Guest Writer, Author at Wildfire Today

LA Fires – Burning Cities

Guest WriterMay 18, 2025May 19, 2025California, Training, Wildland Firefighter2 Comments

Trucks heading to the Palisades fires 11 January 2025. Photo: Kelly Martin

By Lindon Pronto

We have entered an operational gray zone: wildfires burning in cities. These fires are the jurisdiction of urban fire departments, but often they rely on wildland firefighters to get the job done, and wildland firefighters are increasingly being called to fight wildfires in urban environments.

During the breaking news frenzy around large wildland fires, I rarely say what I really want to say – it’s a game of responding to sensational and reactionary questions, just like how we approach fire itself. So, here’s what I’ll add to the discussion about the LA fires.

This is an edited version of an article in Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires

There will be a lot to learn. And some officials and organizations are going to need to take some responsibility. And certainly, residents in fireprone landscapes need to contemplate their own responsibilities. But these are the two fundamental questions I see that we need to address:

What will be collectively required of us to prevent such disasters in the future?
How will we respond to similar disasters when they occur?

Since the January fires, news stories, op-eds and social media have been swirling with lots of great propositions to these questions: more prescribed fire, fire-hardened construction (hempcrete!) and landscaping, better urban planning, building codes, budget priorities, public utility SOPs, fire-tech, etc. I think the answers to how to address question 1 are relatively straightforward – experts have been sounding the alarm and offering solutions on these issues for decades. Answering question 2 is more challenging.

Looking at the long list of things to address to prevent such a disaster from happening again, it’s obvious the changes, motivation, behavioral shifts, policy response and funding needed mean we will likely have many more devastated communities long before these changes come to fruition. This brings us to question 2 –the burden on the conscience of the collective response community. At the end of the day, we all still expect firefighters to respond, as they have always done.

Fire fighting is siloed: there are many types of firefighters from municipal and state to industrial, airport, and maritime. To oversimplify in the California context, there are wildland firefighters and urban / structure firefighters, and some who do a bit of both, especially in California, known for its wildland-urban interface.

CAL FIRE is an example of an agency that evolved to do both. Los Angeles County Fire is another example. But fundamentally, wildland firefighters are trained and equipped differently and operate tactically and strategically different than urban fire departments.

I’m not knocking one group of firefighters; I’m just saying we don’t expect a smokejumper to run into a burning building. But we do expect urban fire departments to manage the most complex and extreme wildfires, ordering outside resources as needed.

But telling an urban firefighter not to extinguish a burning building goes against every instinct. This was apparent in the LA fires – urban firefighters pumping massive quantities of water through large-diameter fire hoses on fully involved structures. In other words, valiantly using the equipment they have, to do exactly what they were trained to do. Urban firefighters are a stationary firefighting force whose objective is to tap into the nearest fire hydrant; the fire truck serves as pumping platform and the firefighters are committed to this effort until the structure is fully extinguished. This is obviously an untenable approach if a sea of structures is on fire during a wind event. Houses and cars, businesses and schools – all on fire. Instead of trees and bushes, it’s a jungle of petroleum products and biomass – a devastatingly overwhelming situation.

Wildland firefighters are trained not to fight a house on fire but to stop it from spreading to the surrounding area. Wildland firefighters operate very differently; their initial objective is not to extinguish a fire but to rob it of available fuel to eventually contain its spread. This is why wildland firefighters are very mobile, and move with the progression of the fire, often doing so without relying on water, or at least very little water.

Looking ahead, I believe the response community does need to think outside the box when it comes to this new operational gray zone. Firefighters will be called into these scenarios in the future, and to answer that second question, adaptations in our strategies, tactics, and use of resources need to be addressed. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from the wildland fire community – after all, as the Washington Post reported, LA has long been over-dependent on wildland firefighting agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to handle fire in the city and county’s jurisdiction.

This is an edited version of an article in Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires

Lindon Pronto (M.Sc. environmental governance) has more than 20 years of experience and expertise in wildfire management with employment, research, deployments, and remote support in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Pronto has years of operational experience as a federal wildland firefighter in California.

