When the 2003 Cedar fire erupted into what was then the largest fire in state history, it exposed weaknesses in the county’s firefighting abilities.
Communication between agencies was fractured. Coordination was limited. Information about the surging fire was incomplete, and many residents never received warnings before the flames were at their doors.
The Cedar fire, ignited on Oct. 25, 2003, was a wind-driven inferno fire that raced from east of Ramona to overrun Scripps Ranch in just 10 short hours. It was soon followed by the Paradise fire in Valley Center and the Otay fire in South County.
Thousands of homes burned. Seventeen people died.
Over the past 20 years, change has come from those hard lessons learned.
Today, San Diego County not only has more resources locally available but has improved equipment, communications and tactics that make knocking down newly started fires a priority.
There is now a County Fire Department, set up in 2008 to improve and coordinate fire service in rural areas. During the Cedar fire, several small, independent fire departments, some of them volunteer, dotted the county. Now staffing at those sites is provided by Cal Fire. Earlier this year, the department absorbed its 20th agency.
It’s taken time and money, political will and public buy-in, but lessons learned have transformed the way we fight fire.
Lesson one: Get aggressive
Nowadays, there is no complacency when fire breaks out. Aggressive initial attacks are ordered and a large number of resources — on the ground and in the air — are routinely dispatched.
“We’re going to throw everything including the kitchen sink at it and try and keep the fire small so that we don’t have these major fires,” said Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire Chief Tony Mecham. “We’ve been pretty effective the last five years with that kind of mindset.”
Now when a wildfire is reported in many areas, the local Cal Fire/Sheriff helicopters crews — the pilot is a sheriff’s deputy, the crew are firefighters — immediately head to their aircraft.
“We realize your best chances of stopping a fire before it gets as big as a Cedar fire or the Witch fire is to concentrate all of your efforts at the beginning of that fire,” said San Diego Fire-Rescue Chief Colin Stowell. “We will divert aircraft and other resources, and we will redirect to a new (fire) start to stop those before they get out of control.
“If the heads get bigger, the flanks get bigger.”
The city has plans in place to address fires in areas neighboring its boundaries — places such as Poway, Ramona and Escondido — which it calls “mutual threat zones.” If a fire breaks out within 1 mile of the city, that triggers a response of fire resources from San Diego. Under the old system, fire trucks wouldn’t be sent until requested.
Lesson two: Expand aerial resources
Aerial firefighting has been greatly scaled up in the years since the Cedar fire, with local agencies spending millions to acquire firefighting helicopters.
Sheriff’s Sgt. Scott Bligh said that in 2003, only one of the department’s helicopters had been equipped to carry a bucket — a small one at that — for water drops. It was “nowhere near the firefighting powerhouse we have now.”
Today, not counting military assets, there are at least 13 copters in the county capable of fighting fires: two from San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, three from the Sheriff’s Department, two from the U.S. Forest Service and one leased by Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire.
Plus, five helicopters capable of dropping water or fire retardant are owned or leased by San Diego Gas & Electric Co., which developed its aviation program around 2010. That was after the company’s utility lines were blamed for the 2007 Witch Creek fire, which approached the size and devastation seen in Cedar.
“The way we have looked at this from the beginning is that this is a community effort. We are making ourselves part of the bigger firefighting system here in San Diego,” said Brian D’Agostino, SDG&E’s vice president of Wildfire and Climate Science.
Flight rules came under scrutiny in 2003 after people learned a sheriff’s helicopter was turned back just minutes from dumping water on the Cedar fire shortly after it was discovered because they were losing daylight. Fire officials cited long-standing safety rules that prohibit using aircraft to battle wildfires in the dark, which meant aircraft were prohibited from taking on any new missions 30 minutes before sunset. Debate followed about whether a few water drops would have made a difference.
In another incident that raised questions, fire officials initially turned away Navy helicopters because they lacked state certification. Nowadays, the state has agreements with the military, meaning those assets could be tapped in the event of a major fire. Local fire agencies also routinely train with military pilots.
Two years after the Cedar fire, San Diego Fire-Rescue began doing night firefighting missions. It remains the only agency in the region with that capability, so it will answer calls from other areas. But officials won’t send the helicopter at night unless there’s a threat to lives, structures, critical infrastructure, or to keep a fire from growing significantly.
