 Good evening everybody. My name is Ian Larkin. I am the Cal Fire Unit Chief for the San Mateo Santa Cruz Unit. Welcome to the last of two Cal Fire CZU Lightning Complex community meetings that are being held. Tonight's meeting will be presented to Supervisorio District 5 focusing on the San Lorenzo Valley and the communities of Felton, Ben Lohman, Brookdale, Boulder Creek, Zion and Scotts Valley. The first meeting of this two-part series was held last night for Supervisorio District 3 focusing on the Bonny Dune, Davenport and North Coast areas. If you are from a different part of the county, this information that's being provided at each of the meetings is exactly the same presentation. So if you were here last night, you're going to see the exact same presentation that you saw last night. First thing I would like to start out with is a moment of silence in recognition of Mr. Tad Jones who tragically lost his life during the CZU Lightning Complex. Thank you for that moment of silence. I would like to apologize to you all for how long it's taken Cal Fire to hold these community meetings. Normally we would hold these types of community meetings in person and prior to the full control of the incident to allow our Cal Fire incident management team to participate in this meeting. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the precautions that we have to take with that, we were unable to meet that goal. We had come to a point that we could no longer hold off conducting these meetings due to these restrictions. So we found a new platform to deliver this meeting. This meeting will provide an incident summary and lessons learned. It is not meant to be a after-action review. Our presentation is approximately 50 minutes, 5-0 minutes in length, and at the conclusion we will have an answer in question period. We were asking everybody to please hold your questions until the end of the presentation. I know these have been challenging times for us all and I know you all have lost a lot. A lot of you have lost your homes and emotions are high. I would like to say that we are empathetic to your losses as we have also had several of our own firefighters that have suffered these same losses. I'm requesting that all of us be courteous to each other during the question and answer segment so that we can try to get to as many of the questions as possible. I do want to remind everybody that this is a live meeting broadcast on community TV. Now I'd like to introduce our panelists for tonight. Cal Fire Deputy Chief Nate Armstrong will be co-presenting with me tonight. Cal Fire Deputy Chief Jonathan Cox who will be assisting us in the facilitation of the answer in question session. And then from the Sheriff's Office we have Chief Deputy Chris Clark and then from the Santa Cruz County Office of Emergency Services we have Michael B. Supervisor McPherson is listening into this broadcast but will not be participating as a panelist. I'd also like to take an opportunity to thank Community TV for providing us this venue to be able to deliver this meeting. So we're going to go ahead and start off here. I'd like to just start off by painting a picture of what occurred here. So at approximately 3 a.m. on August 16, 2020, a lightning storm made landfall that generated approximately 12,000 lightning strikes across California. That series of lightning strikes caused more than 585 fires across the state of California and of that 24 of those fires became major incidents. 300 plus lightning strikes hit directly here in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. From those 300 lightning strikes we had 27 confirmed fires that had been ignited in the unit from that storm that had passed through. I'm just to kind of paint a picture of our daily staffing here in the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit, better known as CZU. Our staffing consists of 13 fire engines that are staffed on a daily basis during our peak fire season. Two bulldozers. We have three fire crews and then we have four shift battalion chiefs that provide overhead support for approximately 455,000 state responsibility acres or state lands that we protect here in the two counties. Leading up to this we've been experiencing drought conditions for several years as we're all aware of. Recently the weather leading up to the weeks prior to this we had seen temperatures in excess of 100 degrees and our relative humidities had been in the single digits and as low as 4% humidity leading up to the fires. And the week prior to the fire we had no coastal influence that is kind of our helps with our humidity recoveries at night leading up to the fire event. So before I turn the presentation over to Deputy Chief Armstrong, I wanted to just take a moment to be very clear to everybody. So every decision that we make and every action that we take have three main priorities that we make that we use in our decision making process. Those are the protection of life protection of property and environment and in that order. So I just want to emphasize to everybody the last thing that any of us ever wanted to occur in an incident like this is to have somebody die or for people to lose their homes. So when we base our decisions, we base them on those three, those principles and priorities life, property and the environment. So at this point, I'll turn the presentation over to Deputy Chief Armstrong. Good evening everybody is Chief Larkin said my name is Nate Armstrong the deputy chief for Cal fire here in the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit overseeing our state operations and overall operations with within Santa Cruz County for us. So, I want to take you guys through just some operational kind of components in the early days the first couple of days of the fire really before it grew into what everybody knew it to be. So, this whole lightning siege really started for us kind of the day before on August the 15th. What you're seeing on the screen right now is are the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit lightning plan and we won't go into massive detail on this it's just to illustrate. We do have a plan for events just such as this and we call it now see a lightning coordination area plan. So basically what it does is it breaks things down for us to go into a different mode from our day to day operations and really be able to track multiple strikes, get folks out to assess those strikes and hopefully be able to staff any small fires and keep them small. So, the day before, like I say on August 15 we knew that this lightning was coming. We didn't know to the extent that it would be but just to reinforce the everybody we had sent that sent out this plan made sure everybody was refreshed on it knowing that we would likely be following the next day. And we absolutely did. We followed the plan to a T. It was well implemented. It was well exercised. Unfortunately, we just didn't have the resources to fully staff all of the things like we would have wished. So that that's all really go just want to touch on this lightning plan really quick. So, early morning, Sunday, August 16. By the time we got up or about 600 in the morning, or sorry, 6am. We had 27 fires active fires in the unit. We were receiving hundreds of 911 calls. And I'm sure some of the folks on on this call tonight may have been you may have seen a smoke plume and called 911 so typically what happens is as the sun comes up, more people are getting up these smoke plumes we get to be more visible and we get dozens if not hundreds of calls per fire so significant strain on our system. Early that morning, our duty chief for the unit instituted what we call a staffing pattern and that was to hold all of our personnel on duty. That would be the beginning of what was well over a month before most folks had a single day off. So we held all our personnel on duty. We staffed every extra piece of equipment that we had from reserve engines to county engines that we administer through contracts. We also called all of our volunteer companies that Cal Fire administers and Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties and just just to have them staff their equipment as they were available because we knew we were going to need the help. Obviously, our local cooperators throughout the county were also involved as we started to fight some of these fires. It got down to the extent where we had folks in pickup trucks with hand tools just really get people out to find these fires and really assess what we had. The next slide please chief. So what I want to illustrate a couple of things with this slide so the photo that you're looking at is with the exception of one that I should have added but it's too late now so I'll tell you about it. These are all the fires that most people that are on the call tonight probably never heard of. These are all the fires that we extinguished within about the first 24 hours so most of the fires were small we were able to catch them. We were able to contain them and put them out or at least get them in those early stages. And a couple of notable fires on here. If you can see the three dash 11 right there on chief's cursor. That was in the community of Zionty. That was a little better than 10 acres it was in a very well populated area. And our Cal fire resources Zionty fire protection district. We're on that fire for a couple of days but that was extinguished or contained at least in the in the first day. The three dash 10 was in the China Great area. Again that was that was that was in a semi populated area that was that was an almost immediate threat to structures but that was also extinguished in the first day. The fire that didn't make this map it was the where an elephire. And that is just south of that three dash 22 on the on the north coast, north of Davenport. That was probably the most immediate threat. Aside from that three dash 11 to the communities of Davenport and I'm sorry, Bonnie doing that was about 120 acres by the time we contained it the next day. But that was fully contained by the time that this fire really blew up to what most people know so anyway like I said just like to illustrate the point of the big fire that everybody came to know was really out of three fires that grew together the vast majority of them were extinguished. The other thing I want to touch on really quick while we're on this slide is the name, because we've got a lot of questions about the name how do we come with CZU August lightning complex. So, there's 21 operational units throughout the state of California for Cal fire. The San Mateo Santa Cruz unit that we're all in here is called CZU it's a three letter identifier that all the units have so when we have a multiple fires that we manage under one structure. It's called a complex so you can see the number of fires that are on this map we can't, you know, name each and every one of those things so we group all together, and we call and for this. It was called the CZU August lightning complex so just a little semantics but we get asked quite a bit so I figured and cover it. The next slide please chief. So, this is one other fire that semi should have been on that map that I just showed you this is the Waddell fire. And this picture was taken from San Mateo County looking south on highway one. And if you aren't terribly familiar with the area this was just north the Waddell Creek drainage the Rancho de los Aurea. This fire was actually the most immediate threat, if you will grant it wasn't a looming threat by any means because it was a small slow growing fire, but this was the closest fire to the communities of last chance. We had this fire staffed from the first day on the 16th. And we had it nearly contained we had folks on it, like I say continuously, and it was almost contained on the 18th. When all of when those three other fires really grew into into the large fire. And unfortunately we had to pull the resources off of the Waddell fire to go help fight fire in last chance. So moving into Monday, August 17. What we really had was, there were those handful, there were a bunch of those little small fires that unfortunately we still have to have some sort of resource on. We can't just walk away from fires after they're deemed out we really need to patrol them for a day or two to make sure that they don't come back. When when no other resources are around. So we do our best to spread those resources out sometimes an engine can patrol two or three fires. But what we really had on on day two on the 17th was five fires that we were staffing in a larger capacity, two of those being the where and Ella and the Waddell fire. And then the other three were in San Mateo County in uninhabited forested areas. And you can see here on