Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human podcast.
This is episode 446,
and my guest
is Garrett Clancy.
Garrett is the chief of the Bell Canyon
volunteer
wildfire
fire department.
In that capacity, he's a type one firefighter
and EMT,
and they're public information
officer.
He's also an army veteran,
served in the national guard.
He was a military police officer, and he's
a filmmaker.
So but we concentrate on the firefighting part
because
we just had all those fires, and he
was the head of his
team to keep his area of LA, Bell
Canyon,
protected from the recent
craziness of wildfires.
And
are they wildfires when one fire starts another
fire? I don't I'm not sure, but
it was wild. So I'm just gonna go
with it. I have a bit of a
head cold, so
excuse my
schnozzles,
my schnozzie schnozz sounds.
And a lot of chaotic right now. I'm
moving out of Santa Monica into a different
part of LA,
And,
so there's just lots going on.
I did see a funny movie. My friend
George Gallo, who I interviewed on this podcast,
and it's a great episode.
Of course, if I were smart, I would
know which episode number it is. And I
do know it off the top of my
head, but it's a really good one if
you wanna go back and listen.
Anyway, his film,
The Comeback Trail,
that he wrote with a guy named Josh
and he directed, and it stars Morgan Freeman
and Tommy Lee Jones
and
Robert De Niro and Zach Braff, and,
it is so funny. Oh my gosh.
It's hilarious. I I had a great time.
The whole audience cracked up, which is always
fun because things are so stressful these days
with just the world.
It was good to laugh for an hour
and a half. I think it's on
Apple TV and Amazon
Prime,
although I'm trying not to do anything with
Amazon right now. I feel like it's somewhere
else. Oh, it's gonna be in select theaters
too. Anyway, he's a friend of mine. Don't
get paid to say it, but it was
a really fun movie.
And if you're into funny
I recommend it. George is the guy that,
did
Midnight Run, which if you've never seen Midnight
Run, oh my gosh. That is a great
movie.
But I digress. Oh, he also did Bad
Boys.
That's a whole other thing. Anyway,
yeah.
So check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests and the show. Hey Human Podcast is
on YouTube under official Susan Ruth. I'm on
Patreon at Susan Ruthism,
though I admit I have been woeful about
Patreon.
And my TikTok and Instagram is Susan Ruthism.
Been woeful about that too. Check out susanruth.com
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Thank you.
Be well.
Thank you for listening.
Take care of each other. Take care of
yourself.
And
here we go.
Derek Clancy, welcome to Hey Human.
Thank you. Let's jump right in. Where did
you grow up? Are you from California?
No. I'm not from California, but I have
lived here more than half my life now.
I'm from a little town North Of Boston
called Georgetown,
and so I mainly grew up in Massachusetts.
But
the thing about my town is they have
the oldest
continuously
operating,
private slash volunteer fire department in the country.
My neighbors were the guys that were the
volunteer fire fire department in the town and,
you know,
had whatever job they had, working at the
local hardware store, getting a call, and and
then becoming the becoming a fireman instantly.
So I saw that and I I thought
that was pretty cool and,
I wanted to do that. What's the big
difference between the volunteer firefighting groups and the
and and a regular firefighting
team?
Pay.
I I mean, in terms of,
knowledge or or requirements.
I figured you probably were doing it for
free. Yeah. Yeah.
Somewhere between 7882%
of of all departments in America are fully
volunteer.
Here in California, we have 450
volunteer fire departments,
and across the country, 18,000.
So they make up the bulk of, you
know, first responders.
Now in some
small cities where they have a volunteer fire
department, they're always gonna have, you know, maybe
a paid chief and, one or two, maybe
a captain that that that's also paid in
full time. But those folks are doing the
same thing that, you know, the LA City
Firefighters or the LA County Firefighters are doing.
In the smaller towns, there's, you know, less
of that and less frequency of
structure fires or hazmat incidences.
But, you know, for the most part, the
volunteer firefighters in in across the country are
are are well trained, but just, you know,
they're not doing it all the time. But
in in even in the middle of nowhere,
which is a lot of the country,
rather than waiting an hour for the local
city ambulance or fire department to come, folks
have put together
volunteer fire departments so they can get quicker
help. I guess it's it's a pretty noble
I always viewed it as that, as a
noble service, I guess, community service. It's definitely
a noble service. I think running toward fire
is not something the average person would do.
I imagine, especially in California, that
communities
are more and more leaning toward having their
own private
forces that are separate. Is that also part
of the the main firefighters, or is that
part of the volunteer firefighters? Because I I
think they're hired guns.
Some insurance companies, big ones, like, they'll send
in a truck, a small
what's it called? The type six truck, like
a pickup truck that has a tank on
the back and and water flowing capabilities. We
have two of those in our department. But
they'll come in, and they'll go to one
or two houses that have the insurance carrier,
the same insurance carrier, and they'll spray foam
on the house, protect that house, but they're
not there to fight
the the general fire.
