Interview Only w/ Pete Curran - The Wildfire Conditions In 2026 Are Extremely Alarming

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

This episode of The Chuck Podcast is brought to you by Ethos.

And what Ethos does is it helps you find life insurance.

Let me tell you why life insurance bailed me out.

My father died when I was 16.

We didn't have a lot of money when it happened.

And we were in a pretty tough financial spot after it happened.

I'm an only child. Suddenly my mother's single.

Single mother. She had a job. Suddenly lost a job looking for

another job. And we were struggling.

You know, my dad didn't leave us in the best financial situation.

But he did make one purchase. He bought a life insurance policy.

Wasn't a huge chunk of change.

But it was enough when we found it.

And when I say we found it, meaning we went through his desk and we found,

oh, look at this. Let's see if there's anything here.

And it helped us out at a time that we really needed it.

And that's why I think it's important that if you can,

especially if you have young children,

if you can get life insurance, you should get it.

Life is full of unexpected emergencies, unexpected things happen.

It is an extra bit of security.

Something you can leave and help out at a time when you're not,

you're not there to help.

So what does ethos do?

Well, ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy.

And it's 100% online.

You can get a quote in seconds.

You can apply in minutes.

And you can get same day coverage.

They will find you the right fit.

There's no medical exam.

You just answer a few simple health questions online.

You can get up to $3 million in coverage.

And some policies are as low as $30 a month.

And you'll get your lowest rate from their network

of trusted carriers.

So take 10 minutes to get covered today

with life insurance through ethos.

Get your free quote at ethos.com slash chuck.

That is ETHOS.com slash chuck.

Application times may vary and rates may vary.

Well, my next guest is filled the role of a staff meteorologist

for an organization called WatchDuty.

And as many of you know, I've been obsessed with the local news

problem that we have all across the country.

It doesn't matter media market like I do in Washington

or where my guest is in Southern California.

It doesn't mean that local news is getting the coverage

that is necessary.

And the focus of the conversation with this organization

has to do with wildfires and wildfire season,

which of course is such a huge issue in California,

being a Floridian.

It's the equivalent of constantly having

to be prepared for hurricane season or tropical storms.

What that consumes pretty much everybody's half

of everybody's brain in Florida, just like wildfire season

consumes about half of everybody's brain

in Southern California.

And I see Pete is nodding along here in agreement.

So, but what I find fascinating about WatchDuty

is it's filling a role that traditional local media

once filled.

And we know with all the cuts this is missing.

And in some ways, this might end up being a more trusted

and a better way to do this.

So part of this is also highlighting something new

in the information ecosystem.

So let me bring in Pete Curran, staff meteorologist

for WatchDuty.

Pete, nice to meet you.

Good to meet you, Chuck.

Thank you for having me.

So look, we're on the, I used to ask this

of one of my oldest and closest friends,

lives in L.A. and he's now fond of saying,

there is no such thing as wildfire season,

unless you want to call all 12 months of the calendar a season.

Do you concur with that these days?

Absolutely.

Right, we all know for years that the fire scene

has been getting longer.

And if you talk to any firefighter and you ask them,

after it's been a tremendously rainy winter perhaps,

and you ask them, what do you think about fire season?

And they will say without missing a beat,

it will be the mother of all fire seasons

because they will be new growth

and that growth will dry out and it will be really bad.

And if we've had zero rain, and it's been a really dry winter,

and you asked the firefighter what kind of fire season

they will say, it will be the worst fire season ever.

So it's a standard answer.

That's the way it is in California.

When I started in the fire service,

so that's my background.

I started as a firefighter.

It's been an entire career in the fire service.

And we used to have a regular fire season, right?

It used to start in Southern California.

We even start maybe late May, early June with some grass fires

and then as the season progressed and the summer got hotter.

But we were done with by typically November 1st,

right after the Santa Ana's Palm.

So fire season in California was the equivalent

of what hurricane season traditionally was,

which is June 1st, November 30th.

That was approximately fire season out west.

There you go, right?

And so there was a tremendous,

right, all the fire service.

They're staffing and logistics and resources,

all based on that.

And so now it's a change in that for the last,

obviously, decade that we've sort of turned

into a year round fire season.

Tell me about watch duty.

I know where it got on my radar, one of my producers,

Lauren Gardner, he lives in L.A.

and I remember during the fire in California,

the palisades in particular,

watch duty became just a must have app.

All of a sudden, everybody, it was one of those,

you know, it must be an odd thing for you guys

to say your biggest growth period was

during one of the worst disasters ever, right?

That's never a comfortable place to be.

And yet, the reason you grew is you had information

that people found to be factually correct and helpful.

Look, you said you were a firefighter before.

What was the information flow

to the public pre-watch duty in your mind?

Sure, because one of the roles I filled

was there's a situation unit leader

on an incident management team.

So I can tell you what that information flow was.

And that is twice a day we take a snapshot of the incident

and that goes, they fill out a very official form

and that's the percentage of containment,

how many acres, how many resources on the fire.

So that would be updated twice a day.

