Oh this will all come out in the lawsuits im sure.
5 Likes
A lot of people are asking about it.
Now the park employee is put at risk because people are stupid.
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What Word or Words fits
disorder
disarray
clutter
heap
shambles
litter
tangle
jumble
muddle
mishmash
chaos
confusion
disorganization
turmoil
muck
fright
sight
dogās dinner/breakfast
tip
plight
predicament
emergency
tight spot
tight corner
difficulty
straits
trouble
quandary
dilemma
problem
muddle
mix-up
confusion
I know there are some choice four letter ones but trying to keep it G rated.
6 Likes
Wildland Firefighting on a scale.of 1-10, LAFD iss 5 at best
Commercial Structure Fires
Residential Structure fires
USA&R
Medical Aids
Wildland.
While LAFD is a good organization, sending a āTask Forceā to a Wildland fire makes no sense. Sure you get the bodies, but a truck company that specializes in Ventilation, Rescue, Overhaul is not Wildland FF, cold trailing, line construction, etc. They are not the same discipline, use the same PPE or have the same level of training. Wildland FF is an afterthought except for the Dozer Guyās and now the handcrew program. At the time of the Larchmount, LAFD utilized LAC Handcrews to cut line around the fire. The fire was under LAFD DPA with a LAFD IC.
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Thanks to an excessive amount of caffeine this a.m. i had a thought to ask AI āwhat are LAFD procedures for utilizing drones with infrared technology on wildland firesā and this is what i got back - apologies for taking up so much bandwidth - GROK is a very wordy application..
Btw, I found bullet #5 under the Procedures heading to be very interesting to say the leastā¦
From GROK..
Overview of LAFD Drone (UAS) Program
The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has been a pioneer in integrating Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), commonly known as drones, into firefighting operations since 2017. The program emphasizes enhancing firefighter safety, providing real-time situational awareness, and reducing reliance on more costly manned aircraft like helicopters. Drones equipped with infrared (thermal) technology, such as Forward Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR) or radiometric thermal sensors, are particularly valuable for wildland fires. These tools detect heat signatures through smoke, at night, or in obscured areas, enabling identification of hotspots, fire perimeter mapping, and resource allocation.
The LAFDās UAS fleet includes models like the DJI Matrice 100 (with FLIR for hotspot assessment), DJI Matrice 300 RTK (with H20T hybrid visible/thermal sensors), and DJI Phantom 4 Pros. As of recent reports, the department operates at least 11 drones, with ongoing expansions through partnerships like the 2019 Solution Development Partnership with DJI. All pilots hold FAA Part 107 certifications, and operations comply with federal Certificates of Authorization (COA).
Specific Applications of Infrared-Equipped Drones in Wildland Fires
Infrared drones are deployed to address visibility challenges in wildland environments, where smoke, terrain, and darkness hinder ground assessments. Key uses include:
- Hotspot Detection and Fire Perimeter Surveys: Thermal imaging identifies smoldering areas or underground heat sources that could reignite, allowing crews to prioritize mop-up efforts. For example, drones can map 25-50 acres of burned terrain in a single flight, pinpointing hotspots with 10-foot accuracy.
- Situational Awareness and Resource Allocation: Real-time thermal feeds help incident commanders visualize fire spread, track crew positions, and identify escape routes, reducing risks in complex terrains.
- Post-Fire Mop-Up and Damage Assessment: After containment, drones scan for lingering heat to ensure complete extinguishment, supporting āwet mop-upā extending 100 feet from the fire edge.
- Nighttime and Low-Visibility Operations: Infrared sensors provide ānight-visionā capabilities, enabling monitoring when manned aircraft are unsafe due to wind, smoke, or darkness.
These applications were first demonstrated during the 2017 Skirball Fire, where thermal drones assessed hotspots and burn perimeters, and have been refined in events like the 2018 Woolsey Fire.