What's happened since the pallet now the reform
because of the Woolsey fire in in 02/2018,
a direct result of that. We lost 40
homes in my community in Bell Canyon. Since
then, because of the Palisades
fire and the Eaton fire, I think five
communities have reached out to us
saying that they wanna form
brigades, you know, for the most part, or
or volunteer fire pumps in their community, and
could we advise them?
So it's gonna be I believe it's gonna
be the new norm, especially in California. And
the reason is, listen, during,
you know, the the recent huge
fires, bigger than we've ever had, seven states
and three countries sent,
resources, fire resources. So,
I I mean, on on
the simplest level, there's just not enough firefighters
and resources
to cover
those type of incidents.
And if you got everybody on those big
incidents, that was our fear at Bell Canyon,
because there were so many resources dedicated to
the Palisades fire and and so many more
dedicated to the Eaton fire and even a
couple of other small fires. We felt vulnerable
like we're gonna be on our own here.
And our mission by the way, my department
mission is we don't leave Belle Canyon, we
stay. And I I'll talk about why, afterwards.
But
we did have a fire breakout. We had
the, Kenneth fire breakout right on the edge
of our our our community. And so we
were you know, we had 24 members of
our department up there,
and we were the only department on this
side of the fire. Had the fire come
closer, I know that we would have gotten
resources from LA City, Ventura County Fire, because
we're in Ventura County. But in those moments,
while we were watching the fire moving, we
were alone. And there were a couple of
sheriff's deputies with us, but that's it.
So we knew that, we were the front
line. So the reason we, have a mission
of
not providing mutual aid,
not that we wouldn't help, you know, somebody
right outside our our our gate or whatever,
is
because we felt that
the reason we lost homes in the Woolsey
Fire is because the agencies left. They went
somewhere else, which is which is what happened.
Now knowing what I know from
the firefighter training I've been involved in over
the past five years,
they made the call that they felt they
needed to make given the the weather
behavior at the time, the fire weather behavior.
They they couldn't know that the winds were
gonna shift
overnight and then come to the other side
of Bell Canyon and take out those homes.
And also we had a water main break
and so there was no hydrant pressure
for much of the canyon.
Now we've actually adapted a secondary firefighting plan
with our department to address an issue like
that if it were to happen again, and
that's a pool fighting firefighting component.
We have a lot of swimming pools in
there, a a ton. And we have pumps
that we have on the department. We've encouraged
residents to buy their own pumps, and a
lot of them have. And so we can,
in essence, fill fire trucks
all day long. We'll never run out of
water. You know, it's a little bit
less convenient than hooking up to a hydrant.
It takes a little bit more time, but
we could fill fire trucks, and we can
also fight fires from those pools. I feel
like moving forward
for those who don't know, and I'm sure
most people who are listening do know, when
the fires
there were seven active fires happening at the
same time, which along with these incredible
gale force winds
and
I mean, I remember standing in my yard
watching.
It was like being in the middle of
some crazy movie set.
I'm wondering if moving forward, it wouldn't be
hoof
all Californias and all
people
in areas where fires could happen. I mean,
fire can happen anywhere. But if you have
a pool,
it seems like a no brainer. Have something
that will pump it out. I I feel
like moving forward, that's going to be
the thing.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It is. And it's
funny because we've been pushing residents to do
that for
a couple of years. And then during the
the week of the fire, everybody suddenly finally
decided that that's when they were gonna get
one. So we were running around, you know,
we were on full fire watch, but running
around to folks,
residents' homes and and helping them set up
these pumps. We couldn't say no at that
point. Right? Yeah. Are you geared up in
this case when you are getting ready to
face the line? Do you have the same
safety? We have the same we do. Yeah.
So we're we're wildland we're we're called the
the Bell Canyon Volunteer Wildland Fire Department. The
reason we have the word wildland is to
make the distinction between
city structural firefighters and what wildland firefighters do,
but we're not even really wildland firefighters because
what we live in is something called the
urban
wildland interface.
So it's the home, we have our homes
and surrounding the homes is, the wilderness, right?
So we're not doing what traditional wildland firefighters
do, which is to trek in with a
bunch of gear, sometimes miles to fight a
fire.
You know, we don't we're here, right? And
we're wearing the PPE, protective gear that wildland
firefighters wear the same stuff and using the
same tools, but we're not having to go
anywhere to do that. It's just it's here.
And the reason we don't
didn't bother to do this the interior structure
training,
It's very expensive. Just buying the, the SCBA
masks would be prohibitively expensive for for our
our department.
