Stopping the Next Firestorm

Fighting a firestorm is like stopping a blitzkrieg; time to adapt military tactics to fire fighting.

After the Cedar Fire of 2003, this newspaper urged that San Diego acquire its own state of the art firefighting equipment including the mother of all flying firetrucks—a Russianbuilt aircraft that is the biggest of its kind on earth—because fire is the gravest threat we face. The response was predictable; the skinflint San Diego mentality that would rather bake in the sun instead of doing anything productive sounded off en masse, calling this newspaper alarmist, hysterical, liberal and a lot of lesser things too. Many people regarded the disaster as a rare fluke that could be ignored.

Unfortunately, we were right. Only four years later, San Diego repeated the event, only on a grander scale.

Happily, some lessons were learned in '03; the Reverse 911 System seems to have worked well and some claim it saved 120,000 lives. We seem to have trimmed the red tape somewhat where accessing fire fighting planes are concerned, too. This time, we had only one bureaucrat that gummed up the works instead of a small army of them. This is progress. Our fire fighters are better, they have better equipment and they can move faster than they could in ’03, too.

But as the smoke clears, there are a few obvious things that call for attention. One of them is where we build; the other is how we think of fire fighting, the threat we face and how to successfully combat the fire next time.

Long time activist Jim Bell has tried to catch San Diego’s attention to what he claims is the need to change our environmental impact here. The way to do that, Bell says, is to have more people live in the city proper in tall buildings that would add density to the landscape. The surrounding areas would become open space, carefully cultivated and managed. The idea is to surround lots of people with lots of parks. Bell offers many claims of how this would make a better San Diego; perhaps one claim he missed is that it may make San Diego harder to burn by keeping structures out of likely fire zones. During the recent fires, ESPRESSO tracked the wind and found that much of the city’s area was not blasted by the gale force Santa Anas that drove the fires westward so quickly. From Imperial Beach up the Strand and across the bay to Point Loma, west to Clairemont and out east around SDSU, the wind churned in a clockwise motion at around 5 to 8 miles per hour—and helped keep the fire out of the city. Perhaps if more San Diegans lived in those areas we would have lost fewer structures and saved some lives. ESPRESSO believes the concept deserves more study.

Some firefighters have likened the fires of '’03 and the recent ones to fighting a war. Using this analogy, the fires are the invading German Army of WWII—and San Diego is France. In case you missed class that day, the German army blitzed through France and conquered it before the French could defend themselves. But like the Second World War, winning the fight against the Blitzfires can’t be done cheaply and it can’t be done without massive resources that are alert and ready to respond. This means San Diego has a choice: Find the money to pay for the weapons to win the next fight or accept losing property and perhaps many lives, especially if the wind blows the wrong way and the city core catches fire.

If we think of fighting a fire like fighting a war, we should accept that the next firefight can’t be won with exposed men and women pushing forward with hoses, picks and shovels alone. Firefighters need something akin to the military tank to do that and those tanks will have to operate using military-based tactics; fighting forward and on the flanks of a fire to condense its area and extinguish it. Some bright soul somewhere can surely adapt a tank with a fire retardant dispenser instead of a cannon and perhaps a squadron of them would be enough, maybe.

Tanks fight in concert with aircraft that find the enemy, target it and pound it from above while tanks punch through and roll on over. We have some planes now that do a great job—when they are available and not ground bound due to bureaucracy, haze or high winds. No disrespect to the pilots, but low flying planes are worthless if they have to face 100 mph gales, smoke and heat over broken ground. Another kind of plane is needed for the job; one that can fly over the winds hugging the ground, and that kind of plane is a high-level bomber—a kind of firefighting B-52 carrying some very sophisticated water balloons in the form of bombshells filled with water and rigged to burst above the targeted fires. A sprinkling of 1,000-lb. water bombs from a dozen planes flying in V-formation should make the kind of difference needed and shorten the time spent losing property and lives in a firestorm.

And of course, all it takes is money, time, effort, training—and some more money.

Maybe developing that kind of fire fighting technique doesn't have to be a yawning money pit, either. Uncle Sam has old tanks for sale and a prototype fire tank doesn't have to cost the yearly gross of Sea World to develop. There is no need for a $500-million dollar B-52 either when there are older airliners that could be refurbished into a new kind of firebomber. There may be other customers for the kind of fire fighting technology that need to be developed, and some sharp Republican senator on the armed services committee may be able to get the loan of some military specialists to adapt military tactics to firefighting. Insurance companies might logically find it wise to spend money on saving large areas from devastating loss, and it may be worth tapping every environmentalist in the state for a few bucks to keep the environment from going up in smoke again, too. Patents can make money; new, San Diego-proved equipment may one day pay.

Beyond that, wars are won when the people who face the fire put every ounce of effort into winning. Volunteers, in the form of fire companies, maintenance crews, mechanics, clerks, communications specialists and others are a potential resource that shouldn't be ignored if only because a volunteer may release a veteran firefighter from some secondary task in an emergency. San Diego has a population of some three million people; 300 of them could surely be formed into some kind of reserve company that, if properly trained, could fill secondary or even primary roles when needed.

One volunteer role that should be filled immediately is that of an organized corps of private pilots who fly their own planes on a regular schedule around the county, scouting for telltale smoke. Six planes at a time flying shifts from dawn 'til dusk a over designated patches of San Diego daily during fire season could give firefighters their first warning of trouble, making funds spent on a volunteer corps of flyers money well spent.

San Diego made great advances in fire fighting since the '03 fires and every one of us owes the fire crews a deep well of respect. We owe it to ourselves to get ready for the next firefight, too. Some weather watchers claim that global warming has extended the local fire season by over two months, and the drought shows no signs of abating. We can't assume that huge Santa Ana driven firestorms here are a once in a lifetime fluke anymore. We need to make firefighting our version of Civil Defense.