Abstract
Wildfire risk has increased dramatically in California over more than two decades, 2000 - 2021, reflecting the intense impact of climate change on the state’s environmental and ecological systems. Most urgent is the impact of wildfire at the wildland-urban-interface (WUI), and the challenge to prevent cascading disaster for regions connected via interdependent lifelines of transportation, communications, electrical power, water, sewer, and gas line distribution systems that characterize geographic regions. To what extent do large, multi-organizational, multi-jurisdictional networks of organizations learn from experience and adapt their performance in response to the dynamic conditions of an actual extreme event? This article identifies four types of networks operating in the 2020 Lightning Complex Wildfires in northern California and documents the rapid escalation of risk and costs based on a preliminary analysis of the 209 incident reports filed by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire) for the SCU Fire that engulfed large sections of five counties in the southeastern San Francisco Bay Region. The article concludes that Interagency Incident Management Networks provide essential intelligence to support local management of operations in the dynamic context of wildfire risk.
Highlights
1.1 The ChallengeManaging catastrophic hazards.Dramatic shifts in weather patterns resulting from climate change have created more frequent and more extreme events that threaten the safety and well-being of communities across the world
While experience from previous years has demonstrated that the wildfire threat is multidisciplinary and requires a multiorganizational, multi-jurisdictional effort to mitigate the risk, the larger question is how to design and implement effective operations to respond to dynamic wildfire events in real time
What factors operate to calibrate structure to capacity for flexibility in forging a functional operating system for managing wildfire risk? This paper will examine these questions in the context of actual wildfire operations that occurred on the same day, August 17, 2020, in northern California largely within the San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Region of nine counties, 101 cities, and 7 million residents
Summary
The demands for response, coordination, and control in this set of actual events were unimaginably complex under urgent threat. Doing so across multiple jurisdictions that had widely varying access to resources and were constrained by health restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic presented a formidable challenge to agency personnel. In this context, CalFire adopted a management strategy that had its origins in military operations but was adapted to the rapidly changing operational environments of extreme events. The IIMTs did not replace the local Incident Command Teams, but rather acknowledged the extraordinary burden they were facing and provided an advanced level of hazard intelligence, analysis, experience, and informed access to external support for aid in coping with rapidly escalating wildfires
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