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Wildfires are unpredictable, but their response has become very predictable.
When a wildfire broke out in Ventura County this week amid strong Santa Ana winds, firefighters and other first responders were already on hand and ready to respond at a moment’s notice.
“In some ways, this is the most organized chaos you can experience,” said Verdugo Fire Academy Chief Sam DiGiovanna. “The Ventura County Fire Department and mutual aid resources did a great job.”
It’s not an accident.
DiGiovanna and Verdugo Fire Academy help train firefighters for large-scale incidents like wildfires. When it comes to wildfires, protecting lives and property is the top priority and done strategically, even while fighting fires and battling dangerous winds.
“You’re thinking about saving lives, stopping this fire, stopping the spread, evacuating people. Incident commanders have a lot of things on their mind,” he said. “The incident commander installs structural protection in a specific area. The sheriff’s department or law enforcement agency initiates the evacuation, so it’s a unified command that brings in many organizations and additional firefighting resources.”
It wasn’t always like that.
In the past, most firefighters’ careers would end after just two or three large wildfires, but fires of this size have become more common in recent years.
“In the old days, you had a fire going on and you didn’t have the hose couplings or the radio frequencies or the equipment to go with it. It was a pretty chaotic situation,” he explained. “The facilities are much better and mutual aid is much more advanced than when I first started. That caused us a lot of problems.”
DiGiovanna, who has been in the fire service for more than 30 years, said he has seen major changes to organized firefighting.
The agency will enter into what is known as a “unified command,” with federal, state, and local first responders working together to develop plans and take immediate action.
“From the moment we receive this call, the order is here to protect life, property and the environment,” DiGiovanna said. “We were pre-positioning strike teams during the red flag alert period and they were pre-positioning strike teams.
“But when you have winds like this, like with this fire, when you know this is going to be a long-term event, incident commanders will start requesting additional resources,” he added.
The wildfires come on the sixth anniversary of the Woolsey Fire, one of the most destructive fires in California history.
That was a year after the record-setting Thomas Fire.
Both occurred in Ventura County, and fire after fire ended with analysis by all of the various agencies and utilities involved to determine what worked and what didn’t.
This type of analysis leads to the carefully executed plans used in mountain fires.
“They did a great job. It’s unbelievable,” DiGiovanna said. “And this has to be said, we’re getting better at this problem probably because it’s happening more often.”
On Thursday, Ventura County officials announced that more than 130 homes and buildings had been destroyed, but DiGiovanna noted that thousands more people were saved and, more importantly, there were no deaths.
He said this was proof that training and coordinated efforts to extinguish fires and save lives were working.
“I couldn’t be more proud of them,” DiGiovanna said. “This event will be over soon and they will have a lot of work ahead of them. But if there is another fire today, they will pick themselves up and start all over again.”
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