 I'm also inventing our future and things to quiet. I'm your host, Brittany Zimmerman. I'm Richard Hall, you're co-host. And joining us today is our guest, the fire chief, Kazua Todd, who will help us do a deep dive into our F conversation. So this week's F letter is Firefighting Solution. Welcome, Kazua, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good, thank you for inviting me on the show. We're really excited to have you. And of course, I think this is a topic that is extremely appropriate, right? For where we're sitting today in the state of Hawaii. And after seeing a lot of the recent things that have gone on, both on the Big Island and on our neighboring island, I think there's a lot of questions around this. So it's a particularly of interest. And Richard, how are you doing? Oh, pretty top shape. Yep. I can't wait to ask a whole bunch of questions. All right, you want to start it off? You want to drop the questions, Richard? Yeah, you know what's on my mind is this. You know, chief, what would you recommend for rural houses if you had, you could suggest what homeowners could do to protect themselves from fires that's coming from the outside, coming toward the house, stuff like that. What general strategy would you suggest? You know, one of the best things that's out there for homeowners is our Firewise programs. And Firewise was an initiative to deal with wild land, urban interfaces, in terms of, you know, there's a brush fire and the fire is coming and it comes up to the edge of your house because, you know, your house is maybe backing some brush or a field or even a forest or things like that. And so Firewise looked at like, well, how do houses survive fires? And what were the characteristics of a house that, you know, the fire came through the area and the house was still there after? If you guys are watching all the stuff going in Maui, they talk about, you know, the miracle house in Lahaina and everything else. And one of the things that was, you know, maybe a little different than that house and some of the others was just the fact that it had a nice green space around the house and that there weren't any plants that were directly against the house that allowed the fire transition into the house. And so there definitely are things that, you know, us as the general public can do for our personal homes. You know, we can make sure that we have a good barrier around our house in terms of a green space between our house and things that are combustible. We can keep things that are combustible away from the sides of the homes. We can make sure that entrances of the soffits of our house aren't open that allow embers to come inside and start a fire internally. And so there's some different things in there, but the best thing to remember would be Firewise. And if you do a Google search for Firewise, it brings up a whole host of information about, you know, the different steps you can take from choosing what kind of plants are in your yard to maintaining, you know, that green space around to reducing combustibles and fuels and things like that. And they're just as useful for if your neighbor's house got to some fire as it is for, you know, if there is one of these wildland fires that's coming through the area. Yeah, thanks a lot. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, absolutely. So how many fire stations do we have on the Big Island? So currently on the Big Island of Hawaii, we have a total of 20 paid fire stations and 18 volunteer fire stations. Hawaii County is the only county in the state of Hawaii right now that is a combination system in that we have both volunteers and we have paid personnel. And we have a mixture of stations between the two. Generally a station is either paid or volunteer. It's not like we have stations where we're mixing our people. But the history of the volunteer side for our department actually stretches back to our founding. In 1888, the Hilo Volunteer Fire Department was formed and for the first 36 years or so, there were no paid firefighters in the County of Hawaii. Somewhere around 1922 to 1924, the first paid fire chief and firefighters were basically enacted. And that was fire chief William Todd and not related to me, but it was the first paid fire chief for our department and he took over. And at that time they had seven employees. Now that for the whole island basically. But over the years we've expanded and we had more and more paid personnel. But unlike the other islands that eventually did away with their volunteers, because of the geographic size of the big island that are in need to just respond to so many places in such a large response area, we've maintained those volunteers over the years. So we've actually, you know, almost 130 years of volunteers on our island if I'm doing the math directly and another, you know, 100 or so years of regular firefighters on the island that are paid. So a mixture of the two. That's wild. And are the volunteers, people who just know a lot about firefighting? Are they past, are they certified in some way? Like if you get to pick between having like a paid, you know, county employee versus volunteer in terms of their expertise and their abilities, or are they approximately similar? That is interesting in that there's a wide disparity in both directions. I have, you know, some volunteer personnel have been volunteering with us for decades and are extremely knowledgeable and extremely capable in terms of, you know, attacking fire and just having spent so much time with us. I also have some people that decided to volunteer yesterday and are, you know, basically very, very new and lacking in experience. Plus with our paid personnel is that the training is exactly the same, right? We've been training them for, you know, decades basically in the same classroom and the same, you know, curriculum, newer books, newer techniques sometimes, but generally, you know, when a firefighter gets hired by the county boy and becomes