We don't need to. We have it's very
rare that we have an a fire in
Bell Canyon in in a house, and we
have 780
homes approximately, and we have LA City Fire
to do that. They're gonna take ten minutes
to fifteen minutes longer than the normal response
time. But in that period of time, it's
happened already twice. We get there. We can
set things up. We can make sure people
are out of the house. We can make
sure that the properties surrounding the house are
protected. We can shut off utilities, and we
can also give and the last time this
happened, we were able to radio to LA
City Fire as they were coming in where
exactly the best entrance for this big house
was because we had already assessed that.
And I heard it go out over their
radio, and they just took they they took
our word. They took us out our word,
which is which
yeah. We're a new department, and we're not
a full department.
We're supplement, and there have been some
it's taken a while for them, the bigger
firefighter,
the fire departments that serve us to accept
us, and
I don't know if they'll they'll ever accept
us. And I don't expect that they they
would. We're never gonna be their peers, and
we're not in competition with them. We don't
wanna be their peers. You know, now that
they've seen on many, many occasions, because we've
done 620 calls in four years,
many occasions, they've
they've worked with us, and there hasn't been
an issue. There's never been an issue. They've
never said, you know, you guys need to
move or you need to you know, it's
in fact, the the fire that we had
on July 21 in here, the Brush Fire,
we were on scene twelve minutes before the
first
outside agency came.
We we essentially saved the house and we
were in that backyard fighting the fire that
was coming up the hill. And when the
first agencies came on, on the scene, they
came and saw what we were doing, all
wearing the right gear, the safety gear. Our
trucks were hooked up to hoses. We were
putting water on the fire, and they just
said, great. Fantastic.
We're gonna go work up here. You guys,
you have this area. And
they just accepted us. And that was a
big day for us because that was the
first big fire that we had since we
formed. Most of our calls are, just, you
know, neighborhood type calls. We do a lot
of rattlesnake removals, like a lot, 60 or
70 a year. We relocate the rattlesnakes, we
we don't kill them. You don't make boots.
We don't make boots. No. And we and
we just do a lot of okay. So
I'll give you an example. We got a
call on our emergency line 05:30 in the
morning last week. A woman who lives up
the street from me said, there's an animal
in my pool. I can't see what it
is, but it's splashing. It's big.
So I called one of my captains who
I knew would would would get up at
that time in the morning. We went out
there, and it happened to be a dog.
A dog was drowning in the pool. And
we saved the dog,
and now he's he's up for adoption. But,
so calls like that, you know. And we
get a lot of calls like that in
our community. You know, hey. My dog is
lost. Hey. My tortoise is lost. That's four
times we've had those calls. Or someone has
found a tortoise and we've had to find
the owner.
So stuff like that, and just minor stuff.
Many times the city fire department will come
in
to a minor traffic accident or something like
that. They'll see that we have it under
control. They'll literally wave and say, You guys
got it? And they'll turn right around and
leave.
It's complimentary,
you know?
Absolutely. Las Torres is also a great name
for a band, if anyone thinks Yeah. Yeah.
There you go. For a band name. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
What about emergency
medical? Do you get called to that? Because
I imagine you all have that kind of
training.
Yeah. All of us on the department have
at least a standard Red Cross first aid,
CPR AED training. We have seven EMTs. I'm
one of those EMTs. So we can provide
a higher level. What I've told the local
agencies,
because they've asked,
because
that's most calls that any fire department has.
Like 80% of calls are medical calls.
And if you have
a certified EMS component to your department,
it's a complicated,
you know, program or system, you know, you
gotta be in touch with doctors at the
local hospitals. There's a medical director. We don't
have that because we don't need it. What
we do is
essentially we're good Samaritans with better training and
better equipment. And so we've responded to many
medical calls,
and we can stabilize a patient before, you
know, LAFD rolls up with their paramedics
or their BOS and
it's worked out great. The more complicated calls
where people have, you know, serious fractures, I'm
more than happy to see them roll off
with their better equipment
and experience and and to take over. But,
yeah, in a in a, like, a cardiac
arrest situation or a a bleeding situation that
could lead to to death because it's a
significant bleed, that
ten to twelve to fifteen minutes that we're
shaving,
it could really mean literally be life or
death. Yeah. This is why also I think
it's so important that every home should have
the kind of emergency go bag that includes
things like
wound care, bleed stop,
some basic things that can be used
if help is going to be ten, fifteen
minutes. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly.
We started out
just
as a way to
fight the next fire, which we knew it
would come, and it will. Right? But then
we decided, you know what? We can do
more. Folks are calling us for everything anyways.
We might as well just make that part
of our our system. Like, you know,
a resident called and said, hey. My kid's,
locked in the car.