LA Fires – Reconnaissance

Guest WriterMay 14, 2025California, Prescribed Fire, Prevention, Review1 Comment

By Michael Scott-Hill

In mid-January I was sent on a military company assignment to recon the Los Angeles fires and use the experience to teach our leadership staff about wildfire. I was in Australia and was flown to California. As I packed, I turned on the TV and saw footage – big flames, heroes, victims and their stories, political blame slinging, shouts of incompetence, and lots of videos of fire aviation operations.

I arrived in Southern California and linked up with my small team of corporate leaders. I was their wildfire expert and the next day, after the red flag weather forecasts for Santa Ana winds lifted, we headed down the coast to visit the tragic wake of the Pacific Palisades fire.

[This is an edited extract of a longer article on the author’s observations from his assignment on these fires taken from Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires.]

Having spent a career around the US Forest Service wildfire operations, the footprint of wildfire response was familiar: inbound structural city firefighting engines in short convoys; task forces; tents; trucks; trailers; staged fire equipment; and crews waiting at an oceanside incident command post. There were no federal fire response rigs, just CAL FIRE local fire response vehicles, and many law enforcement patrolling to deter arsonists and looters.

The Pacific Coast Highway between the coastline and where the rolling hills – with their brush and dried grass – climb upward among homes. Photo Michael Scott-Hill

PERSPECTIVE FROM YEARS OF BURNING

Days later, flying back to Australia, I processed all I had experienced.

I’ve worked on countless wildfires with the US Forest Service, yet these LA fires were unique. No matter how each began, did the fires have to be as bad as they turned out to be?

Thirty-two years ago, I had been a wildland firefighter stationed in Southern California and earned my place on the Los Padres Hotshots. In 1993 we successfully fought several wildfires sometimes driven by Santa Ana winds.

I learned that the fire regime in California is ancient in its cyclic patterns. I was taught about weather patterns and fire fuels; we specialized in working the big fires along the urban fringe. Southern California is one of the world’s most wildfire prone areas, and its wildfire flames have the potential to mix with its people – and often do.

In Southern California many people craft comfortable lives, using technology to distance themselves from the realities of the natural world: air conditioners and beautiful shady yards insulate the people from the natural hot, often harsh, landscape.

What has changed in the Southern California wildfires since I was a young hotshot?

The tactics employed in fighting wildfires have shifted – at least in California – to promote situations for large fire growth using indirect attack strategies. Weather patterns worldwide have shifted, causing fire seasons to be altered in locations; and of course, there are financial realities that make wildland fire fighting no longer as attractive a profession as it once was.

There are factors in Southern California that won’t change. The hot sun will shine. The grass and brush will grow, and this vegetation will cure and die in its normal life cycles. The Santa Ana winds will always blow in strong from Nevada and race over the hills. Wildfires will always start naturally, by accident, or arson.

Piles of yard vegetation to be chipped had been cut by contracted crews awaited mobile chippers. The hazard-reduction operation continued into areas untouched by fire, to reduce future fuels. Photo Michael Scott-Hill

Which of these factors can be modified by humans? Fuels that fires consume can be managed to reduce accumulation (loading) that builds up over time. Wildfires need fuel to take hold and grow, just as they need ignition sources. The wildfire fuels typical of Southern California, such as dried grass, brush and timber, all have predictable cyclic points in their life cycles when they are ready, able to carry, and to be consumed by fire.

In Southern California when I was working there, urban interface zones and Santa Ana winds were always factors; they were dangerous, so we learned about them and used that knowledge to prepare for all that could happen. Could the LA Emergency Response Management apparatus have been better prepared? LA has seen urban development expand its boundaries more than its density; the interface is so much larger than it was when fire careers began. And the 30-year fire return interval in chaparral is longer than many careers. How do agencies prepare?

There are many valuable lessons in disaster management, and pre-disaster preparedness that can be pulled from the LA fires, if we take the time and effort to look carefully enough beneath the layers of smoke that might be blocking our vision.

Read the full article in Wildfire Magazine

LA Fires – a personal perspective

Guest WriterMay 7, 2025California, Opinion, United States, Wildfire3 Comments

By Kelly Martin

This is not a reflection about who or what to blame. But blame was the tagline I was watching on TV within the first 24 hours of the Palisades and Eaton fires that wiped out swathes of communities in southern California. This is my account of what I saw and my contemplation about what comes next.

