Farm Talk Podcast: Interview with Carpinteria-Summerland Fire Chief, Greg Fish

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Paul Ward: Hi everyone. It’s Paul Ward and welcome to another edition of Farm Talk. I’m excited because our guest today is Fire Chief Greg Fish in Carpentaria, California. Chief, Welcome to the show. 

Greg Fish: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. 

Paul Ward: One thing that is on people’s mind I think in this area are large wildland fires. We’ve had what seems like big fires for the last several years, actually in the middle of winter, which is kind of odd. I know that people are working to fight fires and prevent fires. What do you think is the most important thing for people to know when it comes to large fires?

Greg Fish: Well, so first and foremost these fires that burn are mostly controlled by the wind, right? So if a fire started like it did in the Fillmore area, during the Thomas Fire, it was fueled by really fast and dry winds. Those winds were so unprecedented that they pushed the burn as far as it did west. So when the winds blow we’re kind of at the mercy of mother nature at that point. There are some certain things that we can do to prepare, to make sure that the impact from those fires is minimized. One of those things is to do good vegetation management around your house or around your farm to make sure that there’s no place for the fire to connect to a house or a structure or a barn or whatever, have you. And that’s done by making sure that the native vegetation, which burns really well, is managed to an area where at least for like cheatgrass, you wouldn’t want to have that cheatgrass more than about two inches growing.

Greg Fish: So you’d take your weed wacker and whack it down to about two inches. Never go down to mineral earth because in the water, when it rains, will create a problem as well. And that’s when you get mudflows and debris flows. Second to that would be a native vegetation, such as a sumac tree or a bush. You want to make sure those are limbed-up so that there’s no ladder fuels to take it to the higher Pines and stuff like that. Lastly, you want to space everything out. So you don’t have to clear the land off to mineral earth. Never would we recommend that you do that, but that’d be one way. The second thing is that you need to have a plan. So one of the plans that we subscribed to, and this is basically all over the world, they do this in Australia, they do it in the Mediterranean and it’s called, “Ready, Set, Go.”

Greg Fish: You can Google “Ready, Set, Go” at any given time. There’s many websites, including our own Carpenteria-Summerland Fire Protection District. It has a “Ready Set, Go” brochure. What it tells you to do is be ready; so have a plan. If you’ve got to evacuate, have at least one or two paths out away from your house to go somewhere. Where are you going to go? Right? That’s ready. Then set. When the time comes, you should have a bag ready to pack, put your medications in, put your valuables in; it’s stuff that can’t be replaced, like photographs, put those things in there. So when the time comes, when they turn on the switch and they say, “it’s time to evacuate,” you go. You get in your car, you take your bags, you have that preplan set up already, and you just deliver yourself to a safe area until the fire passes through. An when the fire department is done dealing with the problem in your neighborhood or around your farm, you can go back and you can repopulate

Paul Ward: If somebody had a question specific to their property about how to make it safe, can they actually call the fire department and they’ll come out? I know there’s a deadline for brush clearance, where you’re driving around and making sure that, you know, properties are taken care of. But if somebody had that kind of a question, would the fire department come out and look at individual properties? 

Greg Fish: Absolutely. So in these jurisdictions and fire districts where they have, what I call intermix, it’s where the brush is intermixed with the structures. Yeah. There’s absolutely going to be someone that would be more than happy to help you determine what you need to do to make your vegetation safe. As it relates to those structures here in Carpentaria-Summerland, we actually have a wildland fire prevention specialist who will actually go to your place. You call him, he will come to you. He will give you his advice and he will give you whatever he can do to harden your house, to harden your structure. So that during a major wildland incident, we don’t lose that infrastructure.

Paul Ward: And I think it’s important to have the eaves sealed. Is that correct? Like make sure the Ember, if they’re flying through the air that they’re not coming up underneath the roof?

Greg Fish: So this is something that kind of sits a little bit in a special place for me in Glendale. Back in the late eighties, there was a fire called the College Hills fire and a lot of structures that had tile roofs burned to the ground because their eaves were not boxed in, or if they were boxed in the vents didn’t have screens on them. So the embers would go in and get into the attic. They’d catch the attic on fire. And the house had burned from the inside out instead of from the outside in, which is what you think. So the homeowners of all the 62 homes that were burned or damaged, made sure that they took care of that. And they haven’t had a problem in the College Hill area since. Not to say they haven’t had fires, they just haven’t had a problem losing their homes in that area. So, yeah, boxing in eaves is really important with some type of noncombustible material, as well as making sure that your out vents have a tight screen on it so that no ember can get past that screen and burn the house from the attic or the inside out.

