Zeke Lunder discussed the Gifford fire, which started on August 12 and has been burning for 12 days. The fire is mostly contained in the southern two-thirds, but concerns remain about the north end. Lunder reviewed maps and webcam footage, noting the fire’s progress and the challenges of fighting mid-slope fires. He also critiqued a LA Times article on wildfire technology, arguing that current efforts focus too much on suppression and not enough on preparing for the ones that are sure to come. The second half of the livestream looked at raw footage from the Lookout’s recent LA e-bike tour, and talked about the difficulty in making the city’s most fire-prone neighborhoods safe from future fires. We also looked at extreme fire hazards in the Bay Area. Lunder emphasized the need for urban planning to mitigate fire risks and highlighted the importance of community preparedness and proactive measures.
Cover photo: Los Padres NF Facebook
Lookout Livestream
Summary of Livestream
North End of the Gifford Fire
- Zeke Lunder references the north end of the Gifford fire, including Santa Margarita Lake and nearby towns.
- The fire started on Highway 166 and has been burning for about 12 days, with the southern two-thirds mostly contained.
- The focus is on the north end of the fire, where a firing operation is planned to control the fire’s spread.
- Zeke Lunder explains the maps, and the challenges of fighting fires in mid-slope areas.
Fire Operations and Challenges
- Zeke Lunder discusses the timing of the firing operation, aiming to light the fire before it crosses a drainage and moves uphill.
- Aircraft were working to paint lines with retardant to make it easier to hold the fire when lit.
- An infrared airplane had mechanical issues, preventing infrared mapping overnight.
- Zeke Lunder reviews heat satellite data, noting the fire has not yet crossed the drainage but is close.
Webcam Views and Fire Behavior
- Zeke Lunder reviews webcam footage from Black Mountain and Lopez Hill, showing dramatic smoke production and fire behavior.
- The fire is backing down the slope towards the dozer line, with significant interior burning.
- The predominant wind direction is blowing out of the north, helping to loft burning material and prevent long-range spotting.
- Zeke Lunder explains the challenges of fighting fires in mid-slope areas and the importance of planning fire lines.
Review of LA Times Article on Wildfire Technology
- Zeke Lunder reviews an article from the LA Times about wildfire technology and its potential to defeat advancing flames.
- The article discusses a company called Rain and their partnership with Lockheed Martin to develop autonomous firefighting technology.
- Zeke Lunder criticizes the focus on suppressing fires and argues that fires are inevitable and not stoppable under the worst conditions.
- He emphasizes the need for cities to be re-imagined to withstand fires and the limitations of human’s ability to control fire.
- Hurricanes and tornadoes are presented as examples of similar phenomena we don’t try to control.
Real-World Examples and Fire Prevention
- Zeke Lunder discusses the real-world challenges of fire prevention in urban areas, using Bel Air and Beverly Glen as examples.
- He highlights the challenges of fighting fires in steep, narrow canyons with dense vegetation.
- The importance of maintaining clearance around homes and replacing wooden fences with steel landscaping is emphasized.
- Zeke Lunder shares his experience of riding around these neighborhoods on an e-bike, noting the beauty and potential dangers of the landscape.
Impact of Climate Change on Fire Risk
- Zeke Lunder discusses the impact of climate change on fire risk, particularly in Marin County and the Bay Area.
- He explains how increased days with critical fire conditions can lead to more frequent and severe fires.
- The importance of vegetation management and the challenges of fighting fires in densely populated areas are highlighted.
- Zeke Lunder shares his personal experience of witnessing the Tunnel Fire and the devastating impact of fires in urban areas.
Fire Prevention Strategies and Solutions
- Zeke Lunder discusses various fire prevention strategies, including the use of water tanks and the importance of planning for fire.
- He emphasizes the need for communities to take proactive measures to reduce fire risk.
- The role of insurance companies in assessing fire risk and the importance of understanding fire history are discussed.
- Zeke Lunder offers his services as a consultant to help homeowners assess and mitigate fire risk.
Conclusion and Call to Action
- Zeke Lunder concludes by emphasizing the importance of planning for fire and taking proactive measures to reduce risk.
- He encourages viewers to visit the Lookout website for more information and resources on fire prevention.
- The importance of community involvement and collaboration in fire prevention efforts is highlighted.
- Zeke Lunder thanks viewers for their attention and encourages them to share the information with others.