And so the information to the public and the media

and everything else would happen about 6 a.m.

in the morning and 6 p.m.

in between those hours.

There really wasn't specific information about the incident.

So now with watch duty,

we have an army of reporters,

contributors that are looking at this incident in real time.

They are digesting radio traffic on radio scanners

or listening to the real-time information

they're looking at cameras,

the wildfire cameras that are pointed at the fires.

They're looking at satellite imagery of hotspots

and things like that.

So they are able to report in real time

things like where the fire is moving.

How fast is it?

Are there any evacuations?

So they vet this information,

they make sure that it is valid through a number of sources

before it appears on the app.

So only vetted information appears on that app as official.

But for years before this existed,

so how did you farm,

you know, when you were on these incident teams,

did you just have a collection of local media

that was paying attention?

You tried to have relationships with different TV meteorologists

or how did it work?

So there was on every incident management team,

there's a public information officer,

PIO shop, and they may have one to 20 people

depending on how big the fire is.

So those folks would do outreach to the local medias.

But also, but they would always have to key only

off of those official twice a day,

ICS 209 reports is what they call.

And so they could only sing whatever was on those sheets.

But yes, previous to watch duty,

it would be the PIOs,

but mostly it would go to the national interagency fire center,

where official places that would release this information,

the maps that you see, the fire perimeter maps, the acreage,

that's where it would come from.

And you guys are fully private.

Is it nonprofit?

Is it NGO?

How would you describe it?

It is fully nonprofit donor supported app.

This all started.

John Clark Mills was in the tech industry,

Silicon Valley around 2021,

purchased a home and then was immediately

threatened by wildfire.

And he found that there was no one place that he could go

to find out about evacuations,

to find out about the fire movement,

to find out about what was happening.

And so his thought was, shouldn't there be such a thing,

this one stop shop?

And he made it.

He made it happen.

And that's what watch duty is.

So let's talk about this season.

It was a wet winter,

so that that that, but as you said,

you can spin a wet winter means new growth,

means more fuel for fires,

or a dry winter means even drier condition,

more fuel for fires.

I mean, is it really heads we lose tails you lose?

This season, it is pointing in that direction, right?

So as you know, we had a pretty wet winter,

but what we didn't have was a lot of snow, right?

So even though, let's say in California,

it's a lot of big snow back.

We're about, right?

So and not just in California,

we're talking about through the entire west,

Colorado, the lowest snow pack ever,

right throughout the west.

Hey, man, we got plenty of your snow.

We got plenty of that out east.

It was a crazy.

We got more, there was a stat, Pete, you'll love this.

I think we had, Denver had more days over 70,

and we had more snow out here.

I mean, it was just crazy.

It's been a crazy season.

And so, right, I mean, we're seeing things

that the handwriting is on the wall, right?

So in February, we had a 280,000 acre fire in Kansas.

Then in March, 680,000 acre fire in Nebraska,

followed by another 250,000 in mid-March.

When does that happen? That never happens.

March, I mean, that's supposed to be still winter,

right? Still sort of moist and wet.

No, in low-lying areas, so the planes

were the first wake-up call.

A 680,000 acre fire in mid-March is a wake-up call.

Then in California, we have the hottest march on record ever.

Right? Then we start seeing a marine heat wave

caused by this march, right?

So off the Eastern Pacific,

we have the hottest, the Scripps Institute

is reporting sea surface temperatures,

the hottest they've seen.

Now we have what, last week, a category five typhoon

in the Western Pacific in April, right?

So my comment previously was the handwriting is on the wall.

And if you're a fire manager, if you're in this business,

if you're a fire behavior analyst,

if you're looking at those fuels,

and you are not realizing these signs,

then your head is in the sand.

It's going to be a very significant season.

How, you know, look, I'm being an East Coaster.

I'm, you know, like I said, we're all in.

And if you're a Floridian, you're an amateur meteorologist,

a hurricane expert.

We all think we're hurricane experts.

I spent years at the hurricane center, you bet.

And so, but I feel very ignorant

when it comes to fire season.

And all of that for, again, proximity is everything.

How hard is it to forecast fire season?

And I mean, and how connected is it to La Nina and El Nino?

And I know we're about to do a flip.

Right. So great question.

So as the forecasters are looking at this season,

what are we looking at?

Well, first, we're looking at that,

the things we just talked about, the dry smooth snowpack.

We know that all of the things that burn,

which is what, grass, brush, timber,

those things are drying out in record ways.

Because normally we would start fire season with grass fires,

but the heavier stuff, the timber would be wet from the snow.

Well, guess what? We don't have the snow.

So now, we have a scenario where all the fuels are drying out rapidly.

And we're going to enter into a scenario where we're going to start to have

these 100 acre fires, 200 acre fires in California,

and all of a sudden, the timber that wouldn't normally burn

is now going to be receptive to burning

a month or two earlier than it would be.

So we're looking at in all areas, a scenario where,

throughout the west, throughout the Midwest, even,

of a significant fire season.

So we look at these models, we look at the weather models.

Obviously, you know, a wildfire is driven by slope,

topography, fuel, and weather,

weather being the most difficult to predict, right?

