I noticed with the fires across the plains this week that storm chasers were covering the fires. Although most storm chasers are experienced chasing tornadoes, it was apparent they were pretty clueless about fire and I felt from some of the video I saw, they were impeding firefighters from doing their job. Some were even using drones, which is taboo for fires.
I’m just wondering how all of you feel about these chasers. I can see they are helpful getting the word out to civilians in the area, just like with tornadoes, but at what cost. Is there at least some sort of training these chasers can get specifically for fires? As we all know, it only takes a wind shift to change everything. I would hate to see someone killed because of their inexperience. Thoughts?
I believe most storm chasers are okay doing what they love – chasing storms. After all, emergency services are not usually heading toward the tornado or hurricane but are trying to shelter in place and wait for it to pass, or get out of the way. That means the congestion on-scene isn’t really there during the height of the emergency.
Storm chasers turning into fire chasers presents a whole other set of issues. They are trying to chase the fires and get close, while firefighters are trying to get there, maneuver through the smoke and chaos, battle the flames, and evacuate any threatened people, livestock, and pets. This will result in congestion, confusion, and vehicle and pedestrian traffic at the worst possible time. You described the potentially catastrophic effect a wind shift could cause very well.
I would hope that fire departments start an education and public outreach program to nip this in the bud. Entering the scene of an emergency could easily be justified as “interference with firefighters and emergency personnel.” Which is commonly regulated by statutes. I can see some of the more “out there” and aggressive ones try to pull the media access card: “You have to let journalists have access.” But a strong stance and education program to control them, like currently occurs on large wildland fires in some states, should be initiated.
It may seem abstract and/or over complicated to share the link below - i believe (and my experience as a wildlander / 1st responder informs me) that the points made by Jim Bishop et al cut right to the root of the mater and are critical in addressing the question & the concern you raise.
For a layperson or a wannabe fire chaser the point of this PDF is not that you must learn the lessons of F.L.A.M.E. The point spelled out in the first few pages is to come away with a brief look into just how fast things can and are known to change in order to inform any decisions to chase fires. Imo, they really need to adopt a “Student of Fire” ethos/core value and then seek more knowledge before freelancing into that endeavor.
Sitting with your post i keep coming back to 2 main points.
First one being that i’m not a tornado chaser so i’m wishing i knew more about the behavior and characteristics of tornadoes - specifically how they react to environmental changes/inputs - small & large inputs. Since that is a blind spot for me i have to go by what i’ve learned regarding the different types of vortices that we typically observe on fires and how they behave - thank you Donald Haines et al.
Second, since wildfires react logarithmically to changes in the fire environment (fuels, Weather & Topography) is is not un-common to see exponential changes in behavior (rate of spread, flame lengths, flame heights, intensities, etc) on the order of 3x, 4x, 15x, 200x or more. Do tornadoes not associated/created by a large fire also react & behave this way also? That is what makes storm chasing fires a bad idea in my mind. These exponential increases are what news reporters and some less experienced 1st responders call the “unexpected” however these things happen all time, are predictable and they are responsible for many responder and civilian fatalities, burnovers, injuries etc.
In my mind when you are close enough to “chase the fire” you are most likely if not most certainly contributing to the chaos more than helping to sort out the chaos. There is a need to weight the benefit of streaming in real time for a group of followers against being another obstacle/life concern for responders to have to spend precious mental bandwidth. When responders expend bandwidth on storm chasers and/or curious citizenry that come out of the woodwork whenever there is a fire - it inevitably takes bandwidth away from their situational awareness and that equals a net negative in overall “safety” in more ways than one.
One last thing that is just now coming to mind as i type.
There are situations (Palisades is one recent example) where the only reasonable plan should be to stay out of the way and/or evacuate as fast and as far away as possible yet “we” send our 1st responders into those situations because its expected and its what society desires of it’s emergency responders. Just because they go into those situations willingly doesn’t mean that others (non-responders) should - how will storm chasers recognize these situations when they occur? I don’t think they will - i believe they will be drawn in like moth to flame. Just because they can/will doesn’t mean they should. People watching their feeds as the fire is 2 blocks or 2 canyons or 2 miles away need to be evacuating or already gone - not watching social media unless its from a safe distance far away from the fireground/scene because fires can move miles in minutes.
