[Music]
so for about the last 20 years of my
career I’ve had the opportunity to work
on some of the most consequential
projects and issues that face our region
our state and even our nation but really
over the last ten years I’ve had the
distinct honor and privilege to work
alongside our wildland firefighters
addressing issues of Community Safety
and resilience attack effectiveness and
firefighter health and safety during
that decade I came across a startling
realization now it’s not some new tool
to improve attack effectiveness or help
save lives the realization I had was
nothing at all
and what I mean by that is that I found
out that over the years as we started
asking questions as we started doing our
research there were so many things that
haven’t been addressed effectively
wildland firefighting is easily a
generation behind that of high-rise
structure and urban firefighting now
this is something that took me a long
time to realize and really get a handle
on but let me tell you the firefighters
they realize this from day one so let me
take you back in time a little bit and
introduce you to Ed Pulaski in 1911 he
adopted a new tool for wildland
firefighting that tool today bears his
name the Pulaski now a hundred years ago
if you were to look at wildland
firefighting it’s a fairly rudimentary
process at that time but if you were to
compare that to say the military at
about that same time it’s also a very
different environment than what we see
today in fact if you were to take a
soldier off the battlefield in the early
1900s and place them on the battlefield
today it would be nearly unrecognizable
there would be some similarities right
but a lot has
– mentally changed if you were to take a
wildland firefighter from early 1900s
and dropped them on a wildland fire
today it would be unfortunately
immediately recognizable now some would
say the industry has shifted right but
the tools are the same a lot of the
tactics are the same and yes indeed we
do have new technology we have aircraft
we have new things that have never been
used before and so some people would say
well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it but
what I’m here to talk to you about is
that it is broken and so let’s go back
to the 1960s 1970s when our country was
facing some really big issues
all right you couldn’t see across the
street in Los Angeles rivers were
literally catching on fire the symbol of
our nation the bald eagle was going
extinct we had places like Love Canal
emerge as some of the most toxic
hazardous sites in the United States but
we also landed a person on the moon and
so at that time we said these aren’t
insurmountable problems we can figure
these things out so at about the same
time the Nixon administration had
started a program and a commission to
deal with urban firefighting because it
was a big problem at the time and so in
1973 they commissioned a report called
America burning and that report helped
to fundamentally change urban
firefighting as we know it today it
talked about prevention training and
outreach
it had materials and design issues for
homes and buildings and it had a
significant focus on research and
education so by 1974 we create the
federal fire prevention and Control Act
and we have made some remarkable strides
and gains in urban firefighting so if
you compared 1970s to about today we can
show you that the number of deaths that
occur every year is down by nearly 70
percent the property lost has decreased
and these are adjusted numbers
has decreased by nearly half structure
fires in the United States have gone
down by nearly 63 percent and the number
of injuries that we have from structure
and urban fires have decreased by 75%
remarkable gains now to put that a
little bit more into perspective though
at that same time period our population
the United States increased by over a
hundred million people Wow
I mean that much growth at that time and
still we’re able to make those dramatic
changes in our country phenomenal now
let me show you what happened with
wildland firefighting in that same time
period the fire season from the 1970s to
today has increased by nearly 50% if you
look at just our federal lands in the
Forest Service and this mirrors the rest
of the United States and California the
number of fires over a thousand acres as
increased by a hundred percent the
number of fires over ten thousand acres
is increased by two hundred and fifty
percent and the total number of acres
burned in the United States has gone
from roughly three million acres per
year in the 1970s to well over eight
million acres today it’s stunning the
worst year on record was 2015 where we
burned over 12 and a half million acres
in the United States so yeah it is
broken and we need to figure out how to
change this industry to provide them
with new tools to fight wildland fires
to put this in perspective 8 million
acres is the size of the state of
Massachusetts that we lose every year in
the United States and a bit of a
geography lesson anybody know it’s five
states the size of oh come on folks
Delaware alright but it’s also to put it
into a local perspective losing about
420 cities the size of Temecula I mean
that’s what we’re losing every year 95%
of those fires nationwide are human
caused events
not natural events they’re not lightning
strikes they’re human caused
one-in-six damages infrastructure
transportation and one in ten results in
the loss of a home with roughly 3,000
homes every year being lost to a
wildland fire it’s not just a West Coast
issue it’s not just a California issue
nationwide we have over two hundred and
seventy seven thousand square miles of
what’s called the wildland urban
interface or that really high-risk zone
where our urban areas meet the wildland
right forty five million homes in the
United States are built in that
interface in this high-risk area
Connecticut is number one with the most
amount of wildland urban interface but
California we win we have more homes in