Procedures for Utilizing Infrared Drones on Wildland Fires
LAFD procedures are guided by a March 2023 policy memo on fire containment and mop-up (applicable to vegetation, wildland, and brush fires), internal UAS guidelines approved by the Board of Fire Commissioners in 2017, and alignment with broader standards like the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and California Incident Command Certification System (CICCS). The process is incident-commander driven, with UAS deployment integrated into the Incident Command System (ICS). Below is a step-by-step outline based on documented protocols:
| Step | Description | Key Considerations
-
Incident Assessment and Request** | The Incident Commander (IC) evaluates the fireās size, complexity, and risks (e.g., >1 acre, high wind, or urban interface). UAS with infrared is requested via radio or dispatch if aerial intel is needed for hotspots or mapping. Deployment is prioritized for high-risk scenarios like structural threats or nighttime ops. | Limited to LAFD-certified pilots (70+ trained). No deployment if it endangers crews or interferes with manned air ops.
-
Pre-Flight Preparation, Pilots conduct site surveys, check weather (e.g., winds <20 knots for stability), calibrate thermal sensors, and notify FAA/Air Traffic Control under COA. Equipment includes dual-sensor setups (visible + infrared) for hybrid data. | Battery life (20-30 min flights) and no-fly zones enforced; amateur drones banned near incidents to avoid collisions. |
-
Launch and Data Collection, Drone launches from a safe staging area (e.g., command post). Infrared mode scans for heat (e.g., 32-2,000Ā°F range), capturing live video feeds streamed to ICs via DJIās mission software. Flights focus on perimeter patrols, hotspot grids, or crew tracking. | Visual line-of-sight maintained; beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) requires special waivers. Data logged for after-action reviews. |
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Real-Time Analysis and Action, Thermal imagery highlights anomalies (e.g., red/orange for >100Ā°F heat). IC uses feeds to direct water drops, cut lines, or evacuate. Software like Nova integrates infrared data for 3D maps. | Coordinates with CAL FIRE or mutual aid; reduces ground exposure by 80% in some drills. |
-
Post-Flight and Mop-Up Verification, Drone data guides targeted mop-up; repeat flights confirm ācoldā status (no heat signatures). Reports include geotagged thermal overlays for documentation. | For large fires, extended mop-up (100+ ft) required; failure to use thermal (as critiqued in 2025 Palisades Fire review) can lead to reignition risks. |
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Debrief and Training, All missions debriefed for improvements. Annual training on LAFD property simulates wildland scenarios, emphasizing infrared use. | UAS ops limited to protective roles; no surveillance for non-emergency purposes.
These procedures ensure safe, efficient integration, with drones costing far less than helicopters ($50K initial investment vs. $10K+ per flight). Challenges include wind limitations and regulatory hurdles, but LAFDās program has conducted 175+ missions, cutting response times dramatically.
For the most current details, consult LAFDās official UAS guidelines or contact their Air Operations at Station 114.
1 Like
Once again.. inflammatory and ridiculous statement loaded with cheap and subjective statements attacking an entire agency of people.
A serious mistake with grave consequences was madeā¦ was it the first time.. nope. Will it be the last.. nope.
I can point out several rekindles with grave consequences which have occurred across this state and region.
As for their wildland firefighting capability.. many of the members of that department came from wildland firefighting backgrounds. Making a wholesale judgement or summary statement is just meant to inflame an already terrible situation.
As for sending a TF to a wildland fire.. it is their system. I guess you could easily suggest that sending a fire engine with a non rated pump to a structure fire does not make any sense.. but CF and other agencies do it all the time.. why because at the end of the day it is often about getting people there.
The personnel on the truck companies are not excluded from wildland training and are issued the same PPE as everyone else.
I worked on a truck for 20 years.. and I am a type 1 OSC.. so does my background eliminate me from being a well rounded FF or does it just reflect the vehicle I rode on while I was at work?
When LAFD becomes drawn down.. the TF can be flex staffed and the pumps can operate independently to respond to any type of fire.
As for the HC response.. yes LACFD sent crews.. why ? Because they were close to the incident and responding under an aid agreement.
I understand the need to dissect and assign blame that is what we do as a culture and as humans.