So when I go to a fire, I'm looking at the winds,

I'm looking at, is there a cold front?

Are the winds going to change direction?

Is there lightning?

Right, typically a lightning bust from a decaying tropical system, actually.

Right, so we do have tropical cyclones that might come up

the Baja Spine of Mexico.

Even though the water is too cold for them to sustain themselves.

You just talked about the warm water, though.

I keep like the minute you said that.

It's like, there you go.

There you go.

Are we going to see something we've never seen before,

like landfall on the west coast of one of these typhoons?

Right.

So two years ago, we had a decaying tropical storm.

It was still tropical to storm as it entered this southern U.S.

First time ever, but it brought abundant lightning over California

that started all these fires that went for months.

So this year with that hot water, the El Nino,

the developing issues on the sea surface temperatures,

we could certainly see tropical activity

further north.

We're already hearing from the fishermen.

You want to know about El Nino?

You talked to the fishermen.

If they're catching these big fish that they don't normally catch in those waters,

that's the first sign and that's what we're hearing.

Wow.

Yeah.

With a hurricane, there's some preparation.

Yep.

Walk me through what you'd be telling what you are telling people

in Southern California.

Because unlike a hurricane, there's not a,

I assume it's not like you can track.

Well, we know a fire may start in this 10 day period.

You don't have that kind of precision like we do with with organized storms.

So, you know, that I assume is the hardest part

to get people to prepare.

It's, you know, the human species are procrastinators.

I think we've learned this now over time.

100%.

So what we're telling the people is and what the drumbeat has been,

right?

Certainly the LA wildfires in 2025 was a wake up call

to harden your home against wildfire, right?

To be ready to evacuate, to have a go kit,

not unlike, you know, a tropical scenario.

But really, when you're talking about wildfire,

and we saw this in the LA wildfires, right?

The wind blows the embers into the built environment.

It gets into the addicts, into the eaves,

then you're losing the house.

It starts the fence on fire.

It lights the playground equipment on fire in your backyard,

the wood that may be stacked.

So trying to mitigate those issues is a big thing, right?

So we call it zero zone,

which means the four or five feet closest to your home,

whatever that is, planters, whatever.

Move all that combustible material away from your home.

Try to cover up your attic vents with a fine enough mesh screen

that prevents those embers from going in.

And basically just be smart.

Clear your property of anything that's combustible.

Because once those embers start flying,

and they're going on mile or two beyond where the fire is,

there's very little, right?

You've lost control of the ability to get out in front of that.

It's going to light anything on fire that's combustible.

So that's a real challenge in trying to get people to harden their homes,

be ready to go to, ready to evacuate.

That is really the key moving into fire.

So does dampness matter?

You know, you'll see some people hosing their backyards

if they know a wildfire is coming, you know, all of that.

Does that, what is the level of help something like that does?

So you know, if they went down their roofs,

they went down the fuels that can help for a while,

you bet it might.

But as you, as you can imagine,

once a wildfire is moving into an urban interface,

everybody's doing that, right?

The firefighters are trying to tap the hydrants,

everybody's on their hose, right?

And so that water pressure that the firefighters desperately need

now is going to go down.

And what happens during the pallet sage fire?

Absolutely.

And then what happened as soon as you burn a home,

right?

Imagine all that plumbing that now is exposed, right?

The toilet, all of that plumbing now is.

So then you have water.

Really?

Really?

And you multiply that in the hundreds and then commercial buildings

that have commercial sprinkler systems

that are now flowing because those pipes have burned.

So that is part of the problem.

You have free flowing water and you lose water pressure.

This episode of The Chuck Todd Cast

is brought to you by Sol.

So if you love that end of the day, unwind,

but hate banging over,

Sol's out of office is for you.

These sparkling THC drinks and gummies

give you the same relaxed social feeling

without the alcohol, without the calories,

and without the crash.

Sol is a wellness brand that believes feeling good

should be fun and easy.

Sol specializes in delicious,

hemp derived THC and CBD products

designed to boost your mood and help you unwind.

Their best selling out-of-office gummies

were designed to provide a mild, relaxing,

buzz, boost your mood and enhance creativity

and relaxation.

With five different strengths,

you can tailor the dose to fit your vibe.

So also has a variety of products,

specifically designed to help you get a better night's rest,

including their top-selling sleepy gummies,

a fan-favorite for deep,

restorous sleep.

Look, I have made no secret.

I am a believer in this stuff

in cannabis and hemp derived.

I do not partake in alcohol for the most part.

I think this stuff is a lot safer than alcohol,

a lot less addictive than alcohol.

And yes, I have to say I love these drinks.

It is the glass of wine.

And you know, after work,

that's what this is.

So no hangover and no excess calories like this.

I'm a big fan.

So bring on the good vibes

and treat yourself to soul today.

Right now, soul is offering my audience.

30% off your entire order.

Go to get soul.com and use the word

podcast.

That's get soul.com promo code

podcast for 30% off.

And yes, I too am a customer.

So we've learned that there are resiliency measures

in how you keep a roof from flying off.