Paul Ward: It seems like this season has been a little bit, I guess, safer or better than past seasons? It seems like the utility companies are doing some more preventative actions, turning the power out. If the wind gets too fast you know, waiting until the wind dies down and then the power goes back on, is that happening more too? 

Greg Fish: Yeah, That’s happening. As far as this season, we really haven’t seen the impacts of this season just yet. But it’s true, at this point in time, we do see a little more activity, but that’s not to say that it’s not going to kick in later. As far as the utilities I can speak to Edison. And in one case they have invested a tremendous amount of money in making sure that they are not the cause of wildland fires in the future. And what they’ve done is they’ve brought in fire experts that are educated at a higher level and know how to predict fire behavior. They can predict winds, they can predict humidities, and they can predict what that impact is going to have on their infrastructure, as far as the wires and the towers that they have.

Greg Fish: And so what they’re doing now regularly, if they feel that there’s enough threat, they shut down the power. They’ll shut down the grid in that particular area. That way, if a limb gets blown off of a tree, hits a wire, and it goes into the weeds and starts a fast moving wildland fire; something similar to what happened in the Thomas fire. You won’t have this just massive amount of devastation caused by a wire. So that’s the public safety power shutoff. A PSPS is what they’re known as and Edison is taking a lot of steps to make sure that happens. There’s two things that you have to remember about that. One, the fire department doesn’t have any control over that. And two, if you’re involved in a PSPS, you need to have a plan, right? So if you’re on oxygen that needs to be generated from electricity, you need to have a generator that’s going to be able to get you going and make sure your oxygen can completely replenish its system, right? So that you don’t breathe it down. And now you’re going to be in a bad way. 

Greg Fish: You also want to make sure that you have a plan, should you need to get out of your house. You’re probably not going to have the electricity, so your TV’s not going to work or your Dish Network or your DirecTV or your cable TV is not going to be working. More than likely wifi will not work as well. So you need to have a plan to figure out how you’re going to get informed. What we recommend is a transistor radio. Just a little AM/FM simple weather radio works great. You can get the weather and you can get information from the local news.

Paul Ward: I know some folks who lived during the east winds. You know, the power just went out and it was out for like three days last year. So more folks I know are getting generators to be able to stay home, to at least run the refrigerator and the microwave. So they’re not stuck in a hotel all of a sudden.

Greg Fish: One of the things that we like to stress, if you’re going to buy a generator, is to make sure that the generators are left outdoors so that it could ventilate properly. They do run pretty clean, but there’s still trace amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. We don’t want our people getting poisoned by the exhaust from those generators. So make sure you have enough extension cord to put that thing outside if it’s going to power your microwave or your refrigerator.

Paul Ward: What does it take to become a firefighter?

Greg Fish: To start with, it takes a lot of dedication. It takes a person that wants to really be in it for the long haul, because it’s not something that you just wake up and you flip the switch and you say, “Okay, I’m going to be a firefighter.” And then the next week you’re hired, it doesn’t work like that at all. The competition’s pretty heavy. A lot of people really enjoy the thought of being a firefighter, but there are not very many people that ever make it. For every one or two jobs that are out there, there’s probably 300 or 400 people that want that one particular job. So it’s very competitive. So it takes someone who’s tenacious. It also helps to have some type of education. So there’s Fire Technology where you can get your education and you can get a bachelor’s in Fire Protection Systems.

Greg Fish: You can even get a master’s degree in Fire Administration. So that would be something that I would recommend and second to that would be that you need to be exposed to the fire service. So if it looks like a really romantic job, when you’re watching the news, it’s not always romantic. There’s a lot of stress that goes into this job. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure that we feel when we’re operating in that environment. And so you have to have the right personality for that. We do a very comprehensive background investigation to make sure you have no criminal background, because remember when you’re going into a house you’re dealing with people’s belongings and they’re not there, right? So all their precious jewelry, all their precious belongings belong to you as that firefighter. And so we have to have complete confidence that you’re going to do the right thing with those belongings.