this map, two of those fires named under that that lightning complex plan was the five dash 15 and the five dash 18. The other one that's off this map that does come into play as the five dash 14 those are the three that really grew in merged and grew to be the large fire. So all of these fires were 80 plus acres anywhere from 800 or sorry 80 to 200 acres. With the exception of those two that were on the on the Santa Cruz County coast, these ones that were out in the forest and lands of San Mateo County were really inaccessible. They're all in heavy timber. They were all moving at a slow rate of spread at this time on the 17th still. The one major thing and you're going to continue to hear it was we had limited resources we really had a limited capacity to actually staff these fires. So moving into the 17th, we actually had the same folks that had been up since 3am on the day before on the 16th are still staffing these fires on the 17th because we just couldn't get enough resources in into the county due to the drawdown throughout the state. So we were placing large resource requests. Unfortunately, those requests largely went unfilled again just because of the volume of fires throughout the state. One thing I'll indicate. So this map that you guys are looking at is the actual branch director or field supervisors map that he was using that day. And you might be able to see that pink outline that kind of surrounds those two fires and that goes along some ridges other topographical features and roads that that was his plan containment. And that was what he felt that if he had the resources that he needed. This is what this this would be a reasonable containment box to to contain this fire. Unfortunately, we just didn't have those resources available to us. So here's just an aerial photo one thing we did get on the 17th. We had the ability to get a couple of helicopters here which was really pretty impressive because there weren't a whole lot available in the state and we were lucky to get them. Just because of the inaccessibility of these fires we knew that aircraft was going to be critical if we could just help keep these fires at bay until we can get ground resources on them. So, in this photo, you can see just by that smoke production it was it was an understory burn. So, what we mean by that is that's all that ground litter and fuel basically all the dead things that have been falling out of trees for dozens, going on nearly 100 years because a lot of this area doesn't have recorded fire history we don't have record of wildfires in those areas so that's all that stuff that's laying on the forest floor. That's actually a good thing in this respect you can see that next bullet point is where it says no crowning. So we talked about with a crown fire is not just a single tree burning or one or two trees burning. But that's when all of the tree tops are burning and it's going for it, you know, very quickly from tree to tree to tree to tree. The crowning is really the activity that some folks unfortunately saw late the night of the 18th or moving into the 19th even a little bit still in the 20th. Those crown fires are moved so rapidly and forcefully that there's nothing we can do about them until that fire comes back down to the ground. Unfortunately, on the 17th, one thing that further hampered our ability to get additional resources was that there's there were some other fires in the Bayer and I'll talk about them at the end of the presentation. But they really grew exponentially we had a fire to the east of us in Santa Clara, as well as a fire that was rapidly expanding in the North Bay area. In Sonoma County that were in that fire particularly is a well populated area already. And so that really drew some resources that would not become available to us. Next slide chief. So again on the 17th, having those helicopters available to us is a great tool. It gave us the ability to get in the air and get some good aerial reconnaissance. So we're able to fly the fire is and really see their locations and what the threats were at that time and what the projected threats were to be over the next couple of days. At that point, we can tell those fires in the forested lands we're going to give us some some challenges to get into once we could get the resources pulled off of these other smaller fires. We knew that we were going to be committed to those for for at least a few days or so we thought. And so we requested a type three instant management team. That day and that that instant management team is a interagency team of individuals here in the South Bay area. And the main focus of that is just to help us with some of the planning and logistical functions as far as tracking resources putting together our daily plans supporting the firefighters logistically with all the tools and supplies and everything that they need. We continued to request additional resources between Monday the 17th and moving into the morning of the 18th, where the fire would eventually blow up that evening. We had resource resource requests for over 150 fire engines that we would never get. So, on the 17th, we're also beginning to engage a little more heavily with the sheriff's offices. County administrative offices and OS functions for both counties, knowing that this would likely be a lasting event. Still at this time, those fires just weren't moving fast and you'll see in a couple of our progression slides that those first couple days for the amount of fires we had just wasn't a ton of acreage at least not in in our minds. Next slide, Chief. So here's a map of the five fires that we had that day on the 17th that were still active for us. You can see the where and I let down the very bottom of the map there. I don't know if it's covered by your guys little zoom functions. You can see the Waddell on that North Santa Cruz County coast. And then you can see those three fires that I've been mentioning that really grew it merged grew together to be the large fire so on the 17th still they were they were still in San Mateo County they're relatively small. I'll show you a graphic in a minute that shows that the topography they were sitting in it was actually pretty favorable for us. The three fires that 514 1518 were the ones that would really grow to give us a lot of trouble. They were also at that point near populated areas of San Mateo County so those were were really we were keeping an eye on at that point. So a couple of things with this map number one, I hope that you guys can kind of ingrain this map in your mind, because we're going to show you this map a couple other times throughout the presentation as the fires begin to grow. And it might help you kind of gain a grasp of just how much they were growing each day. Again, you see the where and now on the Waddell and you see those three fires now those couple that the five dash 18 and the five dash 15 or those ones furthest on the north. And this is a topographical relief map so it shows us like mountains and valleys and so forth. And what we see with this map is those two fires are sitting on the lee side of that ridge, and they're just slowly backing down again, we showed you those pictures but they were slowly backing down through that ground fuel and just down into that little river drain I believe that's the pescadero creek drainage. And you can see that that day that was a total of 861 acres at that point on the 17th. Next slide sheet. So I'll hand it back to Chief Larkin here in a second he'll take you through the next couple days of the fire. I believe you with this photo. This was taken late in the day on the 17th. So this is just about 24 hours before the fire really began to merge and really begin to move quickly and into our populated areas, particularly into the San Lorenzo Valley and Bonnie Dune. And what we can see from this photo, like I said it's still it's that understory burn. It's fairly fairly cleanly in that we don't see a lot of crowning in this one thing that we do see in this is that smokes really starting to lay down and granted this was taken in the evening when that offshore wind would pick up. But it was really starting to lay down and that does a couple of things for us it one it's an indicator that eventually we would see that when would really pick up and drive the fire. And what happens with that when the smoke lays down is it makes it difficult for us to fight fire with aircraft, just where when they aren't able to see and get into particular areas so just another challenge we had to deal with. And without turning back to you, Chief. Thanks chief Armstrong. So I'm going to kind of carry you through the next couple days on the 18th. The three fires that were burning in San Mateo County that we had referenced 518 513 and 514. They continue to burn in a southerly direction. As you can see indicated in this picture, and mostly it was still an understory burn we did have some isolated trees that would torch out. But for the most part the fire was still on the ground. It had not reached into the canopies. But we did notice that the fire did start to burn in a little bit greater intensity here on the 18th. And based on these indications here. I just want to give retrospect to, you know, how fire has a six incident management teams that help us manage these large scale incidents, multiple teams that already been deployed in the state on other fires that were much larger in size than what we were dealing with here in the unit. We'd already had our type three incident management team that had helped stand up our organization here. But we went ahead and make the request for type one incident management team to come into the unit to help facilitate the management of this incident as our complexity started to grow. So as we progressed on the 18th fire activity started to increase throughout the day, we started to see much more fire activity, as well as we started to experience spot fires in multiple areas, which is a great concern of ours. As Chief Armstrong had mentioned, each operational period we have resource requests to go out, and those resource requests were basically unfilled. So we have folks that are still on the line at this point of the morning of the 18th that had been out there from the very beginning, the early morning of the 16th. So they're running on 48 plus hours of being on the line. And it really started to hit us as a safety concern. So we did have to make a decision, whether to leave folks out there or pull them off the line. And we did have to pull some of our resources off the line so that we could get them some adequate rest and get them some food so that we didn't get any of our firefighters hurt. As I said, we started getting multiple spot fires. And as the day progressed, we talked about this map. So the increase in acreage overnight from the 17th to the morning of the 18th. The fire had grown approximately 4700 acres. As you saw in those pictures before with the smoke laying down. It really was a difficult indicator of trying to get a good accurate spot of how far the fire had actually burned to the south. But with ground resources in place and what aerial aircraft we had mainly helicopters that we were able to fly on the fire in the perimeter. Due to the smoked out conditions we were able to ascertain that these were what our approximate perimeters were. On this day, as you can see to the very far south, the war now a fire had little to no growth, but the Waddell fire had some growth but at that time we had what we anticipated to be adequate resources to try to contain that fire. As the day progressed on the 18th, the fire continued to grow in intensity. And it started to have a greater concern to the point where we had engaged with both of our Sheriff's departments in both counties on the evacuation processes and what was going to need to take place for those to occur. And those evacuation orders were initiated on the 18th. It started in San Mateo County as that had the most immediate need and that San Mateo County Sheriff's department started those evacuation process. In the meantime, we were working with Santa Cruz County Sheriff's department on our evacuation plan, putting that in order and getting those notifications out to the residents. I just want to kind of backpedal just a short bit here with this picture. This is a picture of Cloverdale Road looking back to the south from the Pescadero area. And then you can see that we were starting to get increased fire buildup of the fire as the day progressed. This is another photo a little bit later in the day, just about before dusk. You can see that we were starting to get those increased fire runs on the perimeter of the fire and the interior where these three fires are starting to burn together and