Ted Adams and Mike Williams host a conversation on disaster preparation with Rob Hazzard, a retired fire marshal and battalion chief. Rob shares his background growing up in Santa Barbara and his experience in firefighting. They discuss the importance of preparation, evacuation techniques, and the challenges of predicting and dealing with wildland fires. Rob emphasizes the personal choice and difficulty of leaving one's home during a fire. He also shares his personal experience and acknowledges that staying and defending one's property is not always a reasonable or safe option.
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Not If But When, Conversations on Disaster Preparation. I'm Ted Adams, the Director of the Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council, and my co-host is Mike Williams, CEO of the Wildland Residents Association. Today it's our pleasure to have with us well-respected fire official Rob Hazzard, recently retired fire marshal and battalion chief of Santa Barbara County Fire Department. So Rob, I guess let's just start off maybe, you want to give us a little background, you just did give us a little bit, is there anything, I think it's pretty self-explanatory, it's been 30-some years in the fire services in Santa Barbara County, and Rob is very well versed in many, many aspects.
He's always been an inspired firefighter and administrator, he knows a whole lot about the system, and give us a little bit of it. Well, thanks for that introduction, I appreciate it, and I'd say probably the most important thing to know about me is I'm born and bred Santa Barbara, and actually fifth generation, and that's important because I've always had a strong feeling of Santa Barbara as being home, and everybody in it, and all the people that live there and come, and the people that come and play and visit, as just being a special place, and so in the fire service, you know, the place that you work, it's like your home team, you know, it's, you become emotionally connected to your community, and to, you know, making sure that you do the best you can to make that community safe.
I started out here locally on the Los Padres National Forest, my first season was on a hotshot crew, the Los Padres Hotshots, which are, you know, this is the premier hand crew program that the Forest Service operates, going all the way back to the 1940s, late 1940s, and I learned an enormous amount about wildland fire on my time on the hand crew. We would respond to fires all over the western United States, and actually even, they sent us to Kentucky one year to fight fires underneath the hardwoods.
Well, let me interrupt you just a sec here. One of the things that's outstanding about your experience is that you were brought up in the wildland fire, the urban interface as it's called, and had a lot of experience even before you got into the fire service, you gained a lot of respect for urban and suburban and wildland fire. Yeah, so, interesting fact, I lived up in Taro Canyon back in the early 70s, and I have a visceral memory of being down in the city of Carpinteria, visiting one of my friends, one of my schoolmates, and looking up in the mountains and seeing this giant column of smoke.
It was 1971. It was the Romero fire, and my dad got up on the roof of the house with a hose and hosed off the roof and watered down all the embers that were falling on it, and sadly, we never went back to that house. We ended up moving right after that fire, and we were down in the foothills of Carpinteria, but all those years growing up in Taro Canyon, you become very familiar with the chaparral and the vegetation, the topography, and the wind patterns and all that, the weather systems.
We ended up moving up to the Gaviota Coast when I was nine years old, and I spent the rest of my youth and young adulthood up in Refugio, up in the mountain up there, and same thing. Surrounded by chaparral vegetation, defensible space became something that I was doing as a 12-year-old kid. My dad would hand me a rake and a weed whacker and tell me, go to town. It's that time of year. Go weed whack the grass and start raking all the oak leaves.
We did burn piles, and I knew how to do that as a young kid and learned how to run a saw, so it just became sort of a natural skill set that I think was an advantage when I started working with the Forest Service. I felt right at home with the crew and the kind of work they did. Well, and really good at supervising and instructing even as you were just entering the service because you'd had it all at your...
Yeah, it just felt familiar. I remember a lot of the time we'd spend doing these pretty intense hikes to stay in shape with all of our gear. It was kind of a normal morning routine to load up a bunch of heavy packs and go for a two-hour hike up some very steep mountain trail, and it just felt normal to me. It felt just like where I grew up. Everything was a slope. I didn't have flat ground when I was a kid.
I'd play soccer on a grass field with my Labrador, my black Lab, and I'd have to kick the ball up the field because it would do a big arc and come back down with the slope, and I'd try to figure out where it was going to go. So yeah, flat ground was a weird thing to me. I remember when I was in high school, at Dos Pueblos High School, everything was flat, and all my friends would make fun of me because I'd walk so fast, and they'd call me the mountain boy, like, why are you walking so fast? I was like, I don't know.
Why are you a slow walker? But yeah, so I think growing up out in the sticks, you understand that environment, so that's sort of a leg up, because you don't have to learn that kind of environment. You can focus on sort of deeper concepts of wildland fire and why it burns and that kind of... And that's what we want to focus on today, one of the concepts that there's not a small amount of controversy, and that is evacuation techniques and areas of how and what's the best way to...
And there's a lot of material out there on how to prepare to evacuate, but not a whole lot of material when you leave your driveway with your car packed with your pets and your family, and how do you comport yourself as you try to escape, and especially the farther in the rural environment you live, the more chances that you will be crossing some of the fire or the fire will be crossing you, and that's something we'd like to talk about today, and you've had a lot of experience with that, so let's hear some of that.
Well, you're right. You're absolutely right. There's a ton of material out there to help people prepare their homes with defensible space, and home hardening now is a big thing, creating a home that's very resistant to embers and all that. And there's so much science now about the best way to do defensible space. We've really... Unfortunately, because of all the structures that have burned down across the state in the last decade, one of the positive aspects of that was we engaged in a lot of science in determining why homes burned.