And it turns out, hey, three inch nails are better

than inch and a half nails.

Do we need, is it better housing material?

Like what's, what's some, you know,

you know, I'm old enough to remember

when people worried about whether they're homes

in California or earthquake resilience.

Yep. Yep.

Now it seems as if I'd be more concerned

about whether my property was fire resilient

more than I would earthquake resilient.

So what is, what is that you, you describe the outside?

Is there different types of building materials

we'd all be thinking about?

Do we want one story, not two story?

I mean, I just like, let's assume we're living

in this hellscape now for a while.

Okay. I mean, you know, it is what it is.

How do we live with this threat in a way

that won't feel like you're constantly

having to evacuate?

So another great question.

So we know that the, the better you can harden your home

and we talked about the outside,

but I was involved in the, in the after-action analysis

at the LLWAL fires and we went through those communities

as we saw blocks that were decimated by WAL fires

and then we saw an entire block untouched

standing brand new homes built to certain specifications

and so to your point, what was that?

That was a non-combustible roof material, right?

So any kind of composite material on your roof

that doesn't sustain combustion, right?

So the old wood, shade shingles roofs,

those are just waiting to catch on fire.

So you want to bend them?

Is this something that maybe, I mean, look,

you're not, I'm not asking you to be a politician

or a regulator, but if they were asking your expert opinion,

we'd be like, you know, this shouldn't even be allowed.

Like, for instance, in Florida,

I don't think you should have manufactured housing.

I'm not saying manufactured housing doesn't fill a role,

but if you're in an environment

that you could get 50 or more mile an hour,

when's these things blow right over?

I don't think it's illegal.

So let me tell you a secret.

It's not so secret.

But when firefighters go into a community

and they have a fire coming into an entire urban interface,

they're going to send a bunch of fire engines to the block

and the first got folks in that block

are going to do an analysis or an assessment

within 10 minutes of which homes have been hardened

and which haven't.

And those homes that have that shaked shingle roof

that have overhang of growth materials, power lines,

things like that, combustion materials, right?

They know that's a problem house.

Versus the house that's got a composite material roof glass

that's maybe double paying glass, right?

So the external pain of the glass cracks need

but the inside maintains.

We saw that in Los Angeles.

So other things that you can do,

we also found that fences wouldn't fences.

They catch on fire, they bring the fire to the house

because the fences usually grab up to the house.

So get a composite fence, right?

Do you think you can make it that's that plastic?

Maybe the plastic or some sort of metal fence,

whatever you want to do, aluminum that doesn't sustain

because that is what we found brought fire to the house

that ended up burning the house down.

And now it's on video, right?

We see homes have those cameras.

We watch it happen in real time.

So let's talk about power companies.

What is the level of power line burying in California?

How I know in Florida every time there's a new construction,

they bury power lines.

But if it's grandfathered in, it's grandfathered in.

What's the situation in California on that?

Same situation.

So we know it's no news that the power companies

have had failures where those lines have started fires

in California, large wildfires in the past.

That's certainly not news.

And as these are identified and they can,

they bury those power lines.

We know that in high winds, there's arcing.

They have power line failures, falls into composable grass.

And so that's what started the whole public safety power

shut-offs, the PSPS's, right?

So I'm sure you've read that when these red flag warnings,

when these high winds are expected in high fire danger corridors,

they will preemptively shut down the power to those areas.

And so we've been living with that for five years plus now.

And so it is arguably either of our words, doesn't it?

I mean, it doesn't feel like it's worked, hasn't it?

Well, it's hard to say, right?

So it depends on if they shut it off

and they avoided a fire, would we know?

Yeah.

Can they shut off the power lines into Los Angeles

in the middle of a regular business day?

Because those same circuits also provide power

to the wild line interface, right?

So it's a problem for the power companies.

I get it, but the more they can bury that stuff,

the more they can harden those areas.

And so really, I've seen in the last five years,

the power companies, they have been very,

trying to be very proactive with fire danger.

They've hired a lot of meteorologists that do nothing,

but they put sensors in all their high power transmission

towers, which is great information to meteorologists, right?

So that's where we get a lot of our data

is from these utility weather stations that they put up.

They are trying to forecast fire danger.

They're trying to preemptively do these

public safety power shut offs, but it's still a problem.

It's still a problem.

How do you, can you ever really just,

I mean, the real answer was just shut off the power

when there's a red flag warning,

but I don't think the public would like that.

Well, the real answer though is burying

is sort of forcing the burial power lines.

I mean, I know the way, you know, even here in Virginia,

they, the way the power company works is if they have

a certain number of neighbors could say no,

then well, they're not gonna bury power lines

in this community.

It seems like at some point, it's not gonna be a choice.

Now, the question is, is it something,

is it an insurance premium that you risk seeing

quadruple if you don't do it?

If your neighborhood doesn't have buried power lines,

the everybody's gonna pay more in home owners insurance

or not, I mean, you know, sadly,

it usually is how you get behavior to change

is when there's a financial penalty or incentive.