consume all that fuel and put up that significant column of smoke. And all along this time evacuation orders were being initiated, reverse 911s were going out. And this is a little bit later in the evening on the 18th. As I said evacuation orders had already been initiated in the Boulder Creek area upper Bonnie Dune, the north coast, as well as the ridge line of skyline, because we weren't really sure where this fire was going to pick up and run to. If you're very familiar with that area it has very deep terrain and that fire could have ran in multiple directions. Firefighters, like I said had already been double shifted. We had put them down to bed them down for rest for safety purposes. But at this point we had to make a very, very difficult decision on what was the priority. The priority was life safety. We had evacuations initiated. So we made the decision to wake all those firefighters out of bed and put them back out on the line fire continue to make runs to the south. This evening, as you can see on the picture on the right, or I'm sorry on the left of your screen is a picture looking up from upper 236 above Big Basin. As you can see significant fire runs were occurring. And then if you look at the picture to the right, that's a picture from Pillar Point Harbor, looking back to the south so you can see how that fire had made a significant runs during that period of time. So I'm going to show about a 16 second video for you all. This video may trigger some traumatic events or rehashing for some of the folks that may have been in an area where the fire was pretty significant. So I just want to make sure that if you do not want to view the video. If you can please turn off your sound and look away for about 16 seconds as I played this video. This video is of Big Basin State Park headquarters. We had those engine companies that were woken up out of bed were sent up into this area to help evacuate the campground. There are Big Basin and their escape group actually got cut off and this is just a short video of the fire conditions that they encountered. So it was pretty significant there with the amount of fire that was in and around Park headquarters as they were trying to protect what structures they could, but due to the fire intensity, most of those structures were destroyed. This is another photo of about 2am and the conditions that were out in the last chance area. As you can see pretty significant crews out there trying to protect what structures they could. They had actually been pulled from the Waddell fire to be redeployed over to the last chance area to try to protect as many structures as they possibly could. So as I had said we had requested on the 18th the Cal Fire Incident Management Team during the day of the 18th the team was en route. They got into the CZU unit. We had done a debrief with them or what we call an in brief with them. We had basically given them the lay of the land. We had integrated a lot of their operational staff to go out and get the lay of the land and work with our current operational staff that was out on the ground to become more familiar with what was what was happening. One of the things that that took place that significantly changed the environment from the day before is we had a significant fire event we had the fire spawning six miles in front of itself. The fire burned more than 43,000 acres in that 24 hour period. So the team came in and inherited a situation that was much different than what we had the morning before when we had actually requested them. This is a picture from an old wildfire camera located up in the Bonnie Dune area. It's located off Patrick Drive. And just a note here is the timestamp on this camera. It's August 19 and around 1122 at night. And those are just some indications of what those fire conditions were when that fire went through that area. So as I said, we talked about that original topographical map that we showed and I just want to point out these dark green areas. So those were those initial three fires that cause some significant concerns that actually eventually burned down into this area burnt together and what progressed down to the south into Santa Cruz County and into the San Lorenzo Valley and the north coast. It was a consumption of just over 43,000 acres in that 24 hour period. So this is just another indication on the 20th of what conditions we had fire had progressed was continued to progress in the southerly direction. And as you can see had significant buildups full consumption of fuel in that area and was making significant runs into the Bonnie Dune and down into. The ridge line above Boulder Creek all the way down into the Ben Lohman area as it made its way south. So by August 20 evacuations were in full swing. They will continue to all the way into August 22. During that period of time over 77,000 people had been notified to an order to evacuate. This was the only option we had at this time due to our consistent lack of resources and not getting orders to fill. We had no resources to really get in and try to do perimeter control or structure protection. It was more so to try to get folks out and take action where we could to make any progress on the fire until we got additional resources in a few days later. So looking at the 20th that growth between the 19th and 20th still had a significant fire growth that day was about 15,300 acres. It's indicated in that lighter green the fire was still pushing to the south. We did have some increases on the north coast, but the fire was primarily moving and continue to push to the south. On the 21st, as you can see, fire progression was still moving. Some of this area over here and this is where it was dropping down into Felton and Ben Lohman where we were just starting to get resources in to really help us with that suppression effort and getting a perimeter control around here. On the 22nd, you can see that the growth was really starting to subside at that point. And then this is just real quick, a summary of the progression of the fire from the start until the, I believe it's a 26. So I'm going to start this progression here. It'll start out with a bunch of red dots. Sorry about that. It'll start with a bunch of red dots. Those are the lightning strikes that had started fires. Then it'll progress to some underlay colors that will give you the perimeters of each day. So those are the big progression days. As you can saw, it had that large progression and then it continued to progress out over the next few days. Small progressions as we got more resources in and starting to get our perimeters in. So as you can see the perimeter control had really subsided and we had not full containment but pretty good containment on it as of the 28. This is another progression I'm going to show you. This was just a progression of the evacuations as we, those evacuations were conducted and the fire perimeter will be underneath that progression for the evacuations. These are strictly evacuations that we're capturing here. This is fire kind of building up and as you start to see those red and orange boxes, those are the evacuation zones that were ordered to evacuate based on the day. So the yellow indicates that those are evacuation warnings and the red is evacuation orders, which were carried out during this process. Pretty quick here, you'll start to see some green show up and that is part of the repopulation where we started allowing residents back into their homes based on the perimeter control and the safety that we felt that the fire was not going to progress any farther to the south and to the east. It took a while for us to get the evacuation orders lifted. Obviously, there was a significant amount of infrastructure that was damaged during this fire. And that had a lot to do with us being able to get folks back in because we needed to make it safe for everybody once they got back into the area. So, and as of today, we still only have one zone that is in a mandatory evacuation. And that is, you can see here this didn't progress all the way to the end, but is the one zone in Big Basin State Park, which is still closed as the highway is closed. So we still show it remaining closed. I would that I'll turn it back over to Chief Armstrong. So, I just want to spend the next couple of minutes or next couple of slides going over a little bit of information on our resources that we did have or or or lacked for this event and the one thing. You know, that's a constant thing that we've heard is that we didn't have enough stuff on this fire and what you're hearing from us tonight is that we absolutely agree. Chief Larkin I agree wholeheartedly we did not have enough resources of pretty much any type on this fire and we knew that from the beginning we were constantly trying to get additional resources in. So what I want to go over with this slide was just as a handful of things where you're looking at is a couple of things the daily progression of the acreage the daily progression of the containment and the total number of personnel actually assigned to the incident. One thing I like to have people note on the total number of personnel assigned is that's the total number of personnel assigned. Remember that you know our firefighters typically work 24 hours on 24 hours off because they have to have some sort of rest at some point so so they rest a day and come back out for the first couple of days of this fire that they weren't getting that they were they were on it. But the other point of that total personnel assigned there's a percentage of that that's not actually firefighters on the line to that's folks that are that are supporting the operations and everything. Those are assigned to the fire but not on the fire line. The other thing I like to point out is the containment. As I mentioned at the beginning of this we base all incidents whether it be a vehicle accident has met a small fire a large fire. We have three instant priorities that we go in order life safety property environment and until we take care of protecting the life safety of ourselves and the citizens. We can move on to protecting property and resources. Yes sometimes we can do that together. But as a significant life threat we have to address that so for the first couple of days of the fire and into the evacuations when we still had a lot of folks in those populated areas. They shift our mindset a little bit and making sure that they're safe before we can really protect the homes. So, like I said we were we were taxed on resources. We were taxed all of our volunteer companies. All the local agencies from the Valley Agencies of Boulder Creek Ben Lohman Felton were all engaged in structure defense with these. All of our other local cooperators like Santa Cruz City Scott Valley. Everybody was on this fire, especially the night that it really blew up on the 18th. The city departments essentially had like one engine left in Santa Cruz protecting the entire city and so forth so they were giving us everything they had it just wasn't enough. And the other thing, and I'm sorry I didn't mention it in an earlier slide if a lot of you folks have been here long enough you're familiar enough with the geography. That day that the resources that we had on on the fires, they were out on logging roads in the San Mateo forest, essentially so when this fire got up and ran towards the Boulder Creek and the rest of the San Lorenzo Valley. And these resources weren't on the fire line they had to drive all the you know come off the line drive down highway one and come in so there was some lag time so that's when we're really bringing in, we were calling in everybody that we had and chief larkin might go over that as well when he mentions when he talks about the mutual aid system so we had we had absolutely everything available to us at the time from the local agencies. The mutual aid system in California, we're highly reliant on that mutual aid system so a lot of folks don't realize Cal fire at its peak of fire season which we were in at this time has 356 fire engines that's it. It really doesn't seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things that statewide, not all 356 of those fire engines can go to every single fire so one thing we've heard a lot is that you know it was X number of days before I saw Cal fire engine. That's because we're highly reliant in these large fires on that mutual aid system and getting those local government agencies from throughout the state to help us out. Unfortunately, there's a lag time right for what you guys can hop in your car and drive three hours away that takes us a day or two. For those departments to be able to backfill resources and still protect their community but but send resources to help us so while