Run or Stay? How to Decide?

All three of the most destructive California wildfires, in terms of structures destroyed, occurred in the decade of the '90s. Worse, 26 deaths resulted from these fires. Consideration of these bare facts, and almost two years of research, leads to these summary conclusions:

One: If you live in Topanga it is highly likely that you will confront a major wildfire--one that burns more than 500 acres. In the past 80 years Topanga has suffered a major wildfire at least once in every decade, often twice. Although the occurrence of wildfire is predictable, the interval between fires is not. Some authorities have speculated that it would be 10-20 years before regrowth of brush could support a full-blown wildfire. There is enough uncertainty in this regard so that no important decision should rest on assumptions about how long it takes before regrowth of brush will support a wildfire.

Two: Steep terrain, in addition to dryness and high winds, makes wildfires faster moving. In case you hadn't noticed, most of Topanga is very steep. Under typical wildfire conditions in Topanga, fire will move uphill faster than almost anyone can run. If you are close enough to the fire to think you might need to run for it, you may have already made a life-threatening mistake.

Three: Whether you elect to stay to protect your home or to evacuate as soon as possible, the chances of your home surviving a wildfire depend on actions taken well before a fire erupts. If you haven't done the clearing, if you haven't a plan, if you haven't made the investments of time and effort to acquire and learn how to use essential tools, you will be leaving your fate to chance.

Four: Any decision to stay or to evacuate must be based on these broad sets of factors:

First, under no circumstances should anyone remain behind alone. Nation-wide over a dozen firemen are killed every year in fighting wildfires, and many times that number are injured. A prime cause of these casualties is being taken unawares by a sudden change in the fire's behavior. You must have someone to watch your back.

Second, brush clearance alone is insufficient. To stay with reasonable safety also requires study of fire behavior, acquisition of tools and clothing, and practice.

Third, a wildfire is a stressful experience. How much risk are you willing to accept? How much risk and stress are you willing to impose on your family? The very young, the very old, and the physically handicapped should be gotten out of harm's way ASAP. In periods of extreme fire danger, evacuation of the most vulnerable household members may be called for before a wildfire breaks out in your neighborhood.

Fourth, in addition to brush clearance, you must mitigate the vulnerability of your home--the materials from which it is constructed, the extent of defensible space surrounding it, its siting in relation to the terrain.

Fifth, escape routes have to be evaluated in light of conditions at the time of use. Normally accessible routes may become dangerous due to then-existing conditions. Preparation to shelter in place may be the wisest choice.

Five: If your decision is to leave at once, you owe it to your neighbors and to the firefighters who might defend your house in your absence to leave your house in the most defensible possible condition. Firefighters may be professionals, but they are not kamikazes. This study provides checklists of things to do before leaving--such as closing, but not locking, all exterior windows and doors (and not forgetting the garage door).

Six: If you stay, above all, plan for your survival should things turn ugly, and rehearse your plan with what time you have. This may mean sheltering in place, taking advantage of your home's inherent resistance to fire. Outfit yourself, deploy your defenses, make yourself known. You should have planned with your family and neighbors so that individual efforts can reinforce each other.

Seven: However much individual preparation is necessary, preparation house-by-house is inefficient. There is much the community may do to lower costs and increase the effectiveness of preparation against wildfire. Just a few examples:

>In cooperation with the Fire Department and any other concerned officials, identify, prepare and maintain more public refuge areas in addition to the three that exist now (the Community House, Topanga Elementary School and the Big Rock Recreation Area). For example, recent changes in the center of town may have made it the largest safe area in the Canyon. This is a technical issue, but the potential safety benefits are certainly worth the effort.

>Organize brush clearance and preparedness planning on a neighborhood-wide basis to assure mutual support and minimize the impact on privacy and aesthetics.

>Tighten the communications links between the Arson Watch, T-CEP, the schools and other civic organizations to enhance warning and the flow of good information.

Wildfires are dangerous whatever you do, wherever you are in their vicinity. Wildfires are not unitary phenomena--they burn with intensity that varies with fuel, terrain and wind conditions; they speed up and slow down; they change direction unpredictably and very fast. In 1993 a fire flashed from Old Canyon Road up the length of Hondo Canyon in less than 20 minutes--about the time it took for a 1961 fire to burn from Cheney to the Post Office Tract.

Introduction

Who and What is T-CEP?

The Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness (T-CEP) is an all-volunteer, tax-exempt, public education organization that was created in the aftermath of the 1993 Topanga Canyon fire and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It became clear that our unincorporated community needed to be better prepared to take care of itself after a major emergency.

The same lesson had been learned after every previous major disaster. The resulting efforts, however, tended to fade away after several months. The people who formed T-CEP were determined that this history would not be repeated.