So much like the tropical situation in the southeast,

right, every time there's a firearm insurance rates go up

and I believe that it is gonna end up being like you stated

that areas that don't have buried power lines

that have exposure to higher potential

of fire danger are gonna end up footing that bill

to try to bury those lines because we're certainly paying

for it in insurance costs for fire danger.

Right now, all that stuff is assessed by fire danger

when I moved into my house.

My insurance said, well, we can't,

we're gonna have to cancel your home owners insurance

because your house is right up against a lodline area.

Our high resolution satellite imagery dictated

that your house was up against, yes, up against Berlin.

And I said, that is irrigated association vegetation.

Does your satellite differentiate?

And they're like, really?

I go, yes, this is green irrigated vegetation.

And they go, okay, you're fine then,

but that's what we're up against.

So you had approved you weren't a fire risk

and you could individually make that happen.

Didn't matter that I was a fire behavior analyst

and a meteorologist that spent a career in the fire service

and I said, listen, I know about this

and I'm not in an urban wildland interface,

but right, it's the embers, it's the wind speed

and the ember cast.

It's all they have to say is you're within three miles

of the urban interface, you're exposed to embers.

So when do you start losing sleep?

When there's a high wind warning, when, you know,

what is sort of when you're, you know, going,

I better have, I better have the coffee going.

So the answer is, yes, when we start seeing the fuels

that are going to be what we call receptive fuel bed,

the probability of ignition.

So if the grass or the brush, the timber, whatever it is

dry enough, and we already talked about it,

that we know it'll catch fire if there's an ignition

and then you add some hot dry winds

or cold front passage that's not going to rain.

That's when the red flag warnings go out,

that's when my role in watch duty is to provide

this weather information to the watch duty

so they can proact, right, in terms of staffing,

in terms of beefing up the reporters

that are going to be watching in the certain areas.

So I pinpoint the areas that are going to be

the highest fire danger, and internally watch duty

would do things to make sure that they're ready for that.

So they're trying to proact, rather than react

to these, to these high fire danger, fire weather situations.

We're taping late morning, early afternoon

on Tuesday, April 21st.

Would you say that your, that the danger right now

is already elevated and it's you're in an ever any,

any day now we could get the wrong,

some campfire gone awry because of the conditions

that, because of the conditions you just described

over the last 90 days.

I would say that we are maybe not this month,

but probably a few months away from that.

So really starting in June is when you think

this is going to be a really, really ugly summer.

I think, and if you add the potential of maybe some lightning

from a decaying tropical system so as soon as you know,

so we start in the Pacific May 15th, you guys start June 1st.

We start, you know, a couple weeks earlier.

All we need is something like that to kick off

what will is certainly going to be a very significant

fire season.

I am very concerned.

All of my co-workers are very concerned.

I think it's going to be a very active fire season.

When it comes to, it's interesting to me that you're,

were you a firefighter before you were a meteorologist?

Well, it is an, I'm an odd duck in that way.

And then I came to a backward set, so check you're absolutely right.

So, and that's why I got interested in meteorology.

So I think you'll find this interesting.

So I spent, I was a firefighter paramedic here in Southern California,

got promoted and spent really 28 years in the fire service

in Southern California, and during that period of time,

they started sending me as part of these teams

to these large wildfires.

And it was at those large wildfires that I realized how

weather, how important weather was and how it basically drove

the cadence of the incident.

And so I started taking a few classes as much as I could.

I was already a reserve for FEMA.

And I was considering maybe taking an early retirement

and going back to school to earn a meteorology degree,

which is right at that point in my career was unheard of.

So I did that.

I sold my house.

I grabbed my then 84 year old mom,

moved lock stock and barrel to Miami, Florida.

It went to school at FIU, and earned a meteorology degree,

while working at the National Hurricane Center.

For those three years, while I was there,

get to fly through a hurricane.

And so as soon as I was done with school,

I came back, went back on the same incident management team

as I had been on as a situation unit leader.

But now as the incident meteorologist.

So I was able to get qualified as an I met,

which is the guy that goes out to the fire.

I sit in the tent.

So instead of running up and down the hills with the hose,

I get to be briefing the folks on the potential fire

danger and making sure that everybody stays safe.

Because weather is the number one issue

when it comes to being prepared for wind changes,

lightning, thunderstorms.

It's a big deal when I'm out there.

And yeah, I'm usually out there for at least two weeks at a time.

Well, my daughter's about to graduate

with a degree in oceanography and a minor in meteorology.

There you go.

For University of Miami.

So obviously South Florida, a pretty good haven

for weather education.

Let me ask you on the meteorology front.

How, you know, a staff meteorologist

for a fire department now.

Did that exist 20 years ago?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

And now it's a normalized position, no?

It's becoming more normal.

These large organizations, especially state organizations,

califier and California.

I seem like the LA fire department,

the big fire department are doing this, right?

Yeah.

And they have a fire behavior analyst.

So that is the guy that matches the weather

with the potential fire behavior in the fuels condition.

And so they call them an FBAM fire behavior analyst.

And so these positions now to your point

are endemic in most of these large organizations.

