where we need to go, because otherwise, I mean the new the newer building codes are much better, and we’ve seen that on multiple fires now, in the last 10 years, where a fire will bump into modern construction that’s been built since. I don’t know when did chapter seven come in? 2010 something like that.

Unknown Speaker
There’s 2007

Tim Chavez
2007 that sounds right, and and those houses do a lot better. But we need to, we need to figure out a way to retrofit in some of these areas, because the the current. Housing stock that’s from the 60s and from the 70s is really vulnerable. And I wish we had data to look at to see how old these houses were in Altadena and but I bet that many of them were from the, you know, population boom that happened in the post war years.

Zeke Lunder
You know, you know one thing I think about quite a bit, like I worked a lot in Paradise after the camp fire. I spent the whole winter, kind of, working on erosion control projects up there. And it was spooky to drive around and see what survived and what didn’t right. But my friend Eric Knapp and Jana Val COVID. They they did a paper on the campfire, and the factors that did or did not affect survivability. And the number one factor that affected structures burning was proximity to another structure that burned. And so when we talk about hardening, it’s hard because you’ve got a heart, you can’t just harden the house. You’ve got to harden every freaking chicken coop and storage shed. I mean, look at all these sheds, all these outbuildings. There’s like every house here has got buildings and and that was something about paradise that was, like, quirky and cool. And also that took it out was that all these hillbillies and cool Woods dwellers had tons of sheds, you know, and, like, I went up there a lot because I’d buy stuff off Craigslist, and I’d go and, like, buy a bandsaw or something, and I’d go to this, some retired guy from Paradise, you know, there’s a lot of retired people from the bay area who are machinists or engineers who brought really incredible shops when they moved to paradise. But it was kind of this anarchy where you could, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got five sheds in my backyard in Chico, right, like this, The Lookout is coming to you from a little, you know, it started off as a bike shed, and I got the shed that my kid like paints in, and I’ve got the shed that came with the place, and I’ve got a wood shed. And then my kid built a shed, because he’s, you know, he’s my kid. So, like, we got our own little shed calling just in town. So, like, and none of those are, like, cement siding or, you know, I’m lucky if I weed eat around them, but it just so much this stuff seems pretty intractable to me. So, I mean, one community burns down. You don’t have the sheds yet, but you know, as soon as since vegetation is tall enough that your neighbors can’t see what you’re doing, then you can, like, get like, get away with building all kinds of stuff, right? Yeah, no

Tim Chavez
building permits needed, right? And it’s like, fuck, excuse me,

Zeke Lunder
pardon me, yeah, like, who? I don’t want to live in a place where I can’t build sheds in my backyard, you know? So it’s like, that’s the, you know, I don’t want people to think that I’m, like, preaching that we should, like, have a nanny state where, like, you can’t build a shed, because a life without sheds is, like, a life not worth it’s not worth living, in my opinion. So just to bring it back personally, like, like, yeah, I don’t. I don’t want to see a place where, like, we all have to, like, register our dog houses and make sure they’re made with Hardy board. So it just oftentimes, it seems to me like I know that we have wins, that fuel breaks are often successful under the, not the extreme conditions, yeah, but, but eventually, like you’re gonna have that fire that takes takes it out right

Tim Chavez
mid summer, June, July, August. Fuel breaks are great. But come October, and now you know, one of the big factors that we haven’t talked about here is we’re in January, and most places in Southern California haven’t had significant rain in eight months or more. And you know, these, these cyclical things, these kind of midterm, you know, less than a year or maybe less than two year droughts, that’s a normal thing in California, and it’s maybe going to be exacerbated by climate change, but it’s normal. I mean, it’s normal for Southern California to go to have a dry winter. And I remember when I was in high school, 7677 winter was one of the driest ones I remember. And you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s par for the course here, but and then when you get one where you haven’t had any rain, you don’t get any rain in November, you don’t get any rain in December, you don’t get any rain in January, which is what we’re looking at now. I mean, there’s nothing in the forecast for 10, 1216, days out. Now we’re going to be in February, no rain. And February, March and April are the peak of the Santa Ana season. I mean, it’s when the frequency of Santa Ana is it’s like every week, but when you’ve had six, 810, inches of rain, it’s no big deal. But now it’s going to be a big deal, and this is going to continue this. I’m not saying this exact kind of disaster is going to continue to happen through the through the winter, but there’s potential here for about every three to 10 days for a Santa Ana to happen and people doing stupid stuff in the woods, or welders or power lines down, or a vehicle fire in the brush. It’s gonna happen again. And you know, I hate the year round fire season idea, because some years it really doesn’t apply. You really have to be careful with your messaging, with the quote, unquote year round fire season, but, but this is one of those years, maybe.