that high-risk area than any other state
with roughly 5.1 million homes and
growing that number is going to increase
because here’s another surprising number
California has only built about 15
percent of the land available in that
wildland urban interface 15 percent so
we have to wrap our hands around this we
have to help the fire industry deal with
this situation we have to bring them out
of a century-old practice as I’ve worked
with them over the years a lot of folks
refer to them as an industry of deep
tradition unencumbered by progress right
so the the concept of a wildland fire
that’s stuff that just burns vegetation
or heavy timber chaparral or grasslands
has vastly changed we don’t see that as
much anymore we see these fires moving
into our backyards and when this has
happened we see fires that bring in
products that burn that we’ve never had
historically and we try and wonder as
those firefighters are working out there
for weeks at a time days at a time 24
hour shifts what are they being exposed
to what’s happening to them while they
are doing their job to protect York
and your lives now structure
firefighters after the Americas burning
made some vast changes in protective
gear and protocols they wear the scbas
the devices that help give them fresh
air and breathing wildland firefighters
have the equivalent to a bandana why
because the breathing apparatus only
gives you about 20 to 30 minutes of air
at best it’s heavy its large and it’s
cumbersome to use in an environment
where you’re working for 8 12 or 24
hours hiking right we don’t have that
kind of protection and so we started
asking some basic questions like when
you’re 200 feet away from a home and a
vehicle that’s burning and you’re
fighting wildland fire
what are you breathing and stunning to
find out that we didn’t know the answer
to that after a hundred years of
wildland firefighting we haven’t figured
that out really if you go to the
Memorial in Sacramento firefighters
memorial just outside the Capitol over
the last several years roughly 90% of
the names that have been added to that
wall are the result of cancer fatalities
not fatalities on the fire line so
something is happening something has
changed in this industry how do we deal
with it so in 2014 I was invited by Cal
Fire local and others to host a workshop
and this workshop was focused on how do
we address this situation how do we
create that Blue Ribbon Commission that
was done in 1973 by the Nixon
administration so we brought people from
all over the country to Sacramento to
ask the hard questions how do we move
this thing forward and we had several
days of great conversation and dialogue
one of the things that came out of it is
we just need to change the nomenclature
right we need to stop calling it a
wildfire and start calling it a wildland
urban interface fire all right let’s be
real with the situation that were
confronted with every day because
people’s perceptions will change once
you start using those terms more
let’s stop calling it a fire season a
fire season suggests that there’s a
discrete period of the year in which we
have fires that’s not the case in fact
half of the largest fires in
California’s recent history have
happened in the wintertime so we need to
change the way we think about this but
most importantly the biggest
recommendations that came out of that
symposium were much like in 1973
research and education right so at this
point I’ve hit
sadly the midpoint in my working career
I think right and I had to make a
decision you know I spent years going to
the scientific conferences giving
presentations in front of other
scientists and everybody sort of patting
themselves on the back and each other
saying oh yeah I agree with you and
that’s great information and and a lot
of this stuff just sat on a shelf and
collected dust right and so I made a
decision I stopped doing that and I
started working hand in hand with the
wildland firefighters and asking them
what’s important to you what are the
questions that need to be asked I wasn’t
presenting my results just at national
science meetings anymore I was
presenting them at firefighter
conferences workshops specific to those
firefighters and what I found was the
reports and the research and the
information we had was relevant and it
didn’t sit on a shelf and collect dust
it made its way into the hands of our
policymakers our legislature our
decision makers at the local government
state government and even even federal
government level we were affecting some
kind of change but it wasn’t enough
right it wasn’t nearly enough we know
that firefighters and wildland urban
interface are regularly exposed to
hazardous and toxic substances from
carbon monoxide to volatile organic
compounds and polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons known cancer-causing
substances we don’t know how bad it is
and we don’t know what the long-term
effects are because there has never been
a long-term study on any of this we did
a study and tracked about a hundred
firefighters over a period of a couple
of years and we found out
that they exceeded all sorts of
recommended heart temperature and
exposure rates they were experiencing
some of the harshest conditions
imaginable on this planet we had fire
fighters with peak heart rates sustained
at above 200 beats a minute and even 220
beats a minute now if you know anything
about your heart rate it says the
American Heart Association recommends
220 minus your age as a maximum heart
rate and a working heart rate maximum is
85% of that number right so if you want
to do the mass mine is about 157 then
you can figure out how old I am
so two-thirds of our firefighters were
working at or near dehydration many of
them carried core body temperatures
above 102 degrees for hours and hours at
a time and a significant number of them
were edging close to 104 degrees we were
able to work with some of the foremost
national laboratories National Institute
of Standards and Technology the u.s.