that mutual aid system is great. Remember they were taxed to because there's all these fires statewide and everybody's asking for the same stuff. And by the end of this incident, we would have crews from the National Guard on it. We had out of state resources. We had the furthest away was New Jersey. So we had folks from Arizona, Colorado all over the place but had firefighters from New Jersey. By the end of this, and if you think that's that doesn't take a little while to get it absolutely does. Next slide please chief. So this is just a snapshot. And granted, this is August 23. This isn't, you know, the day that our fire really blew up on the night of the 18th. But if you look at the start time on on the start date on a lot of those fires, they were right about the same time as ours. And we show you this to emphasize. So this is all the fires throughout the state that we were what we say in competition for resources. And so there's a statewide system. There's a statewide system that's implemented during fire season, when there's a lot of fires going on, and it's cooperators from the state, federal and local levels that prioritize fires for resources. And there's several factors that go into that from the size in acres to the potential size, you know, life structure and infrastructure threats and so forth. And so for the first three days, the 1617 to 18. We were in that pool with everybody else and that's that group has a very regimented way that they rank these fires, and we were number three in the state. So we weren't going to get everything that we asked for, which is, which is clear. We were number three in the state. The day of the 19th we became number one. So that doesn't get us anything but just to show you that there is a process to this and we're kind of at the mercy of that process sometimes. Go ahead and advance forward there chief. So one thing I do like to show here is. We were strapped for resources. We absolutely agree. But when I started, you know, talking to folks at these other fires and started realizing our priority. We put this together. And this is just shows our fire this easy August lightning fire as well as some neighboring fires that we were in competition for resources. That fire below us going on that left hand column is the Santa Clara lightning complex. That was to the east of us in Santa Clara County, I believe in the end in the Stanislaus County. The LNU lightning complex was the North Bay area, Sonoma, and you can see, I don't have anything for the first three days because they were just handling that fire on their own. They had a large unit they have a ton of resources available. And they were kind of managing that on their own for it started working out yet. And then the final fire on the bottom there is the river fire that was in Monterey County, just to the south of us so just a couple of things to note like on the on the 16th, our fire was sitting at 300 acres. The Santa Clara just the east of us. I'm sorry, the river fire to the south of us, almost seven times the size of our fire and we had more fire engines than they did just barely but but we did moving into the 17th. The Santa Clara fire was sitting at 861 acres. The Santa Clara fire that east of us was almost four times our size but we had four times as many fire engines with just many crews and we actually got a couple of helicopters that day, whereas they had none. Just skipping ahead past the 18th. The couple of things to note on the 19th. Our fire isn't the only one that grew exponentially that day. Yeah, it grew huge. But if you look at that Santa Clara fire it went from 35,000 acres to 102. And that river fire that a little bit smaller everyone from 4500 to 15,000 so all these fires grew at an exponential rate that night of the 18th and in the morning of the 19th. But specifically on the on the 19th. Again, if you look at our fire at 49,000 acres that Santa Clara fire was twice the size of ours and we had three times the number of bulldozers twice as many fire engines more hand crews three times many helicopters and so forth so I could go on but the picture I'm trying to paint is, we absolutely agree. We wanted my partner Jonathan puts it well we wanted firefighters coming in by the by the thousands, and we were getting them by the 10s or the hundreds at best which he saw in that that previous graph I showed you so. Unfortunately, it a draw down like this that we experienced it was it was just so hard to get back to you chief. Thank you chief Armstrong and so just to just to give a quick recap summary of the events that led us up to this point. So, we had during our incident. We had put out over 112 informational press releases for the incident. And one of the things that we once the team got here we got really established. One of my priorities and one of my objectives for the team was to make sure that information was fresh and available. So we were doing a two day instant briefings at 6am and 6pm. We were making sure that all the social media outlets that we utilize Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, next door were all fully functional and activated. One of the most sad parts about this fires we did have one civilian fatality out in the last chance area. We evacuated over 77,000 people between the two counties, which was a monumental task, and to only have one civilian fatality is a testament to our sheriff's office for being able to get these folks out and get that messaging ready to leave the area. The final acreage of the fire was 86,509 acres. 63,000 of that was in Santa Cruz County. And the remaining portion of that was in San Mateo County at 22,755 acres. There was 1490 structures destroyed in this fire. 1,431 of those were in Santa Cruz County. And of that 911 of those in Santa Cruz County were single family dwellings. At the peak of our fire, we had just over 2400 firefighters assigned. The peak was very fast before we started to see a decline due to those other fires in the state that started to break out after our fire hit started starting to draw resources away pretty quickly based on the priorities and our success in getting contained in the resources here to accomplish that. This is the largest fire in Santa Cruz recorded history. So that was something very significant that none of us ever wanted to see, but it happened. During this fire we had infrastructure affected significantly. We had bridges destroyed power lines and our telecommunication infrastructure was damaged pretty heavily during this fire. We remained on this incident for months. And just in our last few months in January, even with the wind events we had here, we still had some areas out in the remote areas of the fire in the well interior areas where we had fires that popped up where there's still hot material out there that hasn't fully burnt out yet or been fully extinguished in by the rain. So we've been out there trying to contain those areas and make sure that those were out during that period of January when we have those storms that came through. And, you know, we burnt 100 acres in the month of January, which is unheard of for us here in Santa Cruz County. And then the fire is the cost tag price tag for was a little bit over $68 million to fight the fire. And one of the key elements here is that we exhausted all of our local resources. I'm the OES operational area coordinator for Santa Cruz County. And during this fire, we had engaged all of our local operators throughout the county to assist us with this fire and our local fire agencies in the neighboring counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara to provide resources to us. It got down to the point where we were calling backdoor road deals and calling our neighbor to the East and saying, Hey, can you just give us a few engines for the night so we can try to protect structures and they would say, Hey, I can give you a few engines, they would send them on over. And we would be the good partner and we would let those engines go back at the end of that requested timeframe but they were very instrumental in helping us with specific task oriented suppression efforts on this fire. So this is just an aerial photo of the burnt aftermath, looking back from the south towards the north. Just a devastating fire and consumed a lot of forested land, a lot of homes that are in the rural environments, just a devastating fire. You know, the sheer lack of resources. Honestly, I think that if we could have gotten a lot more engines here a lot sooner, it would have been a much different story. And as we paint that picture of the lack of resources, which I'm going to cover here in just a minute when I talk a little bit about lessons learned. I was the initial attack I see on the Lockheed fire, which was burnt about 8000 acres in 2009. And during that fire. The next morning when I walked into briefing, we had about 800 fire personnel at our briefing that morning. As you saw in our presentation, our next morning briefing consisted of about 300 total people on the fire. And it was spread out in a much more geographical area, but within 72 hours we had over 1500 people on the Lockheed fire. Here it took us almost 12 days to have that number of people on this fire so that just gives a sure sure testament of the drawdown of resources statewide. So, moving on to our lessons learned. So, when we look back at this fire, one of the key indications that we look back on is our fuel conditions. So our fuel conditions have never presented us with this type of fire conditions in the history of the 100 years of recorded fire history that we have here in CZU during the CZU lightning complex. This is continued years of drought and climate change. This is requiring us to have to revisit how we look at our fuels. We have been noted here on the central coast to kind of be the asbestos for us. Fires just don't burn here because of our mild climate and the high fuel moistures we get due to our great rain seasons that we have here. But we haven't experienced that in many, many years. So it's really having an effect and how we are going to look at our fuels moving forward with those conditions and how they're going to carry fire and how we make decisions based on that. The lightning event. As we indicated, we have a lightning coordination plan that was was implemented as it was designed. Everything worked as it was. We exercise that plan. We had resources out as we said some of them in pickups with shovels out trying to contain as many of these these 27 fires that we had. We had engaged our local cooperators. You know, I know we had a folks from Boulder Creek and Zion out on fires for multiple shifts to help contain these fires in a small area. Well, these fires that were in the more remote areas. We had more difficulty in because we actually had to cut our way into those fires because there is really a limited access to that. But the one thing that our lightning plan, we weren't able to do. We weren't able to execute that plan as it was designed because of the lack of resources. So the design is you search out and find these small fires and you bombard it with resources. Put the fires out where they're small and everything's good. But that's the one thing that we're we're looking back at that and the lack of resources really made a difference there. Evacuations. This is another big item that we're looking at and how we reference our evacuations based on our fuel conditions. You know, these rates of spread that we saw in this fuel that we've never seen burn like that in this area of the state is really having to we're having to look back at that and say, based on what we've seen and what we know, evacuations will need to be considered and conducted much better. Much earlier in fire events in the future so that we can get people out of harm's way in the event that we have the lack of resources, but also the consideration is is, these are narrow mountainous roads that we all live in in this area. And it's difficult to get large number of people out in a very quick period of time. And that's one of the things that we're considering now. And then infrastructure failures, you know, with the damage it was it was caused prior to the, or during the lightning event, there was a lot of trees that were blown down and infrastructure was damaged in power lines, as well as telecommunication during that. That had significant impacts on our ability to communicate with public, you know, the infrastructure, you know, in the far remote areas of the rural communities or even some of the just just remote areas of the community. All that stuff is ran on battery backups, a lot of it. And that infrastructure is old and it hasn't probably been maintained probably to level it should be. But those batteries