I needed to see this urban conflagration for myself. The fires were so outside my 40 years of wildland fire experience there was no rational part of my brain to reconcile what I was witnessing.

[This article first appeared in Wildfire Magazine – Special Edition: LA Fires.]

I went to bed Jan. 7 and woke up the next day to a request from California to neighboring states for help. The call for fire engines went out far and wide as an Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) request – a national disaster-relief compact that allows states to share resources during emergencies or disasters. Could it be possible that our little White Bird Fire Department (population 100) could be part of this effort? I was repeating over and over, we have to go, we have to go, we have to go. The morning of Jan. 9, I found myself loading my summertime fire gear in the dead of a snowy winter in Idaho and heading south for our two day trip to Los Angeles.

After I retired in 2019 from a 35-year career working for the US Forest Service and National Park Service I found myself volunteering for many opportunities to give back to my community and the larger wildland fire community nationally and internationally. These opportunities allow me to see things differently. I’m no longer a fire chief or a member of an incident management team; I’m no longer a supervisor. In LA, I was happy to be serving as a firefighter, as I had done in 1984 when I was humble, curious and excited for the journey ahead. We left the frigid winter of central Idaho and after two days of traveling, slowly emerged into the envelope of the warm ocean breeze along the Pacific Coast Highway. I see now why so many people are attracted to the ocean and the temperate climate. Many millions of people choose to live in LA, even with the deadly Santa Ana winds always lurking in the background. No amount of human intervention will tame the Santa Anas.

This LA assignment brought my career full circle. I remember the epiphany I had at the Grand Canyon when I was flown by helicopter to the North Rim for a wildfire response. Sleeping in the rocks, dead tired after a seven-day wilderness fire experience, I knew at that moment every day from then on would be dedicated to working as a wildland firefighter. My younger self could never have imagined my older self-responding on an engine to a wildfire in LA, suppressing flare ups behind multi-million-dollar homes, helping people recover something – anything – that was recognizable of their past lives. The extreme contrast of my first fires in the wilderness of Grand Canyon National Park and the urban conflagration of LA could not be greater. I continue to remind myself that I had, and am still having, an amazing career serving the American public, and I’m extremely proud to have been part of a national response.

During the long trip from deep-winter Idaho to summer-like conditions in Malibu, I spent a lot of time being mindful about what I was getting into: tens of thousands of homes gone, lives lost, and billions of dollars of loss that surely would take years of recovery. Our travel route took us through the heart of LA in our oversized engine in gripping traffic. As we were given the wave to pass through the roadblock on the Pacific Coast Highway, it was as if everything became quiet and the anxiety of driving in heavy traffic was gone. It was game time. There was no one on this popular highway, just our five engines in perfect spacing. Our taskforce rumbled toward the first visual of the devastation. When people tell you the scene was unlike anything anyone has ever experienced, it’s true. My first impression was how could so many buildings for miles along the Pacific Coast Highway be gone, nothing but rubble – ash, concrete and metal – large, commercial buildings just gone. How do so many buildings built literally on the ocean coast go up in flames? Truly unbelievable.

Our fire engine was assigned a very specific area to suppress hotspots and open flames. We got to know our area quite well and got to know where small spot fires could threaten containment. The physical geography of this area was my first revelation about what we were witnessing. The area was densely populated. Homes lined both sides of steep canyons; some homes were built further up the slope with incredible views of the ocean. I soon discovered why these neighborhoods were very desirable places to live.

Idaho Taskforce #4 patrolling the burned area near homes for hotspots and taking suppression action to ensure no reignition. Photo by Kelly Martin

I spent the better part of my fire career working and living in Yosemite National Park and on incident management teams, but Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles were new ground for me. I felt like everything was novel again. Our first assignment was along the eastern boundary of the Palisades fire. Our mission was to keep the fire from jumping the canyon and igniting highly volatile vegetation that could reignite the eastern spread and threaten more homes and lives. I felt grateful the most severe Santa Ana winds had passed, but we all felt the heavy weight of protecting multi-million-dollar homes from any further damage.