Forest Service and others and we brought
the materials we brought these things
into the laboratory and said what are we
exposing these folks to what are these
conditions like and then we did larger
sort of burns where we tried to simulate
you know the wildland urban interface
but I’ll tell you something I learned
along this journey as well it’s not like
being there you know researchers and
scientists are really good at being in
the laboratory a lot of times looking at
things for different perspective I had
the opportunity to work side-by-side
shoulder-to-shoulder with wildland
firefighters and it completely changed
my perspective on wildland firefighting
being there seeing that feeling it
breathing it right it completely changed
my perspective on what these folks are
putting themselves through on a regular
basis scientists often aren’t able to
see the forest for the trees and so we
need to work hand in hand with those
firefighters and so we created a program
at Cal State University at San Marcos
that’s a Bachelor of Science in wildland
fire and the urban interface first of
its kind in the country
and there’s something unique to this
program we actually worked hand
and with firefighters and fire agencies
across the United States and we told
them look I’m not hiring folks you are
so what is it that you need in this
curriculum what do you need to have
these folks learn and of course a big
push was the research side the
scientists we want good scientists and
we realized that if you want to
effectuate good change
yeah the scientists the researchers we
can sit back and we can do our job but
man if you provide them with the tools
themselves to do it that’s the biggest
opportunity for change and so hopefully
if all the permissions are through the
university system and everything else
next year we’ll be launching this
program and we hope that it’s just one
more tool that we can give the wildland
urban interface firefighters to do their
job today thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
so for about the last 20 years of my
career I’ve had the opportunity to work
on some of the most consequential
projects and issues that face our region
our state and even our nation but really
over the last ten years I’ve had the
distinct honor and privilege to work
alongside our wildland firefighters
addressing issues of Community Safety
and resilience attack effectiveness and
firefighter health and safety during
that decade I came across a startling
realization now it’s not some new tool
to improve attack effectiveness or help
save lives the realization I had was
nothing at all
and what I mean by that is that I found
out that over the years as we started
asking questions as we started doing our
research there were so many things that
haven’t been addressed effectively
wildland firefighting is easily a
generation behind that of high-rise
structure and urban firefighting now
this is something that took me a long
time to realize and really get a handle
on but let me tell you the firefighters
they realize this from day one so let me
take you back in time a little bit and
introduce you to Ed Pulaski in 1911 he
adopted a new tool for wildland
firefighting that tool today bears his
name the Pulaski now a hundred years ago
if you were to look at wildland
firefighting it’s a fairly rudimentary
process at that time but if you were to
compare that to say the military at
about that same time it’s also a very
different environment than what we see
today in fact if you were to take a
soldier off the battlefield in the early
1900s and place them on the battlefield
today it would be nearly unrecognizable
there would be some similarities right
but a lot has
– mentally changed if you were to take a
wildland firefighter from early 1900s
and dropped them on a wildland fire
today it would be unfortunately
immediately recognizable now some would
say the industry has shifted right but
the tools are the same a lot of the
tactics are the same and yes indeed we
do have new technology we have aircraft
we have new things that have never been
used before and so some people would say
well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it but
what I’m here to talk to you about is
that it is broken and so let’s go back
to the 1960s 1970s when our country was
facing some really big issues
all right you couldn’t see across the
street in Los Angeles rivers were
literally catching on fire the symbol of
our nation the bald eagle was going
extinct we had places like Love Canal
emerge as some of the most toxic
hazardous sites in the United States but
we also landed a person on the moon and
so at that time we said these aren’t
insurmountable problems we can figure
these things out so at about the same
time the Nixon administration had
started a program and a commission to
deal with urban firefighting because it
was a big problem at the time and so in
1973 they commissioned a report called
America burning and that report helped
to fundamentally change urban
firefighting as we know it today it
talked about prevention training and
outreach
it had materials and design issues for
homes and buildings and it had a
significant focus on research and
education so by 1974 we create the
federal fire prevention and Control Act
and we have made some remarkable strides
and gains in urban firefighting so if
you compared 1970s to about today we can