don't last as long as they do and those systems start to fail much earlier in this event, as we saw, and then the damage that sustained just in the fire in itself. That really hampered our ability, like I said to notify the public so we're looking at what things we can do to provide that notification much earlier in that process. The Code Red system, which is our county reverse 911 system, one of the things with reverse 911 systems there are an opt in system. So in order to be a part of that reverse Code Red 911 system, you have to actually physically go in and register in that system to receive those alerts on your cell phones and things of that nature. So that's really troublesome because there wasn't a whole lot of folks in the county that had actually went in and registered. I think the number was about 17,000 county wide that had registered for Code Red prior to the fire. The other thing that we found with Code Red is evacuations were in progress. The reverse 911 system, which is handled through a netcom, which is our regional dispatch center in Santa Cruz, they found that the system had a throttle on it so it would not allow the number of calls to go out as what we anticipated. So they were able to work with the vendor and get that throttle increased to expedite those calls and get more calls out more timely during the incident. I'm going to talk a little bit about the California mutual aid system. I know Chief Armstrong talked about it, but California has a robust mutual aid system, fire mutual aid system. And during times like this, we had 12,000 lightning strikes that caused 585 fires, 24 of those fires became major events that basically drew all those available resources in. And when we talk about the system in place that prioritizes how resources are allocated, this is all part of that mutual aid system and how those are allocated. And as Chief Armstrong indicated, we were number third on that allocation, but you got to remember we weren't number three until almost three days into this lightning event, which a lot of those resources had already been deployed to other fires in the state. We were getting some resources, but they were coming in very, very small increments at that time. Our evacuation platform. So the Santa Cruz County has a evacuation management platform. This platform was developed after the summit Martin traving and Lockheed fires of 2008 and 2009. This version of the platform was used to initiate our evacuations. And but very quickly we found we were in the process of transitioning to a new platform called zone haven. We were able to transition seamlessly to the zone haven platform, which brought us a few new items that we could do we actually had visible items that were available to the public. Almost instantaneously, when we were evacuating the zone, the zone would be changed and it would allow more of a public facing side of what was actually going on as far as evacuations. And you know that was used both those systems were used in the successful and safe evacuation of over 58,000 Santa Cruz County residents and 19,000 San Mateo County residents. Fuel reduction efforts are fuel reduction efforts have been very difficult to achieve. I'll be the first to admit it. It's a difficult process in a county like Santa Cruz. Though a lot of work has been done. There's a lot more work that has to be done. And this is going to be require a cooperative effort by all the engagement of all of our communities are resource conservation districts of our fire safe councils and really starting to leverage trying to be able to get some funding here to help with that fuel reduction effort through grants and other funding mechanisms. Our individual property owner, divisible space and inspections, these are called only 100 inspections. These are where we come out and make sure you've got your hundred foot or 30 foot of clearance based on our divisible space criteria. Those inspections aren't where they need to be. And you know really we need to have a greater emphasis on gaining compliance with our residents in that program. Because really at divisible space is key to us being able to provide any kind of structural protection when we do have resources here to provide that protection. Then our fire prevention messaging. You know that's another key one is we probably don't do enough of this and getting information out to the public on what what to be prepared for and how to have a plan and your go bag and the ready set go compliances. And just overall fire prevention messaging of when fire season is coming how to prepare for that and what things to be ready for so we're looking at methods of trying to increase that messaging to better serve the public under those that format. So with that that concludes our presentation with our lessons learned. So we're going to go ahead and start our comment question and answer session here. One thing I will say we do have a time we're going to try to get as many questions in as the time we have remaining. But if for some reason we're unable to answer your question please use the question and answer function within zoom. We are being provided all the questions that are answered or that are asked so that we can provide answers to them, even though we may not be able to get them all asked and answered in the presentation. You can also send comments or questions to an email address that we have made available to you. It's called CZU fire questions all one word CZU fire questions at fire dot ca dot GOV. And that will be monitoring that to help try to answer some questions. You will receive with the email you provided when you registered for the webinar here. You will receive a survey that will have a list of questions and some areas where you can add comment to that so that we can get your feedback that way and try to answer questions if we weren't able to do it. And then lastly, if you, my name is Ian Larkin I'm the unit chief. I provided you my contact number to my office it's area code 831-335-6700. If you have comments or you would like to talk to me directly about a specific question or item, I'd be more than happy to accept your call so with that I'm going to turn this over to Deputy Chief Jonathan Cox to facilitate our question and answer session. Thanks chief. Now we'll have some time to answer questions. You'll be able to speak and ask your question a couple of different ways. Due to the number of questions that we anticipate we are asking that you limit your question to just one. We'd like to you to encourage to use the secondary methods if you have multiple questions, including the survey as well as the CZU fire questions at fire dot ca dot GOV. We'll answer questions in two ways and we'll alternate in between the two. The first is if you use the raise hand function on the phone or the zoom, we will be able to monitor the hands that are raised and call upon you. You'll be unmuted and you'll be able to ask your question. If you dialed in using a phone you can hit star nine and then star six to unmute and mute. The secondary way to ask questions is through the Q&A chat function. If you vote for the question, if someone has the question that you'd like answered, you can vote for it and upvote the questions which we will see at the top and get to. We'll be alternate between the two methods to hear as many questions as possible. Again, if we're unable to get to your question, please be sure to use the Q&A function and we will capture those questions and answer them in a later time. You can also get your question answered by emailing CZU fire questions at fire dot ca dot GOV. All right, this is your opportunity to ask questions and get answers. We just ask again for professionalism and courtesy with your specific questions and note that disruptions will not be tolerated. With that, we will start by answering questions through the raised hand function. And we'll start with Jacqueline Hendricks. Thank you for holding this forum tonight. I really appreciate it. So my question is that on your YouTube channel, you feature a video of the Loma Mara volunteers on scene on August 16th at 1151 of Utano Ridge and San Mateo County. Yet in your presentation tonight you were saying that the fires in that area in those three regions were inaccessible. And how do you kind of justify the difference here in what you're reporting both on your YouTube and in your report tonight. Thank you. Thanks Jacqueline and I'll pass out to Chief Larkin. Jacqueline, thanks for your question. I appreciate it. So most of the fires that were in that general area of San Mateo County, they weren't fully inaccessible. There was a couple of them that had burned down to a couple of access roads up on the Butano. But two of the primary fires had very, very difficult access that we were actually having to cut our way in to those fires. And some of those fires, I'm not sure exactly when the picture had been taken, but the fires had burned down to a couple of the road systems a day into the fire. But the vast majority of them had to be cut into so not necessarily saying they're fully inaccessible, but we did have very difficult access into numerous fires in that area. All right, next question we'll take is from Forrest. What I'm hearing is that there's, there seems to be a big discrepancy between what Cal Fires reporting is fact and what people on the ground experienced this fact. And I'm wondering when there will be an actual public meeting or debrief with the public, where we can actually hammer out what really did and did not happen, and at what time those events occurred. Yeah, Forrest, thanks for your question. So what I can say to that is the information that we're providing is the information that we have. We're not fabricating. We're not information you may be getting maybe coming from different sources that had different experiences. So these are coming from our folks that were on the line and information that we have at our disposal to provide the information we have in this presentation. Thanks for the question. And there are no additional meetings planned at this time. All right, next we will go to Bre driver. Thank you for taking my question. Um, could you please address the local firefighter response and how Cal Fire worked with those resources. Did you work with the Boulder Creek bin loman and felt in fire departments. These were readily available resources that were familiar with the area. And also, will working with local fire departments be a part of future plans, and how will they be involved in the future processes with Cal Fire. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, thank you for the question. And we do work very closely with our local cooperating fire agencies. And as you mentioned, the Boulder Creek bin loman and felt in fire districts. And during this incident, the, all three agencies were brought into unified command. At some point in the early stages, when we were out suppressing the smaller lightning strike fires. All those agencies were actively involved in the assistance and suppressing those fires so we have a great relationship with those folks in all those agencies. And as I said, they were all part of the unified command structure. When the incident escalated so they had an active role in the suppression efforts for the fire. Chief Armstrong, did you want to add anything to that or are you just turning. All right. I'll take one more hand raised question and let's go to MC Dwyer for the next one. Hi, I just want to say I really appreciate getting information from your perspective it does help understand what happened that this fire did literally explode overnight. Just a couple of points on the evacuation strategy through code read. We received an evacuation notice that said there was a fire in Loma Mar. And that on the map that was like so far away. I mean we took it seriously we got out. And I'm really grateful that, you know, there was only one person that died so you know obviously your evacuation worked but I'm just letting you know it was not very specific it said it was an evacuation. We didn't understand the difference between an advisory and a mandatory. So that's just a note. I do want to address something I saw in the Q&A several times. There are a lot of rumors that the local firefighters were overruled by cow fire, and we're not allowed to defend neighborhoods do you can you speak to that. I'm sure I'm unaware of it. So, to answer that question is we were actively engaged I know the local fire agencies had committed resources to the incident through the unified incident command structure, and they had also taken action in their own communities with additional resources to protect assets within their fire districts which is to their to their legal right to