Like, we went over there. We couldn't really
do anything other than smash a window with
one of our axes. We didn't because
AAA came. But then we saw what AAA
had, the lockout kit, and we just bought
one. So now we have one. The stuff
like that, you know, that we've done to
to build into a a more multi service
department.
I grew up in Washington state, and now
I live in California.
These are densely
wilderness y
brush,
trees,
life cycles of plants happening all the time.
These things are
fire magnets,
I suppose.
Do you think
it would
make sense that states like ours,
instead of upon graduation or maybe it happens
in high school that there'd be programs
two years mandatory if you live in this
state, you go and you clear brush and
you go when I was a little girl,
we had a cabin in the foothills of
the Cascades. And twice a year,
it was mandatory if you were a member
of this
cabin
peep you know, the cabin people that you
would go and you would spend a weekend
and clear brush and get rid of it
and all that. And it it helped keep
these sorts of things from happening. You know,
I've never heard that idea before. I'm not
aware there's, you know, the the conservation corps
where where younger people,
do stuff like this. We actually helped train
some recently,
but that was like new training to them.
It wasn't part of their program before.
So it's a great idea. I mean, it's
a great idea. I'll write my senators and
my and my governor. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes.
And they're all definitely they want solutions to
the wildfire. Yeah. So it does require some
training, but it's training that that you could
do if you were 16, 17, 18. I
I I don't see why.
Yeah. I I think folks that and and
pretty much every, at least, public high school
has a community service
component. They have to, you know, you have
to do so many hours. Right? Yeah. I
think that's a great idea because that's see,
that's the key and we work on that
as well. We assess properties and, help clear
up brush.
That's
that's the front line. If that's done well,
then, you know, your home is gonna be
safer. I mean, I was eight and nine,
seven. I would there are pictures of me
real little, and I loved it. The little
ones, you know, we have our little work
gloves, and we could pull the little underbrush,
and it just felt good to be a
part of something. And I think that something
that this country specifically is really lacking these
days
is
the community feeling and the the feeling like
we are all in this together.
And
I'm a big believer in community service. I
think
a mandatory community service instead of, you know,
other countries do military. And I've talked about
this on the show before, but a mandatory
community service upon graduation
would do wonders
to change Oh, yeah. I for sure. This
course.
Yeah. I I wish we had that. I
I wish we did. But I I think
that, you know,
as time goes on,
the the need for the need for that
will grow and grow. Oh, yeah. I mean,
Kentucky's underwater right now. So if they had
a a huge group of people who have
been trained to deal with that kind of
thing,
it could turn, no pun intended, the tides.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Even in a supplementary role.
So rather than having workers that should be
on the front line, trained workers
in in floods or or fires,
community service
folks could be doing the stuff that takes
them away from that, which is the logistical
side, getting supplies to them and and whatnot.
I mean, that's a huge, you know I
mean, that's kinda what we do for the
big city fire departments in here on big
calls is we supplement them. Two members of
our department are actually full times LA City
Firefighters,
and they, you know, they they help us
on their days off. And invariably, there are
calls when their days when they had days
off and they're there.
But, you know, we don't have the training
to ventilate a roof. Right? So we don't
need to. We just supplement,
you know, so that the city firefighters can
do that. Mhmm. Without having to move stuff
out of the way, without having to ask
people to move their cars because to park
their ladder truck. We've already done that.
Yeah. I mean, that was a big deal
with the Palisades. Right? People just abandoned their
cars, and then none of the trucks could
get up the hill. There was a perfect
storm. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Exactly. Tell me about
your assessment
protocols.
So you
you know a fire has has been a
you've been alerted to a fire.
What's next? How do you get everybody together?
How do you decide what to do? Do
you then start fires in front of the
line of the fire to to stop it?
What do you do? No. That controlled burn
stuff is very
tenuous.
Several huge fires have have
been the result of controlled burns that got
out of control.
So, no, we don't do any of that.
It's not even done a lot,
as much as it used to be done.
Depends on the situation. If we if we're
on call and we're already several of us
are already dressed and ready to go, like
we were for the whole week and a
half of the Palisades and Eaton fire, then
we're ready to go. And we've already set
up who's going to be on this crew,
who's going to be on that crew.
It's very organized and communication is very,
disciplined. But if it's a call that we
just get, there's a fire.
On the way to the call, we we
organize the call. We don't know who's gonna
show up. We don't know who's available, but
we're on the radio and okay. You guys
are in Brush 2, you know, and whatever
the once we get to the scene and
assess what the needs are and the size
of it's called, then we figure out where
to put people.
So far, it's worked out well.
I don't know. In a huge fire, I
don't know how it's gonna work out, but
we'll we'll we'll do our part.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, one would hope that,
as you mentioned, the fact that you're there
before
the quote unquote regular groups can get there,
that you may that's that may make all
the difference. Yeah. Because we're more remote. I
I don't know if you visited here, but
we're we're more remote.
