KDSN RADIO News
Iowan knows what it is like to fight wildfires in California
An Iowan has first-hand knowledge of the problems firefighters in California are facing as wildfires rapidly consume homes and everything else.
Ryan Schlater works in the DNR’s Wildfire Program and was on an assignment in California in July. “We were on the east side of LA in San Bernardino County, in the Redlands area, and then kind of Palm Springs area, and we were there for responding to new fire starts,” he says. “..a new one would happen, and they’d call us, and we’d respond to it and try to initial attack it and stop it before it got big.” Schlater says a number of conditions have combined to make the current fires very tough to fight. “The Santa Ana winds right now, and then, of course, they’re right on the coast. And so the land and sea breezes, you know, that plays a lot of factors into this large fire growth,” Schlater says. “And when that high and that low get just right then it just funnels that high wind right towards LA.”
He says all the mountains and hills create a lot of issues for firefighters as well, along with drought conditions and a lot of vegetation. “It’s Chaparral and it’s Manzanita, so it’s very tall, very thick stuff that they can’t get to. And they do some hazard mitigation to try to reduce the wildfire threat around the city. But there’s a lot of people who moved out into the suburbs. There’s a lot of people who moved up into the hills and hills and so they, you know, each property owner is kind of responsible for that. So, you know, if they don’t do it, they don’t do it,” he says.
Schlater says the high winds push the fires to all the various fuel sources. “That fire pushed all the way through town, all the way through Palisades Park, down into Malibu,” he says, “and it even burned the like what you see on Bay Watch those big wooden lifeguard towers, which are surrounded by sand, you know, there’s no vegetation, so the embers washed into those and got into the, you know, the little cracks of that, and then caused that to cause, you know, start on fire.” Schlater says the fires have moved rapidly despite all the resources L-A County has on the land and in the air to fight them. “At that one fire there was three LA County helicopters, and there was three or four air tankers, big ones, because they had what we call bird dogs or lead planes. And so they come in first, and they let out a little smoke, and that tells the air tanker where to drop their water or they’re retardant,” he explains.
Schlater says a fire moving this fast makes it tough to fight even from the air, because by the time they get up and ready to too drop on a spot, the fire has moved several 100 yards from where they were called in. Firefighter trained in Iowa frequently go to other states to help out. Schlater says they usually are getting the paperwork complete around this time of year to get people ready to go, so they don’t have anyone in California right now. “It’s not saying that we couldn’t send people. We do have one person who went through the financial process already, and she is available, but she is like a logistics support person, so she necessarily, probably wouldn’t go. They’re looking for more operations folks for on the ground right now,” he says.
Schlater has fighting wildfires for 20 years and says Southern California has been a place he never wanted to go to because of all the danger with the tough conditions there.