And so when I go out on the fire with the fire team,

I sit next to a fire behavior analyst.

They need my weather information.

I need their fuels information.

We produce the fire with a forecast

that goes out to all the firefighters.

We do that twice a day.

Just to give an example, how much, obviously,

this has changed firefighting.

It has changed certainly some procedure.

You were on the front lines before this world existed.

Now you see it.

How would you say what's been some of the best practices

that have been created now that meteorology

and experts like yourself are infused

into the firefighting protocols?

So it's made a huge difference.

And sadly, it's taken fatality incidents

to, for wildfire incidents in the past,

to really forge that notion that weather

is super important to these teams.

And in the 90s, really, we started seeing meteorologists

show up to wildfires.

Now it's unheard of that one of these teams

would go out to a fire without a meteorologist.

And we branched with the National Weather Service.

We basically have them on a constant chat, all right,

because they're the ones responsible

for issuing the watches warnings.

So we're in lockstep with them.

I'm attending briefings online with them.

They're saying, hey, do you see this?

Do I see the wind starting at this time?

So I carried that information.

I hone it, the forecast.

I write my own forecast for the fire.

Very detailed to the topography that we're in,

because winds and complex topography

is not easy for the weather models to do.

And we hone that forecast.

But what I really want to say is the fire behavior,

the fire weather that we've been seeing every year,

every year we see more significant fire behavior

that we haven't seen before.

I'll give you an example.

Fire tornadoes, when we used to talk about a fire tornado,

we would all think, well, that's a fire world.

It's a little rope area of instability.

It's maybe a couple feet wide.

It goes 20, 25 feet in the atmosphere.

And then it's because of the instability caused by the fire

and the heat on the ground.

Starting in 2019, the car fire in Reading, California,

half mile wide, rotating, real, honest to God,

tornado caused by a law fire.

I've never seen that before.

So now we're seeing them every year.

So fire seasons are getting longer.

Fire behavior is getting more significant.

The challenges to firefighters is becoming more significant.

So you think about the firefighting community,

in which is where I came through that environment.

And the way we teach our new folks

is by the old guys teaching the new guys.

This is what I saw.

This is what I did.

Now, in a situation where we're seeing fire behavior,

we've never seen before.

So that old guy teaching the new guy paradigm

is now not working anymore.

Because the new guy's seeing it for the first time,

right, along with the old guy, right?

So that is a challenge to the fire service.

And we're having to redefine what that is every year.

What's the data stream you're not getting

that you wish you did that would improve your forecasting?

Oh, holy cow, meteorologist living data, you know that, right?

So I'll give you an example.

We use remote automated weather stations

called RAWs, self-contained weather stations

that we can put in the backcountry that are solar powered.

They don't require connectivity in terms of, you know,

any hardwiring.

So they broadcast up to a satellite

and every hour we get temperature humidity,

wind speed, wind direction,

brand barometric pressure, every hour.

Well, is that frequent enough for you?

Sure.

Yeah, the utility weather stations.

Yeah.

Five minute data from the utility stations.

Five minute data from most of the other stations.

So one thing we can use is more frequent updates.

The reason that it is the way it is

is because each one of those stations

after broadcast up to a satellite,

I'm a very narrow window to do that.

And that there's only so much bandwidth, if you will.

So, but the technology gets better every year.

Now we have a lot of different satellite systems,

so maybe that will change.

But we live and die by data.

The wildfires in Los Angeles,

part of what happened on the eaten fire

in the Althadena area was because of mountain wave,

what we call a mountain wave phenomenon.

So when strong winds flow over topography,

we get very turbulent winds on the leaf side

of that topography.

I would love to be able to time that

if we had some wind profilers, some LIDAR microwaves,

we could time when those were happening

because the firefighters on the ground

would say about every 30 and 45 minutes,

we have a violent burst of winds.

And then it would back off for another half hour,

45 minutes, and then we'd have another 100 miles an hour

recorded on that fire.

So if we could provide that warning,

if we could get more into details, save lives.

So the more data, the better meteorologists live

and die by the data.

This episode of the Chuck Toddcast is brought to you by Wildgrain.

Wildgrain is the first bake from frozen subscription,

box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries,

and fresh pastas.

Plus all the items conveniently bake in 25 minutes or less,

unlike many store-bought options,

Wildgrain uses some simple ingredients you can pronounce

and a slow fermentation process

that can be a lot easier on your belly,

little gut health there, right?

And richer in nutrients and antioxidants.

There's also no preservatives and no shortcuts.

The Wildgrain boxes are fully customizable

in addition to their variety box.

They have a gluten-free box, a vegan box,

and a new protein box.

I will tell you I have done the gluten-free box.

I have done it a second time.

I have also used the code, the Toddcast code.

If you use the promo code Toddcast,

to check out you get $30 off,

I've already used it as a gift to somebody else

who loves this bread.

It is hard to find good gluten-free bread.

It is fantastic.

They give you step-by-step instructions.

I really dig this.

There is nothing like having an artisan bakery

in your freezer to chase away the winter chill.