Are you up by Mike?
My cousin? Yeah. Yeah. He's in the I
know. I still don't know where the Calabasas
versus Bell versus I'm that all confuses me.
Matthew Piepenburg (3one forty three): Bell Canyon is
Ventura County. It's like the easternmost part of
Ventura County.
There's only one way in and one way
out of Bell Canyon, a long road that
comes in, and it starts on the LA
city line. So you can't you can't ever
leave Bell Canyon without going through the city
of LA. So that's where we are, but
we're very,
we're remote. Lots of land, lots of open
space here, lots of wildlife. Again, a longer
response time. And the back of our canyon
is literally,
because I've been there, I've been up there
waiting and timing how long it takes for
the other agencies to arrive. It's like twenty,
twenty one, twenty two minutes. That's a long
time. Especially if it has a long road
to get to you. Yeah. And these aren't
like straight roads. They're, like, hilly, curvy,
fire engines can only go so fast. We
have challenging geography
and topography.
So
How do
you convince your insurance company to insure you
medically when you all are volunteer fire fighters?
I mean, I know that they when I
got my my assessment,
they asked things like, do you wear your
seat belt? Do you ever jump out of
an airplane? Imagine if I said, oh, but
I do run into fire.
It might change things. It just it hasn't
been an issue. You know, our fire department
insurance policy
is with the company that they that's what
they do. They insure volunteer fire departments. Sure.
That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have
children?
I do. Yeah.
Have they
gotten
into the family business?
No. No. No. My son's older and lives
back east. My daughter's 12. She doesn't really
like when I in the beginning, because she
was so still has some PTSD from the
Woolsey fire and having to evacuate and seeing
her neighbor's home's burned. She gets wearied when
I go out on calls. Even when I
we go to train, you know, she she
gets she seems to get a little anxious.
Normal.
Yeah. Yeah.
Listen, we wouldn't have formed this fire department
had we not experienced a
a traumatic wildfire.
Had no homes burned, we wouldn't have had
the incentive. We would have we would have
felt safe, which is what Bell Canyon residents
have said.
You know, Bell Canyon was founded in '69
and there have been several big fires. And
when I moved in in 2015,
you know, residents that had been here said
the same thing. Oh, yeah. We have big
fires, but you know what? We've never lost
a home. We've never lost a home. We're
fine. We're fine. And then we lost 40.
So and most of us stayed. I stayed
for most of that fire. We couldn't do
anything. We couldn't really do anything worth, you
know,
that some homes were saved by by guys
that ended up being on the fire department,
but not to the level that we could
have done with the equipment and the training
and the, you know, what we have now.
It's incredibly traumatic to experience
that.
Yeah. Yeah.
To watch your neighborhood that you've
loved and lived in and been a part
of, that could watch the community
burn.
It's a lot. It's a lot, and and
it lasts for years. You know? So that
fire was 02/2018,
and I I think maybe
60% of the homes have been rebuilt since
then. Only 60%.
In a weird way, the our fire department
benefited from
one of those losses,
in that
the property owner,
he was older, so he didn't wanna rebuild.
He tried to sell his his lot, his
burned out lot, but he had had a
bridge
from the street to his lot which also
burned
over pretty, I think it's an 85 foot
crevice or whatever you want to call it.
And so he wasn't able to sell the
lot for what he wanted to because there
just aren't that many contractors out there willing
and have the ability to build a bridge
before they even begin building a house.
So finally he said, You know what? I'm
just going to I want to donate the
property to you guys
and you should sell it.
Because whatever you get for it, that's going
to be a great resource for you to
continue operations.
And that's what we did. We sold it
right away to a contractor who knows how
to build a bridge and wanted to build
a bridge. And he got a great tax
write off because we're a five zero one(three)
nonprofit.
And by the way, we just, we survive
on donations,
resident donations. That's how we survive. This, this
is, this is going to help us operate
for, in theory, for, for years. And we
have gotten a couple of small grants from
Cal Fire
and one from Southern California Edison,
but pretty small
grants and helpful, but
we still need to fundraise. Yeah, absolutely. I'm
sure WatchDuty app got a lot of fundraising
funds after this is a free app and
everyone I mean, I I was on that
thing like crazy trying to figure out where
the fire was. I I had to evacuate
a couple different places. It was just
Yeah. That was insane.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a really
good app and a fairly new one. Speaking
of apps, my department has been developing an
app,
specifically for our community. We already have an
SMS
messaging where we can send out a message
to whoever subscribes,
like evacuate now or whatever it is.
But we have some folks in here who,
have put together an app for us. That's
great. Tech people. Tech people that do this
and who live here, and so
we wouldn't
really have been able to afford to do
it were they not donating their their time.
Absolutely.