The next 14 days we covered a lot of ground throughout the Pacific Palisades area and just to the east of the fire’s edge to ensure no reignition. I was struck most by the sheer devastation, block after block of leveled buildings, but occasionally I would see a house still standing and I could not help but study these houses up close. Had firefighters been there? What was the construction of the house? How old was the house? How and why did particular homes survive? The heroic efforts of individual engine companies is likely one of the untold stories that will come out over time. For CAL-FIRE, LA City and LA County and surrounding fire departments that were called into to assist, I can’t help but try to put myself on their engines with the firefighters who did their very best – as they had been trained to do – to save life and property, watching home after home, and business after business, fall.

I saw first-hand concrete bank buildings that were but shells. How does a concrete building in the middle of town on flat terrain just disappear? My curiosity began to shift to try to understand the many factors that contributed to this devastation. Weeks later, at home, I was still processing what I saw and the people we met and helped.

The first glimpse of what was to come; major buildings on both sides of the Pacific Coast Highway were destroyed. Photo by Kelly Martin

My experiences in LA will forever be part of my fire career: Homes reduced to ashes with Christmas decorations on their hedges and fences; miles and miles of ash, concrete rubble and twisted metal; devastated homes and buildings along the pacific coast washing into the ocean; remaining homes that did not burn that were saved by owners or firefighters and home hardening construction. Amid such destruction and devastation of life and property I looked for color among the chaos. I found small comfort in emerging new flowers, just two weeks after Jan. 7.

LA experienced a great boom after the Second World War. Houses and small lots were the first indication to me that the building boom after 1945 likely did not consider the possibility that whole communities could be destroyed by fire. Communities continued to expand into the wild, untamed fire territory. Building continued and the population surged from 3.5 million to more than 18 million by the 21st century. Combine the population growth with few if any builders or homeowners who understood home hardening or Firewise™ concepts, and the lack of building codes. Community planning 70 years ago was very different than it is today, and the number of communities still in the path of future wildfires is staggering. Devastating loss of life and property will happen again. Closely packed housing units, vegetation hedges 15 to 20 feet tall between homes, home development in steep canyons, and narrow roads – it’s clear how this catastrophic urban conflagration developed.

Kelly Martin was IAWF President in 2024. Martin retired as chief of fire and aviation, Yosemite National Park, National Park Service, Pacific West Region, in 2019.

She began her federal career as a GS-3 with the Apostle Island National Lakeshore in 1984 while attending college and worked her way up through the ranks during her 34-year career. Martin also served on the Presidential Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. She is the past chair of two National Wildfire Coordinating Group programs: Fire Environment Committee and the National Fire Management Leadership (M-582) course. Martin is a mentor and coach for the national and international Women in Fire Training Exchange (WTREX) program. She now serves as a volunteer firefighter and trainer for White Bird Fire Department in Idaho and started a fire consulting business in 2024.

Controlled burns reduce wildfire risk, but they require trained staff and funding − this could be a rough year

Guest WriterMay 6, 2025May 6, 2025Colorado, Research, Wildfire1 Comment

This article was originally written by Laura Dee, Associate Professor of Ecology, University of Colorado Boulder , and is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Red skies in August, longer fire seasons and checking air quality before taking my toddler to the park. This has become the new norm in the western United States as wildfires become more frequent, larger and more catastrophic.

As an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, I know that fires are part of the natural processes that forests need to stay healthy. But the combined effects of a warmer and drier climate, more people living in fire-prone areas and vegetation and debris built up over years of fire suppression are leading to more severe fires that spread faster. And that’s putting humans, ecosystems and economies at risk.

To help prevent catastrophic fires, the U.S. Forest Service issued a 10-year strategy in 2022 that includes scaling up the use of controlled burns and other techniques to remove excess plant growth and dry, dead materials that fuel wildfires.

However, the Forest Service’s wildfire management activities have been thrown into turmoil in 2025 with funding cuts and disruptions and uncertainty from the federal government.

The planet just saw its hottest year on record. If spring and summer 2025 are also dry and hot, conditions could be prime for severe fires again.

More severe fires harm forest recovery and people

Today’s severe wildfires have been pushing societies, emergency response systems and forests beyond what they have evolved to handle.