Greg Fish: You’re going to take care of those people with the standard of what I call someone I love, right? If it were my mom, if it were my sister, my brother, my dad, I’m going to take care of that person’s house as if it were my own family members. And so with that, that takes a lot more work. It takes a lot more dedication. So to start off with, yeah you’re going to need your EMT, which is Emergency Medical Technician. If you can get your paramedic license, that’s even better. A lot of fire departments are requiring paramedic licenses now. And you just have to be tenacious, take every test you possibly can get after it. And there’s going be some point in time when all the stars are going to align, and they’re going to offer you a position as a firefighter.

Paul Ward: And it is in many ways, a medical position. I mean, you get many more medical calls than you do fire calls. You’re not putting a fire out every day, but you’re getting a medical call all the time, right?

Greg Fish: Yeah, that’s correct. So I would say anywhere from about 70 to 85%, depending on the jurisdiction, of the calls you run have to do with medical. They are medical in nature, anywhere from a chest pain to someone not feeling good, anxiety, anything along the medical front we have to deal with those. So you have to have medical training. And that’s why I say Emergency Medical Technician would be one method of training yourself to get that certification so that you can operate in that environment.

Paul Ward: Do firefighters; I mean, maybe this is a silly question, but do firefighters get nervous? I mean, I think of, you know, danger and I just naturally run the other direction, but you guys are running towards the danger. 

Greg Fish: I will say this generally speaking, we are trained really well to deal with the problems at hand. There’s always going to be an incident or two within your career that you’re going to feel very nervous about and that you’re going to feel like you don’t have any control over. Most of the time we have control of what we’re dealing with, but I’ll give you a great example. What happened on 9/11, those firefighters, those 343 firefighters, I guarantee you were nervous. They knew what they were involved in. I remember watching the documentary and following the battalion chief around those guys, he had tremendous amounts of nervous energy that they harnessed, and they turned it into something very positive. And obviously thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people that were in the twin towers that day survived because of the heroic actions from those firefighters.

Greg Fish: Were they nervous? Absolutely. Did they know they were going to die? I would imagine they did. I’d venture to say that a handful of them knew, yeah, this is going to be the day that I die, but I’d rather be nowhere else dying in my boots, taking care of the public. And that’s what makes them heroes. Right. I don’t know at the moment of truth, if I would be able to do that, I’d like to think that I would, but it doesn’t always work like that. And so those 343 people that perished on 9/11 you got to tip your hat to them because they truly are the heroes. That’s what the fire service is all about is sacrificing yourself to make sure that the community is safe.

Paul Ward: Right. They really know that that’s their calling. And you know, you don’t go into it like, “Oh, I’ll go be a fireman, cause I can’t think of what else I want to do.” You know, it’s not that kind of position. Alot goes into it. You know, it’s a certain personality type that can do it.

Greg Fish: Oh, it’s absolutely a certain personality type. Yep. So when you say nervous, there’s also adrenaline, right? When you get a massive adrenaline rush that occurs when you’re in that high pressure environment. So we as the people that thrive in that environment are the people that can take that adrenaline and turn it into something positive, as opposed to allowing that adrenaline to turn it into something nervousness related. And that would cause you to make bad decisions.

Paul Ward: That’s a good point. So you come from a firefighting family?

Greg Fish: Yes, I do. My father was an LA city firefighter. He got hired right after he served in World War II. He realized that he was going to need to support his wife and his new baby. And in 1948, he started in the LA County Fire Department. He didn’t like the first call that he went on. It was a 20 minute response time. He was up in Lake Elizabeth and he says there’s gotta be more action than that. So in 1950, he took the test for the Los Angeles City Fire Department. And in 1976, he retired as a fire Captain.

Paul Ward: What made you want to go into the same line of work?

Greg Fish: You know, it’s ironic because I grew up going to the fire station during holidays and like Thanksgiving, we would have the Thanksgiving meal at the fire station and it never really hit me. I always thought, wow, this is really cool, but I don’t know if this is really a career choice for me. I was working in a machine shop one day and one of the fellow machinists told me he was working his last day. It was a Friday. I said, “Where are you going to work?” He says, “I’m going to go work at the LA County Fire Department. And you’re going to be in here sweating behind a machine.” And I thought, I don’t know if I can do that for 30 years or 40 years. So I really got to thinking about what he was talking about. Like, think about all the benefits of being a firefighter.