What can people from your experience,
what could people do in their own homes
if they are in fire area
to protect that much more aside from getting
together groups of volunteer helpers?
Working hard on keeping your property,
fire safe, you know,
getting an assessment.
We have several people that that that assess
properties in here. I am I have a
certified
DSA,
defensive space assessor, through CAL FIRE.
The thing is, when the onus is on
the homeowner,
we can go to properties,
and very few homeowners actually ask for assessments,
which is disappointing.
They'll say, well, you know, maybe this tree's
too close and, you know, you should probably
think about getting rid of these these,
dried up bushes that are against your your
wall here.
But the onus is on the homeowner. If
they don't sometimes they'll say something like, oh,
gosh. My grandfather gave me that tree. It's
been growing for fifty years. I don't really
wanna cut it. Okay. You know? But that's
that's the way you you save your home
and protect your family is is to have
this
defensive space around your property that's, you know,
fairly significant.
And, you know, clean gutters and and,
vents that are one eighth
inch vents rather than the traditional one quarter
because embers can't really get into the one
eighth inch vents. You know, double double paned
glass, especially if you're very close to,
brushy areas because the heat, just that the
heat from
without the flames even touching your house, that
convective energy and that radiant heat can can
break through single pane glass. And then
that's an egress I mean, an ingress for
your fire
your emperors.
So that's that's kind of, you know, the
main thing that they can do. And also
just have a a to go bag if
you have to evacuate.
Right?
Important papers, medications,
stuff like that. And and a plan and
a plan with your family. This is what
we're gonna do, and this is where we're
gonna go. And you can't say we're gonna
go to the local Holiday Inn. It's probably
going to be booked up. If you're evacuating,
other people are evacuating.
Stuff like that.
Pets, make sure you go in. I have
a lot of pets. I have 14 rescue
animals. And so
how how do we get the pets out?
You know? What do you have? Four dogs,
three horses,
five cats, two turtles. That's so the tortoise
here, you've got the turtle situation.
Yeah. They're they're inside. They're inside turtles, so
they're smaller. But, but the horses, you know,
actually, they're spread out now. We have one
in Moore Park and one in Malibu.
But during
the fire, the the Palisades fire, we were
very nervous about, our horse over in Malibu.
He was okay, ultimately.
There was a lot of activity around making
sure the horses in and around the city
were okay, that I saw a lot of
that. I mean it's, it's so sad, and
then to see the wildlife coming in trying,
just trying to find water.
Find water. Yeah. And my wife,
up until recently ran our equestrian center. So
she had been through two
significant evacuations. And so she's you know, we
had a plan in place and it worked
out. It worked out. And
that's what you hope. You hope that things
are gonna you're gonna have enough time. It's
nice to have enough time. Like the Woolsey
fire, we we sort of had enough time
to for at least a lot of folks
to evacuate and get some of that stuff
done. You don't always though. The poor people
in the Palisades, that just exploded. It just
exploded. It came on so fast. I have
friends who lost homes. I have other friends
who their homes are still standing, but they
won't be able to get back for a
year because of the smoke damage. Everything in
the house has to be gutted.
That's one of my friends. He he's in
his neighborhood that was completely devastated. His home
survived. It's like There's no rhyme or reason
to it. No. There's no there's nothing here.
There's no town left. And so he moved
his family to,
Orange County for at least a year. Yeah.
So sad. How
much
weight do you, as volunteer firefighters,
have with
after assessing
an experience
that you've been through to go and say
to the powers that be,
look, there are a lot of holes in
the system, or this went well. Do you
have that kind of
open door to be able to
talk to the people that make those kinds
of plans? We're starting to develop relationships with
our
three battalion chiefs from Sugar County Battalion Chiefs
because, you know, there there's a battalion chief
for each shift. And we know a lot
of the LA City guys. Again, two of
our members are LA City Firefighters. Well, that's
never been an issue. I mean, we're we're
talking about, we're very lucky that I mean,
LA City Fire
and Cherry County Fire, they're they're some of
the best agencies in the world, you know,
equipment wise, training wise,
the personnel. So
far be it for us to criticize anything.
I mean, well, they're great. We've seen them
in in in operation. I mean, they're they're
they're fantastic. But, yeah, I mean, sure. If
if we had an issue,
there's folks that higher up that we can
reach out to. We just haven't had one.
In your position, do you look at the
world in a dystopian way, or are you
optimistic?
I mean, things are seem like they are
more and more,
rampant. Things are happening at a higher tick.
How is that affecting your
understanding of the world around you?
I've grown more accepting. I guess I'm less
shocked at things that happen, becoming desensitized.