You go to war with the army you have.. not the one you want.
9 Likes
This is nothing new, in the 70ās and 80ās I worked along side LAFD on many brush fires were light forces where used on brush fires. The closest stations gets the call and if it is light force both the engine and truck respond. And still do it to this day.
3 Likes
Ask any current LAFD tenured employee and they will say they are suffering a dire leadership problem and needed to rebuild the leadership they had in the past. They as an agency are very good at what they do, hiding their mistakes as the current leadership and civilian oversite is trying to do is painting a bad picture and further strains the existing leadership problem.
Frankly the optics suck and they are not getting better.
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Not trying to sow the seeds of division here, but I would like to point out to people that there is a Cal Fire unit that will absolutely send a quint to a vegetation fire. My understanding is that the Task Force/ light force is the same concept because they have water hence the engine going with the ladder truck every time.
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Affirmā¦not trying to stray from the point of the rekindleā¦ that is a fact and cannot be overlooked and none of this meant to diminish the grave effects of what occurred.
But a wholesale skewering of a proud and accomplished fire department whose members have proven themselves to be some of the best firefighters in this country by a one person on this board is really unprofessional. If you are a fireman.. you have a baseline level of respect for others who do the job. Some people just donāt get that and never will.
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And yet another scud from media & lawyer tonite.
How many ways can the intentions, words, plans & actions get twisted?
I guess weāre fixin to find out regarding the term ālet burnā
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Common sense would say this of course is Exempt when you have a predicted Santa ana wind event inbound. 8 acres would of been a 100% mop up . Period. No smokes and Rehab burmes on the down hill side. That the way I did it for 31 years. the media jumped on the symantics of the āLet burnā term.
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All of this finger-pointing and zero attention or blame given to the people who have decided to build houses and dwell in some of the most dangerous wildfire habitat in the world!
Iām going to plug our SoCal Lookout fire series again, here. Itās pretty free of politics, and is just me, Tim Chavez, Harrison Raine, and Denny OāNeil riding e-bikes around LA marveling at the absolute suicide of packing houses into SoCalās coastal foothills. Danger in Plain Sight - The Lookout
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I watched the series, you guys did a great job on cinematography, enjoyed seeing Chief OāNeill, canāt remember where, but had him as a Div on some fire somewhere on the coast my first year or two. Good human with a great temperament dealing with a grip of salty HFEOs. Haha. I had no clue of all the water ways leading around the LA basin, but the Algorithm later supplied some fishing videos out of the same tributaries and waterways surrounded by concrete, shopping carts and local aerosol art.
Cheers
5 Likes
As usual your postās pretty much always get my mind turning & churning in good ways!
Imo..
I think it fair to state some obvious facts that might make the comment section go nutās..
1 - Your work, passion and content is stellar & very very informative and educational. That SoCal series is a top notch/Type 1 example!
2 - Not everyone who died or lost everything in these fires were property / home owners.
3 - Itās beyond challenging & near impossible to move / re-locate when itās all you can do to make ends meet. Even in such glamorous places as Palisades not everyone is a movie star or ārichā person.
4 - In the same vein as #3 itās not easy to leave when your job and all of your family/belongings are in one of these areas.
5 - As with #3 & #4 we are all born and grow up somewhere - many factors lead to why we stay put and/or re-locate. Just like wildfire there are many layers to that onion so blanket blaming everyone in fire prone areas for living in fire prone areas doesnāt feel/seem right to me. I think i know what you are saying, and i certainly agree to an extent.
6 - Iām as confused as anyone as to why humans repeatedly occupy the places most likely to be impacted negatively by mother natures actions.
Where i live in RDD the complex of houses that i am part of are built upon very large paleo-current ripples and its called north hilltop. Betting hardly anyone here gives 2 thoughts about how/why these giant features were created and how the flows that created them will happen again at some point. Look on a map at how many humans live next to rivers/water that are actually under-fit streams from a much lager flows that only lidar helps to bring out. Those flows can/will happen again - perhaps not in my lifetime or yours but they will occur bcuz that is the cycle of things.. #milankovitch.