So there's a wealth of information and skills that people can apply to preparation. And resource. Mm-hmm. Tons of resources. Exactly. But at the end of the day, when you leave, it's a personal choice. The sooner the better, but we're human, and we all make decisions, and sometimes you think you're making the right decision, but you're caught. Mother Nature is fickle. And wildland fire is, of all of the natural phenomenon on the planet, wildland fire is one of the toughest to predict.
It really is. Even for seasoned wildland firefighters, just look at the statistics for firefighter burnovers and fatalities, and you'll see that there's been some very seasoned, knowledgeable, skilled wildland firefighters that made errors in human judgment that resulted in a burnover or tragically, in some cases, fatalities. So we know it's a difficult thing to predict, and that's the whole key to being successful both in fire suppression and as civilians, as residents, how we interact with wildland fire.
Because typically, for residents, it's going to be evacuating to get away from the fire. And so we know that there's a lot of challenges with predicting where the fire's going to be, how intense it's going to burn, what kind of fire will impact your property and your home. And it's perfectly understandable that people don't want to leave their home. It's just like your lifetime investment, everything you own, all your life savings are in your home. Also, everything you know, all your security is in your home.
So you're being asked to leave your secure spot and go into the unknown, which is very difficult under those circumstances. And then there's another factor, like I'm a living proof of this factor. So I have told this many times to people that I am sometimes not the best person to ask about evacuation. Because I grew up in a rural area on a 40-acre parcel with a handmade house my dad built back in the 70s that was all wood.
And that thing was matchstick. It was going to burn down if no one was there. And consequently, there was going to be somebody there. That's what my old man taught me. And he ran us through the whole drill. Every spring he would tell us, okay, this hose line, hook it to this faucet, goes to a rainbow bird on the roof, you're going to do this, you're going to do that. You know, he and my, me and my little brother had a whole set of marching orders about what we were going to do if there was a wildland fire.
Now, you know, of course, that's not a reasonable thing to expect for a lot of people. And in many cases, it's not a smart thing to do, no matter how prepared you are. But that was our plan. And it's just interesting, because as a young kid, I didn't really know what it was going to look like. I remember, like, thinking about what a wildland fire would look like, and I'd seen smoke columns from a long ways away.
But I'd never been in a fire. I'd been around burn piles my whole life, and so I knew how hot they could get. But I didn't know what a wildland fire was actually going to be like until I got on the hotshot crew. And that was an eye-opening experience. The first time I was, like, in a completely smoked-out situation with embers, you know, hitting me, and the roar of the fire, you know, it was an enlightening experience to me.
And it kind of changed my perception of, like, what the average person, how they would function in that kind of an environment. Because, you know, here's the biggest problem with, you know, staying on your property and trying to defend something that most people aren't trained to do. Yeah, you lose all of your situational awareness once the smoke rolls over you. You suddenly find yourself almost, like, in a little bubble of sensory deprivation in terms of, like, seeing out past the smoke.
Well, your priorities change. Yeah, they do. And then it actually starts to become sort of sensory overload in the opposite way, where your eyes are burning, and your lungs are burning, and you're feeling embers hit you. And so it just triggers an automatic feeling of, you know, anxiety, and some people experience panic and make bad decisions. So I think that's the most important thing for people to know, is the longer you delay leaving your property, you're putting yourself closer to that point where you'll lose that ability to essentially move.
You'll be stuck in place. You'll be stuck on your property. You won't be able to drive away. You won't be able to see the road. You won't be able to see your driveway. You might not even be able to find your car in the driveway. And your natural reaction will be to go back into the house. And that's probably, at that point, that's probably the best thing to do, is go back in the house and shut all the windows.
And hopefully you did that already. So I think that's the big challenge, is, you know, the rural properties are the first ones that usually get hit with these large fires. And those are the most independent people in our county, right, are the people that live on these rural properties. And so it's really important to understand what you're going to be dealing with. So what's happening with that, now that we understand all the things that can be adversarial to the condition of evacuation, let's talk a little bit about, you're in your car with your animals and your family and stuff, and you're driving out your driveway, and you're choosing which way to go, obviously, most likely, you've thought about which way you're going to go.
And there are several different ways that you can go most often. But first of all, you're depending on, you know, where the fire is, obviously, and you don't want to drive into the fire. And then you have to consider where are the fire suppression activities coming from, which is one of the problems we ran into in our community when we had a big fire. We were sent down the road that the equipment was coming in on, all of a sudden, there was nowhere to go.
Everyone had to turn around and go back and go out the other way. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that can happen, as you've mentioned a couple of times in the conversation, that are not able to be predicted. So what we need to do is understand that we need common sense to be able to evaluate the options and take the best way to go. One of the things that's been discussed a great deal, obviously, is the shelter-in-place situation, but also shelter-in-place in an area that is much less likely to have a burnover in your community that's a short distance away, and establishing where that is.
And, of course, that points to the idea of organizing your community so that the community has some solidarity and some communication under emergency circumstances. And the farther you live from town, the more likely that's already in place. But oftentimes, the fire's going to burn into your community, even if you live on the perimeter. If you do, and when you do organize your community, if you're in a rural part of the periphery of a larger community, there isn't a good chance, if you look at the history of fire in Santa Barbara County, for instance, that the fire can burn into your community from outside from the wildland areas.
