- Title: Private firefighters fuel tensions while saving California vineyards, mansions
- Date: 14th May 2021
- Summary: ST. HELENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (APRIL 4, 2021) (REUTERS) CLOSE-UP OF SIGNAGE FOR LOKOYA PAN FROM LOKOYA SIGN TO VINEYARD VINEYARD VARIOUS OF BURN SCARS ALONGSIDE VINEYARD
- Embargoed: 28th May 2021 11:22
- Keywords: CalFire Glass Fire Glass Fire incident disasters government firefighters private contractor firefighters private firefighters public firefighters wildfires
- Location: CALISTOGA + FOLSOM + SACRAMENTO + SHAVER LAKE + ST. HELENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- City: CALISTOGA + FOLSOM + SACRAMENTO + SHAVER LAKE + ST. HELENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- Country: USA
- Topics: Disaster/Accidents,United States,Wildfires/Forest Fires
- Reuters ID: LVA003ECTNEX3
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Last October, firefighter Ryan Bellanca, and his crew battled to keep the huge Glass Fire from devastating an up-market Napa vineyard.
But Bellanca wasn't working for any fire department. The owner of the vineyard hired his company to protect the property.
Authorities, including Cal Fire and the Napa Sheriff's office, eventually stepped in and held them for several hours, according to Bellanca and a document from the Napa Sheriff's office detailing the incident with the firefighters that were reviewed by Reuters. Bellanca said Cal Fire accused his crew of lighting dangerous backfires and failing to leave an evacuated area.
"We were working with a client under a private contract and were inside the zone that at some point was an evacuated area. We then had CalFire's management team come in and ask us to go ahead and evacuate and head on out to incident command so they could understand what we had going on at that site. At the bottom of the hill a couple miles down the hill, we were actually detained by some of CalFire's LEOs (law enforcement officers) and questioned further onsite there," Bellanca said.
Bellanca denies lighting backfires - which consume fuel in a wildfire's path - but admits his team failed to advise Cal Fire, the state's fire agency, that it was in the evacuated area, as required by law.
"Anytime you fight fire, new things happen and this was a way for both CalFire and private wildland firefighters to grow and learn from," said Bellanca, president of Bella Forestry.
The incident highlights how parts of a booming private firefighting business are creating friction with government firefighters as wildfires grow more frequent and dangerous across the western United States. It also underscores the inequity of who receives protection. World-class vineyards, Hollywood stars' mansions, and wealthy suburbs have growing options to protect themselves. Meanwhile, a record number of Californians were refused home insurance renewals, primarily in areas with wildfire risk.
California's largest firefighting union calls the Glass Fire incident a cautionary tale and says it should be further investigated.
"California wildfires are complex. In the past few years, they're monstrous," said Brian Rice, a retired firefighter who represents over 30,000 government firefighters as the president of California Professional Firefighters. "The state of California and most municipalities have refused to properly staff their fire departments, betting that the big incident won't come. We've proven over and over and over it is coming and it has come. And private contractors, acting with independent action, responsible to no one except their insurance company and the bottom line, a dollar, are absolutely not the answer, nor are they the future."
According to the Napa Sheriff's document, five people, including Bellanca, were stopped. The Napa County District Attorney's Office in December declined to press charges of unauthorized entry into an emergency area, telling Reuters there was insufficient evidence that Cal Fire had asked the firefighters. Assistant District Attorney Paul Gero said the Cal Fire report he saw did not mention backfires. Because charges weren't filed, there was no court proceeding.
Rice, who investigated the incident himself, said the activities carried out by Bellanca's crew posed a danger to ongoing operations.
"These private contractors took it upon themselves to take one of the most dangerous and trained on operations in wildland firefighting on themselves. They didn't communicate it to anybody. They did it by themselves. And they not only endangered the lives of those (government) firefighters on that strike team that were moving from the incident command with their assignment to their assigned place, but all the firefighters in that area," Rice said.
Cal Fire, the California department in charge of fire protection, declined to comment on the incident or provide documents sought under public records requests, saying the case remained under investigation. The department declined to say what exactly it was still investigating.