a paid firefighter, the training they have and the training that, you know, our firefighters for the last, you know, a couple of decades have gone through is basically the same, you know? And so with a paid personnel, you know exactly what you're gonna get with our volunteers, you can get the whole range. You have some people that are amazingly, you know, experienced in what they're doing and have a great deal of expertise. And you also have some very, very new people that have just decided to volunteer and, you know, that training can take a long time before they get to that because of the fact that it is a volunteer side of things. What does firefighter training look like? Well, it's about a year long in the county boy. So in addition to being the only county that is a volunteer and paid combination department system, we're also the only county that is a combined EMS and fire system. So currently we receive a budget from the state to manage our ambulance responses on the island. And so we have 16 ALS ambulances or advanced life support ambulances, which have paramedics as well as an EMT on top. And so those personnel are also trained to be firefighters. But when we talk about training, personnel that get hired by the Hawaii County Fire Department are expected to not only go through training to become firefighters, they're also expected to go through training and become EMTs at the bare minimum. We also don't mind if they become paramedics, but essentially the basic requirement is that anyone who goes through our training, which takes a year, it's about half of that time is going to be to become a firefight under a pro-board certification. And about half of that time is going to be becoming a EMT under state licensure. So they have to get their state license to be an EMTB in the state of Hawaii and be able to practice on an ambulance. And so their certification allows them to drive ambulances and help out with those issues. As for the training itself, it's a pretty grueling year. We tell our personnel to hug and kiss their family members goodbye and that we'll return them in a year or so, but please do all their laundry for them because they're going to kind of work out all day long and then they're going to go home and study all night and then they're going to go to sleep and you'll maybe get to talk to them on weekends because that's pretty intensive. We only allow them to fail a certain number of tests and then they're released. They can essentially fail tests once and they got to pass a remake and if they fail either the remake or they fail too many tests in a row or just in total they're released and then lose their job. So we expect very high levels of performance from our personnel because the public expects a lot out of us. So that training is inclusive of learning how to do ladder operations to hold a nozzle to walking into burning buildings and understanding flames inside buildings and fire dynamics to understanding path flow and ventilation on the fire side on the EMS side they're expecting to learn how to do IVs and read EKGs and administer drugs and do minor things like how to wrap wounds or things like that as well. And then we also spend a variety of time learning how to drive vehicles because emergency vehicles have lights and sirens and that affects people around you and so defensive driving is also an aspect in that and then we also do a water week as we expect them to basically kind of be a lifeguard as well. So they spend a week in the water we have a water week training and they will spend eight hours in the water a day for five days in a row. Oh my gosh, that's so pretty intense. And once you get through that are there like refreshers is there stuff that people have to do? Like are they retesting? What does it look like throughout the career? Your whole career is training. And yeah, so I visit my stations on a pretty regular basis and one of the things the guys complain about is, Jeff, I'm so tired of all this online training. We went to a lot of online training during COVID but we do a lot of training. There's time right between calls and if there isn't a call going on right now it's an opportunity to train and exercise. One of the things some guys say they like about being a firefighter is they're paid to work out but they are paid to work out because when stuff's going wrong and you know, Maui, this island, wherever you want kind of one of those big strong people. Male female doesn't matter to us but you want someone who's physically fit to come in there and handle stuff and so it came to work out, it came to exercise, it came to train. And yeah, like a couple of decades I've been in for myself and myself as the fire chief I'm still doing training on a very, very regular basis. It's less of the stuff that my firefighters go through in terms of fire dynamics and refreshers on how to use the hose at the line or things like that and more about how to be a good fire chief but from the very top of the organizations or the very bottom, the training never really ends. I could tell you're in good shape, you know why? Because the several times we're around you, man, you can eat. So I know you're using a lot of energy. I don't know about that. Definitely being a fire chief has not been the greatest thing for my waistline. I, you know, in my old position, I used to run as a battalion chief and ran the warehouse and one of the things I liked the best about it was, you know, two days a week or so I'd take off the shirt and go throw boxes in the warehouse and so it was like getting some good exercise, other thing, you know, heavy boxes and throwing stuff in the dumpster to get it out of the warehouse that once it was too old or whatever and moving hose and checking stuff. And it felt like, you know, still being a firefighter but, you know, getting some really important work done for the department. And as a chief, oh, my job is mostly nowadays just meetings and going to do emails and stuff like that. I've