So we should talk a little bit about creating that possibility for defensible shelter-in-place space, and what that entails, like how much area do you need? And, of course, it's very subjective. You don't know how much wind is there going to be. The higher the wind, the less chance there is of finding a good place. And so, anyway, you kind of asked that question, what would be a good parameter, actually, for taking a shelter in a piece of property close to your home? So, well, let's just take it back to what we recommend for defensible space around your structure.
So we all know, or we should know, that the state requires 100 foot of managed defensible space around your property. There's a reason why they came up with 100 feet. It's because in average shoulder-high vegetation on relatively flat ground with normal fire weather conditions, so assuming a 10 to 15 mile-an-hour wind and a certain temperature and a certain relative humidity that you would find in an average summertime condition, you need about, roughly, 100 foot separation from those flames to avoid injury.
And so it's no different if you're trying to find what we would, in the fire service, call a safety zone. So that exact parameter that you're asking about is something that wildland firefighters are doing every minute on the fire line. They are analyzing their position and either scouting or they've already determined places they can go if the fire blows up. And generally speaking, that's what they're looking for, something around 100 foot separation from dense vegetation. And as you start to increase the slope below you, because fire likes to run up slope, or as you increase the wind speed, for example, the notorious sundowner winds that we all face on the south coast of Santa Barbara County, then those dimensions get bigger.
And so you can see that if you're stuck out in the open, it's a relatively large area that you need to be survivable. And then it's not just separation from those heavier vegetation, like trees and chaparral, but it's also the ground vegetation. You don't want to be in a grass field unless it's heavily mowed. And even a mowed field will eventually burn with small flames, but if you're standing in the middle of it, you're going to have to figure out how to sort of dance around that small fire edge.
In the wildland fire suppression discipline, we use the burned area as our safety zone. So every time we're fighting fire, we always know where the burned off area is that we can retreat to, because we know that area no longer has vegetation that can burn. So as long as it's cooled off enough for us to get into, it might not be comfortable, it might be smoky and irritating, but it's safe. So that's a common thing that firefighters always have in their back pocket, is where is my safety zone, and what's my escape route to get to my safety zone? If we translate that to the civilian world and use those same principles to talk about things like temporary refuge areas, terminology that people have answered about, or another term I'm seeing lately is community refuge areas, which I kind of like a little bit better.
If you're actually going to identify one of these, let's actually use the right terminology, because I think temporary refuge areas already has a fire service connotation. So if we were to look at our community and figure out, well, what do we have available to us? That's the first step, is knowing your community, where do you have wide, clear areas with reduced vegetation, reduced ability of fire to burn through with high density. In the urban interface, when we get down into the foothills, we've got lots of things.
We've got parking lots and schools and places like that. Any place that has very fire-resistant buildings, like a school, where it's almost non-flammable construction. Because once buildings burn, then that's a whole other level of heat exposure you're going to have. So you have to take that into account. The middle of a neighborhood street might seem like a safe place, but if all the tract houses are on fire, it won't be a safe place. You'll have to rapidly retreat from that, because of the heat of a structure fire.
Not only is it intense, but it's long duration. I think that's the most important thing for the mountain communities, is knowing what's available. I'll give you an example. You live in Painted Cave, and Painted Cave has a couple places that people have looked at and said, hey, this is a big, wide, open, clear area. Could this be a community refuge area? I think that's the first step, is the community recognizing it's there. Then you have to take a look and determine, well, how would people access it? Is it a clear pathway to it, or is it complicated? Is there gates that might be shut, because we're talking about private property? And then, if it's an area that's dominated by grass vegetation, well, we all know that our annual grasses right now, we can all see them, they're extremely tall, after all the rain we had.
And until those grasses are mowed, grass fires can be extremely intense, and they burn fast and short-duration heat, but can be high-intensity heat. We just had a 14,000-acre grass fire in the San Joaquin Valley, and burned down a bunch of homes. You would want to know that that grass field was being maintained, either grazed off by livestock or mowed, that some kind of action had been taken, and you'd want to communicate that to your community, that, yeah, we looked at this.
So this then goes back to why it's so important for communities to develop some kind of leadership structure, whether it's fire-wise, or in the case of the mountain communities, you have the Wildlife Residents Association, there's homeowners associations for many neighborhoods. If communities want to have that option, that last resort, and I think there's some validity to this, because it's not really fair to just tell people, ready, set, go, leave early. That's the answer. Because sometimes they don't get out in time.
So why wouldn't we have a fallback, why wouldn't we have a place that we could go that would be better than staying in a place with dense vegetation, where you essentially are just relying on your house not to burn down, as you're stuck inside. So I truly do believe that there's validity to this idea of community refuge areas, but it's only going to work, these things will only work if the community does their homework. So it's kind of like, as homeowners, you work on your yard, you work on your house, to make it fire safe.
Well, community refuge areas are going to require community involvement, and that's the only way it'll work. So question, what about the duration of a fire? If you go into your home, how long are you going to be having to stay in the home until the fire dies down enough so you can go out and put out a spot fire? So if you're surrounded by grassland areas, so if you live in the San Diego Valley, and you're on a five-acre parcel, and you've done all your mowing, and there's a grass fire that comes ripping through, it will literally burn through the grass and be blue skies with barely any smoke in 10 minutes.
