Thick Traffic

The firestorms that swept through southern California from Oct. 21 to Nov. 4, 2003, were one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history. At the height of the firestorms, no less than 14 major wildland and wildland-urban interface fires were burning in portions of Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties. Across the 14 fires, a total of 750,043 acres were burned, 3,710 homes were lost and 24 people lost their lives, including one out-of-area firefighter. Firefighting resources throughout the western U.S. and particularly in California were stretched to the limit. Firefighters from as far away as Michigan were called into the area to bolster beleaguered and fatigued local, regional, state and federal firefighters.

The Cedar Fire in San Diego County was the largest wildland fire in California history, consuming well over one-third the total acreage of the firestorms. Four fires in San Diego County covered 13% of the county’s land area. At the peak of the firestorms on Oct. 28, 1,659 engines were committed along with 65 helicopters and 13,371 personnel on the fire lines in southern California. This article describes the transportation impacts during the most critical stages of the Cedar Fire in San Diego County.

Spread like wildfire

Of the 14 fires that made up the 2003 firestorms, the Cedar Fire was by far the largest, most deadly and had arguably the most controversial beginning. The fire was first reported at 5:37 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 25. A San Diego County Sheriff’s helicopter was in the vicinity of the fire searching for a lost hunter and saw the first wisp of smoke. The lost hunter was subsequently found to be responsible for the fire. The call was made to the San Diego Sheriff Department dispatcher who forwarded the call to the California Department of Forestry and Firefighting for response. The response was not forthcoming since the expiration time for air operations was 5:35 p.m., or half an hour before sunset on that day, according to state and federal firefighting air operations policies. This, and the inaccessible location of the fire, gave it time and space to rapidly spread during Saturday night and early Sunday morning, despite the rapid commitment of over 300 firefighters and associated ground firefighting apparatus.

The Cedar Fire entered the city of San Diego from the east and northeast on early Sunday morning, Oct. 26, around 6:30. Early 9-1-1 reports from the area of the Scripp’s Ranch residential community at around 8 a.m. were discounted by fire dispatchers as being associated with known fire activity about 20 miles to the east. The westward progression of the fire during the night had surprised everyone, advancing 30 miles in just 10 hours. At this point the fire was approaching one of the largest residential areas in the city just east of the I-15 freeway. In the next few hours, 337 residences would be lost in this area. In the mid-morning hours on Sunday, the fire jumped 14 lanes of the I-15 freeway, igniting brush on the west side of I-15 and causing additional confusion in the area. Shortly after this, the fire also jumped SR-52, an east-west freeway that crosses I-15, and was threatening homes in the Tierrasanta residential area and businesses in the Kearny Mesa industrial area, all south of SR-52.

The San Diego Fire Department was clearly under siege at this time as little help was available to combat the spread of the firestorm into the city due to three other fires raging in San Diego County and elsewhere in southern California. To make matters worse, a light aircraft departing Montgomery Field (just south of the major fire areas) crashed on the north-south SR-163 freeway on Sunday afternoon due to the heavy smoke in the area. The fire also burned onto the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station on the west side of I-15, stopping only when reaching the natural firebreak of the runways.

Hard to move

During the early hours of the Cedar Fire, civilian evacuation warning systems were non-existent or not effective. Most evacuations in the Cedar Fire were accomplished by SDCF deputies and California Highway Patrol officers acting on their own initiative or on requests through their 9-1-1 Communications Centers. The county’s Emergency Alert System was not activated by the County Sheriff for a variety of reasons. Chief among these was the rapidly changing situation and lack of evacuation route information. This situation was worsened by the rapid spread of the Cedar Fire in the early morning hours on a Sunday morning. Most of the fatalities that occurred in the southern California firestorms happened on Sunday, Oct. 26, in the Cedar Fire due to its rapid spread and the lack of clearly specified evacuation routes for many affected rural areas in the county. This period accounted for 13 of the total 14 fatalities in this fire (the 14th was a firefighter lost in the line of duty on Oct. 29).

The rapid and unpredictable progress of fires on Oct. 26 made traffic management in the affected portions of the city of San Diego a nightmare. During the day on Sunday, north-south I-15 and I-805 were closed to traffic along with SR 163 and 52, both major freeways in the region. I-5 then had to handle almost all the north-south traffic between San Diego and points north.

In addition, the spread of the Cedar fire to the south and east of the city caused the closure of the east-west I-8, severely hampering traffic movement to and from the Imperial Valley and Arizona. In addition to city freeways, numerous rural highways in San Diego County were closed due to the spread of the fire in several directions from shifting Santa Ana winds.

When the fire jumped I-15, the evacuation of the FAA Terminal Radar Approach Control was ordered by noon on Sunday. This was a major disruption to commercial air operations throughout the U.S., because this center controls arrivals and departures into all southern California airports. Regional transit agencies were pressed into service to carry firefighters to the fire lines in the city due to the lack of serviceable engines, bringing back memories of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on 9/11.

Closed communication

One shortcoming observed in studying various after-action reports was the general lack of knowledge on the part of incident commanders and EOC personnel concerning transportation management resources. San Diego has a regional Transportation Management Center (TMC) jointly operated by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the California Highway Patrol (CHP). This center contains a number of systems that are of value in managing an incident of this magnitude. These include the CHP dispatch system (which was used heavily during the incident to publish road closures on the CHP statewide website), the Caltrans Advanced Transportation Management System (ATMS) which provides real-time data on traffic flows on all freeways in the region, access to real-time closed-circuit TV video imagery and control of changeable message signs.

The signs were used to warn motorists of major freeway closures but other means of communicating the rapidly changing road closure situation were not as effective. Workstations connected to the ATMS would have been a highly useful resource in the county EOC that was seeking access to all available information on transportation systems and resources.

Caltrans used its signboard-equipped Traffic Management Team incident response vehicles extensively throughout this event but their operational management was radio-intensive at a time when communications resources were heavily burdened. This situation has since been alleviated by the installation of an Automatic Vehicle Location and data communications system in the TMC. After-action reports also stressed the need for additional training for transportation personnel in wildland fire safety and the need for emergency managers to more effectively use these resources to manage road closures.

Burned, but not beaten

The Firestorm of 2003 brought unprecedented levels of damage in terms of acreage burned, homes destroyed and lives lost throughout a five-county area in southern California. The Cedar Fire in San Diego was the largest wildfire in California history. The results could have been much worse had it not been for the eventual onset of favorable weather conditions and the heroic efforts of firefighters and other emergency personnel. These personnel performed magnificently even though they were at times stretched too thin and had little rest.

Although California had suffered from several major fires in past years and applied many lessons learned to operational and institutional issues, this event provided a new source of lessons learned. In general, population warning was not as timely as it could have been, evacuations were at times chaotic, communications interoperability suffered as always, lack of timely information dissemination on the progress and status of fires prevented more effective coordinated action and lack of accurate information frustrated the civilian populace.

The need to more aggressively use the considerable resources within the transportation community was underscored. Once again we have proven that development on the fringes of vast open areas of brush and timber is fraught with danger, and the ever-present risk of human and property losses from wildland-urban interface fires will not likely diminish if history is a guide.

TME