Well, I don't know if that's a good
or a bad thing, but,
yeah, just accepting, like, okay, these things are
gonna happen. People are gonna do these terrible
things maybe. And and,
you know, if you look through history, other
other folks and generations have suffered some really
traumatic events. Right? We've been more or less
lucky
growing up, but
whatever happens, I'm just gonna
accept it. But I gotta tell you something,
about our fire department. You know, we're we're
all we've done tons of training and sort
of so we have certifications and the right
certifications and all that stuff
and all the right equipment.
We have over a mile of fire hose.
That's a lot of hose. Right?
What we also have and when we first
formed this fire department,
folks were in our our community were very,
very happy about it, very happy about it.
And thus, we were able to raise hundreds
of thousands of dollars in donations to build
the department. But like any community, there's a
small group
that is going to be critical
haters, right?
When we have that group, they are pretty
they seem obsessed with with, destroying our fire
department. And when I tell people this, they
can't they can't imagine
there there could be folks like this, but
in our community, there are. And unfortunately,
some of them
have some power in our community.
So we've been
I was just complaining about this this morning.
I'm like, I you know, had I known
that I'd just be writing letters in our
defense to the residents all the time, you
know, why I shouldn't have bothered getting all
the training, you know, that I
want. And and so it's, it's been a
battle. We, we've been battling just a small
group in our community, but they are relentless
in their attacks on us. And they just,
you know, they say, oh, they're not trained.
They haven't done AB. They tell a lot
of they put out a lot of misinformation
about us,
and it's all personal vendetta. There's a couple
of folks on the department
that this group really has had it out
for for years.
You know, they've been able to convince some
folks in the canyon,
we call it the canyon, that,
you know,
we shouldn't be here. Yeah. The vast majority
of folks want us here. In fact, we
had a meeting,
the other night after
we had been served with our second letter,
lawyer's letter from from our HOA telling us
to cease operations and, you know, we're we're
an independent five zero one c three. We're
not attached to the HOA. So we're like,
no. That's not happening. You know, we're not
going anywhere.
And a bunch of our supporters showed up
at the meeting and and voiced their concern
rather loudly.
So we're still having to fight those battles.
We're gonna win those battles because it just
makes sense.
Of course it makes sense. It seems ridiculous
that anyone would be against y'all.
Yep. Yep. That's
nothing we could have ever anticipated.
Yeah. There's always gotta be the couple people
that just
have to try and ruin everything.
Right. Every community has a couple of those.
Right? Absolutely. All gotten together
in one
pack, you know.
So it's really been fighting that. It's not
been pleasant, but at the same time, we're
still responding to calls where people are still
calling us, using our services, and and, you
know, telling us, you know, we're we're so
glad you guys are here. You know, we
want you here. We always say at the
end of the day,
if everybody in this community decided they didn't
want us, except for the 34 members of
the fire department and our families, we'd still
be operating and,
you know,
protecting our families.
Absolutely.
How if I
am somewhere in This United States or anywhere
in the world, I suppose, because these these
issues are going to start cropping up in
lots of places all around the world,
how does one
begin this process to to start? If I
wanted to start, do you have online resources
for people
to go to saying, hey, if you wanna
start your own volunteer firefighters, do this stuff.
How would I go about it?
Do you mean do we or did we
Do you have that kind of access for
people that are looking to start their own
in their communities?
Most of the volunteer fire departments in America
have been around for a long time. Mhmm.
Very few new ones. We're
probably the newest one in the country, and
we've been around
for four and a half years. So going
back to what I said at the beginning
where I grew up in a town that
had one, I already sort of had an
idea of
what that meant. Also, I had, family members
in in the fire service in in cities
in Massachusetts.
So I mean, I had some idea. And
then, you know, I was in the When
I was in the army, I was, military
police. And so I had that first responder
experience, and
I was in the National Guard after that.
So
I had a lot of
that experience
to
to draw from, and
other guys that were in there at the
beginning were former police officers, or current police
officers.
We had
enough of that to
kind of know what we needed to do.
So, I mean, if if you're someone who
doesn't have any of that experience and doesn't
have any,
idea what fire departments do or how they
operate except seeing the fire trucks rolling down
the street and getting out of their way.
Yeah. I I don't know how easy it
would be. We did the the near impossible.
And folks have told us that. They're like,
how did you do that? How did you
build what you had built in such a
short period of time? There's a lot of
serendipity involved. We're very lucky because we're
a a community that has a lot of
professionals.
You know. So on our department alone, we
have two lawyers, four engineers,
four pilots,
a bunch of, contractors. We have
folks with various skills that were able to
get things done for us in
various areas.
Also as a film producer, and by the
way, putting together a firebomb is kind of
like producing a film. Sure. Yeah. I mean,
you're putting the right people into the right
roles, right, to get the bigger project completed.
And that's, so I drew from that experience
also. It wasn't easy. We formed it during
the COVID shutdown. So most of our guys
were home
and they hadn't been home. We just wouldn't
have been able to do what we did.