If you live in Chaparral, it's more like about 30 to 40 minutes of burn duration. If you're in heavy timber, so you're living up in the foothills of the Sierras, you're in a pine conifer kind of forest, or you're in an area dominated by eucalyptus, and the eucalyptus starts going, those fuels can burn for hours. Because once the canopy burns off, now you've got these huge logs and what we call thousand-hour fuels, this is vegetation that's essentially tree trunks and logs, those things will burn for hours.
And the heat might be too much for you to maintain. And then the other component of that would be structure. So if there's multiple structures burning, they'll burn for over an hour. And direction of wind flow always has a lot to do with the fires, with the flames. I mean, I look at it every day, so I'll give you something that I think about. So I live in a pretty, currently I live down in eastern Goleta, below Hollister, out by Moore Mesa, so it's not even rated as any fire hazard severity zone.
However, the Painted Cave Fire got pretty close to it, looking at the old historical maps. And, you know, it's a pretty slim chance that our neighborhood will be impacted, but it's not impossible. And my next-door neighbor's house is, it's a rental. They don't do their landscaping. I look at it every day, and I'm just waiting for that moment in time when the weeds dry out and become a fire hazard. And so I think about it, like, if that house burns, it's only 15 feet away from my house.
I'm in a small little lot, and so, yeah, I would probably lose my house if my neighbor caught on fire. So that is something to know. Like, you should look at not just your house, but look at your neighbors and know what is a potential threat to your home, because then you can anticipate it, right? You can know that, like, you know, I think if that house caught on fire, the heat would be so intense that probably my place is a goner.
And that will impact your decision process, whether you leave or stay. And I know there have been fires when people were sheltering in place, and the fire came, and they perished because of it. So the question is, how fast does the structure, you know, get completely under combustion so that it's untenable? And that's subjective. It's subjective, and it obviously depends on the fire weather conditions. You know, wildland fire, again, it's a lot. I always sort of compare it to the ocean.
We have calm ocean days, and we have gnarly storm days, and we have days of giant surf. So it's difficult to categorize, you know, things like this, because there's so much, you know, there's so many dynamic factors involved. But in general, the fires that impact the Santa Barbara South Coast particularly are sundowner-dominated. And there's a reason for that. The South Coast has a coastal influence. It has high relative humidity during normal days. We've all been experiencing that for the last two months as we were in May gray and June gloom.
But even in July and August, the normal wind that comes off the ocean, generally speaking, is relatively humid enough to limit intense fire spread on the South Coast. As soon as we get sundowners, all of that flips. And we can have, you know, incredibly intense fires like we've seen over the last decade, and like we saw back in the 90s with the Painted Cave Fire, and a previous generation of wildland firefighters saw this back in the 60s and the 50s with the Refugio Fire and the Coyote Fire.
So we know that we can have these conditions. So in those types of conditions, if you live in a house that is mostly susceptible to embers, so let's say it has wood siding, I'm going to assume it has a Class A roof, which is a relatively non-combustible roof, because that's what's required by code, and it's very rare to find any homes that don't have a Class A roof. But there's so many other parts of the house that are vulnerable to flame and embers.
So let's say you've got a house that's got wood siding, and maybe you have a deck, right, got a deck. Maybe you have some wood furniture in the yard. Maybe you have some wood chips around the foundation of the house within that first five feet of the walls. When you find that house being impacted by what we call the head of the fire, this is the flame front at the front of the fire, it's being pushed by the wind, hottest part of the fire, most embers being generated, most heat being generated, highest rate of spread.
If that impacts a house like that, and it starts to go, right, multiple ember ignitions all around the house, right, under the eaves, down around the foundation, wood fences on fire, dog houses on fire, yard furniture on fire, doormats on fire, embers going through cracks in the walls, going through underneath your garage door, you name it. That house could be fully involved within 10 minutes. And once it's fully involved, you're not getting out. That's the problem.
And there's no place to go. There's no place to go. So now, on the other hand, if you, you know, let's say your house has got stucco siding, covered eaves, really good defensible space, what we call zone zero, this is that critical zone, it's from the foundation of your house out five feet all the way around the home. If that has been cleared of all flammable material, like no wood chips, no bark, no vegetation that can burn of any kind, you might be fine.
That house might actually survive. Certainly, it would take a lot longer to ignite. And here's the thing, the longer that house delays igniting, it means that at some point, the wildland fire has run its course around you. And as I described it, it takes 30 minutes for all that to burn out around you. And on these wind-driven fires, it actually burns faster. It'll burn, it'll, in a shorter period of time, it will burn out the fuels.
And the intense wind will actually sort of clear out the smoke at some point. Did I say this? And remove the fire from behind your building. And that's the moment that you want to, you know, be watching, like, you know, your moment to leave the house. Because if you can get out of the house and now walk around the house and see if you have any embers, you can put out these ignitions starting to occur. It either gives you the opportunity to now get in your vehicle, hopefully that didn't burn up, and get away from the home.
Or if you've got water and you feel like you can physically do what you need to do, you can put out these ember ignitions. I mean, sometimes there's just tiny little smoldering embers that are lodged in some little crack somewhere in the house. Under the deck. Yeah. I've saved a ton of homes using that technique, where we'll shelter in the fire truck while that smoke and heat blast is hitting the lot. And then as soon as it kind of does its thing, we'll go out and pull our hose lines and start wetting the house down.