do so. And all I can speak to that is they were actively engaged. And I'm unaware of them ever being told that they could not participate so what I can say on the evacuation messaging in the early phases of this, I know some of the messaging may have been confusing. And as it indicated the fire in Loma Mar would have been the fire that actually had made its way and burned down into Santa Cruz those three fires. merged and burned down into Santa Cruz County so we are trying to tighten up that messaging in that process. So I know some of the messaging that went out early on may have been confusing. And that's one of the other items that we are looking at in our evacuation management platform is to provide better education for the public. And as I mentioned we are transitioning to this new platform called zone haven. And in that process, we will be rolling out a know your zone campaign. So to educate folks the public on more what which each of those type of indications mean whether it's a warning or if it's an order. And currently we have an advisory status in place for any of those areas that might have a debris flow consideration so that that's part of our goal here in our fire prevention messaging is to roll that out with our know the zone campaign, along with local cooperating fire agencies that are part of the zone haven product that will be rolled out here in the very near future. Thank you for the question. All right, next question we'll take from the Q&A in the chat and that is from Linda Garfield. If you have the technology to measure moisture content in forest fuels reliably reliably, and are fully aware that we're in a multi year drought and it's scientifically proven climate change. Please explain why Cal Fire was caught off guard by how quickly this fire blew up, particularly when the current weather was as you explained. I'll be happy to field it. Chief Cox Linda thank you for the question. And I think we kind of may have answered in bits and pieces but I'd like to tie it together a little bit. We use all the tools available to us. And one of the most reliable things for us is, or a couple of most reliable things for us, historical data and real time data. So for the first couple days of this fire, like we mentioned, was really burning very, very slow and everything, not real intense fire by any means. And so we had that real time data that we're looking at. Historically, like we said, the fires just haven't seen and you know it's a perception that everybody has that are used to have anyway. The redwood forests were fairly resilient and didn't burn with the intensity that we saw here. We chief Larkin mentioned that you know this fire burn 43,000 acres in less than 24 hours after this fire was over I asked our, our fire captain that tracks the stats and everything and data in the footprints all these fires. And he said, hey, how, how many years do we have to go back to to have burned 43,000 acres and he says it's really easy I already checked never. He said we have 100 years of recordable fire history in the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit and we haven't collectively ever burned 43,000 acres so to answer your question yeah we were caught off guard. And because this fire did something that we had never ever seen before, nobody had in this area. And she had to add to that. Yeah, you know, I was just going to add that, not necessarily being caught off guard. If we would have had adequate resources earlier in the fire, we would have been able to get in and suppress these fires before they were able to grow in size and intensity. What it did catch us off guard is how rapidly they were able to expand we've never seen our redwood forest burn like they did. And it was, it was alarming to us when we saw that and that's in our lessons learned we conveyed that that we are really having to look into the And based on this drought and climate change that we're seeing how we react and how we plan and prepare for that type of event to occur if it ever occurs again. And you got and I think that the key element here is to remember that it's not every day that we get 12,000 lightning strikes to hit California and our resources get drawn down to the, you know, 585 fires and 24 major events And it's not every day that we're going to see that, you know, we, we go back to the lucky fire where we had, you know, 1500 people within 72 hours here to fight that fire and kept it small and we're able to contain it. And what I will revert back to in that that eight year period, or in 2008, or actually 2009 was a lucky is one of the areas that we were able to contain the fire was at a redwood forest. And the fire significantly slowed down when it hit that fuel type so those are the things that we're taking into consideration as we look into the future. All right. Next question and this one kind of gets back to a little bit of the volunteers locally is from Jamie. How did Cal fire protect his station and James and Creek but not the water company next to it or the entire neighborhood next to and around the station. And then can you address the rumors of Cal fire telling BCF D to back down from the fall and leave neighborhood. So, in relation to the James and Creek station so what I can say is in that area that station has a great defensible space around it. There is not much vegetation in and around the building it's got adequate clearances around there so why that station is still standing. We had a resource in and around that area at the time, but I really don't have a good answer to that question, other than, you know, it had good defensible space. It is constructed with a metal roof. So that may have played a factor into that. I don't see reading this question here. As far as the question of having the full. Boulder Creek volunteers back down from falling. Once again, I don't have any direct information and can't confirm. If that actually occurred, I do not know so I cannot answer that question, but I will try and get back to that and I'll know to ask that and see if we can get a response. Next question we'll go to Beth dire it's a four part question. So we'll start number one, we understand the resources from the state for firefighting. This fire was limited. What was the backup plan when resource request went unfilled particularly early in the fire. At the time, what was Cal Fire's policy on using local resources and has that policy changed or might be changed going forward. So that's a lot to feel do you want to feel some of that. Yeah, I'll cover some of that and thank you Beth for the few questions I might be able to cover all these and if not chief will help me out here. So at the time, what was Cal Fire's use. We absolutely use our local resources so I know at least as of the morning of the 18th. We had to local government strike teams. We had two engines and a leader out of our local government here and that consisted of, you know, the city of Santa Cruz, Scots Valley, Central Fire Protection District, and other cooperators so we did have those I believe one of the strike team was a task force but that's semantics. So we absolutely have full engagement of the local resources as much as they were able to offer up the as far as how we're local fire departments integrated in the firefighting efforts. I think that kind of stands we got a little bit more. Like I said, they, everybody offered up what they could in those initial days and that was even before the main body of fire was in the Santa Cruz County. That night of the 18th when the fire blew in Santa Cruz County, our local cooperators were absolutely tremendous they threw absolutely everything they had at it like I said earlier. The major cities that have have three to four fire engines in them at a time dumped everything into to this effort because they knew that we needed it. And then when were they integrated into unified command I'm going to skip past that I'm going to let chief feel because he might remember the exact date, but they were integrated immediately as far as when the fire did come into the community, as far as as far as helping indicate the zones of their communities that needed to be evacuated in that effort. As far as what is Cal fires policy regarding the use of trained volunteers. It's somewhat vague to me. But what I can say is Cal fire administers the Santa Cruz County fire department, and we do have five volunteer companies throughout the county, and they are, they're trained to a high level. And we have to make sure that anybody that will be participating in firefighting is qualified and trained at that level. I know the question has come up of it what seems to be kind of like the old days, almost what the forestry fire departments were founded on where you know the boss would go down to the logging and mining camps and grab any willing body and unfortunately we just can't do that anymore, due to, you know liability and safety of yourselves and those folks. And as far as local cert teams involved by Cal fire and disaster response efforts, including the evacuations and firefighting. None of our local cert volunteers are trained to any sort of firefighting level. And as far as evacuations go, we do have Chief Deputy Chris Clark on the on the line tonight. The evacuation effort is truly a law enforcement function so Chief Deputy Clark might be able to answer that a little bit better. But one thing I can tell you is, while they might be trained to help with evacuations and everything. We probably would not be comfortable putting them in an active fire situation being that they do not have the training protective equipment and so forth and Chief Deputy Clark I don't know if you want to add on that at all. No, thanks, Chief Armstrong we had 100, nearly 200 personnel that next that very next night we had everybody we could the night of, and then a ton tons of personnel the following night, and the fall and the nights to follow so I felt good about our staffing numbers from our evacuation standpoint so hopefully that answered the question. Okay, thanks, Chief Deputy Clark, I just have one, one item to answer that when it comes to the use of local resources. We had agencies, as Chief Armstrong stated, the committed heavy heavy commitments upwards of 75% of their department to helping fight the fire. And, you know, we had we had folks that were coming back, asking to come back from vacation, refusing to leave the line. So, the all out effort of everybody involved, all the agencies here locally in Santa Cruz County, you was a monumental member of, if they were only protecting their own district to the folks that were on the far edges of the lines out in the remote areas. Everybody was putting in 100% effort to try to get these fires under control so that we would be able to bring some kind of safety back to the Alright, our next question is from Brian be were homes slash neighborhoods systematically triaged. You've made clear that you were understaffed, but how did you deal with this fact and optimize the resources you did have. There are numerous reports of engine standing idle. Lastly, can you please give some specific some further specifics on spotting. What was the criteria to prioritize these spot fires, all these answers will go to better to better in future responses. So, let me let me try to break this question out so we're we're neighborhoods systematically triaged. So what I can say is, later in the event when we did get folks in, they were able to actually go in and do some structure triage and actually put you somebody have seen the yellow tags with triangles on them, where folks had went in and actually triaged structures. So what I can say, when we had resources available to do that. They were absolutely out doing that but that was later in the event. As I said, our three priorities are life safety, property and environment. In the early stage of this when this fire rolled down out of the out of the un unpopulated areas into the more populated areas of our rural communities. Our main focus was getting people out of the way and protecting lives. So, that that that was our main focus. And then let me see if I can dig out what else you have here. It's a multiple part question, which I see the next person. So, let's talk about the spot fires. So, yeah, so this fire once the fire got up into the crowns. There was amber cast that was carrying embers well in vans of the main fire that was actually starting smaller spot fires out in front of it that would grow in size and then when the main fire would consume the spot fires of the spot fires were preheating the fuel in front of the main fire, which allowed that fire to grow even much faster so the the I'm not sure what your the prioritization of a spot fire is but when you have