There is also that pesky fact that no mater where you at in Ca you are on a faultline and probably next to or close to a volcano!? To me it seems no mater where you live or what you live in we are ALL within reach of the next disaster and the feeling of #safety is an illusion that all humans want to hold onto no mater what..
Back you your point.
Repeating the same behaviors - building flammable dwellings surrounded by fence to fence flammable vegetation inside an interface zone AND zero thought given to hardening structures and alleviating ingress/egress routes to safe zones is bananas. I just cant/wont fault the dead.
In those places i would like to see firmer red lines drawn with public education to say that 1st responders wont be coming to help when the conditions dictate such. I feel like it should be a given in the social contract of humans - there needs to be the understanding that fire & law enforcement can/will only do so much and responders have every right to say no-go when the conditions turn red flag / unfavorable. Those rules would apply to all communities for all types of incidents and all local, state, fed & private fire/rescue entities. Imo.
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All good points, regarding peoplesā ability to up and move to a new place. I agree homeowners/residents/the public in general shouldnāt be completely off the hook for learning about natural hazards, IMHO.
One thing that is killing me, lately, is seeing Brentwood - literally right next to Palisades - being one of the communities that is most vocal in fighting new Zone Zero regs. Brentwood is a mess(!), with all the landscape factors that drove the Palisades Fire and even denser urban vegetation and worse topography.
I definitely donāt think we should gloss over the many mistakes and errors which helped this particular disaster unfold. That said, I often think that we focus too much on a specific cause of ignition (e.g. blaming PG&E, an individual arsonist, or a specific transmission tower) for an event like the Camp Fire - as if the stage (terrain, weather, fuels) wasnāt already set for a future disaster of this magnitude.
Weāve built ourselves into a lot of corners. With or without Zone Zero, fuelbreaks, IR drone mopup, and infrared AI fire cameras on every telephone pole, a lot places like Brentwood are going to be toast in a future fire. And when that happens, we already know people are going to be blaming SoCal Edison, LAFD, LADWP, Newsom, or whatever poor schmuck happens to be in charge at the timeā¦
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Also whats the point in blaming PGE they just raise my rates after 
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Would like to hear what this person has to say after the next fire happens and takes out the town - for saying this.. āZone Zero would devastate our neighborhood, stripping shade, destabilizing hillsides, raising energy bills and straining the grid, and it would do all of this without making us safer,ā said Thelma Waxman, president of the Brentwood Homeowners Association.
Sometimes i wonder what woud happen if firefighters were the defense & prosecution for all fire related litigations. That thought is usually followed by the thought that no mater how hard weāve tried - humans have been 100% unsuccessful trying to litigate interface fires and / or santa annas from occurring..
I also wonder if these folks realize or understand what the urban heat island effect is and that its happening right now where they live AND has very little to do with the vegetation and more to do with the buildings/structures?!
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I am not sure that you can exclude the person or entity who was responsible for starting the fire from culpability.
After the Camp Fire I sat in a meeting where PG&E reps explained that they were ānowā going to increase pole size and diameter and conductor size to create a more resilient grid.. read.. we knew this was an issue and put off maintenance and upgrades to return profits to investors and recover losses from the last time we made a mistake.
Fires have always been started by power infrastructure.. our changing climate has set the pre-conditions for the fires to become more critical in a shorter period of time.
If you just start with San Bruno and follow the behavior you can see a systematic series of a classic ārun to failureā operating principles.
You run everything to failure or close to failure before you replace so that you can delay capital improvements.
The 2017 fires across the north state should have been a clarion call for the PUC to correct the people who run the grid.. but they did not. 2018 occurred and the deaths of 85 people were enough to get a savvy DA to bring murder charges against the company.
Good lawyers and pressure from state government resulted in the company being held liable but no one going to jail.
Since that time more fires have occurred from their infrastructure which resulted in fatalities. Other utilities have also been responsible for deaths as well.