And we'll usually wet the house down prior to the fire hitting, and then we'll come back out and reassess. Sometimes I haven't had the luxury of having the engine to go into, or a crew truck. But they had such good defensible space that it was just a matter of kind of what we call hunkering down. You just kind of get low to the ground and you kind of breathe through your shirt a little bit and try to reduce your anaerobic breathing and limit, to some extent, as much smoke ingestion as possible, which it's kind of impossible to do.
Little known fact amongst a lot of people, wildland firefighters do not have respiratory projection. I think that's important for people to know. There is no technology currently that gives respiratory protection for wildland firefighters. And neither do the residents. And neither do the residents. And so you will suck a lot of smoke if this happens to you. You will breathe a ton of smoke. And I did that for 36 years. I breathed a lot of smoke. It's okay.
It will be uncomfortable. But you probably won't die if your property has been prepared and you have that defensible space. That's the whole point. That's why it's called defensible space. It used to be called hazard reduction back in the day. Back when it was 30 feet they wanted you to clear, they called it hazard reduction. But when they changed the law and went to the 100-foot clearance, they called it defensible space on purpose for a reason, because it was to create space for firefighters or a resident that's stuck at the house for a defensible zone around the home.
So you touched on something, and I'd like to get your advice about it. What kind of attire, you know, there are certain things that are obvious, you know, goggles. But let's talk about things that aren't so obvious. You don't want to wet a mask and put it over your face. No. Yeah. I'll let you run with that. Well, so that goes back many, many, many, many generations of wildland firefighters. They learned the hard way that a wet bandana, because it was pretty commonplace back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s that wildland firefighters would put a bandana on, and a lot of them would wet it.
And some of those folks, if they were in a situation where they got a hot blast of convective heat that hit them and took a breath through that wet bandana, that that hot convective air would turn that moisture into steam, and then they would get steam burns on their throat and on their lips and potentially even their lungs. So it's better. Your body can withstand dry heat much better than steam. So we always tell wildland firefighters, hey, if you are going to have some kind of respiratory, you know, if you're going to use a bandana or any kind of, you know, mask like that, which honestly, really, it doesn't block the smoke.
All it does is prevent you from breathing large particles like ash and soot. You're still going to breathe the smoke. You're still going to have all the noxious chemicals. Yeah, you know, the wildland smoke is full of a whole bunch of bad stuff. And you're still going to get the carbon monoxide, which is a molecule. So that's not filtered by anything. That's just part of the actual air you're breathing. It's got carbon monoxide in it because of combustion.
And to some extent, the only defense you have against carbon monoxide is to just try to be calm and breathe shallow and not have a high heart rate because you'll breathe less of the carbon monoxide in. And the harder you breathe in that kind of a situation, you're actually taking in more carbon monoxide, which binds with your hemoglobin and then causes downstream negative repercussions. Because your ability to intake oxygen is reduced, it's sort of the worst scenario, you know, that you could imagine.
But yeah, a lot of wildland firefighters, you know, they'll get to three or four days on the fire line, and they start getting really bad headaches, and it's typically the carbon monoxide. Yeah. Well, how about the rest of, like, pants, shirt, underwear, underclothing, like a t-shirt underneath, all that sort of stuff? So, you know, essentially, you want to wear non-synthetic fibers. The exception would be if you happen to have Nomex or Aramid, some kind of flame-resistant clothing, which would be very unlikely unless you happen to be a volunteer firefighter or a professional firefighter off-duty, you're not going to have this type of clothing.
Not to say you can't go out and buy this stuff. You can. You can go buy a Nomex fire shirt, and, you know, they're bright yellow, and you can buy one. Tons of forestry catalogs have Nomex safety gear. But in general, most people won't have that. So your next best option is to wear non-synthetic, like cotton or wool. Wool is actually super effective. It's just warm. And so, and not a lot of people anymore have wool pants or wool fire shirts.
But if you did, wool actually is very fire-resistant. Silk, same thing. Not many people would be out in a silk shirt, but silk is relatively fire-resistant. What you wouldn't want to wear would be something like athletic gear. You know, you wouldn't want to wear an Under Armour shirt, because they're made out of a synthetic, and they'll melt really quick. You'll start to notice all these melted burn holes in your shirt from the embers. So you want to wear some kind of boots, you know, work shoes, closed-toe, you know, something that's going to give you protection.
You know, if you have a hat, some kind of, you know, cotton-style, you know, hat you might wear when you're out gardening or something like that, that will help, because embers will fly in your hair and actually start to give you, like, burn holes in your hair. So, you know, you have to picture that in these fires, if you've ever been in a snowstorm – not everybody has – but if you've ever been in a blizzard, and you've seen snow swirling through the wind in a blizzard, it's just like that in a wildland fire, except it's embers.
There's thousands of them in front of the fire, and they're swirling through the air. Many of them tend to get trapped along the ground, and you'll see, like, just sheets of embers just blowing across the streets and roads and driveways, and then lodging into anything on the ground, you know, and if they find something flammable, then now you have your spot fires. So it's just really important that you're not – that you're not wearing things that are going to catch fire, you know, quick.