Livestream Transcript
Zeke Lunder
Hey everyone, welcome back to the lookout. Today is the 12th of August. We’re going to talk a little bit about the Gifford fire. If you’re just joining us for the first time, where you been welcome to the lookout. My name is Zeke Lunder, and I’m a wildfire talking head, but I spent my career. I’ve been in fire since 1995 working as a mapping specialist and prescribed burner and instructor, and now I talk on YouTube about wildfire and go out in the woods and look at things. And our intention here is to communicate with people about how wildfire works and about forestry technology, and we use maps to tell these stories. So welcome, and I’m gonna, we’re gonna jump into the maps, and we’re gonna, I don’t have a whole lot to report today on this, on this Gifford fire, even though it was, he did all kinds of crazy stuff. No new perimeters have been uploaded for it since about three o’clock. And so I’m kind of all I have to report on is what I’ve been seeing with the webcams. And there’s no real great webcam angles on kind of the most critical parts of the burn. But as far as I know this time, it’s staying within their box, and it’s burning like crazy, and pretty exciting, all that. So we’re also going to do a review of article today that was or article from this week in LA Times about wildfire technology. So let’s jump to the map to start. All right, so kind of for reference, this is the north end of the Gifford fire. And is Santa Margarita lake up here. And here’s Arroyo Grande napomo San Luis Obispo, Santa Margaret. Margarita. Fire started down here on the 166 and it’s been burning for about 12 days. And now the big news is the fire is pretty much done, spreading just about everywhere in the southern two thirds of the fire, and the big question is, what’s going to happen up here on the north happen up here on the north end? So we’re flying in here, kind of to poza, which I’ve only ever heard of. Never been there, but up here on the north end, we’ve been talking for a couple days about how this firing operation was going to unfold. And the lines on here, the green lines are the wilderness area, and the kind of light blue line is where the fire was at 130 and then the red line is where the red fill is where the fire was at three o’clock. And it’s been meaning to do this for a couple days. These wilderness lines a little thicker. I
Zeke Lunder
All right, so Garcia wilderness out here, and a couple days ago, fire was back in here.
Zeke Lunder
Back on the seventh the fire was way back here. So in the last five days, the fires moved about six miles to the north. And so today, they’ve lit a bunch of this stuff on fire here. So their box is basically defined. We’ve got some fire line data here. And the purple lines were their kind of planned lines. And then the black lines were lines that had gotten done. So if we turn off all the planned dozer line, see that there’s black dozer line along this flank of the fire, and then also the high mountain road. And so they kind of, there’s a spot here with the high mountain road, kind of goes mid. Slope and mid slope areas are really hard places for us to fight fire, just because fire, if you’re fighting mid slope line, fire and it’s above you, the rolling material that’s on fire goes over the road and lights far below you. And if you’re fighting with the fire below you, then it’s just hot and nasty and smoky and difficult, because the fire likes to spot over you running uphill. So they’ve punched a bunch of line, including some that goes up in the wilderness. It looks like, according to the ops maps. And the big kind of timing drama that we’ve been talking about for the last couple days is whether or not they can get this slope here fired, meaning they want to light this on fire before this fire gets there, because if the fire crosses this drainage and moves uphill, it’s gonna be real hard for them to control it. They ideally want to put fire on the ground, on this line, and I think that’s probably gonna happen tonight. I thought it was gonna happen last night, but I guess, you know, I don’t think they weren’t ready, and they figured they had time. So and it looks like today they have the fire has not quite got there, even though it’s only like a quarter mile up the hill. There was a lot of aircraft working today. I think a lot of that aircraft work was painting this line with retardant to make it easier for them to hold it when they light it. But um, wouldn’t be surprised if, though that is tonight, last night, there’s an infrared airplane that flies out of Boise National, it’s a national mapping plane, and that had some sort of mechanical issues. So we didn’t get any infrared last night, but with any luck, we’ll have infrared in the morning, and we’ll see what they’ve done overnight, or at least through, you know, midnight, or usually goes over kind of midnight or 1am so that you know the Weather’s supposed to be hot another day, and this is kind of the crux. So I wish I had more intel to share, but that’s about all I’ve got. Is this three o’clock perimeter. I pulled up some heat satellite data that’s from about the same time, and it doesn’t it also doesn’t show the fire getting across yet. It was close, but this stuff isn’t super accurate. This was as of about 1pm also,
Zeke Lunder
is starting at 745, tonight, and it’s kind of hard to see through the tower here, but there’s some kind of big interior burning happening. I I kind of just have to take these clues. You can see the fire up here is backing down the slope. So this is the wilderness, and we’re kind of seeing the fire that’s up on top of the ridge here, backing down the hill in that in that image. So it’s a little hard to see, but all this fire you see up here is the fire kind of slowly backing down this slope towards their dozer line here. So it’ll be interesting to see what you know, I think they’ll probably start firing this tonight. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if tonight is really the biggest night of firing. But I said that. I said last night I was thinking that. And just goes to show I don’t have any great inside Intel right now on the timing of this. Another view on the on today’s fire growth is from Lopez Hill. This is over kind of more towards Santa Maria and starting here at 430 it really cooked. Here for you know, around six o’clock it really cooked.