somehow become a professional email writer and meeting a tender. But, you know, it is necessary and, you know, I try to diet and maintain some shape, certainly pear shape but, you know, working on it. Yeah. All right. I have one question, you know, and EMT, what does EMT stand for? Emergency Medical Technician. Oh, I got you. Got you. Thanks. And I was thinking, what is the typical response time, right? I mean, I've never been in a fire I've had to call and, you know, ask for help. But here on the Big Island, I imagine it's probably pretty different depending on where you are. But what kind of a range are we talking about in terms of responsiveness? So, you know, it varies throughout the United States, really dependent on, you know, whether it's super urban or super rural. On the beyond, we generally have response time between eight and 10 minutes. And, you know, that isn't particularly great. You know, and generally in cities, you're looking for that four to five minute response time as an ideal. But the reality is that we've decided to really spread our population out over the entire island. So, that response time is an average, right? You have places in town where our personnel are on scene in just a couple of minutes. You have places that are out in the countryside a little bit farther away. And, you know, it can be half an hour before we get there because you've, you know, a lot of people have decided that they don't really want to live next to other people. They like that privacy. They like that seclusion. And our island offers that ability because we've decided to basically, you know, cut it apart and make lots all over the place. But one of the problems with that is that, you know, as you move away from society, society's ability to respond to on a timely basis is lengthened a little bit. So, if you're way up that dirt road and there's no water supply and then there's a fire and you're expecting us to come in there and have that same level of service, it is a little difficult because, you know, there's no hydrants and there's no water and things like that. We're having to truck water in. We do our best with it, but yeah, definitely, the big island is more rural than it is urban. And so we don't see that same kind of responses. No, when we look at like the state as a whole, you know, if you look at like Maui, you know, they have a total of 14 stations. You know, Honolulu has like a 44 stations and then like Hawaii is running like 10 right now. I think they're going up to 11. But the size of their islands and the size of their response areas is much smaller. And if you look at our island, we're running 38 stations, which is almost as many as Honolulu. But even so, our island is literally half the land mass of the state. So when you start thinking about it from that perspective, those stations are really spread out. And that doesn't allow us for great response time. But yeah, we do the best we can and we'll be there as soon as we possibly can. So call early, it would be basically what I'd say. For sure. And how many people traditionally need to be out of fire, right? I mean, how many firemen are needing to show up for just like a traditional home fire? So under the National Fire Protection Association's code 1710, which is the NFPA 1710, it's recommended that there'd be 16 firefighters on a single residential structure fire. Once you run to like a strip mall that goes up to 28, and then if you're doing a high rise, they're talking about 42 firefighters to fight a high rise. A large chunk of those guys in the high rise are carrying breathing bottles upstairs too. The guys at the top that are actually fighting the fire, because they're out of breath by the time they get to the top and the 7th, 10th, 20th story running up the stairs, right? But it all varies on what a jurisdiction is able to survive. I can tell you on our island, having 16 firefighters on a single fire, at least initially within the recommendations of 1710, is almost impossible. Because our first station will probably be there within that eight to 10 minutes range, but the next station away might be 20 minutes, might be 30 minutes away before it gets there. So that first station's only gonna come with anywhere from four to six personnel. And so while the time, and depending on where you are in the country, we might only have two other stations respond, in which case they bring maybe another three to four people and another three to four. And so many places on the island, we'd never hit 16 personnel, at least on our paid side. Luckily we do have a wonderful volunteer side and they'll come and assist. Currently our volunteers are not cleared for internal structural firefighting. We don't have them in the appropriate compliant gear and we haven't tested them for SCDAs. But they are able to assist in the external areas of the fire in terms of water supply or trucking water in or helping us hook up or do an external protection. So there's some benefit to that, but it's not the same. And so there's pluses and minuses in our current system. Yeah, and you brought up water supply and that's an interesting thing to think about here because like, I know in town I've seen some fire hydrants, but in the majority of places I visited, I don't think there's fire hydrants everywhere. Well, one third of our island is actually with a water system and a prime third of the island is running off of catchment or some other means of water or residences. And as a result of that, the ability for the fire department to be able to hook in and get water to fight a fire is sometimes limited. It's one of the reasons helicopters are so important for fire operations and whatnot is that oftentimes we're out in the middle of nowhere and the process of filling up the truck full of water, driving into an incident and then dumping it and then coming back, we couldn't be talking a half hour, 45 minute loop by the time we get back with more water, the fire is back to where it