And you want to kind of, every once in a while, just make sure you're good. If you're wearing cotton, cotton's flammable, it just won't melt. That's the advantage of cotton. If you wear synthetics, they melt, and they'll give you a horrendous burn. But you could be on fire and not know it. You could. And so it's really important to just be checking yourself, you know, hopefully, you know, when that ember storm hits, you've found a place to go to get out of it.
Oftentimes, it's just a simple matter of get on the other side of the house. If the fire's hitting, say, the north side of your home, get on the south side. Firefighters do this all the time. We use these types of, you know, blockages from the heat and smoke. That's what we call temporary refuge areas, where we will get behind the engine or we'll go around the other side of the house and kind of wait a little bit, take a tactical pause while the fire's hitting an area that we were engaged in, and then we wait for that heat to subside, and then we come back in and we pick up the pieces.
So it's very similar to warfare, where you're constantly kind of going in and then taking a tactical retreat and then a tactical advance, and, you know, it's all based on your awareness of the environment around you. It's important, because everything changes so rapidly that if you can make a judgment call about which way the wind is blowing, because it may not have been blowing that direction like 10 minutes before, and then to get behind something. Mike, you got something, anything on your...
Well, I'm listening to Rob, and this is such critical information, and it is so difficult to get people to appreciate what he's referring to as the smoke, the heat, and the embers. So whether you've been in it, you just don't know, and even then, the cognitive dissonance of people that just, they want to pretend this isn't happening. The Whittier fire, the smoke from the Whittier fire was just hideous. Of all the fires that have been up there, and all the fires that I personally have gone to, the Whittier was the worst.
It's just hanging on the ground, and it's just... The idea that people were going to stay and defend their homes or ride it out was just silly, and it did get the attention of some folks. It had been up there for a long time, but how to convey this in a way that you don't sound like an alarmist or a crazy person or something, but this is real, and once it starts going into that direction, you're committed, and whether or not you're ready or not, that's a different story.
Well, that's where a lot of fatalities occur, is when people choose to stay with their homes until 10 minutes before the fire arrives, and then they run out and jump in their car, and then they got trapped. Yeah, and it's just, are you physically, emotionally, and ready for what's coming? And if you don't know what it is, it's best to get out. Now, there's certainly people that are, but even with the... You and I were on the air for the Haste to Seize the Fire, and experienced long-term Forest Service guys were calling in off the air, talking about how this is a fire to get out of the way of, that even with all their experience and all of their tough-it-out-and-we're-somebody attitude, which is all legitimate, they're saying, pack up and get out.
And I think that the kind of fires we're having on the front country, and have had, should alarm everybody to the potential of what you're talking about, and smoke will kill you. Well, the smoke gets to you first, I believe, and sometimes it's way before the fire, but it's also very disturbing, very nauseous, very anxious producing, and very difficult to drive in. I was doing a refresher course out at Hollister Ranch a couple weeks ago. They have their own fire brigade out there, and I go out and help them do their stuff.
And one of the guys out there just retired from 18, so we were talking, and I said, what do you guys do? I get a headache even on pile burns. I get the headache before I even show up. I just can't stand that smoke, and I hate it. And he started laughing, and he says, we all start popping the aspirins and the Advils before we leave the station. And it's a brilliant thought, because we do start drinking water before we even start the truck.
You start drinking water. Why shouldn't I be popping a couple of Excedrin at the same time? You're laughing. Well, so, you know, for 30-something years, I actually really kind of liked the smell of the smoke. So, I mean, this is the person I know. Yeah, from 20 miles away. I mean, even in it. I mean, hot shots are kind of, you know, that's a unique experience. So it's like, you know, most people wouldn't want, you know, bullets coming at them, but a lot of special forces guys, that's their job.
That's what they do, and to some extent, they feel fulfilled when they're in combat. And hot shots are the same way when it comes to wildland fire. They actually feel fulfilled when they're engaged in wildland fire. And all the components of that, the embers, the smoke, the heat, the hard labor that you're involved in, the mental gymnastics you have to go through to do your decision-making process, you know, they thrive on it. And the smell of the smoke became a comfortable thing to me.
It became, it represented that I was in the place that I was good at, and this is what I do. I'm good at this. This is my reason for, like, being. This is my job. This is what I do. If I'm not smelling smoke, I'm actually not really doing my job. I'm waiting for a fire to go to. Right. And it became a smell that was very familiar and felt like kind of in my happy place.
I know that sounds weird, but. No, no, I understand, yeah. But here, but point in fact, that changed in my last couple years on the job. I don't know what happened, but something changed inside my head. I wasn't going on as many fires. I sit behind a desk, you know, maybe the fire marshal. I don't know why, but they did. And I was now an administrator. I still would go on the big fires. I just wasn't going on the hundreds of small fires, medium-sized fires.
And I started noticing kind of just a couple years ago that I was on these fires and I was like getting a headache. And even the smell of the smoke inside of my vehicle, I didn't like it anymore. I thought like, oh, this is terrible. I got to open my windows and air this out. I really noticed it on some prescribed fires because I was still actively managing the prescribed fire program. And I was going out on those prescribed fires and engaging in some leadership positions and kind of in the thick of the smoke.