Zeke Lunder
But the good news with all this basically, is that, you know, when you have a big column like this that goes up, it lofts burning material way up into itself, and it that’s when you get your real long range spotting. So they’re really lucky today that the predominant flow was right back into the fire. So you see the, basically, the the wind is blowing out of the north and a little bit out of the Northwest. Pretty much all day. And the most active part of the fire, if we go kind of north up, is out in here. And so the embers are kind of getting lofted into an area that’s already burned. Burned, and so you’ve got, like, a decent buffer there, like, from where it’s burning, you’ve got almost two miles that’s already black, and anything over a mile of spotting is pretty impressive. And, I mean, this is impressive loft, but you know, oftentimes you get your biggest embers and longest range spotting in, like, big conifers, where, like, whole pine cones are going to be launched a mile or two. And so it’s a good deal, but they have to think about that with their firing. They can’t go over here and head fire this whole slope and have basically a column that they develop here, because the embers from that will go downrange here and be into the wrong area. So just part of the kind of calculus they have to do is where their fire is going to loft into on this image, you can also see we had some infrared here. I
Zeke Lunder
it. This is a kind of weather satellite showing the heat from the day, and when you see real bright yellow on this that tells you that it’s kind of as hot as things get. So this fire made plenty of heat today, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t as extreme as some of the days we’ve seen.
Zeke Lunder
that’s about it. I want to jump into a review here now of and check out a website here that’s this was in the LA Times. We can find it too many tabs, but here we go, California’s wildfire moonshot, how technology will defeat advancing flames. So there’s a company called rain, and they’re kind of partnered up with Lockheed Martin, or some of the other big death merchants of the world. And so I’ve talked before about how for most of my career, we one of the reasons we haven’t seen big investments in like military technology, in wildfire, is because the money wasn’t there. So, you know, back in the during the, say, Afghanistan war, I was so I started running a wildfire technology company, back before it was cool in the year 2001 and then I basically run mapping companies that specialize in wildfire since then, and kind of had a front row seat in the wildfire technology space. And we were never super. We tried hard for a while to push satellite imagery and other just basic GIS stuff early on, and there wasn’t much interest in the wildfire world for a long time in kind of taking the GIS and doing anything other than making kind of a topo map that had a red line on it for the fire and a black line for where it was out. And you still kind of see that. You know, if I bring up today’s ops map, it doesn’t look really significantly different than the maps that I made in 1999 so things move things move slow in. I’m just trying to find an example here. Things move slow in, like this map here. This is your bread and butter operations map, and it’s a topo USGS Topographic map, and it’s got the basic stuff you’d have on a topo map. And then it’s got black x’s for dozer. It’s got red dashed line for the fire. It’s got black line where the fires out. And this product hasn’t changed substantially since we made them with crayons or Sharpies. You still get a topo with red and black lines on it. So I mean, and I’ve been doing this stuff for 25 years, so that’s just to say the technology has been slow to rollout in wildfire business. Now that we’ve had, you know, burned down paradise and burned down towns of Colorado and everything else, there’s this huge amount of investment in wildfire technology, and there’s all these startups that are flocking to the sector because the money’s there. So, you know, Lockheed Martin was going to play very big in wildfire during the Afghanistan war, because the whole budget for the national fire apparatus was, like, $2 billion a year. And that was like, you know, we were spending that in like two weeks in Afghanistan. So the big money was to be made fighting wars overseas. And these guys didn’t even want to play like, there’s been military technology that applications for wildfire my whole career, but there wasn’t the money there, but now that the money’s here, big time tech investment in kind of these moon shots. So the moon shot, we’re gonna use technology to defeat advancing flames. And so this article is interesting. This company called rain and I. So this is the future of firefighting, they say. And these guys are out watching a demo of this autonomous Black Hawk that is going to theoretically get informed by a satellite where the fire is. It’s going to take off by itself. It’s going to go dump water on the fire. And their goal is to keep the fire, like, under 10 by 10 feet, 90% of the fires and and they’re gonna, like, make sure that there’s water too. They’re gonna, they’re hoping to solve the problem of finding water fighting fire in the West. Anyway, to me, this is, like everything that’s bad about technology, and it’s kind of fire war profiteering, right? Like they’re assuming that the the problem is too much fire, and that we can just continue to put out every fire, and that’s going to, like, solve the fire problem. And it’s right in the top, they’re going to advance, they’re going to defeat advancing flames. So the problem with this is that there’s no stopping fire. You can put fire off, and you can put fire off for a long time, but then it’s going to come and it’s going to come and it’s going to burn your town down. So, you know, Palisades Eden, there’s no amount of technology in the world that’s going to stop a Santa Ana driven fire in mature brush, just like this fire that we’re looking at. There’s no way that’s there no way to put it out in the Garcia wilderness. They’ve got no other fires in the state to speak of. So you’ve got the entire air force of the Forest Service and Cal Fire, you’ve got 5000 people, but we can’t put the fire out because it’s burning in 100 