My 2 cents - take it or leave it! IMT Geek makes really really good observations above. I appreciate the chance to reply to your very legit question/inquiry…
One thing to keep in mind, the California way is not necessarily the way things are in other areas and states.
I am not taking a position either way. I just know East of the Rockies a lot of things work differently. The folks who chase storms for data and information to pass on are quite valuable in areas that do not have local newsies to broadcast events as they are happening such as on the left coast.
One should not necessarily condemn what goes on in other jurisdictions just because that is not how we do it here. Alot can be learned by observing others who do not have big budgets and learn to make do with what they have to work with.
You need to walk at least a half a mile in their shoes to understand the way things are done in other areas.
Having well-prepared media in the fire zone can be really useful for capturing educational imagery. Our recent ‘Danger in Plain Sight’ series about the LA fires benefited enormously from the footage that Michael Steinberg and Tim Walton captured from within the burning neighborhoods. I agree that California is pretty unique when it comes to open media access. I think one of the problems I have noticed is that as news budgets have shrunk, a lot of stations are now running on shoestrings, and have a lot of turnover. Many of the TV field reporters I run into are super green, and get sent out to a fire with no training, whatsoever.
Just like with everything, you get a wide range of skills and sensibilities in any profession, and even the best-prepared folks can come to harm in the chaotic conditions of a natural disaster. We require just about everyone else on the fireground to get trained and carded - it seems like asking the same of the media wouldn’t be unreasonable.
In East Texas, we have some news people who look and sound like high school students doing an internship. Resources are not the same in different geological areas. Possibly why some of the chasers are gaining notoriety is they are the closest thing to local news. Even local newspapers are a rarity.
I didn’t intend for readers to infer that I meant to stop or prevent anyone from ever reporting on fires or streaming them. What I was trying to convey is that I believe wildland fire and now urban conflagration chasing are far more dangerous than tornado chasing. Tornadoes are typically local, move in a fairly predictable manner once they touch down (they don’t spread miles in width and length in minutes but remain as a single, albeit possibly larger, column), and they don’t often cause tornadoes ahead of them as fires do with spot-fires. Yes, I understand they can be very large and very destructive, but they are fairly linear in their paths and certainly don’t like mountains much at all. Fires grow exponentially and are worse in the mountains and remote locations; lately, they even surprise the very experienced.
California and a couple of other states, in one way or another, provide greater access to incidents, which would place them in one classification, while the other states could be grouped into another. The fire and emergency services should approach education and outreach initiatives in their communities or jurisdiction with a focus on 1) safety (I mean, but am trying not to use the term training) and on 2) access regulations in their areas. Maybe something similar to the NWS Skywarn project to keep spotters safer and increase intelligence gathering. I know it is a two-edged sword because if you acknowledge their existence, some attorney will try to imply responsibility for any resulting accidents.
The more people become self-proclaimed reporters and influencers, the worse the problem will become. As more people see it and influencers’/reporters’ notoriety grows, the more likely others will try it themselves, possibly with the same results as those infamous TikTok challenges.
I realize it is not even close to the top of the list of issues we face in emergency management, including coping with our current government and fire environment, as well as the instability, challenges, and constraints in incident management. But at some point, there will be an incident, someone will be hurt or killed (either civilian or responder attempting to intervene), questions will be raised, attorneys will smell cash, and we can all go back and read this (by then our old) discussion of issue recognition and methods to mitigate what is currently just a nascent issue.
Many of the “professional” storm chasers make pretty marginal livings and supplement it with the YouTube income, part-time gigs, etc. I think many view other forms of weather as fair game to expand their offerings to more parts of the year and larger audiences—more people intentionally going to Donner Summit to film big rigs getting stuck in winter storms, trying to catch hurricanes at landfall, and yes, trying to catch fires making runs.
I think your assessment is correct that it’s a whole 'nother barrel of monkeys compared to tornado chasing. Tornadoes mostly move in predictable fashions: storms driven by large synoptic-scale weather systems move quickly, but in a linear and predictable fashion, and storms driven by smaller-scale environmental conditions may move erratically but will also do so more slowly. Chasers also prefer storm setups with good road networks and visibility, and fires love topography and lack of access. There are similar principles to each: maintain situational awareness, don’t get too close, expect the unexpected. But I think it’ll be a growing problem as everything gets increasingly monetized and the climate continues to surprise.