Hold that Line! Managing Wildfires in California
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In California, October is the cruelest month, as wildfires repeatedly sweep through the dry canyons and hills, consuming thousands of acres of wildland and threatening urban communities at the interface. Fanned by hot, dry Santa Ana winds blowing from the inland desert toward the ocean, urban/wildland fires present a known risk to California's coastal cities and urban communities. The question is how to manage this risk with minimum cost and maximum efficiency, recognizing the most uncertain element in risk reduction to be human behavior.
This research examines the interactions among municipal, county, state and federal firefighting authorities, private news organizations, and emergent citizens' groups in the series of more than 20 fires that erupted throughout southern California within 12 hours on October 20, 2007 and continued for nineteen days. Approximately 950,000 people were evacuated from their homes, requiring the mobilization of shelter and feeding services. The analysis focuses on the role of information in mobilizing response operations to the fires, while managing simultaneously the protection of people and property in threatened communities. The events illustrate a rapidly evolving network of organizational response that shifted and re-oriented resources and personnel in accordance with the direction and speed of the wind, volatile temperatures, existing fuel load, and human intervention. In this fragile, dynamic environment, the initial conditions that precipitated the fires were exacerbated by individual actions, but mitigated by organized response to bring the fires under control. The recurring threat of wildland fires creates a rigorous challenge to the design of organizational structure and learning processes in multi-scale operations. What factors enable diverse organizations operating in the urgent, dynamic conditions of wildland fires to develop a common basis for action? What factors, conversely, inhibit coordinated action in the face of common danger? What effect does the use of new information technologies have on the capacity of interjurisdictional fire authorities to coordinate their actions more effectively in a rapidly changing, dangerous environment? Using a theoretical framework that draws upon the concepts of distributed cognition, high reliability theory, and network analysis, we will address these questions by analyzing the patterns of interaction among the major actors participating in the response operations to this series of fires. We will use three sources of data for this analysis. We will first identify the organizational response system, using records from the U.S. Wildland Lessons Learned Center in Phoenix, AZ, content analysis of news articles from the archives of the San Diego Union Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. We anticipate gaining access to the operational logs from at least two county fire agencies and will identify the interactions among the participating organizations. Using these data, we will construct network maps of the changing pattern of interactions among the organizations to assess the direction and rate of change in response to shifting conditions. We will validate this analysis through interviews with key decision makers in response operations. Findings from this analysis will contribute to the field of organizational design, learning, and adaptation in complex, dynamic systems. |
 Center for Catastrophic Risk Management Project TeamPrincipal Investigator(s):Louise ComfortKarlene Roberts Socio Team:Gunes ErtanMary Kate Stimmler |