year old brush in a wilderness area. So spending billions of dollars on robotic, modified death machines to kill fire, it’s the wrong they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem is that fires, we have a lot of assets that are in the way of fire. We have homes, we have towns, we have radio towers, cell towers that we can’t burn up, but we’re not going to stop fire. And I asked fire to come talk about it, and fires like this is stupid. This is stupid. I don’t care about helicopters when the wind’s blowing, I’m gonna win every time. So that is my perspective on rain. These guys, all these tech companies, are saying that, like, well, all this technology can be used for good. We’re gonna use it to figure out which fires to let burn. It’s gonna reduce risks to firefighters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but for now, it’s all. All they’re talking about is better suppression. And to me, that’s that’s not the solution. We’ve been putting fires out for 100 years, and they just keep getting bigger, you know. And then so we’re stuck with the ones that, you know, the more we put out every single fire, the more we’re stuck with the ones that are unmanageable, that burn our towns down. So that’s what I have to say about this. Like it’s just money grubbing. It’s the same companies that are getting rich off of, like selling bombs to kill children in Gaza are trying to get rich off of fire budgets. And I think there’s better ways we could spend the money in both cases. So we’re going to spend a lot of money on this. We’re going to spend, you know, if, if they’re successful in selling this, which I hope they’re not, which is why I’m telling you this is, I hope that people who are consider themselves to be fiscally conservative would would ask, you know, before the government goes and spends, gives, you know, billions of dollars to defense contractors on a strategy that has proven for 100 years not to work, I would hope that we can all kind of talk more about this stuff and and not just give all our money to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and these other people that are really like evil bastards profiting off of Murder, Mayhem and starvation. So I’ll leave it at that.
Zeke Lunder
Anyway, Jesus Christ, robotic helicopters, like, yeah, putting out a fire is not the solution. So lot of a huge amount of human energy and capital, everything is going to solve their own problem. The wrong problem is fires are destructive. We need to build cities that don’t burn. We need to come up with technologies that allow us to have cities where fire can burn right through and not damage and destroy what we care about. But it’s like, this is you might as well, just like be trying to stop a hurricane, trying to stop a tornado. You know, if these guys were inventing robotic helicopters. Years that we’re gonna go, like, stop tornadoes. Like, no one would buy it, but that’s the same thing that they’re trying to pitch here, is we got these robots, they’re AI powered, and they’re gonna stop the hurricane and like, Here, here’s 100 billion dollars. Like, just think of those two things the same. Think of fire and hurricanes, fires and tornadoes as being the same basic Earth force energy that’s unstoppable when the storm is raging.
Zeke Lunder
All right, so maybe we can pivot to something a little less intense. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about, I want to talk about our LA trip a little bit. We’re, um, we’re coming up. I just got a review copy of our episode number three, which is coming out on Friday of our la series. And I just want to play a little kind of B roll from that, because I feel like there’s, there’s lots of lessons. You know, when we went the other day and cruised around in Google Maps,
Zeke Lunder
I think it’s, it’s nice to kind of talk about real world examples. So the video here is a little blown out because it’s raw, but we’re just gonna kind of ride around in Bel Air.
Zeke Lunder
And the guy who had the camera on is the guy who’s ridden a bike the least, but we kind of snuck up this alley. So this is, this
Zeke Lunder
is kind of typical development in kind of Beverly Beverly Glen is right above Beverly Glen market, and these are the neighborhoods that burn when we have these big fires. So when I talk about, like, you know, high technology, you know, expecting that we’re going to solve like, LA’s urban fire problems with technology, like, the reality is that this is what it looks like in these neighborhoods. And as long as the fuels are this thick and the streets are this inaccessible, like helicopters can only do so much, and right now we’ve got night flying helicopters in LA that are amazing, and that’s one of the reasons that LA hasn’t burned already. But it’s also a reason that when Palisades burned, it burns so intensely, is because we are really good at putting out almost every single fire until the conditions are so extreme. So this, I just kind of want to show this is like, show this is like, this is the reality of like fire in Southern California, is that you’ve got these insanely steep narrow canyons, homes built everywhere, and the most incredible kind of natural vegetation you could ever imagine. And then at the top of that, we come out on an actual road. And so during a fire, people are going to have to come in, get in here somehow, in a fire engine, and try to fight a fire that’s coming up from below. So let’s just hop over to Beverly Glen. I it
Zeke Lunder
alright. So so we just rolled. So this is, this is in the episode that we just released last week, episode two, and so we just rode up this little gully here, and now we’re on this street. But when you look at like the topography here, and the vegetation and everything else, like the landscaping, check out the landscaping here and how it’s really just seamless with the architecture the landscaping. If you stick your, you know, I stuck my camera into the bushes like they’re full of dead materials, because these hedges have been here for like, 5060, years,
Zeke Lunder
sometimes. So technology is is shiny, and people want to spend money on it, but it just there’s a limit to technical solutions. The technical solution here is to cut a shitload of brush and replace a ton of wooden fences with steel landscaping.