The controversy over private firefighting comes as heat waves and dry-lightning sieges coincided with drier conditions to burn a record 4.2 million acres in California. Climate scientists blame global warming for the increasingly flammable landscape. Expecting the worst this summer, after an unusually dry winter, the state announced it would invest $536 million more to improve fire protection and also hire nearly 1,400 additional firefighters.
"Let's be realistic. Fire season has already started," Governor Gavin Newsom said on April 8, months ahead of the typical fire season's advent in July, adding that California had already seen twice as many fires this year as in this same period of 2020.
With homes built ever closer to fire-prone countryside, some 280 wildland fire contracting companies now work across the country, mostly in the western U.S., providing services to government agencies, insurance companies and private properties. Many focus on prevention work rather than fighting fires.
When they do battle blazes, private contractors can get in the way or even accelerate a fire, state firefighters complain. That's because the private groups are focused on saving a particular property - for a paying customer - rather than entire communities. Unless they are contracted by government agencies, fire service companies are broadly at liberty in terms of staff training and insurance provided.
Rice of the firefighters' union pointed to an incident at California's Point Reyes National Seashore last year in which two private firefighters were injured by debris from a burning tree. Rice said a professional firefighter would have known not to enter the area. The National Park Service, which manages Point Reyes, said it prioritizes the safety of all firefighters equally and that lessons learned from that incident include to "expect the unexpected."
Representatives of private fire services companies say they work well with authorities.
"We don't see that area of conflict," said David Torgerson, the president of Montana-based Wildfire Defense Systems, which works for insurance companies and says it oversees the largest private-sector wildfire service in the country.
BURNING HOLES IN NAPA'S POCKETS
Private forestry companies provide a gamut of services, from preventative tree trimming to full-on fire suppression with hoses when flames threaten a property. Exact pricing varies, and companies contacted by Reuters declined to provide their rates.
Some details are available for firefighter pay, however. A job advertisement for a private firefighter, posted by California-based Capstone Fire & Safety Management, for instance, states that pay is $13-$15 per hour.
Bellanca, whose company has around 30 employees, declined to identify the vineyard he was protecting during the Glass Fire controversy.
One source close to the incident told Reuters that it belonged to Jackson Family Wines, a prominent family-run company that operates about 40 wineries around the world. One of them, Lokoya, is a few minutes drive up from where Bellanca and his crew were stopped, according to the address in a Napa County Sheriff's report about the issue with Bellanca's crew.
A spokesman for Jackson Family Wines, Galen McCorkle, declined to comment on whether it had hired Bella Forestry but said the wine company was "not involved in any investigation."
The Glass Fire burned 67,484 acres in the Napa and Sonoma regions and destroyed dozens of buildings, including the mansion-like Chateau Boswell winery and a farmhouse containing storage, bottling, and fermentation facilities at the Tuscan castle-style Castello di Amorosa. Six months later, the smell of ash still floats among the charred trees and disintegrated road guardrails that dot vineyard-covered hillsides.
The 2020 wildfires will cost the California wine industry about $3 billion through to 2028, mostly due to grapes that either weren't harvested or were ruined by smoke, according to an estimate by Jon Moramarco, managing partner of alcohol industry consultancy bw166.
An executive in the Napa wine industry predicted that demand for private firefighting will continue to increase after last season's fires when some vineyards struggled to get strapped government crews onto their property.
Cal Fire did not respond to requests for comment on the allegation.
The Napa-based Castello di Amorosa winery, a 175-acre property, says it has invested some $100,000 in gear for a new fire protection team, made up of eight long-term employees, as well as equipment.
Wealthy homeowners, meanwhile, can turn to insurance companies like PURE, which offers wildfire protection for homes that would cost more than $1 million to rebuild.
But California also saw a 31% increase in homeowners being dropped by their insurance from 2018 to 2019, mostly in areas with high wildfire risk, according to the California Department of Insurance. The state government responded by ordering moratoriums on rejected renewals in certain wildfire-prone areas in both 2019 and 2020.
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