After the 1993 fire, officials at every level, from Los Angeles County to Washington, DC, broadcast a low-key but direct message--people who chose to live in hazardous areas would have to accept a greater share of the risk and cost of their protection. Before the Glendale-La Cañada fire of December 1999 was even contained, the Los Angeles Times was reporting rumblings about zoning changes to prevent building in high fire hazard areas.

Since the mid-1980s the concepts of the Wildland/Urban Interface and Wildland/Urban Intermix have evolved to describe areas such as Topanga. The word "Interface" implies a distinct border between the wildland on one side, and built-up areas on the other. The Interface describes areas such as those in Topanga in which homes line the borders of the Topanga State Park.

The "Intermix" is a more complex areas in which wildlands and home are mixed together without a clear line between them. This is the normal state in Topanga, either because homes have been built off the road front in the midst of trees and brush or because, over time, trees and wild and cultivated plants have grown up around homes.

Whether Interface or Intermix, the problems for residents and firefighters are more complicated and dangerous than they are in the usual suburb. These are the problems this booklet is intended to expose for your consideration.

T-CEP is an unofficial response to the conflicting pressures of environmental desirability vs. inherent dangers; desire for rural simplicity vs. the rising value attached to privacy and increasingly scarce building sites; official desire to minimize expenditure on emergency services vs. increasing demand by increasingly affluent residents for more of the same.

T-CEP cooperates closely with local authorities trying to define the common grounds and boundaries between resident and official concerns. Still, there is much more that can and ought to be done in the area of cooperation among individuals and citizen groups in Topanga.

For information, and to participate in the future of your community, please call T-CEP at 310/455-3000 and leave a message, or write to T-CEP, P.O. Box 1708, Topanga, CA 90290. On the Internet go to www.topangamessenger.com or www.topangaonline.com. If the voice in this report is T-CEP's, the voice in the next one should be yours.

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Thanks and Acknowledgments

To try to thank individuals for their help in putting together this booklet would only risk doing injustice by leaving some out. Over the past two years most of my conversations--with neighbors, friends, colleagues associated in various ways with T-CEP, and many mystified strangers--have found their way into wildfire, evacuation and decision-making. It hasn't always been easy for them, but they have contributed, even if unwittingly, to the present form of this study.

We would, however, like to thank the Los Angeles City and County Fire Departments--organizations which harbor many people who have generously given their time and concrete help. These departments illustrate the primary frustration which has afflicted this study. The budget of our original proposal assumed we would have to pay, e.g., for copying and administrative expenses. But time after time people refused our money. As a result, the project actually cost roughly 60% of its budget. Despite our best efforts, we wound up returning money to the California Community Foundation (CCF).

CCF deserves a special vote of thanks. They took a chance on a small, untried organization to complete a project of some complexity, and they worked with us when unexpected delays forced us to restructure the budget.

We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the invaluable help received from many organizations via their web sites, many of which are listed in Appendix B. These include, but are not limited to, the U.S. Forest Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National Park Service, National Fire Protection Agency, University of California Forest Products Laboratory, Wildfire Magazine and the Firewise project.

The question, "To evacuate or not to evacuate?" aside, there will be long-term benefits growing out of this project. T-CEP and the Resource Conservation District, with CCF's encouragement, have initiated a study to determine how the large amount of data assembled for this study can be used to help generate educational materials suitable for use in schools, grades K-12, as well as in public education for adults.

The data assembled for this study will be made available to Topanga residents either at scheduled times or on request. In addition to the more than 150 items in the bibliography--Appendix C to this study--many more publications concerning safety and preparedness for all kinds of emergencies are available in T-CEP's Emergency Operations Center.

Finally, but not least, the computer capabilities created as a result of this study will make it possible for T-CEP to do a better job of responding to emergencies, and will enable us to provide emergency response help to other community organizations.

For his encouragement to think about these longer-lasting benefits--and because all rules have exceptions--we would like to thank John Williams, our grant administrator from the CCF, for his help and understanding.

Finally, even in this day of computers and word processors, it still takes a person to get the words typeset and edited. Thank you, Bonnie McCourt.

The Choice

Three of the most destructive California wildfires, in terms of structures destroyed, occurred in the decade of the '90s.

Figure 1: Highest Structure Loss Fires in California History

As with any statistics, there is some room for haggling about precise numbers and criteria for inclusion in the list. And there is room for debate about whether or why wildfires are getting worse even as more resources are put into suppressing them. But the fact is clear. And the implication is also--if you live in an area such as Topanga for as long as ten years, you are highly likely to be confronted with an immediate choice between scooping what you hold dearest into your car and clearing out, or staying behind to protect your home.