show you that the number of deaths that
occur every year is down by nearly 70
percent the property lost has decreased
and these are adjusted numbers
has decreased by nearly half structure
fires in the United States have gone
down by nearly 63 percent and the number
of injuries that we have from structure
and urban fires have decreased by 75%
remarkable gains now to put that a
little bit more into perspective though
at that same time period our population
the United States increased by over a
hundred million people Wow
I mean that much growth at that time and
still we’re able to make those dramatic
changes in our country phenomenal now
let me show you what happened with
wildland firefighting in that same time
period the fire season from the 1970s to
today has increased by nearly 50% if you
look at just our federal lands in the
Forest Service and this mirrors the rest
of the United States and California the
number of fires over a thousand acres as
increased by a hundred percent the
number of fires over ten thousand acres
is increased by two hundred and fifty
percent and the total number of acres
burned in the United States has gone
from roughly three million acres per
year in the 1970s to well over eight
million acres today it’s stunning the
worst year on record was 2015 where we
burned over 12 and a half million acres
in the United States so yeah it is
broken and we need to figure out how to
change this industry to provide them
with new tools to fight wildland fires
to put this in perspective 8 million
acres is the size of the state of
Massachusetts that we lose every year in
the United States and a bit of a
geography lesson anybody know it’s five
states the size of oh come on folks
Delaware alright but it’s also to put it
into a local perspective losing about
420 cities the size of Temecula I mean
that’s what we’re losing every year 95%
of those fires nationwide are human
caused events
not natural events they’re not lightning
strikes they’re human caused
one-in-six damages infrastructure
transportation and one in ten results in
the loss of a home with roughly 3,000
homes every year being lost to a
wildland fire it’s not just a West Coast
issue it’s not just a California issue
nationwide we have over two hundred and
seventy seven thousand square miles of
what’s called the wildland urban
interface or that really high-risk zone
where our urban areas meet the wildland
right forty five million homes in the
United States are built in that
interface in this high-risk area
Connecticut is number one with the most
amount of wildland urban interface but
California we win we have more homes in
that high-risk area than any other state
with roughly 5.1 million homes and
growing that number is going to increase
because here’s another surprising number
California has only built about 15
percent of the land available in that
wildland urban interface 15 percent so
we have to wrap our hands around this we
have to help the fire industry deal with
this situation we have to bring them out
of a century-old practice as I’ve worked
with them over the years a lot of folks
refer to them as an industry of deep
tradition unencumbered by progress right
so the the concept of a wildland fire
that’s stuff that just burns vegetation
or heavy timber chaparral or grasslands
has vastly changed we don’t see that as
much anymore we see these fires moving
into our backyards and when this has
happened we see fires that bring in
products that burn that we’ve never had
historically and we try and wonder as
those firefighters are working out there
for weeks at a time days at a time 24
hour shifts what are they being exposed
to what’s happening to them while they
are doing their job to protect York
and your lives now structure
firefighters after the Americas burning
made some vast changes in protective
gear and protocols they wear the scbas
the devices that help give them fresh
air and breathing wildland firefighters
have the equivalent to a bandana why
because the breathing apparatus only
gives you about 20 to 30 minutes of air
at best it’s heavy its large and it’s
cumbersome to use in an environment
where you’re working for 8 12 or 24
hours hiking right we don’t have that
kind of protection and so we started
asking some basic questions like when
you’re 200 feet away from a home and a
vehicle that’s burning and you’re
fighting wildland fire
what are you breathing and stunning to
find out that we didn’t know the answer
to that after a hundred years of
wildland firefighting we haven’t figured
that out really if you go to the
Memorial in Sacramento firefighters
memorial just outside the Capitol over
the last several years roughly 90% of
the names that have been added to that
wall are the result of cancer fatalities
not fatalities on the fire line so
something is happening something has
changed in this industry how do we deal
with it so in 2014 I was invited by Cal
Fire local and others to host a workshop
and this workshop was focused on how do
we address this situation how do we
create that Blue Ribbon Commission that
was done in 1973 by the Nixon
administration so we brought people from
all over the country to Sacramento to
ask the hard questions how do we move
this thing forward and we had several
days of great conversation and dialogue
one of the things that came out of it is
