Thomas Fire Mitigation

Known as the largest wildfire in California, The Thomas Fire lasted nearly 6 Months burning over 281,893 acres. It destroyed over several communities stretching from Santa Barbara, California to Santa Paula California.

With California's continuously growing strong winds and strong heat waves, this caused the spread of the Thomas fire to be exponentially worse and faster than others before. Growing with the rapid winds and increasingly bad conditions of the environment.

Climate conditions: Extreme heat and years of ongoing drought, both linked to climate change, are increasing wildfire risk in California by contributing to the frequency and severity of wildfires in recent decades.

California's Fire Prevention

With the constant fire spread throughout California, mitigation strategies listed by the California Fire Department are apparent in the spread of awareness to how to properly prevent / smother & reduce the number of fires each year.

Ex) CAL FIRE Fuels Reduction Projects

Mitigation can be defined as: the act of mitigating something or the state of being mitigated: the process or result of making something less severe, dangerous, painful, harsh, or damaging.

With severity growing California created strategies to evacuate the residents & stop the fire:

Thomas Fire Burn Area Emergency Response (BAER) Team Reports:

The US Forest Service Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team’s purpose was to assess threats to life, property, and cultural and natural resources from fire-induced changes to the watershed that can cause erosion, sedimentation, flooding, and debris flows. The BAER team has completed their reports which provide a synopsis of BAER findings and the Forest Service’s internal request for implementation funding to treat values at risk on Forest Service lands only.

CAL FIRE Fuels Reduction Projects

California (CAL) FIRE engages in fuel reduction work and fire prevention activities throughout the year. Preventing uncontrolled wildfire spread in the State Responsibility Area (SRA) is central to CAL FIRE's mission. Fuels reduction projects reduce fire hazards and risks by creating a break in horizontal and vertical fuel continuity that can modify future wildfire behavior and improve community protection efforts.

• Updating codes and evacuation routes to most effective plans- stemmed from the rapid spread from structure to structure.

Housing Conditions:

California laws requires all new houses in the highest-risk wildfire zones to be built using fire-resistant materials.

• Evacuations: Mandatory evacuation orders were set in place for The Thomas Fire
  • Evacuation order: A lawful order to leave immediately because of an immediate threat to life.
  • Evacuation warnings: a potential threat to life and or property, but it is not mandatory to leave.

Human Induced Climate change has increased the vulnerability of the West lands being more susceptible to wildfires. Examined by this article "Western Wildfires: A Fiery Future', they made notions to the fact that it isn't getting better yet wildfires are trippling in number each year of assessment.

Western Wildfires: A Fiery Future :

This article finds the area burned by larger-than-1,000 acre western wildfires has shown an even larger increase: in an average year, more than six times as many acres across the West were burned in the 2010s than in the 1970's.

"Before the Fire, California has already had several major wildfire events in 2017 where extreme heat and dry conditions combined to dangerous effect. After a record-warm June through August (see image to the right), California experienced the greatest statewide heat wave ever recorded from late August through early September."

“Modern building codes are great for new construction, but the majority of the homes in the wildfire-prone area are already built."

With combined efforts to encourage cost-effective structure hardening and retrofitting that creates fire-resistant homes, businesses, and public buildings, and facilitating vegetation management, the creation and maintenance of defensible space, and other fuel modification activities that provide neighborhood or communitywide benefits against wildfire, The CWMP has drafted a hand written agreement to authorize expenditures, prioritize financial assistance

After assessing California's Fire Prevention Plan, I can conclude that California needs to update their tactics when trying to prevent the continuation of spread of the wildfire as well as preventing it from happening from the start. With mitigation there occurred many flaws in respect to the community as they didn't know what to do in such horrid conditions, causing a frantic panic of what is to unfold. It is also very well apparent that the California Fire Department attempted to get this under control into a condensed area but with failure to monitor health codes, sparked a bigger flame.

Although California has many recovery plans as well as document relating to the governance of Wildfires, I found it difficult to find updated information relating to each city and their task for recovery. This concerns me with the rapid growth of wildfire due to manmade climate change.

• Author Brittney Pritchett provides interesting and cohesive explanations to the expansion of mitigation efforts.
  • Additional Practices Recommended:

• Enacting Fire Wise building codes & spacing homes apart
  • With the widespread and flammable housing code violations, all new houses constructed are required to be built in regard to the new housing codes.
• Have and practice evacuation routes while being more proactive in protecting the residents.
  • An individual who was native to Cali crashed along the evacuation route due to poor sight conditions as well as unfamiliarity to the local evacuation route.
  • This would also be esential to the fast evacuation attempt , relieving caos due to confusion.
• Have all occupants know where their local shelters & provide literature for California home buyers in the area.
• Identify the spots vulnerable during this disaster.
• Create different sources of energy (Powerlines sparked the fire)
  • Following the conclusion of the fire, the California Fire Department recognized a fallen powerline to cause the ignition of the fire.
• Increase wildfire response relief plans.
  • Surrounding business that provided daily necessities to locals became little to scarse due to the fire. With attempts from the locals to help each other, I believe that the surrounding government should have found solutions to help the inhabitants under such conditions.

With there only being but so many fire men, training should be increased with efforts from inhabitants of California as well as surrounding cities and states to combat the prolonged recovery.

• More than 6000 firefighters helped fight the battle, but the number of necessary men and materials diminished quickly a they continues to get beat down.