Staying behind to battle the flames, protecting your hearth, has great appeal. Some will tell you that you can and should. Some will tell you it would be dangerous at best, and potentially the last foolish thing you will ever do.

The purpose of this booklet is not to advise you which course to take. You are responsible for that decision. Rather, we have tried to assemble here the basic information you need to make that decision reasonably, after due consideration of the uniqueness of your situation.

Firefighters trained to deal with wildfires are injured and killed every year--hundreds over the past decade--despite their training, equipment and support organization. Not one of those victims was unaware of the dangers, and not one of them took what he thought was a heroic risk. Yet wildfire is a phenomenon so complex and so fast changing that well trained and highly skilled firefighters are trapped, and some die.

Figure 2: Firefighter Fatalities 1990-1998

Nevertheless, many who live here are determined to protect themselves, their families and property. Many who have stayed behind during a wildfire have made a contribution to saving their homes. Nitpickers may argue that these folks were seldom as crucial as they thought. One scientist, a specialist in fire behavior, makes the point that the heat being generated by a wildfire dwarfs anything that humans can do to cool it. In the aggregate he is right. Once the fire has gotten a start, and as long as the wind is blowing and humidity is low, there is not much that hoses or even Super Scoopers can do about the main front.

But a wildfire is not a unitary phenomenon. It speeds up and slows down, it skips ahead, it creates its own local weather, it burns hotter or cooler depending on the fuel and the humidity. It is intense in some places and much less so in others. It is this variability that creates the possibility for people to take a hand in protecting their own property. But--a big but--only as long as they are prepared and sensitive to these vagaries and able to respond appropriately to them.

Like all important choices, this one is not as clear-cut as we might like to think. There are at least three frameworks within which to think about this choice--in terms of technical fixes, in terms of time, and in terms of people.

Preparation may be reduced to a "to do" list. It is very attractive to take this approach. One can check items off one at a time. One can list vulnerabilities and mitigate them one at a time. The feeling of accomplishment as each item is crossed off the list is real-the feeling of being prepared each time one looks around and sees concrete results of the work is real and worthy. But, preparedness is not only the sum of all individual fixes.

One must think in terms of time--the time it will take to get the brush clearance done correctly before the next fire. Or, how much time it would take--once a fire had gotten started--to get your pump and water and hose all connected and functioning, and to compare that to the amount of time likely to be available to respond. A fire of greater than 500 acres occurs in Topanga Canyon twice or three times in a decade. (Source: OES maps of Topanga fires.) The last such major fire, however, was over seven years ago. There may not be years available to do the long-term things required to prepare.

The technical requirements are pretty much the same across the Canyon. That is, the factors to be considered are the same regardless of where your house is located or when the evaluation is done. But there are areas of the Canyon where homes are more likely to be threatened earlier, or more directly, than in other areas. We will suggest where these differences may be important.

Perhaps, however, the people equation is the most important. Who is going to protect your home--you? Your wife and kids? Your nanny? The day laborers from the center of town? Where do you work? How would you hear of a fire in Topanga? How long would it take you to get home? Who is most likely to be available? Look deep inside--how much risk and stress are you willing to accept? How much are you willing to put on your family?

The fundamental choice must be made well before a wildfire threatens. It is the choice of what measures will be taken to mitigate the vulnerabilities of your family and home to wildfire. Many of these measures will have to have been undertaken years in advance and, if faithfully maintained in the five years or ten years or decades between fires, might do much to protect your home even if no one is there to defend it. Such measures involve brush clearance and the planting and cultivation of fire resistant vegetation around your home. They certainly involve making a family fire emergency plan and rehearsing it so that your children and non-English-speaking nannies and maintenance workers as well as family adults know what to do and where to go.

There may be much to learn about the local history of fires and the quirks of local terrain, alternative routes of access, and the situation of neighbors as sources of help or people who may need your help.

After all the above has been thought through, plans drawn, resources allocated, agreement reached with spouse and other family members, it should be clear that no one should try to cope with a wildfire alone. Probably the leading cause of firefighter death in wildfires is failure to respond in time to a sudden change in the fire's behavior and resultant entrapment--this despite the cardinal rule of work in hazardous situations that at least one member of the work party must watch out for the safety of the group. Those fighting the fire inevitably become preoccupied with the task at hand. They cannot also be expected to watch the fire beyond their immediate front. There must be someone to watch the fire who can give warning of a dangerous change. That is the most important job of all, and it may be the hardest. The tendency to want to be involved--to help--is natural.

So the choice is, am I willing to commit to doing what is necessary to safely and rationally deal with a life-threatening situation? Or, having taken reasonable mitigation action beforehand, is it more sensible for me and mine to depart quickly?