Greg Fish: I went home and I told my dad and my dad had 10 kids. I was number nine out of 10 kids. Yes. I was number nine. I was the first one that actually told him I wanted to be a firefighter. And he, of course, opened up his arms and he hugged me and he said, “I can’t believe one of my kids is finally gonna follow me in that profession.” And so sure enough, that was the beginning of me going to Glendale Community College and taking some classes. Then just being very aggressive in the testing process, I came up to Santa Maria, got into the  Fire Academy in 1986 and at 20 years old in 1987, I got hired as a firefighter. So really fortunate to get hired that young. Of course, (I had) my father mentoring me and teaching me the finer things of how to get through the process of being a firefighter.

Greg Fish: Then again, April 20th, 1987 was a great day for me. It was the day that I was offered a career in the Glendale Fire Department. So since then, I’ve retired from Glendale and I wanted to get up to the Santa Barbara area and there was an opportunity to take the Fire Chief’s test here in Carpenteria-Summerland Fire Protection District. I got hired here in 2018 and with my family, we relocated up here. I have other family in the Santa Barbara county area. And so it’s just been fantastic.

Paul Ward: This is a pretty special spot, it really is. Where do you see technology going in kind of fire control? I mean, it’s very different now because you don’t have the men sitting up on a tower or on a mountain, you know, with binoculars looking for smoke. Those old towers are kind of sitting abandoned and surrounded by barbed wire fencing so nobody trespasses. Now it’s kind of a relic. Where is fire control going now? 

Greg Fish: Fire control, there’s a lot of different technologies that are really emerging. One of them is the ability to plant fire or fire watching cameras in these towers that you used to have somebody up there 24 hours a day doing Firewatch. Well, these cameras are crystal clear HD. Now you can have one person watching maybe 25 different cameras, which is just fantastic. So we can get out ahead of those early, but those are mostly in a wild situation, but there’s also a lot of technology that relates to other ways that we control fire. (For example) In Menlo park, they’re really proud of the fact that they have a hands-free forward looking infrared device. It’s basically a thermal imaging camera and it mounts on their (helmet); it’s really like next. It mounts on their helmet and there’s a camera and they can see through the smoke.

Greg Fish: It’s absolutely amazing. So that’s for structure fires. There’s also a lot of technology as it relates to just getting your iPad involved, right? There’s EPCR- Electronic Patient Care Records- that used to take so much longer. Now we can report data through Electronic Patient Care Reporting, and then they can do a handoff to the hospital when we hand the patient over. Lastly, something as simple as a product called Tablet Command, it helps us command fires. It helps us see in real time through an Automatic Vehicle Locator, AVL. You can actually see on a Google map or Apple map, the vehicles arriving at the scene on Tablet Command. It allows the Incident Commander to have much more situational awareness, keeping people safe; understanding where the fire’s going, that’s Tablet Command.

Greg Fish: That’s something that we’re just starting to involve ourselves with right now here. Carpenteria is sovereign then. Probably the most impressive thing I would say is the Wildland Prediction Models, right? In the San Diego area, there’s a lot of universities that are working together as a consortium to build this thing. It’s basically predictive modeling. If you put in the inputs, it’ll tell you, based on the brush; through LiDAR. They use all kinds of weather observations, and the time of day, it’s just incredible, the technology that they have. They’re almost spot on. We’ve looked at some of these things as they go through different stages of fires. When you look at the prediction of where it actually went, they’re almost exact. So that’s something that’s really helping us make determinations based on, you know, we had to evacuate an entire community. That’s a big decision when you start thinking about that, right? A lot of things are occurring at the same time. Law enforcement needs to go knocking on doors. We need to make sure that everybody in electronic format can find out from their cell phone or through the internet or through their emails. How do we do that? It’s all done through technology. So technology is changing the game for sure.

