Only days after the Colorado Fire sparked and quickly scorched nearly 700 acres of the Big Sur coastline, Cal Fire announced the cause: aided by strong winds, hot embers escaped a private property burn pile and ignited nearby vegetation. The cause of the destructive January fire was a cocktail of human folly and hostile weather.
The burn was permitted by the local volunteer Mid Coast Fire Brigade, but it didn’t take long for the debate to take shape: Why are people allowed to intentionally start fires when we live in such a fire-sensitive area? Who is allowed to permit these burns? Should they continue?
The Colorado Fire has revealed massive misunderstanding between local volunteer fire brigades and Cal Fire over what makes a burn permit legally valid. This confusion has apparently lasted for decades, according to conversations with local fire chiefs and Cal Fire officials.
The Colorado Fire began as a backyard burn, or burn pile, which is the process of clearing vegetation, then piling up the debris and lighting it on fire. Clearing this debris, also known as fire fuel, is a critical wildfire resilience strategy and the alchemy of turning it into ash is the most efficient way to remove it. Monterey County’s burn season stretches from Dec. 1 to April 30, coinciding with the wettest time of year.
Mid Coast Fire Chief Cheryl Goetz says backyard burns are critical in the Palo Colorado region, where her station is located and where the Colorado Fire began. She says locals who wish to burn on their property are required to have a Mid Coast permit. Goetz says, on average, there are 80 active permits at any given time. Big Sur Fire Chief Matt Harris says his squad issued 87 burn permits in 2021, and 132 in 2020. Over at Cachagua Fire, Felicia Fisher, a 14-year veteran EMT, says on average, they issue 10 backyard burn permits per year.
The guidelines for these permits vary. Mid Coast Fire recommends piles no larger than 4 feet by 6 feet, with burning allowed between 7am and 5pm. Big Sur Fire and Cachagua limit pile sizes to 4 feet by 4 feet, and require burns to be completed between 8am and 4pm. On the day of the burn, property owners under all jurisdictions must get the green light from the Monterey Bay Air Resources District, and call the local volunteer fire station to give them a heads up.
However, Mid Coast, Big Sur Fire and Cachagua do not mention anything about a requirement to contact Cal Fire and obtain a burn permit through the state agency. Chiefs and representatives from the three agencies say they’ve never understood that to be a requirement and have long assumed total local control over backyard burning permits. However, in the wake of the Colorado Fire, Cal Fire is doubling down on this as a strict requirement, saying it has always been the case for any properties within the State Responsibility Area. Most of, if not the entire jurisdictions of Mid Coast, Big Sur Fire and Cachagua, fall within that area.
Cal Fire San Benito-Monterey Chief Reno DiTullio says, basically, if a backyard burn falls within that state jurisdiction and does not have a Cal Fire burn permit, the burn is not permitted – even if a property owner has a permit from a local volunteer fire agency. Richard Lopez, Cal Fire’s chief of fire prevention in San Benito-Monterey, says volunteer brigades have never had the authority to permit backyard burns within the State Responsibility Area.
“It has never been that a volunteer brigade, on their own, can permit a backyard burn,” Lopez says. “Our permits are also written specifically for the dates in need. How you can write a three-year permit [like Mid Coast] is blowing us all away.”
DiTullio, in the aftermath of the Colorado Fire, has reached out to the local chiefs to reemphasize the law, which he says is outlined in the Public Resource Code.
“I don’t know how this confusion happened,” DiTullio says. “Two of the chiefs are fairly new so they might not have been aware of this. Goetz worked at Cal Fire, she should have been very aware.”
Harris, the chief at Big Sur Fire, says he is more than comfortable directing property owners to Cal Fire for a burn permit; however, he sees this change as a significant shift in the chain of command, not a reminder of the way things have always been.
Harris, who has been chief for three years and with the volunteer brigade for 13 years, admits he has long questioned why Big Sur Fire issues permits at all since it is a volunteer outfit with no authority to enforce the requirements of the permit. He says the “new” way of issuing permits will clear up the ambiguities between permitting agencies.
Goetz, a 25-year chief at Mid Coast, says she has never thought of a Cal Fire permit as a requirement or important.
“We don’t encourage folks to go to Cal Fire and I’m not going to start enforcing that. The important thing to us is that Mid Coast is notified so we know when someone is burning,” Goetz says. “[What Cal Fire is saying] would be a complete 180-degree turn from the way things have always been.”
Goetz says the burn that started the Colorado Fire was operated by an experienced landowner with a Mid Coast permit. (According to 911 transcripts obtained by the Weekly via a Public Records Act request, the fire began on the Hain property, located just behind the Mid Coast fire station.) The burn, which Goetz believes was a single 4-by-6-foot pile, occurred two days before the Colorado Fire began.
Steve Davis, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service and founder of the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association, says local volunteer agencies have been able to write burn permits but he expects the state to take back permitting power because the risk is now too high. Davis also expects the state to sue the landowner who started the fire.
“This guy needs to lawyer up,” Davis says. “But who is to blame? It’s our whole society. It’s how we’re organizing, and it’s how seriously we’re taking this shit.”
Lopez, Cal Fire’s fire prevention chief, will not say whether the burn was permitted by Cal Fire, or violated any standard burning guidelines. All the information will be in a report due out in a few weeks.
“No matter who they are getting a permit from, it’s not going to stop what happened,” Goetz says. “It was a very unfortunate set of circumstances.”