Zeke Lunder
You and, and to develop a fluency here, you know, like, I mean, this is just if this was all on fire. So, you know, we expect firefighters to drive down this road and try to save these homes. This is why, this is why the fires got big. Is because firefighters can’t, physically, they can’t drive their fire engine, even if, even if the water is working. And they can’t physically drive the fire engine in there and fight the fire without dying, and so yeah, robotic helicopters would put fires less at risk, but they’re still not going to they’re not going to stop these fires, because the scale on which, on the bad day when the fire does happen, you’re not going to have 1000 helicopters, and the helicopters may not be able to fly in that demo that we’re reading about in LA Times like they couldn’t fly the day because it’s too windy. So robotic helicopter, no, you can’t fly when it’s, you know, 80 mile an hour down sloping winds. So this special we’re doing, episode three, is coming out to on Friday, and it’s about how to how to harden your home. What can you do if you live in a neighborhood like this to improve the odds that your house will survive without firefighters there and a lot of it’s small little details. A lot of these homes are stucco and fairly non flammable. So it becomes about little details, about like not having your wooden fence touching your house, cleaning up all the cutting, all the dead material and in this and also just learning to read, learning to read the landscape. And
Zeke Lunder
see, we kept rolling around, and it’s just this whole like, Beverly Hills, Bel Air. It all looks like this, and it’s beautiful. It’s like, you can understand why, if someone is wealthy, they want to live there. It’s like 70 degrees, and there’s birds everywhere, and there’s hardly anyone around, and but, but
Zeke Lunder
it’s sketchy, you know, like, once you start seeing fuel everywhere instead of lush vegetation, once you start saying, like, oh, that’s 60 foot flame lengths, and this is going to torch up. And that’s gonna be 200 foot flame lengths. And, oh, this is just like, you know, low fire, but it’s gonna cause this to crown. Once you start seeing things that way, it makes it makes it hard to like, the esthetic beauty of all this becomes more just like claustrophobia, these Cypress like, when we look at the Eaton fire, these things burn like, really, really, really, well, they’re like, kind of Roman candles going off.
Zeke Lunder
E bike totally equals cheating. I agree, but uh, you would. We wouldn’t have pulled this off on on regular bikes maybe 20 years ago, but uh oh, so nice. We had a good we had a sponsor for this called Aventon, and they they make e bikes, and they gave us some bikes. We still have them, so we’re gonna keep doing these kinds of bike tour movie making this first day, we didn’t have a crew. We just shot with a GoPro, and I shot with a camera on my bike. But for three days, we had a pro crew, and they were on their own bikes, and then the camera fell over.