Zeke Lunder
So what? What can we do? What can we encourage people to do to make this less sketchy, this neck, if we don’t do have two more months with no rain.

What are some things that people do that start fires that people wouldn’t think of?

Tim Chavez
Well, I mean, it’s the same. It’s the same all year round. But any kind of hot work, you know, any kind of welding, grinding, weed eating with metal bladed tools. Even the other day, I was working on my deck and my my hammer on a drywall screw jumped a big old spark, you know, anything like that. You just have to be really careful on these when you’re when, you know, we do a pretty good mess. We do a pretty good job of messaging. The, you know, the red flag program does a pretty good job of messaging whenever conditions are I kind of at the extreme end, you know, I just, I remember back in the in the 70s and 80s, we used to do a lot more, like red flag patrols, where the engines would drive around in the woods and and we’d see people work like I remember doing that. We’d see Caltrans mowing along the roadside, and I would drive up to them and just shut them down and say, Hey, you guys are done for the day. You cannot be doing this. This is dumb. The winds are blowing 40 miles an hour and and it’s October, you can’t, you know, you can’t be doing this. So I don’t know whether you know that kind of enforcement would be, would be useful or helpful, because I don’t think we’re doing a lot of that anymore. You know, we have all these closure areas that, especially on the San Bernardino and the Angeles front country that, you know, supposedly, gates are closed and you’re not supposed to be back there during the fire season. But I don’t know that there’s a lot of enforcement for that kind of thing. So maybe that, maybe that’s part of the solution, you know, like, like you said, it’s always an education thing, just people just have to be really careful. And then, you know, the utility companies, that’s a big problem. They’re doing better. I kind of, I kind of wonder about why they didn’t do a more white, you know, I know everybody hates it, but why they didn’t do a more of a widespread PSPs this go round? I mean, I think at the peak of the event, they only had a few 100 customers that were shut down. I got to kind of wonder about that. And then there’s speculation that maybe, you know, there’s a lot of rumors going around about the cause of the eating and the cause of the Palisades,

Zeke Lunder
but, yeah, we’re not, we’re not going there until, you know, I’ve, that’s one of those things I’ve been steering clear of, yeah, what I what I really have learned in my career is that fire investigators are really good at what they do, yeah? And if it’s our sound like they’re gonna figure it out. And yeah. And so we just kind of steer clear of of that stuff until it runs its course. Yep, because as soon as you get into like that, then it gets into the politics are so crazy right now…

Zeke Lunder
I was talking the other day about how fires look a lot bigger at night, and is there kind of, like a multiplier, if you’re like, training people on like, size up, will you tell them like, hey, it’s gonna look, you know, four times larger at night than like,

Tim Chavez
yeah, we used to call that dog acres divide by seven, because everything looks bigger at night. It’s amazing when it when it’s lit up like that. All right,

Zeke Lunder
You know, covering SoCal is kind of a new thing, and it’s nice to have someone with your experience to kind of back us up. You know, I really appreciate talking to you the first night of the fire when you you kind of clued me into the you thought I would run all the way to Franklin, and then it did. And then, because I’d said it, like, I look smart, but as I was leaning on the shoulder, on two shoulders, I’m trying to, I’m trying to be less predictive, you know, because I feel like I’ll be like, Oh yeah, it’s gonna get to here tomorrow, and then it doesn’t. And then I, then I’m like, kind of anxious about whether or not it will. That’s

Tim Chavez
the life of a fire behavior analyst, right there. Yeah, but you know what I know? Personally, I learned more from being wrong, and I think, I think it causes you to be more analytical when you think about, Well, why didn’t it run all the way to the Franklin fire like we thought it was going to i. And that that is where learning happens.