And yeah, I don't know what it was, man, but a physical thing inside my head just switched, flipped. And I felt like, oh, this is normal. How I was before was abnormal. And this is a normal physiological response. I think burnout becomes a bit of a factor. You start losing your edge because you're not doing it every day. And then there's the other issue of maturity. You just start realizing that you start seeing the bigger, especially after you've been in management.
You just know this thing's going to go on and on and on. Well, to some extent, though, I think it maybe was physiological. At a certain point, my body was letting me know that, hey, this is not a healthy thing. You're not 21 anymore? No, you're not cleaning the stuff out of the system the way you used to. And this is not good. And that is a normal response. And that is the response that people who are stuck on their properties or stuck on a highway and get in that smoke, they're going to feel that feeling of like, this is not good.
I need to get out of this at all costs. But you're committed at that point. But you're committed. And here's the crazy thing. It's catch-22. At the moment in time that you need to have the most situational awareness, where you need to have the highest ability to predict what's happening around you, you're going to have the least amount of situational awareness. Especially if you're not familiar with it and experienced with it. So this is a good spot.
I'd like you to relate some of your experience with being confronted with fire in a vehicle and how that came down and maybe some advice for people that may find themselves in that position. Well, okay. So my third year on the Los Padres Hotshot crew, 1990. This was the year of the Painted Gate fire. And we were actually returning from a fire down in Ojai. We'd been down there for a couple days fighting a fire in the foothills behind town.
And we were released from that fire. We're driving back to Santa Barbara. And the county had a fire that was burning down in the transfer station at the county dump in the foothills there below Cathedral Oaks. And we'd been listening to it on the radio as we were driving back. And then all of a sudden, we hear radio traffic about a plume of smoke up at the top of Old San Marcos Road. And sure enough, we got to the Milpas overpass on 101.
And we could get the clear shot of San Marcos Pass. And there it was. There was a column of smoke coming off. And of course, a sundowner was kicking in at that moment. It was a particularly intense sundowner. One of those that's a pretty rare event when they're this intense. It was blowing all the way across the channel out to the islands. And it was over 100 degrees in the foothills. Winds were blowing like 60 miles an hour.
And so within 10 minutes, we were actively engaged trying to keep the fire from crossing 154. And at a certain point, we found ourselves with a couple civilian vehicles that had somehow got through the roadblock and were stuck on the highway along with us. And we had to find a wide spot on Highway 154 right above the forest boundary sign. So if you're familiar with the pass, which I know you guys are, right above San Antonio Creek, the last group of homes there.
And then you kind of go around the big bend on the pass. As you go up, you'll see the forest boundary sign, Los Padres National Forest, land that many uses. That's where you cross into the forest. And essentially, you're in a rural highway with chaparral on both sides and a steep slope on one side of the road going down and a steep slope on the other. Because it's a mid-slope road all the way to the top.
And we had to find a wide spot kind of right there around that bend as that fire essentially kind of like a tidal wave came right over our position. And it would have been a tough position if it had just been the two crew trucks. Each crew truck carried 10 people. It was a 20-person hand crew. So that would have been tough enough just to find a wide enough spot for these two crew vehicles. So wide enough so they could be side by side.
Yeah, so that we could find the widest spot to give us the most distance as this fire was going to hit us. And we tried to do a little bit of burning around, but the wind was so strong that we couldn't even get anything to go. But immediately, we had embers starting spot fires all around us. But we also had two other vehicles, these people that had got somehow coming down the pass. They got through the roadblock.
I still don't know how that happened, but they did. And they were panicked, of course. And they couldn't go forward because the fire was crossing the highway. And behind us, it was coming down the slope. So we were kind of literally between a rock and a hard place. And we had to put those vehicles between the two crew trucks and then use the crew trucks to kind of provide a little more shelter for them. And we had to weather it out.
And I was 25 years old, and I watched fire area ignite, which is a huge area of the slope above us, all ignited at once. Thousands of embers dropped into the Chaparral. We literally watched it just go all at once. And flames were wrapping over the top of our crew truck, wrapping over a pickup truck that was behind us. And it started to get very hot inside the vehicle, smoky. We could smell off-gassing from the upholstery inside the vehicle.
Steering wheel got too hot for the driver to hold on to. Eventually, the vehicle stalled because the air cleaner, the air filter caught on fire. And then we had compartments on these crew trucks, which carried all of our gear. And they were up on top of the vehicle. And you would access them going up some steps. For a lot of those compartments, the material inside started catching on fire. Sleeping bags and gear bags and things like that were on fire.
So, yeah, it was, you know, I remember feeling like, okay, I think this might be it. This might be it. I'm 25 years old, and I'm not going to make it out of this situation. There was literally no way that you could see leaving the vehicle. Like, looking outside, it wasn't a kernel. It was an inferno. So, the only solution was to stay in that vehicle. Not allow anybody to open the door. And hope, and hope is not a, you know, that's not something that wildland firefighters want to rely on, was to hope that the environment around us burned out.
That the intensity of heat diminished enough that we could then get out and assess if the vehicles were going to be on fire, which they were. So, and that's how it played out. The fire kind of, like, blew itself out, essentially, after about 15 minutes of intense duration. And then we were able to get out and use some fire extinguishers to put out some of the compartments. And, you know, of course, all the paint melted off.
