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Pete Curran — meteorologist for Watch Duty, the nonprofit fire alert app that became indispensable for Californians during the devastating LA fires earlier this year — joins the Chuck Toddcast to discuss why fire season in the West is now effectively a 12-month phenomenon and what every American needs to know to prepare. Curran explains that Watch Duty has revolutionized real-time fire information by providing constant updates, replacing a system where the public previously got just twice-daily official updates that were dangerously inadequate during fast-moving emergencies. The conditions heading into 2026 are alarming: the West had a wet winter but very little snow, California recorded its hottest March ever, a Category 5 cyclone hit the Pacific in April, fuels are drying out at a record rate, and there were already massive fires in Nebraska and Kansas in mid-March that should serve as a wake-up call to a country that still thinks of wildfires as a California problem. Curran walks through what people can actually do to protect their homes, why they should consider non-combustible roofing, which he notes was the single biggest factor in determining which LA homes survived this year's fires. He explains that water pressure typically collapses during major fires (so hosing your house only helps so much), that firefighters now actively triage which homes have been "hardened" before deciding what to defend, and that California utilities are finally getting serious about burying power lines — though vulnerable communities will likely bear the cost.
The conversation broadens into how meteorology and firefighting have become deeply integrated, and what's keeping experts up at night. Curran explains that weather is the single most important thing firefighters must prepare for to stay safe, and reveals that major firefighter organizations now employ staff meteorologists and fire behavior analysts on every incident. He flags serious concerns about firefighter staffing shortages, the fact that federal firefighting resources have been cut and reorganized under the Trump administration, and the biggest nightmare scenario: multiple major fires breaking out simultaneously across regions, leaving no resources to redeploy. His ultimate message is hopeful but urgent: we have better data than ever before, but data alone isn't enough — it requires the resources, attention, and personal preparation to actually save lives.
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Timeline:
(Timestamps may vary based on advertisements)
00:00 Pete Curran (Watch Duty) joins the Chuck ToddCast
01:30 Fire season in California is basically all twelve months now
02:45 Fire season used to only last a few months
03:30 Watch Duty became the must-have app during LA fires
04:00 What was the information flow to the public before Watch Duty?
04:45 Watch Duty updates fire information in real time
05:45 Previous to watch duty, official updates were only twice daily
07:15 The west had a wet winter, but not much snow. Bad for fire season
08:10 There were massive fires in Nebraska and Kansas in mid-March
08:45 California had its hottest March ever, Cat 5 cyclone in Pacific in April
09:15 It’s going to be a very significant fire season
10:15 Fuels are drying out this year at a record rate
11:30 Tropical storms on the west coast bring lightning that start fires
12:45 Humans are procrastinators, how do you advise them to prepare?
13:30 People should clear their properties of anything combustible
14:15 Does hosing the house and yard actually help?
15:00 In a big fire, water pressure becomes a massive problem
16:00 How can people build differently to adapt to fire threat?
16:45 New homes with non combustible roofs survived the LA fires
17:30 Firefighters assess which homes have been hardened during a fire
18:15 Wooden fences bring fire to the house
19:15 What’s the status of California utilities burying power lines?
20:30 Power companies have been proactive about fire danger
21:30 At some point burying lines won’t be a choice
22:15 Vulnerable communities will likely have to bear cost of burying lines
23:30 What fire conditions cause you to lose sleep?
25:15 Elevated danger conditions will begin around June
26:00 Experience of working for the fire service prior to becoming a meteorologist
27:30 Weather is the most important thing for firefighters to prepare for to stay safe
28:15 Firefighter organizations have a staff meteoroligist & fire behavior analyst
29:15 Best practices now that meteorology has been infused with firefighting?
30:45 Every year we see new fire behavior that’s unprecedented
32:30 Remote, solar powered stations provide updated data once an hour
34:00 The more data meteorologists have… the better
34:30 Nobody in climate science denies that there’s global warming
35:00 Every year now becomes “the hottest year ever”
36:30 Fire seasons are getting worse globally, not just in western U.S.
37:30 There aren’t enough candidates to fill all the firefighting roles
39:30 Federal firefighting resources get moved seasonally
40:15 The biggest risk is fires breaking out everywhere at once
40:45 Federal resources have been cut & changed under Trump administration
41:45 The wake up call for this year was the massive fire in Nebraska in March
42:30 Colorado has been under red flag warnings 30 times already this year
43:00 The public gets “warning fatigue” leading them to not prepare
43:45 Watch Duty isn’t just in California, it serves the entire nation
44:15 Watch Duty will be adding flood warnings in the future
46:00 We have better data than ever, just need the resources & attention
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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