Now is the best time to stay in

and enjoy some comforting homemade meals with Wildgrain.

I obviously highly recommend it.

It is worth giving Wildgrain a try.

Right now Wildgrain is offering my listeners $30 off

your first box plus free croissants for life.

Come on.

When you go to wildgrain.com slash Toddcast

to start your subscription today,

that's $30 off your first box

and free croissants for life

when you visit wildgrain.com slash Toddcast

or simply use the promo code Toddcast at checkout.

This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace.

So use that code.

Look, this is becoming a bigger problem.

Is this is it changing climate?

Is it how seasonal is it?

How cyclical is it when it's La Niña?

Is it less of a concern than when it's El Niño?

I mean, run through all of those variables for me.

So nobody in the scientific community

and I think you would agree with this

is denying that there is climate change.

Nobody in my business is denying that there's global warming.

We know that for a fact, right?

We can empirically point at data.

The oceans getting hotter and every year get hotter.

The temperatures get right.

Every year, right?

2023 was the hottest year ever until when?

Until 2024.

And then that was the hottest year ever, right?

So every year we're having that hottest year ever.

We're certainly seeing the effects of that in the wildfires

with the lengthening fire season,

with that fire behavior that we talked about.

Now this year, we're going to add a strengthening El Niño,

what certainly looks like that.

So we already have this,

what they're officially calling the blob

that hot marine area in the Eastern Pacific

of sea surface temperatures.

So the blob, as they're calling it,

is certainly going to help the development of the El Niño,

which takes place in the equatorial Pacific.

So if we are headed into what the European weather models

are calling a potential for a super El Niño,

what is that?

That's anything over two degrees over average warming

in that area of the equatorial Pacific.

So if we're entering into a super El Niño,

what does that mean for the tropical activity in the Pacific?

What does that mean for wildfires?

Does that mean more lightning?

Right, so climate is changing.

We're trying to react to it as fast as we can,

but it's certainly as a foothold in the wildfires

in the west, the fire behavior that we're seeing.

It's been one year after another.

We're on our continent.

We're used to the western part of the continent

being the most susceptible to wildfires part of it.

Is it more open?

So lightning strikes are more likely to trigger them.

Are we, are you, you know,

what is the increase we're seeing in wildfires

and other continents and what does that tell you

about our future on the west coast?

Well, we know that we're seeing wildfires globally.

The their length, their seasonal fire scenes

are growing as well, right?

Australia every year in New Zealand.

Every year has very significant fatality wildfires,

Central America, South America, the jungles.

We've seen those burning.

We know that that's a problem.

So I think it's the evidence is there

that globally we are seeing an increase in fire activity

and it concerns me and our community a great deal.

When I first started,

you would have a firefighter of vacancy very seldom.

We would hire a handful of people every year

because it's a competitive job.

People want to be firefighter, right?

And now it's a good job.

Good people like the hours flexibly, right?

Yeah, we can't hire enough, right?

We go from one academy to the next.

As soon as one academy ends, the next one's starting.

Now you say you can't get enough.

Are you still getting an increase in people

wanting to be firefighters?

You just have more demand or are fewer people

actually wanting to be firefighters?

A lot of people want to be firefighters to your point.

They love the schedule.

It's a great job.

Right, it's the right, I delivered babies.

I flew in helicopters, I did all those things.

One of my best friends from high school

is still better that he failed the firefighters exam

and see how I think he tried it three times.

It took a lot of crazy people's messages.

It's a great job, but it gives you a front row seat really

to seeing all the things that we've talked about.

So like I said, in my career, we had a finite fire season.

Now I'm seeing a fire season that doesn't end.

Now I'm seeing fire tornadoes.

Now I'm seeing tropical weather activity in San Diego.

Now I'm seeing all of these things

that when I started run herd of

and having the manpower to have to adjust it.

So we know fire season, the way that the federal wildfire goes,

we follow fire season around the nation, right?

So in this time of year, usually the Southwest Arizona,

in Mexico, Texas, Panhandle, that's typically

what starts burning first.

And so the federal resources may focus in on those areas.

And then typically as soon as the monsoonal rains come,

maybe in June, then there's a shift, right?

And wildfires moves up to the Pacific Northwest

and it's Washington and it's Oregon

and it's Northern California.

And then as we get later into the season, right?

August, September, then California, right?

Other parts of the West start burning.

And so the federal government, all the U.S.

forces, the Bureau of Land Management,

all those federal agencies, right?

The fixed-wing aircraft, the rotary-wing aircraft,

all the things that the big stuff that everybody needs,

that gets shifted around.

So check my question is, what happens if it all happens at once?

And that's a concern you have.

And that's a concern I have.

If the monsoons don't come on time

and the Northwest starts burning at the same time,

then how are we shifting those manpower staffing logistics?

How are we shifting that like we normally do?

Well, this is a pretty good place to land this plane on.

So what you're saying is we are not prepared,

sort of federal, state, local, the collective.

If multiple regions in this country

experience fire season at the same time,

and what you're saying is because of the sort of,

we've got sort of all these conditions

that are coming together at the same time,

the likelihood of this is what?