no resources to send anywhere to handle additional spot fire somewhere. So, the spot fire is just becomes part of the main fire there is no way to prioritize us until we got additional resources in and could actually start perimeter control which is our obvious primary objective. When we do finally get resources in as well as protecting structure so if you can control the perimeter you can make the fire go out so that those are you know some of our tactical objectives when we start talking about, you know, allocating resources but prioritizing the spot fires. You know that that kind of came with the resources that we had and where we could focus people into that. How do we how do we better our future and responses and to answer that is, you know, I when I can say is history in this county for all the fires we've had with the exception is one fire. We have been able to maintain a small amount of structure loss. We did have the one fate civilian fatality on this fire. But it's because we had adequate resources, we had able to throw a lot of people and equipment at it to suppress these fires and keep them small. In the situations that we were faced with with the sheer lack of resources, even our aerial assets. You know our helicopters the first day, the ridge winds were so high our pilots could not lift off and fly. They attempted numerous times at our request, and it was just too windy for our helicopters to fly. During those first, you know, first day of the fire the 16th and until the morning of the 17th when the winds subsided, we were able to finally get helicopters up in the air, but the fire was laying down on itself. So it did hamper our ability to use aircraft for several days we where we could effectively use it, we implemented it. All right, next question comes to us about fuel and contractors. Diane miss Chi. Please explain Cal fires operational procedures and decisions to require outside flight contractors to sign contracts regarding aviation fuel that they would not be reimbursed, though they are available to make water drops. These outside contractors were offering to assist but they were not allowed to do their requirements of the contracts, though the resources were limited and the state was in the dress. Yeah, that's a that's a difficult question. I'm a little lost on the difference of the flight contractors versus the fuel contractor so what I can say is our, our aviation assets. We have specific purchasing guidelines that are in place with contractors that are certified to provide aviation fuel and aviation fuel that we would need for suppression of the fire or to support that suppression of the fire would already be allocated for all of our resources that we would have, especially our rotary wing, which are our helicopters, all of our aviation assets, air tankers and things, those refuel at an air base so that fuel would be there but to answer your question. Those are contractual things the state on a emergency basis can enter into but I'm unaware of somebody that actually came to the incident base or anywhere where we would have had interaction with them to even make that request so you know it comes down to the contracting and what we can hire under that emergency basis, but aviation fuel, like I said those assets all of our helicopters are hired, what we call wet. They have to provide their own fuel, with the exception of our agency specific ships. And we'll take one more Q&A typed question before we go back to the raised hand feature. This comes from Betsy. It's kind of a fire slash law question. So many residents who know the terrain in the areas and ways into the forests were so willing to be of assistance. Why were locals not utilized. Second part of that is why were locals arrested when they were the ones in their cutting fire breaks in BC. And chief I'll be happy to feel a little bit of that if you don't mind before turning it over or you can but thank you for the question Betsy. One thing I can say we're absolutely using locals with their local knowledge that that are trained firefighters and that were there equipped and part of the system and able to be utilized. Absolutely 100% use that local knowledge. I was there myself utilizing the help of the folks from Bollard Creek Fire Department. As far as allowing local residents into an active fire area and not having them properly trained equipped, etc. not held accountable to any sort of system. We just can't have it because it affects their own safety as well as the overall operation. Like we mentioned before, if we're worried about the safety of somebody else, it's really hard for us to do the rest of the job of protecting the homes and everything. So we were absolutely using all information that was available to us through them as far as locals being arrested. I am myself not familiar with any situation of that sort but unfortunately I'll kick that to Chief Deputy Chris Clark. Yeah, thanks chief Armstrong. No, that's the short answer. We did arrest a number of people obviously for for for victimizing people in the fire area as we said during the event that people were trickling in looking to, you know, do people further harm it and those people were looking for and we found them. And so we did arrest a number of people for looting charges weapons charges but no, we didn't arrest anybody for defending their property. All right, we'll take a raised hand question from Joe. Thank you. With the admitted lack of resources. Why were so many resources allocated to cutting the line to protect the university which was already vacated because of COVID. And it's a state facility and the state has far greater resources to rebuild than the individual homeowner or small businesses throughout the San Lorenzo Valley. Yeah, Joe, thank you for that question so that that contingency line that was put in down near the university. And that was put in with bulldozers. So, the number of resources that were utilized for that specific task were, I believe it was a total of three bulldozers that were used, and they were only there for a period of I believe, one complete shift 24 hours to push that line in and that line was pushed in. If I'm not mistaken on the 18th. That contingency line was put in around that area. And that was mainly to protect the fire as it was moving to the south to try to have a preemptive line in place where we had a fuel type that we could actually get in and actually stop the progression of the fire. The area that that fuel break was put in was in grass. Much easier to fight fire in grass. And that in that line would have potentially held that in check so we could get resources in there to actually stop the front of the fire from progressing any farther into the city of Santa Cruz or down to the university. Thank you for the question. All right, our next question will come from Mary Joe Walsh. Yes, thank you. So I hear a lot of talk about the community members who wanted to help not being properly trained and the bureaucratic reasons. Why someone who is not properly trained would not be allowed back in on the fire line. And I'm wondering both what is the hindsight on our lack of community resilience and our number of volunteers who were equipped to handle it. And what is the plan going forward to eliminate the bureaucratic hurdles that are holding us back from increasing the number of people who are resilient members of our local fire community resilience. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Joe. Thank you for the question. I appreciate that. So yeah, so you know that that's a difficult question to ask a difficult one to answer on top of that. So, you know, it really comes down to having people that are trained for an event. You know, we had a lot of folks that did stay behind, and they were able to save structures, and they were able to do some good work, I would say, but some of that good work comes at a cost, you know, in the midst of the fire. We had a secondary weather event that was predicted. They had predicted thunderstorms to roll through the area. We had a humongous massive fire increase of 43. By that time it was almost 48,000 acres that had ran through areas where it had dirty burn. It did not burn and consume the fuel completely so it ran by so fast that it still had fire burn. And with all the spot fires that we had, if we would have had that weather system come in and we had all these volunteers out there, which we did, and we started getting downbursts that started to blow this fire out even more. We were putting all those people in harm's way. Unfortunately, or I'm sorry, fortunately, the fact is is that weather system did not materialize and fortunately for us, it moved on and didn't cause any significant harm and nobody got hurt. If that would have came through, the unfortunate event would have been, we probably would have had greater civilian fatalities based on that specific premise of that weather event that could have came in. So as we look into the future, you know, that's a difficult question that we need to we need to talk about and find out what is available to us, but we have to put, as an agency, we have to put trained personnel out there that meet certain requirements. If we don't, we open ourselves up for tremendous liability and lawsuits. And we are the bureaucratic government, right, but we have to set balances and check measures in place for us to keep us in line and to make sure that our personnel and the people that we have out on those lines are trained. I'll use the example of a contractor. They, we at times as an agency hire contract crews, hand crews to come in, which I believe on this fire, we actually had a few that may have been here assisting with cutting fire line. All those crews have to meet a minimum standard of training in order to be hired and be put out on the line. So, you know, that's, that's a difficult question as we move and we look and we, you know, we, we, we talk about resiliency and what that looks like. Like I said before, if we had the resources we had available to us to suppress these fires, we would not be having this conversation, right, but we are having the conversation. And can it happen again. There is potential. You know, as we look into the future right now of what our fuel moistures look like present day. Due to the lack of rain. I'm nervous about it as we move in if we don't get more rain. We have serious concerns in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties with what our fire season potentially could look like as we move forward. So those are those are concerns that we all have but the concern we have in greater detail is, you know, life is our number one priority and preserving that and putting somebody in harm's way. It's just not something that I'm willing to do. All right, next question is from Martin B. Martin, you'll need to unmute yourself to ask your question. Sorry, I don't meet myself. I wanted to thank you guys for holding this meeting and I really appreciate everything that Cal Fire did. I do, I do have some questions that are kind of on a macro level. It has to do with overall California budget. As I'm learning about fires and fires in California and how the insurance industry it seems like after the paradise fire, they realize that there were some problems and they had to change some rules. We had the car fire and Reading the fire in Santa Rosa fires in Southern California. So lots of fires and we heard our senators say on a debate stage in March, how our state is on fire. And that was before our fire in Santa Cruz. And so part of my I guess part of my problem or part of my question would be. I noticed that our governor just recently had his budget come across for the coming up fiscal year, and he had five bullet points. And the last bullet point was to add $1 billion towards Cal Fire. And so do you think that that is enough money to help the state or is that still underfunded. And I know that that's a big question and I'm having difficulties saying it but that's really it's sort of a macro question, not a specific to our fire. Thank you, Martin. Yeah, Martin, thank you for the question and I'll try to summarize that because it is a very difficult dive into how the state does their funding. Governor does have a billion dollars in his budget that was added to that. And a lot of that money is going to resiliency it's going to fuel reduction in that resiliency program so that not all that funding is going to go to Cal Fire to increase staffing. We are basically receiving some money this year to offset the cost for having to implement firefighting hand crews. And so due to COVID and the release of inmates at the rate that has occurred in the state for prisons, our inmate population that we use for our inmate crews has