This Is How You Put Out a Fire—and Keep It Out

Yahoo

27-02-2025

This is Zuma Beach Base Camp, a mini-city Lego-ed together overnight in a seaside parking lot below the site of the Palisades Incident. That's how the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) refers to the massive fire that recently swept through Los Angeles: as an incident. And this was a big incident.
By now, the grabby headlines about a city burning have been replaced by ones about politics and the Grammys and whatever else. But parts of the sprawling city—big parts of it—did burn, and those thousands of acres are still dangerous, could still be hiding hotspots, could still be smoldering, could still send a single ember soaring up through a convection column and along the hot ledge of a Santa Ana to a new, parched piece of earth, starting a brand new fire.
The firefighters are still there.
Everyone here is supporting the incident. There are 5,400 firefighters, plus division leaders and support staff. There are muscled members of a private security force wearing dark glasses and manning tents and SUVs and probably unseen perches throughout the camp. There are earnest, friendly folks from the California Conservation Corps, a statewide organization of young, paid workers who help respond to environmental disasters while becoming 'citizens with character, credentials, and commitment.' There are inmates from the correctional system working with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (a group committed to ending mass incarceration)—they're wearing their orange prison suits, cooking and serving breakfast out of the Mobile Kitchen Unit (MKU). There are members of the LAPD and the Governor's Office of Emergency Management. There are volunteers from local ministries (today their shirts say 'Scientology') giving massages and offering prayer. There are at least two therapy dogs.
The camp unfurled itself in the early hours and days of the incident, instantly covering hundreds of parking spaces where only days before, curly-haired surfers had unloaded waxed boards from the beds of their pickups, moms had met friends to let their toddlers run in the winter sand, and anyone else who just wanted to be by the ocean left their cars and wandered off into California dreamland.
Now, it's engines from all over the state (plus 12 other states and five countries). It's football-field tents of supplies and food and Gatorade. It's sleep trailers the size of semis with bunks three-high, starting on the floor. It's pickup trucks and emergency response vehicles angled nose-to-nose along the spine of the parking lot for hundreds of yards, like fishbones. It's a massive trailer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is said to be leading the investigation into the cause of the incident. ('The big dogs,' a firefighter walking by says. 'That's how you know it's bad.')
Popular Mechanics gained exclusive and unfettered access to the Zuma Beach Base Camp as the mission was being redefined—from firefighting to containment and control, including the search for human remains.
The fire is mostly out. Now it has to stay out.
Every morning begins with a briefing at 7 a.m., and the screen is aglow under the milky Malibu sunrise a good hour before that. Workers carry vats of steaming coffee to folding tables around the area of the briefing, and firefighters—or 'resources'—fill their cups while they wait for the day's orders. Soon, resources who are coming off their 24-hour shifts will stream into camp, hungry for breakfast dished out from the MKU. The daily 7 a.m.briefing will launch the next 24-hour shift.
Leaders from the Incident Management Team take turns reporting from the stage on the previous night's activity and outlining plans for the day ahead. The head of each division—Operations, Logistics, Weather, Safety, Air Operations, Health, Communications, everybody—speaks, most of them reciting the facts as quickly as possible so that the crews can get out into the field. Some, at the end of their terse reports, hurry through some words of encouragement, and reminders of the part of the job that transcends facts and tactics and wind forecasts:
Have a safe shift.
If you encounter members of the community, remember, they may have just lost everything that's dear to them.
Work with care and kindness.
Have a safe shift.
Have a safe shift.
Have a safe shift, everyone.
As inmates working with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition load into a Cal Fire truck for a shift in the field (they cut wood, clear debris, and perform other tasks alongside trained crews), firefighters study the day's orders or check in with family members at home before heading out on their 24-hour shift. Every truck is equipped with a tablet loaded with Avenza—a mapping app that functions even in remote areas. It's synched for everyone working the incident, and crews can add things like a newly discovered water source (a pond, for example).
If a firefighter might need it in the field, they can find it in the supply tent. Cal Fire maintains storage warehouses throughout the state, and when an incident breaks out, crews speed to the base camp with trucks full of everything, including thick, stiff coils of yellow firehose. Ice chests, flashlights, Nomex fire suits, masks, caution tape, boots, chainsaws—it's like an outdoor Costco for fighting fires. There are even Snap Tanks (portable tanks that can be set up in the field), which water trucks come around to refill.