Paul Ward: I mean, you think about the tragedy of the Paradise Fire up north; that was just horrific. Then the Thomas Fire and the Woolsey Fire. You think about the technologies and I don’t know if it would be the fire department’s role, but you know, some entity could go in and say, “Okay, this area just based on the models needs to be cleared out or just thinned out.” or something like that. I think that’s kind of where it’s headed. 

Greg Fish: I would say, again, we can’t predict weather patterns. They’re pretty consistent from time to time, but there’s always that one-off weather pattern. If that one-off creates a problem, how do we deal with it? Well, we can deal with it in real time, but we would much rather deal with it before the fire starts. So that’s what a lot of these technologies are helping us to do.

Paul Ward: So how does Carpentaria work with other departments in the area?

Greg Fish: In Santa Barbara County, we have what’s called, “The Santa Barbara Fire Chiefs Association,” of which I’m the president right now. That is a very tight knit group of fire chiefs that get together on a regular basis. We talk about how we’re going to deal with our issues, whatever the issues are. I can speak specifically to two fire departments, Carpenteria-Summerland Fire Department, which is the one I work at and the Montecito Fire Protection District, which is our next door neighbor, just to the west. We have a collaborative effort. We’ve dropped our borders between our two agencies. We bring the closest, most appropriate resource to that incident at any given time. The hope is that we would get that in Santa Barbara county and the greater region.

Greg Fish: And that’s what we’re working toward right now through a dispatch center that would allow us to not have any borders between us. If the Carpenteria-Summerland resources are closer than the Montecito resource, we’re going to take it. If it’s vice versa, they’re going to take it. Whoever’s the closest, we get the best service doing it that way through a collaborative effort. So we do have a very tight knit group up here. And as it relates to dealing with major incidents, we do have what’s called an Incident Management Team, an IMT, so we can deal with pretty complex incidents, but if it gets too complex, we’ll call the feds or the state to help us run that incident. But at a lower level, you know,  and definitely within the first 12 hours of a major incident, we have all the tools in the toolbox to deal with any type of incident that we might come across based on the fact that we have qualified and certified people that know how to deal with these types of incidents. 

Paul Ward: If you’re collaborating with Montecito, the system would know that maybe the Montecito truck is closer to that emergency than the Carpentaria tracker. 

Greg Fish: That’s correct, yeah. That’s done through AVL, as we talked about earlier Automatic Vehicle Location, it’s all done by GPS. So we can actually see on a map where our resources are and if we need to dispatch a resource, we know it’s already closer. So we just dispatch them in and it’s flawless. It’s seamless. It takes a minimal amount of time to figure it out. And it’s what’s best for the community. I know if my mother and my sister were living in this area and knew my brother, my you name it, whoever that loved one is, they’re going to get the best service based on the fact that we create policies that allow for the best possible care. We believe that the AVL system and dropping the borders is the best possible scenario for our communities.

Paul Ward: That seems to make perfect sense because you know, if one truck is a mile away. (It’s not like) you gotta call Carpentaria, even though they might be 10 miles away. That seems to make perfect sense.

Greg Fish: Yes. And we also have what’s called the Master Mutual Aid System. The Master Mutual Aid System works within the entire state of California and we help each other out. So if Northern California is having a fire, we send strike teams of resources. A strike team is basically five fire engines and a battalion chief. We send them up north and when we have our big event down here, they send themselves. So we do work together. There can’t be a fire station on every corner like Starbucks, right. That just doesn’t work. So when we have those big events, we call for those resources early and they come our way and they assist us in dealing with any major incident that we have. There were resources all over the Western United States on that Thomas Fire.

Paul Ward: Yeah. I mean, Montana and Nevada and Oregon all came to fight that. 

Greg Fish: Yes. 

Paul Ward: That’s great. Well, Chief Fish, thank you so much for being a guest on Farm Talk. We greatly appreciate it. This has been incredibly informative, and I think our viewers will have learned a lot and appreciate what you had to say. 

Greg Fish: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much. 

Paul Ward: Thank you. Be sure to check in to our next edition of Farm Talk. You can find us on Audible, Amazon, Apple iPlayer, and wherever you find your podcasts. This edition was brought to you by Escrow Hub and The Money Store, and be sure to check in for our next edition. Greg Fish, thank you so much for being a guest on farm talk. I know that our listeners are going to have learned a great deal from what you had to say and we greatly appreciate it.