Leaders from the Santa Barbara County Fire Chiefs Association recently met to create three working groups to address key fire safety issues at the regional level.
“We met as fire chiefs and realized that we are all working on these areas of concern independently. Unfortunately, when we come to solutions independently, it has unintended consequences or impacts in our neighboring jurisdictions, ”said Mark Hartwig, head of the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, to Noozhawk. “Greg Fish (chief of the Carpinteria-Summerland fire department) thought, ‘Why don’t we get our teams together and identify the fire and life safety issues and see if we can solve them regionally?’ In this way, we have a regional set of standards that we can take back to policy makers. “
Fish told Noozhawk, “I tried to come up with an idea where all the representatives from these different agencies would come together and find solutions.”
After collaborating with community members, stakeholders and the various fire departments, the fire brigade association identified three main issues to resolve: access and parking on county trails and beaches, scattered camp and fires and other issues of security associated with homeless camps.
“We found that the more we work together on common issues, the easier it will be for everyone involved, because the communities are so interconnected,” said Kevin Taylor, head of the Montecito Fire Protection District, Noozhawk.
Taylor is leading the working group focused on access to the trail and parking. Rob Hazard, head of the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, is leading the scattered camp task force, and Rob Rappaport, fire Marshal of Carpinteria-Summerland, overseeing the group of homeless camps.
“The goal of the task force is for the three groups to come up with recommendations, provide them to county chiefs and then forward them to their respective elected bodies,” said Hazard.
The working group started out more focused on homeless camps and concerns about the associated fire risks they pose, according to Hazard. From January 1 to December 1 of last year, the county fire department responded to 45 fire-related calls at homeless camps, Hazard said, and 12 of those incidents were forest fires.
As fire chiefs took a closer look at this issue, they began to notice some shifts in other related issues of importance, Hazard said.
The scattered camp was a nexus to the issue of homeless camps, as many residents began to notice a huge increase in night camps beside the road, he added. The 2019 cave fire was man-made, and the use of campfires in the mountains poses an extreme fire risk.
Since most of the dispersed camps take place on public lands in the national forest, county firefighters have no supervisory authority. The camp working group is meeting with Los Padres National Forest staff to find out how they can collaborate together, said Hazard.
“Part of these working groups is identifying who has the authority to comply with the regulations and what options are available to that group of stakeholders,” he added.
Starting from the scattered camp, overcrowded parking on county trails and beaches was the third problem identified. With the increased use of the beginning of the trails, access to the mountains becomes more restricted, which can be a problem for firefighters in an emergency.
“We are currently in the discovery stage,” said Taylor. “We have information from community members, firefighters and other stakeholders, and now we are putting it all together and checking with the agencies responsible for implementation.”
In early February, working groups will regroup and bring back objectives based on the three priorities to provide possible recommendations to the respective elected officials or agencies, Fish said.
“It is a work in progress, but it will really bring clarity with regard to public security,” he added. “We need to deal with these issues so that people do not die, are seriously injured or create greater danger. This is unacceptable. ”
Hartwig said: “This will give us at least a uniform set of recommendations in the sense that the same actions that we take in one jurisdiction would ideally be standardized in others. That way, we would not have these unwanted consequences. “
– Jade Martinez-Pogue, editor of the Noozhawk team, can be contacted at . (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.