Why fire agencies fail to put out blazes that later turn disastrous

Firefighters knew the charred skeleton of a tractor was still smoking when they left the valley floor in Ventura County last year, but didn’t think it posed any danger.

A week after crews declared the 1.8-acre Balcom fire out, powerful Santa Ana winds arrived, picked up some bits of hot rubber from one of the tractor’s scorched tires and carried them over into dry vegetation, bringing the fire back to life, according to investigators.

Though Ventura County Fire Department officials said they went by the book when they left the Balcom fire— clearing containment lines, dropping retardant and even using a drone with an infrared camera to identify lingering heat — it wasn’t enough. The Mountain fire burned nearly 20,000 acres and destroyed roughly 250 homes and structures in Camarillo Hills and nearby communities in western Ventura County.

Infrared image from Balcom fire on the remains of a tractor that caught fire while clearing brush in Somis shows hot spots on the wheels.

(Ventura County Fire Dept.)

As climate change makes the drying landscape more vulnerable, the Mountain and Palisades fires, both originating from smaller blazes firefighters thought they had put out, are raising questions about whether agencies need to rethink how they ensure fires are truly extinguished.

Many agencies have utilized technology like infrared drones to scan for lingering heat, but the solution might be as simple as spending extra time patrolling after the fire to ensure nothing is smoldering, experts say.

“Understanding the consequences that will come from a fire, should it rekindle, and spending extra time and attention and not just taking it for granted that the fire is out is key,” said Chris Dicus, a professor emeritus of wildland fire and fuels management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner said the department is creating a post-fire policy and mop-up procedures in the wake of the Mountain fire. The agency is also bringing in a third party to examine its actions on the fire and suggest areas for improvement.

“We will learn from this,” Gardner said.

Firefighters hose down hot spots on the Balcom fire.

(Ventura County Fire Dept.)

Officials say “holdover fires” — those that remain dormant for days, weeks or months before restarting —aren’t uncommon. In 1991, what began as a small grass fire in Oakland rekindled into a firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed more than 3,300 structures.

More recently, the 2021 Marshall fire — the most destructive blaze in Colorado’s history — was partially caused by embers from a week-old trash fire.

And the wildfire that killed more than 100 people on Maui in 2023 erupted from an earlier brushfire sparked by downed power lines.

The Palisades fire, which devastated the communities of Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga, was a holdover from the Lachman fire, which federal prosecutors say was intentionally set on Jan. 1.

A view of cleared lots and sparse construction after the Palisades Fire in the Sunset Mesa neighborhood of eastern Malibu.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles Fire Department officials, already under scrutiny for not pre-deploying engines in advance of hurricane-force winds, now face questions about why they didn’t fully extinguish the Jan. 1 blaze before a buried ember touched off the Palisades fire — killing 12 people and leveling more than 6,800 structures.

Text messages obtained by The Times revealed that a battalion chief had ordered firefighters to leave the scene of the Lachman fire the day after it broke out, even though they said the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch.

In October, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass directed then-LAFD Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva to launch an investigation into the matter.

Villanueva has previously said that LAFD took all the necessary steps to extinguish the Lachman fire. Firefighters “cold-trailed” the perimeter, chopping a line around the fire and feeling for residual heat. They packed up and left on Jan. 2.

“We did everything that we could do,” he said.

Wildland fire experts say that to reduce the chance of rekindle or holdover fires, departments should follow industry standards and cut a fire break around the burn scar, use hand crews to dig out hot spots and repeatedly check for hot spots in the days after. In the case of the Mountain fire, Ventura County went further, using a drone to find hot spots. LAFD decided against deploying the technology in the Lachman fire, officials said.

Ed Nordskog, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s arson investigator, said that in the handful of rekindles he experienced during his career, he found that fire leadership was reluctant to accept it as a cause.

“It’s a personal embarrassment and possible career ending for a battalion chief or captain to have a rekindle,” he said. “I encountered six to eight rekindles during my career and each time the local battalion chiefs showed up to try and convince the investigators it was arson.”

