This summer is looking to be one of the driest on record, and that means fire danger is high. August marks the 20th anniversary of the Cottonwood Fire, which broke out in the Tahoe National Forest at the Cottonwood Campground in Sierra County; the Crystal Peak Fire that burned into Verdi; and the Hirschdale Fire off I-80 near Truckee. Memories are still strong, seven years later, of the Angora and Washoe fires on the South and West shores, respectively.
A firefighter for 38 years with a specialty in wildfires, Norb Szczurek was a division chief with the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District in Incline Village until his retirement in March. Szczurek started with the Nevada Division of Forestry and Cal Fire, and continued fighting wildfires throughout his career, traveling to Southern California, Colorado, and Arizona. Szczurek, a Tahoe Donner resident, is now enjoying wielding a sailboat instead of a fire hose, but he is still passionate about fire and fire prevention. Moonshine Ink caught up with Szczurek to talk about his experience fighting fires and what this dry summer can mean for the Tahoe region.
How many wildfires do you think you have fought during your career? I feel like I’ve been on thousands; probably hundreds. It was 38 years. Obviously not all of them get as big as the Martis Fire [in 2001]. In this area we have quite a bit of fire history; we’ve had quite a bit of fire activity over the years locally.
Out of all the fires you fought, what has been the most destructive? That is a tough one because I have been to a lot of different places and to a lot of different fires. And I have been to Southern California when they were losing home after home. Those events — that are remote and [involve] someone else’s home — didn’t really impact me to the point that Angora impacted me. It was like, “This is where I live.” In fact, I used to live close to that neighborhood when I lived in South Shore. And that had a whole different effect on me mentally. I was like, “Wow, this is the Tahoe Basin. This is my home and there’s 254 houses burning right now,” as I’m driving through the neighborhoods that first afternoon. I left from home, here in Tahoe Donner, and it was probably an hour into it and I could see the smoke column from Highway 89. I went over there and the radio was reporting 20 homes [burning down], and I was talking to my wife and said, “No, there is easily 200 homes right now.” By that point I was on scene and driving through the neighborhoods and watching house after house burn because we didn’t have enough fire engines soon enough. People didn’t do their defensible space, or did not do a great job at it. It was a wind-driven fire, so we had ember ignition. Even if you do have good defensible space, if you have ember traps you can still lose your house. It was crazy.
Did anything change within the fire districts after that fire? Yeah, there were some very significant changes with the fire districts. It’s not just the fire districts’ responsibility or the homeowners’ responsibility; we all play a role in trying to protect our communities. The easy scapegoat right after that fire was TRPA [Tahoe Regional Planning Agency]. Well, that was never factual. TRPA has been very supportive of us and our fuels program since the mid ’90s. One of the things that came out of Angora is that we all got on the same page, including TRPA and Lahontan on the California side. At the same time that happened, there was the big push for BMPs [Best Management Practices] and erosion control and the 20-year event and the two-hour rain event. Before that, we were kind of sending mixed messages. The erosion control folks wanted leaf litter or pine litter right up to your structure, and that is why a lot of houses burned down in Angora, in my opinion. The ember would get in that leaf litter and the fire trucks would be out chasing the fire on the main fire front and no one is there to watch it and it would get established in the pine needles and it would get to the house. I think the biggest take home from Angora is that we all agreed — five-foot moat around your home. Moats are designed to protect castles, right? We decided to call it a moat. It is not filled with water, but it will be filled with gravel and you remove pine needles from it every year.
In addition to the message being consistent across all agencies, did anything else come out of Angora? The Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team. I was the incident commander of that. A lot of the departments, even in 2007, were still where we were in 1984 as far as wildland fire. In an attempt to share resources and share expertise, we formed the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team. Most of the departments had no idea what vegetation management was all about. We had been doing it for a while and we had a pretty good idea, so we said, “We’re going to help.”
It’s been seven years since the Angora Fire. Have you noticed a shift in thought in the way fires are managed? And with homeowners, too? The sad thing is I have noticed that we’re back to pre-Angora mindset: “Yeah, that happened once, but it won’t happen again.”
Do you think there is a possibility it could happen again? Absolutely. This summer’s shaping up to be…I shouldn’t have retired, I should have stayed another year.
With another dry season, what would you suggest to homeowners and visitors to prevent another Angora from happening? Well, for homeowners it’s crucial they do their defensible space. Ideally, it would be nice if your home could stand on its own during a wildfire so we as firefighters wouldn’t have to worry about it, and you wouldn’t have to worry about it as a homeowner. It’s not realistic because of the whole ember thing — stuff happens in wind-driven events that you would never think. I was on the Washoe Drive fire a few winters ago in January, and there were houses burning down and they shouldn’t have. It was a wind-driven fire. They had great defensible space, but garden hoses were put away because it was wintertime. Again, I was driving around watching houses ignite and the ember in the leaf litter next to their houses. I think in that community I was in, we lost 14 houses. In January.
With the dry year, what are your predictions? Will we see another fire? The potential is certainly here. It is dry right now, and typically we don’t dry out until August where we will have a big fire like Martis. And Martis was in June on Father’s Day, and that was a dry year. I remember that year walking around in the woods a lot thinking, “Gosh, it’s crunchy.” If you are walking in the woods and are hearing snapping under your every footstep, it’s dry. And that was April/May. It’s here again … You’ve seen red flag warnings out a few times already this summer, and that will continue. Do what you can do to protect your home. Do that defensible space.
How much have prescribed burns aided in prevention of fires? It has absolutely decreased the risk of high intensity fires. Sure, we can still get a fire. It won’t eliminate fires. We don’t take all the fuel away when we do prescribed burns, but it has minimized the risk of an Angora-type of fire that is going to run through the neighborhood. It gives the firefighters a better chance of stopping it at the lower intensity instead of 20- to 30-foot flames when we can’t do anything. But 3-foot flame lengths, we can do something about that.