Extreme fires have burned into cities, including destroying thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area in 2025 and near Boulder, Colorado, in 2021. They threaten downstream public drinking water by increasing sediments and contaminants in water supplies, as well as infrastructure, air quality and rural economies. They also increase the risk of flooding and mudslides from soil erosion. And they undermine efforts to mitigate climate change by releasing carbon stored in these ecosystems.

In some cases, fires burned so hot and deep into the soil that the forests are not growing back.

While many species are adapted to survive low-level fires, severe blazes can damage the seeds and cones needed for forests to regrow. My team has seen this trend outside of Fort Collins, Colorado, where four years after the Cameron Peak fire, forests have still not come back the way ecologists would expect them to under past, less severe fires. Returning to a strategy of fire suppression − or trying to “go toe-to-toe with every fire” − will make these cases more common.

A burned landscape with black tree trunks, no canopy and little to no new growth on the ground. — Parts of Cameron Peak, burned in a severe fire in 2020, still showed little evidence of recovery in 2024. Efforts have been underway to try to replant parts of the burned areas by hand.
Bella Oleksy/University of Colorado

Proactive wildfire management can help reduce the risk to forests and property.

Measures such as prescribed burns have proven to be effective for maintaining healthy forests and reducing the severity of subsequent wildfires. A recent review found that selective thinning followed by prescribed fire reduced subsequent fire severity by 72% on average, and prescribed fire on its own reduced severity by 62%.

Four sets of illustrations. The most severe fires happened with no treatment. Thinning helps some. Prescribed burning keeps fires burning lower at the forest floor. — Prescribed burns and forest thinning tend to reduce the risk of extremely destructive wildfires.
Kimberley T. Davis, et al., Forest Ecology and Management, 2024, CC BY

But managing forests well requires knowing how forests are changing, where trees are dying and where undergrowth has built up and increased fire hazards. And, for federal lands, these are some of the jobs that are being targeted by the Trump administration.

Some of the Forest Service staff who were fired or put in limbo by the Trump administration are those who do research or collect and communicate critical data about forests and fire risk. Other fired staff provided support so crews could clear flammable debris and carry out fuel treatments such as prescribed burns, thinning forests and building fire breaks.

Losing people in these roles is like firing all primary care doctors and leaving only EMTs. Both are clearly needed. As many people know from emergency room bills, preventing emergencies is less costly than dealing with the damage later.

Logging is not a long-term fire solution

The Trump administration cited “wildfire risk reduction” when it issued an emergency order to increase logging in national forests by 25%.

But private − unregulated − forest management looks a lot different than managing forests to prevent destructive fires.

Logging, depending on the practice, can involve clear-cutting trees and other techniques that compromise soils. Exposing a forest’s soils and dead vegetation to more sunlight also dries them out, which can increase fire risk in the near term.

Forest Service crew members put tree branches into a wood chipper as they prepare the area for a prescribed burn in the Tahoe National Forest, June 6, 2023. — Forest-thinning operations involve carefully removing young trees and brush that could easily burn, with a goal of creating conditions less likely to send fire into the crowns of trees.
AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez

In general, logging that focuses on extracting the highest-value trees leaves thinner trees that are more vulnerable to fires. A study in the Pacific Northwest found that replanting logged land with the same age and size of trees can lead to more severe fires in the future.

Research and data are essential

For many people in the western U.S., these risks hit close to home.

I’ve seen neighborhoods burn and friends and family displaced, and I have contended with regular air quality warnings and red flag days signaling a high fire risk. I’ve also seen beloved landscapes, such as those on Cameron Peak, transform when conifers that once made up the forest have not regrown.

Burned trees and weeds in the ground below. — Recovery has been slow on Cameron Peak after a severe fire in 2020. This photo was taken in 2024.
Bella Oleksy/University of Colorado

My scientific research group and collaborations with other scientists have been helping to identify cost-effective solutions. That includes which fuel-treatment methods are most effective, which types of forests and conditions they work best in and how often they are needed. We’re also planning research projects to better understand which forests are at greatest risk of not recovering after fires.