was, right? And I've actually fought fires down an ocean view when I was working down there because that's all catchment and everything else. And the nearest hydrant was down in Waipino where we'd go, we'd fight the fire and knock it down, pretty much put it out and then we'd go have to get water. And then by the time we're back, the house is on fire again. And so it was this cycle of almost put out the fire and then we were out of water, right? So we'll get more water, come back, house is on fire again. And we just got enough water and the route to go back and come back with more water took too long. So one of the things we've worked on all the last decade and a half or so is to bring in more water tankers and more mobile water supply to meet those needs. But it's a constant struggle to try to figure out what would be best serving this community and how do we staff that and how do we get personnel and vehicles and how do we maintain those vehicles and replace them when it comes time. It seems to me that there's a lot more brush fires on the corner side, wherever it's dry. In general, that's kind of how you see that and what I'm getting at is, is there, sometime in the future, there's gonna be a time when it gets so dry that all of the green stuff that we have here on the Hebrew side might be a problem or do you folks kind of think that through to anticipate? You know, nothing is out of the possible realm, right? We could have massive brush fires in Hilo if we had to drop long enough. In my life, I have yet to see Hilo that dry. Hilo is up there in the rainiest places in the United States. I'm worried more about probably Hamakua, Ka'u and our greater Kauaihai, you know, South Bahá'u'lláh region, Waikaloa and stuff like that. So every year we're running into fires in the Waikaloa, you know, Kauaihai region, and that's just pretty normal. The grass grows and something starts a fire and it just rips through the area. And it's a pretty consistent thing. One of the nice things is because it's consistent over the years we've added, you know, a decent amount of fire protection. We have a very robust volunteer groups out there because they're getting a lot of time on the line and so they're active. And so we have a good response for that area. The other area that we also get a large response is in the Ka'u area. And part of that is it actually dries out more than you'd think in, you know, the Pahala and Nalehu areas. And we do end up with brush fires down there. And so we can get, you know, longer responses. It's not quite as active as our fires out in the Waikaloa region in terms of number of fires and everything else, but equally, you know, things are going out down in Cookpool. The one other area that does concern me a little bit is in the Hummelpool region. So historically, you know, a lot of sugarcane in that area. And we've moved forward with the planting of a lot of eucalyptus out there. Right now the eucalyptus keeps the undergrowth from growing too much, but I don't know that there's a really good plan for long-term management of the land. And right now they're not really harvesting the trees for any particular purpose, which means, you know, one, we have the potential for a forest fire someday. If we ran into some drought conditions and the fire was able to extend into the crowns of the trees. And then the other thing too is, you know, at some point maybe they do cut down the trees in which case, you know, we're looking at that grass, because it's on the wetter side, the growth that we can see there is far, far greater than what you'll see in Waikulaw. So Waikulaw, usually the scrub gets to about two feet, but we've seen growth on like the homopulocybe where the grass can get up to 10, 12, 15 feet tall. You know, there's California grass and stuff like that. And then if you combine that with a really nice drought and then that catches, oh, and that could be a really, really large fire on the homopulocybe that would be very, very difficult for us to do much about based on our current resources and stuff. So those are the areas that are of primary concern to me as the fire chief and, you know, considering long-term applicability of our resources and how do we get there to solve those issues if they do become one some days, you know, part of the time I spend each day to, you know, talk with my up chain in terms of the mayor and then the staff and the county council about like, well, hey, you know, this is the possible problem and this is what we would need to solve it. And, you know, advocating for money and funding and more positions, not the same. I am built that in the future. What could the average citizen do, you know, like when there's ambulances coming so you hear it and is it your sense that the people that respect, I mean, are reacting in the proper way or could they react better or do you have any comments about that? You know, as far as pulling over and allowing our ambulances to transit to the hospital, I have not noticed any issues. Generally, the general reminder, you always have one or two people that are using this as an opportunity to go a little faster and get out of the way, you know, or whatever. But most people, you know, they're living with Aloha, right? So they take care, they do the right thing. They pull over when, you know, emergency services are coming through and make way in and they're safe, there's exceptions, but that's more of an exception than normal. So, you know, I think our people are amazing and we do a good job of maintaining good public order and, you know, the public is very supportive. So that's something I usually worry about. That's good to hear. And I know we threw a lot of the media recently, right? Everybody's reached out a lot with the news of everything that happened on Maui. I don't think we've talked as much about what had happened on the big islands kind of in that same stretch. Will you fill some of us in on, you know, what was going on on this island? You know, it