In 2022, the city’s helicopters responded to 28 brush fires after dark, and so far in 2023, they have gone to 15.
The Sheriff’s Department, which flies with a Cal Fire crew, hopes to also take on a similar nighttime role in the future, now that the agency bought a larger, twin-engine helicopter. Sheriff’s officials expect it to be delivered by the end of the year. Intense training will follow.
“You can’t just slap on night goggles and all of the sudden you are a nighttime fire pilot,” Bligh said. “There’s a very steep learning curve, and it’s more dangerous than anyone that doesn’t have the experience flying at night would ever know.”
Lesson three: Invest in technology
Technological advances help fire officials know more about fires sooner, and make it possible to project its likely path.
Mecham said dozens of newly installed micro weather-stations taught them that winds in some places can gust up to 100 mph.
Cal Fire uses National Guard satellites to pick up heat signatures, so they can better pinpoint precisely where a fire is burning.
A network of backcountry cameras helps, too; in August, some started using artificial intelligence to look for possible fires.
Also helpful is software that takes all the available information — wind, topography, fire fuels and more — and projects the likely path of the fire.
The technology can project “where that fire will be an hour from now, three hours from now,” Stowell said. “You can start preparing those communities and have them evacuate so you won’t have the chaos that we saw in Scripps Ranch and Tierrasanta at that time (of the Cedar fire).”
Mecham can access the modeling software from his phone. He said he can get projections in hand “within two or three minutes of the first 911 call.”
Lesson four: Beef up communications
Reports compiled by officials after the Cedar fire noted problems with radio communications — including mismatched radio systems that left some crews unable to talk with other agencies in the county.
These days, every San Diego city firefighter has a radio. Twenty years ago, only the captains carried them.
Then there’s the need to communicate with the public. In 2003, many people were unaware of the fire until it was nearly at their doors. Advances in technology have helped address that.
The region now has a reverse 911-style system and can send emergency alerts to cellphones located inside a triangulated area. And they can target those messages — evacuation orders in one community, shelter-in-place warnings in another.
On the ground, as deputies go through the neighborhoods warning people to get out, all patrol vehicles are equipped with a new siren used just for evacuations.
Lesson five: Team up, take action before the fire
Cal Fire’s Mecham said he’s on a first-name basis with chiefs across the county. There’s no infighting or turf battles, he said. Many of them are part of a shared text group.
“We get along, we train together, we talk, we critique calls, we share resources when things get busy or when the weather’s coming in, we have daily conference calls,” he said. “We all know what each other is doing.”
There’s also a better understanding that fires can turn into firestorms.
“This generation of firefighters didn’t have a collective conscience of what the Cedar fire could do,”Mecham said. “We were still thinking, yeah, it’s gonna be a bad fire. It might be, you know, 15,000 acres, 20,000 acres in the morning. But nobody saw that in 10 hours, that fire burned 29 miles.”
It’s not just firefighters who get it. Mecham said there’s been an “acceptance of the fire problem” in the political sphere.
“Now, if we need to expend money and we need to bring resources on ahead of a wind event and nothing happens, they look at that as a good use of public funds,” Mecham said.
When those powerful hot dry desert winds hit, SDG&E can issue a Public Safety Power Shutoff and turn off electricity in strategic areas to avoid the chance that downed power lines will ignite a wildfire.
Crews also get out ahead of time and do prescribed burns alongside roads, including evacuation routes.
Residents are encouraged to take fire prevention steps around their homes, clearing brush away from structures and planning ahead what they’ll do if asked to evacuate. “Defensible space has become a common term,” Stowell said.
Mecham said last year, his department did 55,000 defensible-space inspections — thousands more than 20 years ago. And, he said, 98 percent of everyone they ed complied.
Even with all the changes, officials warn against complacency — there very likely will be a next big one.
Mecham wants people to the 2003 firestorms, because it keeps them cognizant of the need to prepare.
“If people think that the fire department is gonna solve the fire problem, they’re mistaken,” he said. “It’s community wide. It’s a village approach.”