This sort of research is what robust, cost-effective land management is based on.

When careful, evidence-based forest management is replaced with a heavy emphasis on suppressing every fire or clear-cutting forests, I worry that human lives, property and economies, as well as the natural legacy of public lands left to every American, are at risk.

Laura Dee, Associate Professor of Ecology, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bambi’s Legacy

Guest WriterMay 5, 2025May 5, 2025Wildland FirefighterLeave a comment

BY DYLAN BRUCE

The Bambi Bucket™ is a large, collapsable bucket that attaches to helicopters, allowing them to scoop up gallons of water to drop on fires – it isn’t named after Bambi Morey, but she always told younger firefighters in the field that it was.

Morey died in 2024, aged 71, and left behind a legacy of dedication for fire management and cherished memories for those who were lucky enough to know her.

Morey’s career fighting wildfires began in 1986, when she took over the volunteer fire department in Gardner, Colorado, with her husband Craig; by 1989 they were both working with the US Forest Service.

As assistant chief and then chief of the Gardner Fire Department, Morey built the department into an impressive bastion of the community, with new trucks and equipment, plenty of volunteers, and a substation to help respond to fires.

From her very first fire, Morey was hooked on the work, and over the course of her career she fought blazes in nearly all states and even assisted in a space shuttle recovery operation in Texas.

Morey worked as a hand crew and engine crew member, engine boss, and in radio operations, developing a reputation as reliable member of every team she was a part of.

Morey loved working with fire engines, and her pride and joy was her crew’s second engine, a custom build known as 501 – the name was a mystery even to her family, and Morey would always excitedly point out when clocks showed 5:01.

Even after she retired in 2009, Bambi refused to let anyone else drive 501, which she also referred to as her baby.

Bambi Morey. Photo courtesy of Kely Morey.

Most of Morey’s fellow firefighters were men, but she was a strong believer that fire fighting had no gender roles – if you wanted to do the job, you just had to work as hard as everyone else.

Morey was recognized by her peers for her careful planning, compassion, and emotional support, and her grounding presence that helped calm the more nervous junior firefighters was valued by all; by the end of her career, Morey was known to many of the firefighters as Mom.

Morey had to make do with ill-fitting gear designed for men and an absence of any female-oriented resources in the beginning, but as her career went on and more women joined up, things began to improve and fire camps became more accommodating places for her.

There were even some perks to being one of the few women in the field – she rarely had to wait for a shower after a long day on the line.

Morey’s work meant that she had to spend a lot of time away from her family – summers were particularly hard, but her children understood that she was doing important work saving people’s lives and homes.

In honour of her incredible career, some of Morey’s ashes will be placed in a Bambi Bucket and dropped on a fire this coming northern spring – just as she had always joked about.

(The Bambi Bucket was developed by SEI Industries in 1982. The name is trademarked.)

This article first appeared in Wildfire Magazine

Fire Pattern Indicators research helps reconstruct the past

Guest WriterApril 30, 2025Research, TrainingLeave a comment

Like an archeologist examining artifacts to learn about historical events, a wildfire investigator pieces together fire pattern indicators – FPIs – to interpret directional travel of fires, and the origin and cause of wildfires.

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) in the United States has developed an internationally recognized methodology for wildfire investigations based on the fundamentals of FPIs.

When historical events can’t be physically witnessed or reproduced, evidence is gathered to reconstruct the past.

Whether an archaeologist or investigator, context is crucial. Without context, artifacts or FPIs are just standalone items of evidence. Context provides background information that influences how a scene is interpreted. Wildfire context includes but is not limited to weather, topography, fuels, and suppression actions. When evaluating a wildfire scene, a comprehensive standard approach is required to understand the relationship between FPIs and its overall context.

FPIs are fire effects created during the passage of a wildfire; they are the physical evidence of fire progression and provide information about the fire’s behavior, weather, spread, and intensity. FPIs develop within the localized fire behavior context and applicable fire behavior principles and dynamics. When properly analyzed each FPI reflects the direction of fire progression at its location; each FPI is a valuable tool to locate the origin and cause of a wildfire.

For the full story on the NWCG work with fire pattern indicators see Wildfire magazine by Shawn Zimmermaker