Zeke Lunder
So basically, we rode all over the place, and we want you to check it out, because, like these live streams are getting like 10,000 views in two days, and our movies been up almost a week, and it’s gotten 3000 views. So check it out. Tell your friends, make it go viral, because we think it’s really good. We talked about, you know, just how the orientation of these neighborhoods is. And if you watch episode two, you’ll see this, the Palisades fire over here. This is the Palisades fire. And the fire ran right straight down these canyons and took out this whole city. It was Palisades. And so if you just shift the Palisades fire over, like three miles, it’s the exact same landscape. You got the same canyons, except here, instead of having like over here, you got no you got a big park. But you take the exact same landscape over here, and there’s no Park. It’s all multi million dollar homes, and they’re all oriented with the Santa Ana winds. So you know what we saw in Palisades, these houses catch on fire, and then it just the fire just goes. It just becomes like hopscotch, house to house, until it gets to, you know, till the wind stops blowing or something. But it’s gonna be bad. It’s gonna be really, really bad, and and everyone’s under insured. That’s one of the problems here. Is, like most of the like most of these houses are on the FAIR Plan, and most of the people even, may even not know how under insured they are. So we want to kind of share the lessons you know of people, people are learning on Palisades. Some of it’s intractable, right? You got this built landscape with insane hazards. You can see. Of people want to have, like robotic fire helicopters to save the day. It’s just that that’s not possible. And that’s what our movies about. Our movie is not a hopeful movie. It’s not like we went to LA and found the people that are have the hopeful story about fixing everything and the community working together. Because that story, that story is popular. You know, Ron Howard rebuilding power paradise movie. I got to work a little with them, but they already knew what the movie was before they even came to paradise. They’re like, it’s going to be a story of hope and resilience. We’re going to find the people that are stoked on rebuilding. And they came and made a movie about that, but they totally missed, like, all this other stuff about, like, how we’re rebuilding a city that’s going to burn again. And so that’s not our intention with this. Our intention is to try to tell the truth that, hey, if you rebuild over here in Palisades on the edge of this steep cliff that is too steep to even like cut brush underneath like this, how these houses, all these houses on this edge of the city, are probably going to burn down again in the next 60 years, and maybe that’s worth it. You know, maybe you’re like, well, I’ll be dead by then, and I’m gonna, you know, build my house now. But, like, a lot of these things are knowable, and so our trip around SoCal is just like riding around with people who know, who spent their whole career working in fire and thinking about this stuff. Hopefully, you know, help some people avoid being victims twice.
Zeke Lunder
And a commenter says they need many million gallon water tanks on the ridges they do. And there’s limits to that too. You know, there’s limits to our ability, with unlimited amount of water to stop a fire like this, and that’s another thing we talk about. It’s just that, you know, when you’ve got fire over here, like moving from house to house to house, like the fire started.
Zeke Lunder
All right, here’s a here’s the progression of the Palisades. So this is also, this is a spoiler, but this is kind of what we’re talking about in the episode four and five of our series is we look at how the fire started and how it ran, and how the Santa Ana winds, just kind of like it was a given from the get go that This fire was going to blow to the ocean. I uh, but once it was, the winds were pushing it straight down these canyons. It kind of didn’t matter how much water you had, because once, once the house is on fire here, and there’s no space between the house and its neighbors, it’s even with, you know, we talk in the in the movie about, like, Okay, if a house is on fire, typically you need, like, five fire engines and 500 gallons a minute of water to extinguish it. And so you got these houses that are like 10 feet apart. The Radiant heat from one burning house is like almost positive to start the next house on fire if there’s no firefighters there. So if you just look at like once you got now, when the fire got into this neighborhood, it was already half a mile wide. So suddenly you have dozens of homes on fire. So you could have 100 engines and still only really protect 20 homes, and you got hundreds of homes on fire and so and then also you’re evacuating people and trying not to die yourself. So this whole thing about having water, it’s like, yeah, well, having water would have helped, but it in, in our opinion, the people I was traveling around down there who’ve spent their careers fighting fire in SoCal, like it wouldn’t have materially changed the fact that this fire, once it started, was going to the ocean, and it was, you know, we think that you could have had all the water in the world, and these fires would have been the same size. And so check out, check out the series, because we have a lot of great B roll in there, from, from our buddy, Michael Steinberg. Steinberg was on the ground in Palisades, and he got footage the night it was burning, and it’s just good. It’s amazing to be inside that. And I think it helps debunk some of the conspiracy theories and just overall misinformation about how these things happen, because when you see from inside the fire what it looked like, you understand what I’m talking about.
Zeke Lunder
When will Mount Tamalpais suffer a firestorm? Someone says, Well, we want to do a special on the bay area too. I was actually down in the Bay the day that the tunnel fire burned up there and
Zeke Lunder
There’s a lot of places like this. You know, there’s, there’s millions of people that live in these kinds of places. So I’m just gonna turn on the tunnel fire. I’m gonna turn on fire history layer here. So if we go back to kind of this is the one. This is the fire that everyone talks about. It’s burned in 1923 and I can’t remember the name right now. I
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, what happens in Marin County is you’ve got east winds. So we’re kind of looking from the kind of Northeast you get east winds, like maybe a couple times a decade in the fall that blow hard and dry, and that’s when, you know, usually we’ve got this kind of coastal influence, and it’s foggy and pleasant. It’s foggy and pleasant and better, not fires. But every place has kind of got its fire season. And sometimes fire season only comes once a decade, or every 30 years. But that is one of the ways that climate change is kind of changing. The conversation is that with what with climate change, it’s really difficult to generalize and say, like this place is gonna be hotter, that place is gonna be cooler, but there seems to be pretty broad agreement that it increases the number of days potentially that you’re gonna have. You know, maybe in Marin County, you’d have two critical days every 30 years for fire. So even if you double, if you double, if you double that number, that just means it’s twice as likely it’s going to happen. These long, these long interval, high consequence events are kind of describe fire disasters. You know, it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s really bad. And so anything that increases the odds of that happening is bad, and it might mean that instead of Marin County burning every 80 years, it might burn every 40 and that at some point it becomes more likely that it’ll happen during the time that an individual homeowner owns their home. But when you come down into like in San Rafael here, and just where a ton of people live, in the hills here, it’s a lot like the Bay Area. It’s a lot like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, like there’s just a ton of and Marin County has been really aggressive about improving on vegetation, kind of management. You can kind of even see that if you look at this, and then you look back, like 10 years ago,
Zeke Lunder
like here, like 2015 you don’t, you don’t see as much clearance around people’s places. And then you come here to modern day and like, there’s a lot of there’s a lot more veg management. They’ve got, they’ve taxed themselves, basically, and created a kind of special district and a special tax that pays for vegetation management. But it’s still, you know, set up for a catastrophe of epic proportions, and same in Oakland Hills. You know, if you look at where we had the flower, here to Oakland, this is the tunnel fire.
