California’s firefighting resources stretched thin
Newsom confident in ‘world-class’ force; 367 fires in state
With hundreds of blazes raging throughout the Bay Area and across California, firefighting crews are stretched so thin that authorities have put out a call for help from other states.
By Wednesday afternoon California had already seen 367 fires, including 23 major ones, burn up tens of thousands of acres in recent days amid the onslaught of a record-setting heat wave and 10,800 lightning strikes, forcing evacuations and destroying numerous structures, officials said.
Despite having almost 7,000 firefighters scattered around the state and more help on the way, the sheer number of fires is stressing mutual aid and hampering suppression efforts, fire officials say.
“What has occurred over the last 72 hours has certainly stretched the resources of this state,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday during a briefing.
“There’s no question while last year we experienced some acuity of fires — the Kincade Fire, the Getty Fire and some others in Southern California — the total number of fires last year was substantially lower than the activity we are experiencing this year,” Newsom added.
To date, he said, the state has had 6,754 fires compared with 4,007 at this time in 2019.
Newsom said he has asked for 375 fire engine crews from other Western states including Arizona, Nevada and Texas.
Although California has beefed up its ground and airborne firefighting equipment arsenal in recent years, including $85.6 million worth this year, that hasn’t been enough.
“We’re definitely dealing with a significant uptick in fire activity not only in Northern California, but also in Southern California,
and because of that … our resources are very stretched,” said Daniel Bertucelli, a captain with the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, who is part of Cal Fire’s incident management team on the Carmel and River fires.
“The first priority will always be life safety of the public. After that, property conservation, and then we go with incident stabilization,” he said.
“Being the fact that we have several large, complex fires just burning in Northern California makes it very difficult for us to effectively attack these fires strictly due to the fact that we don’t have the resources,” he added.
And unlike past years when firefighters were aided by teams of inmates who dig containment lines, those ranks have been reduced because thousands of prisoners were released over the past few months in an effort to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks inside jails.
“When you lose a large number of those hand crews, you have to rely on other sources to make it up,” Bertucelli said.
Newsom’s state budget this year allocated $72 million to help make up some of that loss by hiring 858 seasonal firefighters. He said Wednesday almost all have been hired.
As if the scorching heat and number of fires weren’t enough to deal with, firefighters also have to battle the potential danger of getting COVID-19.
Officials say although the risk of being infected by the coronavirus is low when they’re fighting blazes outside and generally at least 10 feet apart, firefighters have to be vigilant inside fire engines and at base camps.
“COVID is definitely not an afterthought during a wildland fire response like this,” Bertucelli said.
“We understand that we have a job to do, but we also owe it to ourselves and those that we work with to do it safely so we do not spread this virus,” he said.
Despite all the challenges, Newsom said Wednesday he’s confident about beating back the blazes with a “world-class firefighting force.”
“This is what this state does. We are quite familiar with these challenges,” Newsom said.
The fire season is months from ending, however.
“It’s just another active fire season and it is early in the fire season, so I think it’s going to be very busy,” said Jake Miller, a Cal Fire spokesman for the SCU Lightning Complex fires burning through several Bay Area counties.
“We have experience from those last couple of years with all the fire activity and we’re ready to handle the current fire season here as well.” Bertucelli agreed. “We do recognize the fact that we are stretched thin on resources, but we also recognize that we have a task to do and the public has their expectations of us,” he said.
“We’re going to live up to that expectation.”