Is it 10%, 20%, what do you, how would you put it?

I would put it higher than that.

I would put it at 30 or 40.

We're gonna have multiple regions unfired at the same time,

and then this is gonna be a stretching of resources

that maybe we're not prepared for.

And let's add to that.

What do you think has happened

with those federal welfare agencies over the past year?

Right now we have not been expanded.

We've shifted a lot of things.

We're basically taking all the federal resources

under one roof now.

How do you think firefighters like change?

Yeah, about as well as all of us do, right?

Right, you ask any firefighters,

two things they don't like.

The way things are and change, right?

I know.

It's gonna be American voter.

Hey, you need change, but I want that change.

Okay, thanks.

Exactly.

So yes, I have a concern that we're going to have

overlapping fire seasons that is gonna challenge us

in terms of our resource and capabilities this year.

I did.

And I think look, I'll tell you the biggest issue

that I worry about just sort of politically on this

is that there's this perception

this is a West Coast problem.

And you're talking to me about Kansas and Nebraska.

Last time I checked me,

they're one of those states around the West Coast.

Like this is essentially west of the Mississippi problem, isn't it?

This is the year, right?

The wake up call was a 680,000 acre fire in Nebraska in March.

That was the wake up call.

If we can do that,

now we're really in trouble.

So Colorado, the state of Colorado.

There's a couple of season a couple of years ago.

Yeah.

And we know that the least snowpack on record ever

to their record keeping the Colorado state of Colorado,

a red flag warning, right?

Is something that the National Weather Service issues

when they have significant fire weather, right?

I think the state of Colorado has been under a red flag warning.

I think at least 30 times in the last month and a half.

So now you're the fire chief.

I hate to say that like what does that do?

That numbs people, doesn't it?

Well, that's my point.

That's what I'm gonna ask you.

So if you're the fire chief and I tell you that there's a red flag warning

and you're going to respond to that.

Do you respond the same way 30 times later?

It's the same issue that occurred in Los Angeles.

This happens with hurricane watches versus warnings

and how long the team, you know,

I went through an infamous hurricane

called Hurricane Andrew and when that hit,

one of the reasons it was so devastating

is that South Florida had gone through like 20 misses.

Yeah.

I feel like in my childhood.

People just got used to it.

Oh, we're all experts, you know,

it's going to turn North because they all turn North.

And then this one didn't turn North.

It only takes one.

Well, and that's, and that's always the case.

Well, man, I learned a lot here.

I know it sounds like, look, you're not an activist,

but if you could sound the alarm,

you'd like to get more people paying attention to that we need.

We, it doesn't sound like we have the resources to deal

with what we could be facing this calendar.

I think it's going to be a very significant year.

I think folks need to prepare,

do all the things that we talked about,

harden your home, download watch duty,

one stop shopping.

Back to you guys are in fire notification.

You're not just a California nationwide here, right?

It's a nation right now.

It's the colonists, you bet.

Focus on wildfires, correct?

Well, currently we're focused on wildfires,

but we're probably going to expand to other areas.

There's a good chance that flooding, right?

So we're seeing a lot of similar issues with flooding.

But it's another thing that the forecasting on flooding

is not as accurate as we wish it were.

Well, it's a challenge, right?

So there's this sort of an insidious thing, right?

There's a lot of reasons that flooding occurs,

but we can use the watch duty paradigm and machinery

and focus on flooding also.

Yeah, it seems like we're pretty good at hurricanes

because there are, and even regular storms

because you can track them, right?

Is this, or it's flooding in, yeah.

With the other stuff, there's too many other variables

that it's just hard to account for, right?

Right, you've got, so we had the significant flooding

in the last few days in the Great Lakes region, right?

Michigan, Wisconsin, major flooding, those rivers, right?

So they had very slow moving thunderstorms

that rained, some of them two inches an hour

and sat for days at a time.

So they're still dealing with very significant flooding,

but there's the surprise flooding, right?

The very unfortunate accident that occurred

last year in Texas, right?

In the hill country with the fatalities, right?

So those were slow moving thunderstorms,

overnight, non-moving, causing that.

So we feel that we can focus our watch duty army

and kind of help with that same issue.

Well, regardless of where anybody is on the politics

of climate change, the issue is we need to do more warnings

and be able to mitigate and be able to respond.

And it seems to me that that's, I really hope it is at politics

that is slowing down the amount of resources going into this.

I think just as we've never had better data,

we've never had the ability to be better at this than now.

We just need the political will to fund these entities, right?

We need to respond and we need to not be fatigued by warnings

and we need to really pay attention to what's happening.

We have the data, we just have to respond to it.

Pete Curran.

Very great to meet you.

I really learned a lot and man, you're pretty good at this.

You've got a good meteorologist

that's also got to be able to communicate the science, you know?

Thank you.

You speak American, you don't just speak English.

So I appreciate it.

I'm used to having to brief firefighters, right?

You got 30 second attention span.

You got to get in and get out.

There you go.

Nice work.

Good to meet you Pete.

Thank you, sir.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, Jeff.

This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human.