Zeke Lunder
If you look at some of these neighborhoods, it’s a lot like Bel Air, just access is really bad. And then Palisades, they’re letting people rebuild kind of the exact same. You can rebuild on your lot, and you can actually build denser. You can build like, 10% more square footage. But there’s just these kind of universal problems like this with, with, I mean, this is eucalyptus up here, and then you run into problems where there’s, like, activists that are like, save the eucalyptus, which is non native and burns like freaking gasoline. So there’s, there’s a lot we can do just to not make the problem worse. You know, like, cut down the eucalyptus and plant, you know, an oak or something that isn’t full of, like, like, pretty much anything that you can use to make an essential oil is probably not a good thing to plant. You don’t want lavender and rosemary and eucalyptus and any these other nice, fragrant plants. You don’t really want those, like, right up against your house. And you don’t want, you don’t want a big Eucalyptus grove. So I was a kid during the tunnel fire, and we were down there for a wedding, and we saw the fire start, like, basically, from down in Berkeley. It started right up here somewhere. And we were down, we were driving up, like, from the bay up University Ave, and we saw the fire just we saw a little smoke. My dad’s like, hey, it looks like hey, it looks like there’s a fire up there. And we went did some shopping, and we came out, and there was a freaking mushroom cloud of the fire. And we went to UC Berkeley, and went up in the Campanile, and someone had propped the door open, because a lot of people want to be up in a Campanile watching the fire. Someone propped their someone propped there’s an old staircase that goes to the top of this tower, and someone had prop the door open to the chair and left the door open because it wasn’t open to the public that day. So we just went up the stairs with a bunch of other people, and there’s ton people up there. And we watched this fire. We just watched these eucalyptus groves exploding in the flames, and you could see houses burning. And it was crazy. There was air tankers flying over, like, right over downtown Berkeley. And what I remember most was looking down to the south here and seeing, like, the whole view of the South was this giant black cloud, like, about, you know, down here over, kind of, like, kind of West Oakland, huge black cloud, and it just looked like the end of the world. So we got, you know, we got a lot of those issues Piedmont, all these, like, it’s, it’s the crazy thing to me that said that all these places that are like Montclair, like the most expensive places to live, like some of the most expensive places in the world to live and the most hoity toity have the most extreme hazards. And another example of that, we did some work in Portola Valley. So we’re going to continue our kind of future carnage tour here a little bit.