was a pretty impressive day in terms of fire and how quickly it grew. And for my personnel out in the scene, they were discussing how it was unlike anything they'd ever seen, you know, two years ago, we had the Mono Road and we burned 40,000 acres and the high winds had generated, you know, 50 foot flame fronts off of, you know, just two feet of grass, which was unheard of, you know, at that time and pretty scary. You know, when you look up at the horizon and literally from, you know, mountain to mountain, you can see pretty much everything burning. This one, the winds were even more excessive and, you know, the confusion and the inability to see was interesting. Our personnel were saying, and if anyone who was weighing less than like 150 pounds was having to hold on to the fire truck and sometimes because of how hard the wind was blowing, so they didn't get blown away. And, you know, we're having issues where, you know, you're pumping water, but the water streams were just turning around and going back in the other direction because of the winds, right? So the ability to apply water was difficult too. My personnel did an amazing job. We had about six or seven structures that, you know, we had direct flame impingement on and we were able to go in, stop the fire from spreading and save the structures. We had a warehouse out in the Montague Beach area that caught fire and we let it go because there was not a residence. So we triaged it and let it burn to save other residential structures. And for the most part, we did an amazing job. We lost no one's house was lost. We did sustained damage, but we were able to present or preserve all residential homes in the Fahala, Kauai High, Montague region. So definitely, you know, my personnel, I got it, you know, they might head off for their performance out there were excessively hard. It was touch and go. We had to ground our own helicopters because of how heavy the winds are, but not to take away from Maui who had, you know, an exceptionally hard situation in front of them. You know, I am very pleased with my own personnel and their actions out there. Got you. And did Maui contact you at all? Did Maui need to pull resources from any of the other islands in terms of fire personnel? Maui, right now I'll be going over this weekend to go sit in their AOC and actually talk with them and see what kind of needs they have and everything else. And some of my personnel have responded on their own time. As for fire personnel, one of the bigger issues is vehicles, right? So like, you know, if I send firefighters over, there's nowhere to put them. Got you. Every vehicle's full of firefighters, they're already working, right? They already have something they're doing and they don't really need more firefighters. It's kind of the same over here. Like even if I had a really large need and they're willing to send their firefighters to help us out, there's a problem of how would we even use them? I don't have a vehicle for them to drive. I don't have a way to get them out there to help out to some extent, you know? Pretty much for every vehicle we have, we have someone in those seats, right? Need more trucks. Yeah. The spare capacity is not there. You know, when you talk about like California, Oregon, all these other locations, they're not just sending people. They're sending a truck and that truck is full of people inside of it, right? And so they'll drive up to the major fire and they'll report to the scene. That's the one thing in Hawaii that we just don't have the ability to do, you know? Like they can't just jump on the truck and drive over the bridge and get to Maui. That wasn't quite work that way. And so pretty much they can fly over, but the ability to jump in an interface is difficult, you know? So at this time, we're looking to integrate a little bit more with them, but initially, most of the big work was being done by FEMA level national teams that are coming in with 700 people to do, you know, search and rescue, to comb through the wreckages and the search for bodies and deal with those issues. And so those are slowly being demobilized. And recently we're just looking at some sign-up sheets for sending our incident management personnel over to surf in Maui. And I'll be going over there this weekend to spend some time and see how we can best help. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for keeping this island safe during that very exciting time. And everything that you guys do and the volunteers do is really great to learn about all of that. And yeah, and for those of us who are fire unwise, we'll have to look into that fire-wise program. I like that. That was nice. Thank you so much because what you added, you know, like for example, when you talk about the volunteer, I have no idea. I thought everybody had just the same amount or it was just a normal thing. But what you guys do is pretty impressive. I've got to say, thank you. No, I appreciate it. Awesome. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was gonna say, yeah, just when you see a firefighter out there in our uniform, thank them for their service. They work really hard. And, you know, I have some pretty amazing people. Men, women, you know, like they're there, they're committed and they do an amazing job. Awesome. Any other big things you'd want us to know before we sign off? Chief Todd? No, I appreciate you bringing me on. And hopefully I was able to answer your questions and give you a little bit more information about the fire service. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This is Inventing Our Future on Think Tech Hawaii. Thank you again, Fire Chief Todd, for joining us. And thank you to you, our viewers, for watching. If you want to get on our email advisories to see a complete listing of all the shows, you can sign up for them at thinktechawai.com. But we will be back in about two weeks. So please tune in to do a deep dive into our G invention. Until then, I'm Brittany Zimmerman.