The common argument is that we all use the grid.. so we all share in the responsibility. That is a straw man argument. If I were to use that.. then every time I get onto an airplane I should be able to complete a walk around, review the pilotās resume and give my input on the route to avoid hazardous weather.. but we all know that would not work. We put our trust in the PUC and FERC to ensure that the purveyors are using due diligence in their work to ensure a safe and effective grid.
PG&E has been responsible for over 100 deaths in the north state.. probably closer to 135. And to this date no one has gone to prison. CEOās have been moved on with a golden handshake, a āprivate fire departmentā has been started and rates have skyrocketed for rate payers. In my book.. anyone who is responsible for the deaths of that many people is a serial killer. Let us be clear on those deaths.. they were not quick or painless and the deaths are focused on the most vulnerable of our population.
As for where people live.. there are probably 8 million people who live within 15 miles of the Rogerās Creek Fault. A major university straddles the fault and has a 50,000 seat stadium which sits right on it. That fault is capable of magnitude 7 quake.
Estimates are in the 18-20 million who live within that same distance of the San Andreas. Probably capable of an 8.0.
Crescent City could be wiped out by a Tsunami in minutes from a quake in the PNW.
The rivers of the Central Valley have in the past( 1861) created a lake which extended from Red Bluff to Sacramento. Today that footprint would envelope several hundred thousand people.
As our climate pattens shift we see much more dramatic precipitation patterns which have moved the standard precipitation regimes to less favorable and more compressed periods of time. This has resulted in shorter period of snow(our largest water storage system) and more rapid and early run off peaks which happen to overlap with flood season which preclude us from catching that run off.
Those precipitation changes will continue to limit how and where we develop. Building in increasingly arid areas will come at a price.. agriculture or homes. With the work of the now defunct āDOGEā we have reduced advanced climate studies and monitoring of the weather patterns which will impact the most critical thing to our survival.. water.
All of this is meant to suggest that there is no place āsafeā in CA to build. Alan Brunacini used to say that Phoenix has no natural enemies- no fires.. no floods.. no earthquakesā¦ no Tsunamiās.
To absolve the people who started the fire and continue to do so is just enabling the behavior to continue. Their follow on actions have included the wholesale clearing of trees and vegetation which have altered the landscape and in some areas increased flammability.
They lie to residents and tell them that they must remove trees or face the responsibility if that tree starts a fire. This is a lie.. they should read their own website and review PRC 4293.They then leave the trees and tell the homeowners it is their responsibility to mitigate the logs. It can take a year of fighting with them to remove the trees. The contractors they have hired have been complicit in crime and raiding MJ gardens that they have seen while doing their work.
They lie for a living and hire professional liars to push their agenda. They have become a ātoo big to failā entity who are now essentially backstopped by the state of Ca. Each time they start a fire they send out checks to everyone impacted to buy them off and then increase rates on everyone else. This is not a sustainable business model. They then lobbied and changed the net metering program to reduce solar payments. The house always wins.
Had the fire not been started by the person with the fireworks.. it never would have started again a week later. That is a fact.
Zone 0.. it will take time to get people to change to that. It is important and should be altered to be be more acceptable. The heavy lifting on this will be carried by the insurance companies.. they have already begun that process.
11 Likes
All of your points on PG&E are well-reasoned. There is no doubt their negligence was a systemic practice intended to increase their bottom line, and their post-fire actions (undergrounding, leaving line-clearance slash in the woods, piecemeal fuels reduction) have been insanely expensive and wasteful. Their multi-billion dollar investments in vegetation management alone have almost single-handedly undermined the entire forestry labor market, driving up the costs of chainsaw work for everyone in the State.
Iām not saying we should let them or others responsible for ignitions off the hook, rather, that focusing on reducing ignitions hasnāt made us that much safer, overall.
If it wasnāt PG&E that started the Camp Fire, the railroad, a car wreck, crazy person, lost hunter, target shooter, rock fall, old Coke bottle, welder, mower, or other āfreak accidentā would have likely eventually started a similarly destructive fire, as all the elements needed for a mega-disaster were baked into the pre-fire landscape. Same with the Palisades Fire.
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