How California fights its unpredictable wildfires with analytics

By Julie Cart CalMatters

Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jon Heggie wasn’t expecting much to worry about when a late summer fire erupted north of Santa Cruz, home to California’s moist and cool “asbestos forests.” This place doesn’t burn, he thought, with just three notable fires there in 70 years.

Heggie’s job was to predict for the crews where the wildfire might go and when, working through calculations based on topography, weather and fuels — the “immutable” basics. For fire behavior analysts like Heggie, predictable and familiar are manageable, while weird and unexpected are synonyms for danger.

But that 2020 fire was anything but predictable.

Around 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, ominous thunder cells formed over the region. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes rained down, creating a convulsion of fire that became the CZU Lightning Complex.

By noon there were nearly two dozen fires burning, and not nearly enough people to handle them. Flames were roaring throughout the Coast Range in

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Moving on to local activity, Miller explained that three local ordinances were recently passed in the cities of Davis and Woodland, and at the Yolo County level regarding gun storage.

“In Davis’ ordinance” the Chief detailed “it prohibits keeping a firearm in the residence unless it is carried on the person or in close proximity, or it’s stored in a locked container, or it’s equipped with a firearm safety device. It requires that firearms, not including handguns. In other words, legal rifles or shotguns, left unattended in a vehicle…has to be left in a locked container in the trunk, both conditions, so the shotgun has to be in a locked container inside the deep-shaded forests and waist-high ferns in sight of the Pacific Ocean. No one had ever seen anything like it. The blaze defied predictions and ran unchecked for a month. The fire spread to San Mateo County, burned through 86,000 acres, destroyed almost 1,500 structures and killed a fleeing resident.

“It was astonishing to see that behavior and consumption of heavy fuels,” Heggie said. “Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.”

Almost as troubling was what this fire didn’t do — it didn’t back off at night.

“We would have burning periods increase in the afternoon, and we saw continuous high-intensity burns in the night,” Heggie said. “That’s when we are supposed to make up ground. That didn’t happen.”

That 2020 summer of fires, the worst in California history, recalibrated what veteran firefighters understand about fire behavior: Nothing is as it was.

Intensified by climate change, especially warmer nights locked trunk…it also prohibits that they can’t be left overnight.” Miller noted that the ordinance ”defers to state law for handguns.”

For Yolo County, Miller said the ordinance is “very, very similar to Davis” with the same restrictions on the storage of guns in a residence while having a similar condition for vehicles with the added possi-