Taped to the outside of an operational trailer: notes of support from schoolchildren, and the daily map of the fire's footprint. Each night, a helicopter with infrared technology flies the perimeter of the fire, measuring heat zones and hotspots and generating the daily fire footprint for the map. The first goal is 100 percent containment, which means that the entire perimeter of the fire is an uninterrupted line of zero fuel sources. Then, the incident leaders can start getting into the 'controlled' conversation: making sure that there are no hot spots, no smoke, and nothing smoldering at least 300 feet inward from the fire's perimeter. They work their way around the fire, marking, marking, marking: 300 feet. 300 feet. 300 feet.
In the morning briefing, it was reported that a hotspot had been discovered by a drone with an infrared camera 1,000 feet in from the perimeter. It was a smoldering stump. Not good.
'We want no chance,' said Tyler Tomlinson, public information officer for the Grass Valley Fire Department in northern California, now assigned to the PIO team for the incident. 'No opportunity for the fire to get outside that perimeter.'
The camp runs on order. There is a never a question of where a unit is supposed to be. Communication is constant. There is the daily 7 a.m. briefing, the daily 58-page Incident Action Plan (printed on paper and distributed before the briefing), radios, cell phones, 'trap boards' (plywood structures displaying daily plans, maps, and safety measures), and humans—people of all ranks, just there, walking around camp, being available. Behind this unit is a mobile cellular tower, brought in by one of the major cellular carriers.
'On this incident, my biggest challenge? 85 to 90 percent of my time has been spent on cellular infrastructure—trying to get connectivity for camp, getting connectivity out in the field—because in this area, all of the infrastructure got impacted,' said Bernie Rapp, the Communications leader on the Incident Management Team. 'Fiber lines got burnt through, towers burned. I have emergency-response contacts for all the cellular [companies], so as I'm getting deployed and we're getting our orders and I'm getting ready to travel, I'm making contact with those companies. Verizon, FirstNet, AT&T, T-Mobile, and then Spectrum wireless, they do the cabling, and then Frontier. We needed it for everything, from Zoom meetings to the actual production of the [daily] Incident Action Plan. Time records, finance documents—all that stuff. Connectivity is the big, big role. When we first got here, you turned on a phone and it was SOS. No bars.'
Inside the I-MET trailer, incident meteorologist Rich Thompson creates daily and even hourly forecasts that inform operations. On the wall hangs this fire history map, which shows the footprints of fires going back decades overlaid in different colors. Rob Clark, fire behavior analyst on the incident, has studied it.
'A lot of people have been talking about this Palisades incident as an unprecedented event. Under certain conditions, it was. The devastation and the spread into the community definitely was,' Clark said. 'But for example you can see the Bel-Air Fire 1961 that started just east of the 405 freeway, just after the 405 was completed. A lot of these fires started in that September, October, November timeframe. They took similar paths and directions, and most were caused by that Santa Ana wind event. So it's not that we don't have fires in this area—there have been a lot of large, damaging fires. It's just that we had not seen the fire travel into the communities as deep as this did. We had reports of gusts up to 65 miles an hour, and it could have been higher in areas. Even the firefighters on the ground in the initial tactical phase—there's not a lot they could have done differently. The embers cast from that fire into those communities […], there's not much anybody could have done.'
'Here in January,' he continued, 'we wouldn't expect our fuels to be burning with this intensity. We should have gotten precipitation in the fall months, which would have raised those fuel moisture values, started some green up in some of the grassy, or herbaceous, fuels—we haven't had any of that. They've only recorded about 1/1600 of an inch of rain since July 1. Normally from October to now, this area would have seen on average over five inches of rainfall, and we have had none.'
Clark looks at the map and at his computer screen, then shares a weatherman's credo:
'All models are wrong, some are useful.'
Cal Fire feeds its resources and, by many accounts, feeds them well. Breakfast gets going around 5 a.m., and on the day our photographer was there, the menu was steak and eggs. Nonviolent prison inmates working with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, like the man seen here, cook meals in the MKU and hand out drinks and snacks. Before heading out for their shifts, firefighters fill coolers with '24-hour lunches'—a bag including two different sandwiches and nonperishable snacks like beef jerky and trail mix.
Soon after the morning briefing, hundreds of trucks fan out into the fire zone, traipsing through lot after lot of ash and debris. Not much is recognizable as objects, except the cars and trucks, the occasional pot or pan, a deflated basketball, and nails—nails everywhere, millions of nails that popped like shrapnel out of studs and roofing.
