Boulder fire officer on LA wildfire devastation: ‘Everything we historically trained on is irrelevant now’

On Jan. 12, Seth McKinney, fire management officer for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, arrived in Palisades, California, with dozens of other Colorado firefighters. The landscape was burning. Along with the nearby Eaton Fire, the blaze would scorch more than 50,000 acres — nearly three times the size of the City of Boulder.

It was the latest in a series of massive fires reshaping how McKinney thinks about fire response. “We’re being outclassed,” he said. “Mentally, it sucks for firefighters. I don’t want to lose any homes, much less 1,000 homes in the Marshall Fire, or 13,000 homes in Southern California.” 

McKinney has been a wildland firefighter for 22 years, including a decade as a California Hotshot, an elite group tackling the most extreme blazes. But as climate change fuels bigger, faster, hotter and drier fires, traditional training no longer applies. “Everything that we historically trained on is irrelevant now,” he said. “We’re just getting our butts kicked all the time.”  

Now, he’s encouraging Boulder to invest in long-term fire mitigation — and to temper expectations of what firefighters can save. 

A race against time in California

By the time Colorado crews arrived in California, the fires had slowed, but the urgency remained. McKinney led a strike team of five engines, working 24-hour shifts to extinguish hot spots before they spread.

The above map, by journalist Jeremia Kimelman, was republished from CalMatters.

McKinney emphasized to his team that in these conditions, they had only 30 to 45 seconds to reach a spot fire, gear up, and start spraying water before it became uncontrollable. “We don’t have the capabilities to go after it once it starts going with the wind.”

Colorado crews also cleared roads and downed power lines so utility workers could assess damage. McKinney was shocked by the destruction: miles of homes along the Pacific Coast Highway reduced to ash and rubble. “I guarantee you people in those multimillion-dollar homes on the beach didn’t expect a wildfire.”

A record-breaking trend

For more than a decade, wildfires have shattered records nearly every year.

McKinney rattles off a few:

• The 2018 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, at the time the most destructive in California history.
• The 2021 Dixie Fire in Northern California, the largest and most expensive to contain, at $637 million.
• The 2021 Marshall Fire, Colorado’s most destructive and costly wildfire, and a stark reminder of how close to home these disasters have become.

“Our common denominator between all the large destructive fires now is super hot, dry conditions and the winds,” McKinney said. 

Climate change is intensifying the drought and heat, drying out vegetation and making landscapes more flammable. “I’m not a scientist. I’m not going to go into the why, but things are changing,” McKinney said. “I think that’s pretty obvious.” 

He worries about how long it will take firefighters and communities to adapt. 

“The reality is, we’re losing our watersheds, we’re losing our forests, we’re losing our landscapes,” he said. “Of course, we’re losing our homes, but most of the time, the homes come back faster than the forest.” 

He points to scars from past fires — Boulder Canyon’s 1989 Tiger Fire, Cameron Peak’s moonscape-like burn in Rocky Mountain National Park — as proof of how long the land takes to heal. “At the pace we’re going at, we’re not going to have much forest left in the Western U.S. to protect.” 

Rethinking fire response

Today’s wildfires have outgrown traditional firefighting tactics.

“We can’t just focus on the perimeter when we have high winds that can throw embers a quarter mile,” McKinney said. “Where you’ve got homes that have been basically under a hairdryer — under hot, dry winds — every nook and cranny becomes a potential ignition point for an ember.”

Now, firefighters must secure areas far beyond the fire’s immediate edge. But McKinney isn’t confident every crew in Colorado has the training or resources to fight fires of this scale. If he had 100 engines respond to a wildland fire in Boulder, he’s not sure they’d all know what to do.

“We’re not ready for this,” he said. And the question is, how much can firefighters realistically do in the face of these increasingly extreme conditions?

“Wildfires are the only [natural disaster] that we have a dedicated workforce to address,” McKinney said. “We don’t put the Navy in front of a hurricane and expect the Navy to stop it. We don’t put cement trucks in front of tornadoes and expect that to do anything. But we’ve traditionally put wildland firefighters out on these forest fires, and we go put it out.”

Lessons for Boulder

McKinney said Boulder is better prepared than before the Marshall Fire. The fire division has  improved its emergency alerts and evacuation planning, while agencies now coordinate fire response more closely. 

McKinney believes better training, land management and stricter building codes are critical — but so is community action.  “We have to really empower folks to do mitigation and prepare their homes, and to stay consistent on that for a decade,” he said. 

Even Cal Fire, the world’s largest firefighting force, couldn’t stop the Palisades and Eaton fires.

 “A lot of fire departments look to California,” he said. “They have a dedicated fleet of helicopters and air tankers. Their operating budget is in the billions of dollars — and yet, they are still getting their butts kicked.” 

The reality, he said, is that Boulder’s next major fire response will look more like a hurricane response: saving lives by getting people out.

“It’s definitely a major challenge ahead of us,” he said, “But it can be pretty impressive what an individual can do, and what collectively we can do working together.”