drastically dropped to very, very low levels. I'll give you an example, our inmate camp at Billowman camp up in Bonnie Dune is a five person or a five man camp so we have five crews there. We have two crews staffed because of the lack of inmates. So, a lot of that money is going to replace some of those deficits that we have in capacity for the department to be able to provide emergency response. So, some of that money goes to that to offset those costs but a lot of that money is going to be grant money that's available for resiliency programs for the communities to go after. And, you know, application process to the secure funding for us to do fuel reduction and some other resiliency programs that in our communities, but thank you for the question. All right, next question. It's on the Q&A chat and it's an evacuation based question. It's from Antonia Bradford. My great concern is that there is such a lack of trust now in Cal Fire, the next time you're evacuation compliance that will be incredibly low. How do you plan to work with the public to establish trust in partnership? Yeah, great question Antonia. You know that that is a concern me right and I'm not sure how the trust level has been dropped our sheer reliance on resources is the main factor why this fire grew to the level it did but what I can say about the compliance of evacuations is I understand people are going to want to try to stay behind and defend their properties because we had a lack of resources but what I can say to that is if we get more emphasis on fuel reduction, defensible space and people's homes are prepared, you know, they will feel more comfortable to leave those areas. What I can say as we move forward is when we ask people to evacuate, we're doing it for one reason. And as I said at the very beginning of my presentation, our priorities are life property in the environment. Your life is our number one priority. So when we're evacuating you, we're evacuating people for a reason. It's to get you out of harm's way so that an approaching fire does not cause your death. So I would only hope that folks would realize that and really not make it a trust level with Cal Fire, because all we're doing is making the decisions to work with our Sheriff's Department, implement a plan and then ask them to go affect those evacuations in the future. What I can say is we are going to be evacuating and implementing evacuation plans much earlier in a fire process just due to our fuel situation that we have. Our fuels are much more volatile as we described due to continued drought and our continued climate change. And just the sheer lack of rain this year, you know, like I said, I am concerned for what our fire season looks like moving forward. Alright, question that has come up a few times in the chat. And it is in regard to rumors of back burns. Chief, I don't want to hit on just any comments about. Yeah, so you know, as I stated this question came up last night as well so my comment to the any of the backfires, you know, we use fire in two ways offensively and defensively. It is a fact that it is a tool that we use to help control fires. There are several claims of different backfires that have occurred amongst the fire. And we have a couple complaints that we are looking into so I'm really not at liberty at this point to discuss any of that ongoing inquiry. As it may hamper our abilities to get to truth. So we're looking into that and trying to find out what that looks like. So what I can say is backfires do occur backfires were most likely lit on this this event in both an offensive and defensive fashion. And we're trying to narrow down which ones may have been done in a manner that you know there could be some liability that which at this time. We don't know if that's an actual factual thing that we're still looking into so. Thank you. All right. Next question is from Diane messy. And it is asking at what point did you meet with the slv area fire departments telling them they would have no support available from Cal fire. I'm not really sure the question. When did we meet with the slv departments and tell them we're not going to have any support from Cal fire. So, you know, all the fire departments in the county knew that Cal fire was at its draw down. So, if additional resources were needed. We were not able to provide them from Cal fire. And in fact, we were so far drawn down that we received a notice from our region administration that handles the allocation of resources that we were to uncover every one of our fire stations. And which we did so we had no more resources to commit to anything that would be new or any new needs until we got resources through the resource allocation process, which we explained that occurred earlier. We had, as we said we had over 150 outstanding orders for fire engines. The numerous orders for crews aircraft, every piece of equipment that you could think of we had on order trying to get it here to help us protect the communities and put this fire out. Alright, back to the raised hand feature and we will go to Rebecca Hagen. First of all, I want to say thank you to the sheriff. Before I to my question. It was horrible to be displaced and evacuated and to see on the news how many people were actually kind of go up there to loot. So I really appreciate your efforts in that and then again to Cal fire. My question is I'm off of clear Creek Road. And my understanding is that the fire hydrant was shut off because the major pipe melted. And I wanted to know I know it's not your area but I figured you might have some feedback on what they were doing to correct that for the future. Yeah, so I can, I can try to answer a portion of that question is, yeah, so there was a major pipe that we had several pieces of infrastructure in the San Lorenzo Valley and other areas of the county that were affected by this. Due to the pipes melting because they are plastic pipe, whether they are buried in the ground or if there was other reasons why that they were damaged but I believe most of the water pipes have been replaced or maybe so a few that are outstanding that are due for repair. But I would have to defer you to the water districts specifically to get answers on the status of that repair but we did have numerous lines that were damaged in the fire, including areas even out on the north coast and Davenport the main feeder line from Santa Cruz to Davenport was burnt in the mornellifier which took months to get actually repaired so I would have to defer you to the water district for that specific answer on the repair and what that looks like moving into the future. Thank you for the question. All right next question will be from D scrubs. Yeah, hi. The question I had was about code read. I was actually in the office of Boulder Creek fire. During a lot of this. And we were getting people calling the office. Really early into the fire saying that they had code read alerts that they were getting that nobody else in their neighborhood was getting and they were wondering why they were getting these words when the fire was still, you know, 10 to 14 miles away. And, you know, and then there were, you know, plus there were no notifications from code read, or anybody like that about these evacuation notices to the local fire department. And is that one of the issues that is or those one of the issues that are being dealt with with the code read system. I think your name is Dave or Mr. Struggs. Yeah, I appreciate the question and I'm not specifically sure when the alerts were coming in or what those actual alerts said. But, as I said earlier, the code read system is an opt in system, you actually have to register for it to get those alerts so that may be the reason why some of the residents were getting the alerts, and some of them were not getting the alerts. And specifically to the evacuations that occurred in the Boulder Creek area. Chief Bingham, and I and the sheriff, we had that conversation about how the evacuations were going to be affected and when they were going to be affected in Boulder Creek, and those were initiated on that mutual conversation so I don't know if the fire was 14 miles in advance but those evacuations were made well in advance of that fire front as as you will what well aware you, you will probably live in the valley here. It's not easy to get in and out of the valley so part of our methodology behind here was a systematic approach starting from the very north of the district and of the county area bordering the district was to move into systematic approach from the north to the south evacuating folks to get them out of the valley in the in the midst of the fire front, potentially approaching because we had gotten that word that that fire was moving towards the south so that's part of how that that approach was driven. Some of those code read I'm not sure what those messages actually said, but to answer that portion of the question, specifically is if you did not opt into that system, you would not be getting the alerts. Thank you for the question. All right, we just have a few minutes left. We will go to Mark Lee. Yes, hi. Thank you for presenting tonight. You guys deserve an applause for organizing defense for our community in San Lorenzo Valley. I have a question regarding the policy of Cal fire for what is it. Exit roads that are outs that are in areas that are particularly in the sand hills that are controlled by private property owners and what kind of coordination you are working with them to keep those those emergency exits open during the emergency period. Thank you for that question. You know, that that is a common theme that we see across the county and when we have residents that have allowed for access roads to be across their property. You know, we try to work with them for the areas that we do know and have those identified to make sure that those roads are clear and that they're open and everybody can access them. There are areas where a property owners a sale of a property and things like that occur where property owners do longer want to have that available to the residents so really that's a, I have to defer back to our local fire protection districts to make sure that they're, you know, having that conversation to see what they can do to try to keep those areas open. A lot of these areas, we rely on the local fire agencies for that, helping us with that with the property owners because they have that constant relationship with the community that can help facilitate that conversation so I know in the midst of this fire there were several areas where we had to go back in and open up old fire roads that have been basically abandoned. You know, that's one of the things in the 90s we had significant cutbacks in our state budget where we lost actual resources where we would actually go out and maintain these fire roads and the fire road gates and do that kind of work every year. But due to budget cuts that work hasn't been done for many, many years and that's something that is part of our planning processes that we really need to look back at to make sure that those access roads are available to the communities and work with those property owners. So we don't have a specific policy unless it was required for that development and most of the time unless it's in the strict SRA outside of a fire district where it would be like in our county fire area, we would have direct control over those areas but if it's within a fire protection district, that local fire district would be the one that would really have that history of how that road got established when it was required for the development or if it was just a neighborly gesture that was done years and years ago. All right. Unfortunately we're out of time. Sorry if we didn't have time to get to your question we will be attempting to answer each question that remains in the Q&A section of this zoom call. We will also have questions that you can submit through the survey that you will getting emailed and those questions that you email us directly. I just want to say thank you for your questions and for your courtesy and professionalism during this Q&A session and I'll pass it back to Chief Larkin now for some closing comments. Yeah I'll make this really quick because we are out of time. I appreciate all of you spending the evening with us to allow us to provide you information and allow you to answer questions as well as us to try to provide those answers. As we are we are going to try to answer all the questions that did not get answered in the Q&A. I did provide you an email address as well as my office line that you can contact me directly if you have a specific item you would like to discuss with me so thank you very much and I hope you all have a great evening.