At this house in Pacific Palisades, a pickup truck surrounded by stacks of flagstones (now as brittle as old bone from the fire's heat) suggested a patio project underway. Members of the Arcadia Fire Department—Arcadia is across the city, actually closer to the Eaton Fire, but they had ended up here—performed the slow and deliberate work of gridding: crews walking 10 feet apart looking for hot spots and embers 300 feet in from the perimeter of the entire incident. They poked piles of grey mass with metal poles checking for trapped heat, especially in dense wood such as tree stumps and the railroad ties landscapers use to construct tidy beds.
The FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force has tagged the curbs up and down these streets, evidence of its lot-by-lot efforts. One line indicates the start of a search, and a line through that one shows completion. Other tags can indicate the number of vehicles searched on the property (if any), a date and time, or if any remains were discovered. Some tags say 'Non-human remains'—pets. In these cases, they also leave a collection bag.
It's quiet up here, overlooking the ocean, with no other people besides roving groups of firefighters. But it's not safe. 'There are a lot of walls that look like they're walls, but all the framing is gone. It's just empty plaster waiting to fall on somebody,' the Arcadia captain says. 'Like look at this one: all the studs are burned out, it's just plaster. And we've seen walls bowed out into the road—even we stay away from that.'
Lieutenant Ryan Stenhouse of Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue in Northwest Oregon holds a Flir infrared thermal-imaging camera, which can detect heat. Crews are using these cameras throughout the incident to check properties for hotspots, which can include electricity—just two days ago, Stenhouse's team found live power where it shouldn't have been.
Every once in a while, you see a house or two standing, almost unscathed, surrounded by the ash-filled lots where its neighbors stood just a few days ago. There's no explaining the randomness. 'It's hard to say,' Stenhouse, who has been fighting fire for decades and never seen anything like this, says. 'Crews could have had hoselines on those houses, trying to stop the fire line, until they were facing conditions that they had to abandon.'
Stenhouse pointed out what are called catchment points: corners and alcoves where embers can get trapped and start new fires: driveway corners, steps, raised beds, stoops.
'Up in Portland we have condensed urban areas that are in wildland vegetation like this, but the density of the population in here is just unbelievable,' he said. 'Watching videos, which I think we've all seen, of what I would call a blizzard of fire embers, and what happens are what we call catchment points: all these little nooks and crannies. Those embers fly in there and they'll park up next to a garbage can, the garbage can starts to melt and catch on fire, it catches the gas line on fire that it's next to, and it's just a cascading event. And when you have winds like they had, you could have had ember castings a half-mile to a mile away, and the fire's just jumping at a rate that units can't respond to.'
'Doesn't always work out like this, where Base Camp is set up right by the ocean,' says Tyler Tomlinson, the PIO. Here, three firefighters assess the morning over coffee, waves crashing beyond. As the sun rises, the beach is strewn with other firefighters wandering the beach on their phones, talking to the people who miss them. Others just stand on the beach, watching the ocean.
Having all that water so close to a wildfire is weird. Cal Fire rented two Canadair CL-415 Super Scoopers because those planes can fill their tanks with seawater and drop it on the fires. The aircraft in Cal Fire's air ops fleet are not designed to use saltwater, which corrodes their water delivery systems. 'I would assume,' says Tomlinson, 'the conversation has already started that maybe L.A. County should invest in those Super Scoopers.'
In Altadena, a truck from Las Vegas Fire & Rescue waited for a new part to be delivered. The crew drove six hours from Nevada when the fire broke out. Two Los Angeles firefighters passed by on foot and wanted their photo taken in front of the Las Vegas truck, with its dice decals on the side. Down the block, utility crews trimmed trees and chainsawed logs, clearing the way for new electrical lines—most of which will need to be hung from new poles.
'This is what's happening now: utility restoration, looking for hotspots,' said Vegas firefighter Jonathan Cuff. 'I did hear they are still out here with cadaver dogs, looking for the last of the bodies. Some of them they won't find until construction crews come in and start cleaning up. It's sad. It's a sad reality.'
He looked up into the mountains as a column of dust kicked up toward the sky—an early sign of the return of the winds.
'But this is what we do,' Cuff said. 'It's…what's the word. Fulfilling. It's fulfilling to be able to help in other people's catastrophe.'
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