Zeke Lunder
I’d never really kind of thought much about this particular dealio. But here in the in the Bay Area, you got Silicon Valley, down here, you got Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto Stanford, and then along the foothills here you’ve kind of got the similar craziness where you’ve got this most expensive real estate in the world, and like what they call it. So Portola Valley is an example of this, where Los Altos, Los Altos Hills. We did a job down here. And you this is another one of those places where it’s not going to happen very often, but it’s going to happen with that big east wind, like what was happening when the tunnel fire happened, where a fire that starts on 280 is going to burn through a ton of ground here in like faster than anyone imagines, and kill dozens of people and burn billions of dollars of real estate before anyone even really knows it’s happening. You come down in these neighborhoods, and it’s just kind of like your typical it’s the same problem everywhere is that it’s not on people’s radar, you know, so all the roads are narrow and it’s a beautiful place to be a plant and and also, there’s a lot of people that love their vegetation and love their privacy and don’t want to trim it, don’t want to. Uh, get too deep into hacking their brush. They don’t want to see their neighbors. It’s these universal things, whether you’re rich or poor,
Zeke Lunder
but this kind of whole Woodside Portola Valley, los Los Gatos, all that stuff, this intersection of extreme hazard and extreme wealth, and it’s one of those places where your money can’t really change the fact maybe that these communities were built without regard for fire, so oftentimes the people’s lots aren’t big enough to, you know, like a place like this, like it’s a lot of work if you’re building the top of this kind of crazy box canyon Gully. You might not even own this property here, but if a fire comes from the east, you’re going to wish that there wasn’t such heavy vegetation. So lots of work. Here’s this particle accelerator just randomly out there, like making some plutonium or something. But you’d think like, okay, all these people, like, went to Stanford, right? Like, you think that they might kind of have got the memo about fire, but it’s, it’s not it, and it’s more and it’s more and more on people’s radar here, because people are getting dropped by their insurance. But some of these places, you come in and you can see why they’re getting dropped, because it’s you got all the ingredients. You got the gray pine and you got the thick Live Oak and bad access and no fire for 100 years. So California is a crazy place. I think that’s one thing I love most about the work I’ve had, is just I’ve ended up working in a lot of really random spots, just like, Oh, someone pays me to come drive around for a week and tell them what I think. And it’s like, well, Portal, I didn’t even, I didn’t think about it at all. I never even thought about these places anyway. So what I wanted to say was thinking here is
Zeke Lunder
it’s not hopeless, but you have to do a lot of work, and there’s people who can help you. And company I used to work for that I’ve still got a good relationship with, has hundreds of dudes that run chainsaws and chippers and just come in and get a ton of work done. They’re fire crews. They work on fires, and so they know how to work, and they take pride in it. So if you want to get work done in a really tasteful way, these guys work a lot in really fancy neighborhoods, call me up and I can get you a crew, and they’ll come and they will make the place look different, but it’ll still be nice. So that’s just a pitch real quick for for solutions, because it’s not hopeless, but it’s expensive and it requires a huge amount of sweat. But it doesn’t have to be your sweat if you have money. Then there’s people who are really good at this stuff, and they know how to work, and they know how to do a tidy job, just for complete self promotion. My phone number, you can get a hold of me through the lookout.org and so now’s a good time to talk about the lookout. All right, so we got a website. You know, YouTube’s become kind of our main channel, but we’ve got the lookout.org, the lookout, and this is our archive. Almost all our videos end up here. We’ve got it organized by topic, and you can, you can become PayPal subscriber. Really helps us out. Gives me some cash flow to to buy camera lenses and braces for my kids. And we also have merch on here. We got my wife’s making lookout coffee mugs. We sell hats, sell stickers, Bigfoot stickers. But if you get on there, you can get a hold of me, and I’ll be happy to talk to you about what you need to do. And I also consult hourly on this stuff. I can kind of zoom in on your place and give you a quick appraisal and tell you what I think you need to do. Someone says removing yokes is a spending indeed, and it is so expensive. Tree works expensive. Tree works dangerous, and tree workers get paid well, and insurance and everything those companies are expensive to run. So yeah, it’s 1000s of dollars to take out a big tree. And that’s why more of it doesn’t get done. One of the reasons,
Zeke Lunder
yeah, check out the lookout. We’re pretty proud of all the stuff we’ve got together there. And one of the things that I think is one of the things we don’t get enough traffic on, is interviews with people. We talk with people that have a huge amount of experience, some of them decades and decades of firefighting, like Jim clump, early smoke jumper, you know, still alive. We’ve got some good stories on here. My buddy Nate Daly, who went through the campfire and was traumatized and came to work for me doing prescribed burning and kind of found healing from fire trauma through fire. So yeah, check it out. We feel like we’ve got a lot, you know, we’ve put a lot of energy into finding people and finding stories, and it’s on the website. I’m gonna jump back real quick and look and see if anything has changed on Gifford. If we got a perimeter to talk about there nothing on the forum.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, Dave says he met Jim and his brother when they worked for North I met him. I worked for North tree for 10 years running their mapping. Yeah, well, I know it’s heavy and that we’re kind of direct here, but that’s, I think, what I feel like is that there’s not a lot of people in the public that can tell the truth about these things. Politicians can’t tell the truth. Insurance companies can tell the truth, and people don’t like hearing it. It sucks to hear that. It sucks to hear that your house isn’t insurable, but that’s based on, oftentimes on good, sound, reasoned science, that these, those guys want to make money, but they have to make good bets. And so it’s a clue, if you get dropped, it’s a clue that you need to do a lot of work. And I know that’s it’s can be impossible to pay for it or and moving sometimes is what you have to do. And it’s just kind of the, this is just kind of ride we’re all on together, but we can’t be, you know, like firing the statisticians because we don’t like the stats.