And it was quite an event. We recently, it's funny that you ask this, we recently, a month ago, we did what's called a staff ride, where you get a lot of firefighters together, and you essentially sort of walk through an event like this. And you find the people that were there. Hopefully, they're still alive, you know, and you essentially get a first person account. And, you know, it's a training exercise, right? The military has done this for generations.
It's very common. They do staff rides for famous battles, you know, Battle of Gettysburg. And it's a way to just essentially try to put yourself in someone else's shoes and go, okay, this is what happened. What would you do? What would your choices have been? Or what would, how would you have reacted to this scenario? So, yeah, and since that time, I've had multiple times when I've driven through flames and driven through smoke, and never to that degree of intensity.
That, to this day, that was, you know, that was the feeling that I think a lot of people on the campfire up in the town of Paradise, as they got caught on that highway, they weren't experiencing what we experienced on Highway 154 in 1990. And, you know, some of them made it through it. And unfortunately, some did not. And, you know, I think that, you know, it's a very real thing to understand that you could be trapped on a highway.
And to understand, you know, there are some places on a highway, particularly our mountain highways, our mountain roads, that you just do not want to be. Switchbacks, you know, steep mid-slope portions of our road systems are extremely vulnerable. You mean like Penny Cave Road and Old San Marcos? Exactly, Old San Marcos, Penny Cave. There's just so many bad spots. Well, you gave me a little clue about that during one of our events. And the fact is that you want to stay away from inside curves, which is next to the mountain, and get on the outside curve, because the fire is going to be experiencing the chimney effect, and it'll be burning up those inside curves, where on the outside, you may avoid a lot of the flame fronts.
And, you know, it's important also, I think sometimes people get tunneled on, well, it's a sundowner fire, so the winds are going to be blowing from the northwest or the northeast. And so, you know, and you hear this all the time. People will say, yeah, you know, I looked out my window and the smoke looked like it was 10 miles away, and it was going the other direction. But 30 minutes later, the fire was in my backyard.
So what I think sometimes people, they lose sight of is that the wind swirls and eddies and does all kinds of interesting things on the flanks of these fires. These fires, when they get intense enough, create their own wind vortices, and fires will spread sideways to the wind pretty quick. And so it's really important to not get tunneled, that like, hey, I'm good. I see the fire. It's five miles away. It's burning down the mountain, and I'm above it, so I'm good.
Well, you might not be. You might find that that fire chews its way across the slope, maybe even against the wind. And so it's just super important. And then always remember that when the sundowner stops blowing, this is what happens, is that this fire that's been sitting on that slope burning down, all of a sudden the wind usually swaps, and now it comes from the coast side and pushes that fire back up the hill. And that's exactly what happened on the Painted Cave fire.
On the second day of the fire, that fire turned and burned back up to Painted Cave and took out a bunch of homes in the truck club and jumped the highway and burned right to the doorstep of Painted Cave. The only reason it didn't go into the community was because they put thousands of gallons of retardant on that ridge line and stopped it before the fire hit it. So it's really important to understand that the wind is super dynamic, and wind is what pushes wildland fire.
And don't get tunneled by looking at the smoke and thinking that you're good. Always be aware that wildland fire can do some unpredictable things. We're coming down to our last five minutes here. Any closing thoughts you want to discuss here in the next two, three minutes? Well, I really appreciate that Rob came and gave us his perspective on these things, because it's not a perspective that you're able to gain very often. And I think that our audience will be really gratified hearing all the things that we talked about.
I agree. And I don't think we missed anything. I'm sure that we did miss something, because it's such a complex situation, especially with a public and a wildland fire interface. There are so many times that people, as you said, make the wrong decision. Well, and maybe I'll just throw this out. I always, you know, I'm an optimist, and I spent a lot of my career doing inspections on properties, and I saw the good work that our communities do.
Great work doing defensible space and making our property safer. That needs to extend to our public road systems. And I'm just going to throw this out, that the public road systems are maintained by crews from the county, whether it's fire crews or public works road guys. They have a lot of workload. They have budget issues. They have a lot of irons in the fire, trying to keep our infrastructure maintained. And beef is not enough. But it is super important.
As we see in this 14,000-acre grass fire that just happened in the San Joaquin foothills, these grass fields that are dominating the road shoulders need to be maintained every year. And that could make the difference. If you've got 10 to 20 foot of clearance on that road system, it doesn't have to be nuked off. It doesn't have to be a barren landscape of dirt. It just needs to be maintained, just like the standards you do around your home, the road systems.
Particularly road systems like Painted Caves. Limbing up the local trees. Yep, absolutely. Because if you do get stuck on that road, that could make a big difference. If there's tall grass fields right on the shoulder of the road, it is going to burn the side of your vehicle. And at some point, the windows will fail. And then that's it. It's done. You're not going to survive inside that vehicle. So I think that's something that we all need to use our voice, our voices as community members, to lobby for that work to get completed.
And it might have to involve creative solutions. I know the Painted Caves community has been astoundingly creative with actually getting some of that work done through a partnership and volunteer effort where the county couldn't get a ton. But it really is important to make sure our road systems are maintained. Well, very good. Well, Rob, thank you very much for taking time out of retirement now to come and visit with us. And Ted and I want to remind you, this is sponsored by the Wildland Residence Association and the Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council.
Opinions expressed here are those of us, not necessarily anybody else. And I want to thank you for listening. And we'll catch you next time on Not If But When, Positive Preparation for Disaster.