In each of the major holdover fires in recent years, strong winds have helped carry embers into combustible materials, typically dry terrain.

“What climate warming is doing is it’s creating drier fuels and conditions for fires overall, not just holdover fires,” said Hugh Safford, a research faculty member in the UC Davis department of environmental science and policy and a former ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service.

Some research has indicated that holdover fires, which can survive underground amid snow and rain, are becoming more common in high northern latitudes as the climate warms.

A 2021 study found that the boreal forests of Alaska and Canada in the winter are particularly prone to these types of rekindled fires, which are also known as overwintering or “zombie” fires.

Experts say there isn’t clear information about whether rekindlings are happening more frequently in California. But the fact they’re occurring in urban areas makes them more visible and worth learning from, Dicus said.

“When this might have happened in the middle of nowhere, no one cares, but when it burns down communities, it’s going to make the national news,” he said.

A day after Ventura County officials declared the Balsam fire out last year, crews flew a drone that detected heat near the fire’s edge and the tractor‘s wheels. Firefighters dug out the smoldering material so it could cool. The heat signatures on the tractor weren’t unusual, they thought, since the metal rims would have retained heat overnight.

It even rained in the days after fire crews left the area, further assuaging their concerns.

“We didn’t go back out to this fire days afterward because we didn’t think we needed to. It was cool. It was wet, we had forecasted rains,” Gardner said.

But armed with lessons from that fire, Ventura County fire officials have implemented changes.

The day of a 2.3- acre brush fire near Janss Road in Thousand Oaks last month, a drone team flew the blaze’s footprint and identified hot spots to help firefighters mop up. Crews continued to patrol overnight and again early the next day. They returned two days later with a possibility of increased fire weather in the forecast and scanned the fire footprint to ensure no heat was lingering.

The approach echoed one firefighters took during the Kenneth fire in January. Officials used a drone to scan the 1,000-acre fire footprint to locate hot spots daily for roughly a week amid increased fire weather risks.

“These are a couple of examples of how operational decision making and our response to brush fires continues to evolve,” said Andrew Dowd, a spokesperson for Ventura County Fire.

LAFD’s newly confirmed fire chief, Jaime Moore, said he planned to commission an outside investigation into missteps during the mop-up of the Lachman fire.

But Moore has also been critical of what he called media efforts to “smear” firefighters — a position that some said raises questions about whether fire victims will get answers about what more could have been done to prevent the blaze.

An LAFD after-action report released last month described shortcomings of the department’s response to the Palisades fire, along with recommendations for improvement, but contained only a few mentions of the Lachman fire. A report commissioned by Gov. Gavin Newsom roughly a month after the Palisades and Eaton fires killed 31 people and destroyed 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County will not analyze the Lachman fire response.

“We were asked to study the Palisades, Eaton and … 10 other fires,” Derek Alkonis, one of the report’s authors, said. “We’re driven to get as much data as possible to analyze the systems that are in place to address the very systems that were in place during the Lachman fire.”

LAFD in March issued a policy memo outlining fire containment and mop-up procedures to “ensure complete extinguishment of vegetation, wildland and brush fires.”

Fires that are smaller than 5 acres, the policy states, should include a line cut by hand or with a bulldozer around the entire perimeter, and 100% mop-up where crews extinguish remaining hot spots and smoldering material within the fire’s control lines using water and foam. Larger fires are required to have “wet mop-up extending a minimum of 100 feet from the fire perimeter,” according to the document.

The bulletin states that unmanned aerial system drones “should be considered for deployment” on fires greater than an acre to assist with infrared heat detection and fire perimeter surveys.

Gardner, Ventura County’s fire chief, noted that it’s difficult to question whether firefighters who put their lives at risk responding to these incidents could have taken different actions.

“The trust and respect of the community is of the utmost importance for me and what’s important for my men and women that respond every day and deal with these communities,” he said. “We don’t want that to be broken and that’s why we’re trying to be upfront and transparent and accountable. We’re going to look at ways to do things even better in the future.”

Times staff writers Alene Tchekmedyian and Paul Pringle contributed to this report.