It was very, there's so much serendipity involved.
So it's hard to say, oh, I just
take step a, b, and c.
It's just not that easy. Right? Well, I
think there's a big message in that regardless
is whether or not they,
communities form
a fire brigade. They certainly
it who's
humanity and the community
to
form connection.
Yeah. Because as a group, if some tragedy
strikes, you can operate
as a team. Yeah. And we're, we're a
fully independent
fire department. We're not attached to any agency,
and we purposefully
formed that way because of of an incident
that happened during the Woolsey fire that we
didn't want to happen to us. But, you
know, the fire brigades over in Malibu that
have gotten so much press, they have an
attachment to LA County Fire. So
they've been able to get trained
and,
organized
to at some degree by, you know, the
LA County Fire Department. That's that's great. Right?
That's a huge resource that they have, and
they proved themselves during this fire. You know,
they they did what they were supposed to
do
and saved a lot of homes and and
stayed safe.
And, you know, I know the county supervisor,
Lindsay Horvath, gave,
an, you know, an award to a bunch
of them.
That's great. You know? And so that would
be a piece of advice I would in
fact, that's a piece of advice I gave
to a local community, in Calabasas. They called
to ask for our advice. So when you
guys are LA County, so maybe if you
just want a fire brigade, you should contact
LA County Fire and see,
how they can help you. Yeah. There are
resources. There has to be. There has to
be if this is going to be the
new norm in California,
you know,
it's going to
be nearly impossible for folks to just do
it on their own. They need help. Right?
Yeah. And I do think that clearing the
brush, getting some of the dead stuff out,
getting will help. I mean, all of that
helps.
It's huge. It's,
yeah. And there's a lot of a lot
of resources
in the state and and the and from
the federal government directed towards towards that education.
Yeah.
My experience, and and I've
had these conversations with many folks
doing the same thing,
you know, the brush mitigation is that,
you know, you educate people, maybe 20 people
show up to your workshop,
eight of those people call for an assessment,
three of those people actually do anything
on their properties. It's
Yeah. But every little bit gets gets somewhere.
You know, it's all it's all part of
the big cog. How might people
donate to you or or learn more about
your group? Oh, you can go to our
website, bcvwfd.org.
It's just ourinitials.org.
There's a lot of information on there and
a lot of, you know, pictures and our
story, list of our members, and
what their certifications are. It's been a interesting
journey, something I never planned
on doing. You know, I wanted to when
I was a kid, but, of course, as
as time went on and we're not a
young department by any means. We're,
our average age is just a bit bit
older than
the local fire departments just by necessity. I
mean, that that's you you get what you
get when you have volunteer fire. Whoever in
your community that that's that's what you get.
In cases like this, I would feel like
you would want people that have been around
a while. Yeah. I mean, it just comes
with another level of understanding
and intellect and
ability
to move quickly in a tense situation.
All that comes by a seasoned life.
And human interactions.
Right? We've all been through a lot, so
it's easier to deal with the public. The
public is right? So, yes, all of that.
All of that. And clearly, you've lived a
life of service. I mean, you went down
the list of everything you've done, and I
I appreciate that you exist and that you're
on the planet, and you're doing
something outside of yourself
to make
the world better. And that's what you are
doing, and I think that that inspires others
as well. That's an example. Even if it's
an unintended
example,
you lead in that way. And I I
feel like
the more people like you that exist, the
better we're all gonna be. Well, thanks.
I I do appreciate that.
I I had really been wanting to find
a way to give back more before this
happened, before the fire broke out. I was
tutoring, and I I spent years as a
as a college professor. I was tutoring homeless
high school students
a little bit, and and then this happened.
And so there was my community service project
for the next several years, just continuing.
Yeah. But lucky that, you know, I I've
gotten this opportunity to,
to feel less
self absorbed.
Well, I feel like you could have five
Hey Human episodes, each one about the different
lifetimes you've lived in this lifetime.
Yeah. No doubt. No doubt. I really appreciate
your time. Thank you for listening, everybody, and
and thank you so much. Yeah. Well, thank
you, Susan, for having us. I I us.
I mean, me. I represent the department, of
course. But
it's it's we you know, we wanna get
the word out there that you can you
can do stuff in your own hood to
protect yourself.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And thank you, cousin
Mike, for introducing us. And, apparently, we're gonna
break bread at some point. Well Oh, good.
Yeah. Yeah. Mike's come on as one of
our PR folks, and he's been very helpful.
Yeah. That's good. Campaign
versus the the detractors, you know. So Oh,
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's got a lot
of fighting in him, so I
I could see him being really good at
that, pushing back against the detractors. So,
yeah, thank you so much. Have a great
day. You too. Take care. Bye.
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