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A firefighter works to extinguish flames as the Eaton Fire burns in Pasadena, California, U.S. January 8, 2025. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
What a longtime wildland firefighting veteran thinks can be learned from the LA wildfires
RICHMOND - With decades of experience in the wildland firefighting field, Kelly Martin travelled from Idaho as part of a task force responding to the devastating Los Angeles area wildfires.
The ongoing blaze, which has reduced entire neighbourhoods to smouldering ruins, has killed more than two dozen people and destroyed tens of thousands of structures in one of the most significant wildfire events in U.S. history.
The Los Angeles wildfires could also become the costliest in U.S. history in terms of insured losses if analysts' estimates of $20 billion or more materialise.
Martin is also a former president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group that works to secure better pay, benefits and working conditions for federal wildland firefighters.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When I first saw this, I (thought), this defies any sort of comprehension of what I have experienced and what I know and understand of fire behaviour. So I knew right away that this was something I needed to come down here and see for myself.
I've been in fire behaviour and operations my entire career. I've been a huge proponent of prescribed fire and fuels management, forest thinning in and around communities.
On one hand, your logic tells you that everything you've been doing for 40 years has been good to protect people, homes and communities and all of a sudden in one afternoon or day it completely turns everything – what you know and thought and practiced - on its head.
At least it's causing me to question, not in a bad way, what am I missing? What don't I understand about what happened here, especially from a fire behaviour point of view?
Kelly Martin (L), Bryan Lowe (C), and Paul Hefner (R) from the White Bird Volunteer Fire Department as part of Idaho Task Force 4 for the California wildfires are pictured in Nampa, Idaho, USA, January 8, 2025. Debbie L. Thorson/Handout via Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Kelly Martin (L), Bryan Lowe (C), and Paul Hefner (R) from the White Bird Volunteer Fire Department as part of Idaho Task Force 4 for the California wildfires are pictured in Nampa, Idaho, USA, January 8, 2025. Debbie L. Thorson/Handout via Thomson Reuters Foundation.
I think all of us are looking for solutions. All of us are trying to say well, if we just would have done this then it wouldn't have happened. Or if we would have had more fire equipment. If we would have more water. If we would have had this, that or the other thing.
It's not as simple as saying we need to cut more brush or we need to make homes entirely defensible. I mean, do we all rebuild in concrete homes in these areas? I don't think that's realistic. So we're looking for short cuts, and this isn't a short cut.
All of the cars that got jammed up down Sunset Boulevard as they were escaping – the sheer panic. And then to see all these vehicles that were just abandoned – people literally running for their lives.
And what that did is jam up the fire equipment needing to get into these areas and then you see the pictures on the news of a bulldozer moving all these burned-out cars. So that one really sticks in my mind from an evacuation point of view.
And to see all the buildings along the Pacific Coast Highway - they're gone. They're just incinerated – just nothing but steel and brick is all you can see that's left and you think, it had to jump this whole highway to get to these buildings to burn these buildings down along the oceanfront.
And so you just scratch your head just going 'holy...' - just the immensity of a fire like this.
I want to make sure folks know that I don't have the answers and I'm not casting blame ... because it's not helpful right now.
I'd say go right to the communities. There (are) probably some communities that have survived this wildfire that should be showcased to try to understand why this community survived and another one didn't. And again, not casting blame, but to say that some of these communities have known for a long time that they've been in the crosshairs.
I'm not in a lessons learned mode right now – I'm just more of a facilitator. Let's hear what's really going on out there. But you're going to find right away, as human beings our brain wants to go to well, we're going to blame it on this. Or we're going to blame it on this. And I'm like, that's not helpful. This is going to happen again if we're not thinking about this differently.
(Reporting by David Sherfinski; Editing Jon Hemming.)
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