we just need to change the nomenclature
right we need to stop calling it a
wildfire and start calling it a wildland
urban interface fire all right let’s be
real with the situation that were
confronted with every day because
people’s perceptions will change once
you start using those terms more
let’s stop calling it a fire season a
fire season suggests that there’s a
discrete period of the year in which we
have fires that’s not the case in fact
half of the largest fires in
California’s recent history have
happened in the wintertime so we need to
change the way we think about this but
most importantly the biggest
recommendations that came out of that
symposium were much like in 1973
research and education right so at this
point I’ve hit
sadly the midpoint in my working career
I think right and I had to make a
decision you know I spent years going to
the scientific conferences giving
presentations in front of other
scientists and everybody sort of patting
themselves on the back and each other
saying oh yeah I agree with you and
that’s great information and and a lot
of this stuff just sat on a shelf and
collected dust right and so I made a
decision I stopped doing that and I
started working hand in hand with the
wildland firefighters and asking them
what’s important to you what are the
questions that need to be asked I wasn’t
presenting my results just at national
science meetings anymore I was
presenting them at firefighter
conferences workshops specific to those
firefighters and what I found was the
reports and the research and the
information we had was relevant and it
didn’t sit on a shelf and collect dust
it made its way into the hands of our
policymakers our legislature our
decision makers at the local government
state government and even even federal
government level we were affecting some
kind of change but it wasn’t enough
right it wasn’t nearly enough we know
that firefighters and wildland urban
interface are regularly exposed to
hazardous and toxic substances from
carbon monoxide to volatile organic
compounds and polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons known cancer-causing
substances we don’t know how bad it is
and we don’t know what the long-term
effects are because there has never been
a long-term study on any of this we did
a study and tracked about a hundred
firefighters over a period of a couple
of years and we found out
that they exceeded all sorts of
recommended heart temperature and
exposure rates they were experiencing
some of the harshest conditions
imaginable on this planet we had fire
fighters with peak heart rates sustained
at above 200 beats a minute and even 220
beats a minute now if you know anything
about your heart rate it says the
American Heart Association recommends
220 minus your age as a maximum heart
rate and a working heart rate maximum is
85% of that number right so if you want
to do the mass mine is about 157 then
you can figure out how old I am
so two-thirds of our firefighters were
working at or near dehydration many of
them carried core body temperatures
above 102 degrees for hours and hours at
a time and a significant number of them
were edging close to 104 degrees we were
able to work with some of the foremost
national laboratories National Institute
of Standards and Technology the u.s.
Forest Service and others and we brought
the materials we brought these things
into the laboratory and said what are we
exposing these folks to what are these
conditions like and then we did larger
sort of burns where we tried to simulate
you know the wildland urban interface
but I’ll tell you something I learned
along this journey as well it’s not like
being there you know researchers and
scientists are really good at being in
the laboratory a lot of times looking at
things for different perspective I had
the opportunity to work side-by-side
shoulder-to-shoulder with wildland
firefighters and it completely changed
my perspective on wildland firefighting
being there seeing that feeling it
breathing it right it completely changed
my perspective on what these folks are
putting themselves through on a regular
basis scientists often aren’t able to
see the forest for the trees and so we
need to work hand in hand with those
firefighters and so we created a program
at Cal State University at San Marcos
that’s a Bachelor of Science in wildland
fire and the urban interface first of
its kind in the country
and there’s something unique to this
program we actually worked hand
and with firefighters and fire agencies
across the United States and we told
them look I’m not hiring folks you are
so what is it that you need in this
curriculum what do you need to have
these folks learn and of course a big
push was the research side the
scientists we want good scientists and
we realized that if you want to
effectuate good change
yeah the scientists the researchers we
can sit back and we can do our job but
man if you provide them with the tools
themselves to do it that’s the biggest
opportunity for change and so hopefully
if all the permissions are through the
university system and everything else
next year we’ll be launching this
program and we hope that it’s just one
more tool that we can give the wildland
urban interface firefighters to do their
job today thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
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