Zeke Lunder
Yeah, yeah. I think I’ve been thinking back on my career and just how, like, these, these incidents, follow this trajectory where first few days, no one sleeps, and yep, day four or five, the plans in place, and it gets executed, and then it winds down, and then you’ve still got, like, six to eight days on your your roll, and that most of the time when I was on a fire with you, those six to 10 days of the ramp down were the times that were really enjoyable. And just that you were always working on some sort of little project. You come over to talk to us today. Hey, give me the perimeter from this day, and there’s so much of that learning that happens in that environment during that that ramp down, that it was always, I really, it was always a great time. That’s

Tim Chavez
what I love about this job. Is just being a the fire behavior analyst job is just being able to focus 100% on what is the fire doing, and why is it doing what it’s doing, and how do I take advantage of that, you know, and and use that. It’s pattern recognition, right? It’s recognizing the pattern nature is pretty repetitive, and trying to pick up on what it is that that’s what that’s what AI is all about. Is pattern recognition only you know. You don’t, you don’t get it. You don’t learn anything from Ai, but from the human brain. When you when you figure out the pattern, then you start to ask yourself, why did this happen? Not not just that the pattern is recognized, but why it is why did it happen? That’s the, that’s the victory, right there.

Zeke Lunder
Well, we got, I think we should have a little series where we deconstruct interesting fires we’ve been on, you know, the gap fire, or kind of learning lessons I on the AI tip, I had this kind of funny experience yesterday. I’ve been taking these live streams, and I dump them into otter.ai and it transcribes it for me, but it also creates a summary, and, oh yeah, then I’m just dumping the summary onto the website, like, here’s the live stream, and then here’s a summary, and it’s pretty good. But one thing that happened yesterday it was pretty funny was I talked with Susie Cagle, who’s journalist, and she was, she was saying, well, people in the Bay Area seem to think that, like, because we haven’t had, we haven’t smoked out the Bay Area since the Dixie fire badly, that somehow, like, all this fuels works, working, and that, like, we solved the wildfire problem and and so we, we went through and looked on the map, and I just kind of pointed out, like all these different like the Yuba watershed and the Stannis lost watershed, and all these big like five to 800,000 acre chunks that are unburned, that are gonna get their Mega fires. And so we chatted around that topic. But then when I asked the AI to summarize it, the AI said that obviously there was a need for more planning, really, yeah, and I thought, and it’s like, exactly not what I think like, it’s like, no, there’s a need to just, like, go out and do a lot of work, right? But it’s not like we really need to spend a lot of time, like, planning what to do, right? Like, we’ve known the solutions and but AI, I think it’s been trained on all these plans that you and I have written and like, all this kind of, like, planner type, like analytical people, the people who actually go and do things like run a fellow Buncher all day, they’re not writing reports that are getting like, they’re being used to the AI is being trained by all of us nerds. They’re like, all we know how to do is write a plan, right? And so you ask the robot, and robots like, you need a plan? And it’s like, no, we don’t. We’re like, we need, like, a million people with chainsaws to go out and live in the woods, right? So I just thought, yeah, that’s that’s interesting. That’s funny, yeah, yeah. I don’t think we need more planning. I’m a planner, but I don’t think we need any more planning. We just need to, like, it’s interesting, talking to some people who are in fuels, and they’re like, just go start doing things, you know, like, if you want to, like, improve your resilience, like, go cut brush. It doesn’t matter which brush you cut, just go do something, right? Don’t sit around and talk about it. Like, just go out in the woods and cut some brush. And that will make a difference. Let’s not make this too complicated, all right. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks Tim for for coming on the history, and I think it’s super important, so keep doing it. All right, man, all right, see ya. And thanks everyone for checking out The Lookout, talking to you. See you. Tim, bye. You.