The Mountain Fire in Ventura County last November burned nearly 20,000 acres and damaged or destroyed 369 structures, many of which were in Camarillo, and changed lives forever.
However, it was an earlier fire in Somis, one week prior, which was determined to be the cause.
"The Mountain Fire was absolutely terrible," Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner told a press conference at the department's Thousand Oaks headquarters on Friday.
Gardner was somber as he laid out the timeline of a tractor fire on October 30, which grew to 1.8 acres and was known as the Balcom Fire. It was believed to have been extinguished.
Gardner shared a video of the incident, which showed fire retardant being dropped to contain the fire and hoses being used to extinguish burning material and soak the ground. It was checked the next day for hot spots, and those were dug out. The incident was then closed.
According to Gardner, there was no sign of smoke, and rain fell on November 2.
However, on November 6, a Red Flag Warning was issued, and winds were high in the area. A piece of hot debris from the tractor’s tires carried an ember beyond the containment line and ignited dry vegetation.
"That hot rubber that entombed those tires was blown away when the wind started on the sixth of November," Gardner said.
"[It] blew the rubber away, and after seven days of sitting there with no smoke, with no reported fire, with no concern to anybody that had seen it in the previous seven days, it spotted over the 200 feet of containment we had in place, and started the Mountain Fire," he said.
There are parallels with the Palisades fire, albeit without any alleged criminal intent, where high winds in an area where a fire had occurred just a week before caused hot debris to reignite, and winds whipped the fire into a devastating wildfire.
The question is — was the Mountain Fire preventable?
"That's a million-dollar question, isn't it?" Gardner told KCLU.
"I wish the tractor had never been there and the Balcom fire had never started," he said candidly. "And the fact was we had the Balcom fire under 70 degree weather with mild wind, with relatively normal humidity, with cloudy skies, and with rain in the forecast. Our firefighters responded to and mitigated that emergency based on those conditions. If we had hindsight, we could 'what if' and judge things differently, but I'm going to have to rely on the fact that my men and women respond 80,000 times a year and mitigate emergencies based on the situation they are facing with the tools they have in their hand and they handle it to the best of their ability."
Gardner admitted it had been "hard" to ask tough questions of his department about whether mistakes had been made and if things could have been done differently.
"It's very difficult to ask those questions. Are there things we could do better? And those are tough questions to ask the men and women that put their lives on the line to protect these communities," he said.
"It's extremely difficult, and it is emotional because these are our communities, these are people, these are families," he added.
"Transparency, accountability, and trust with our public is absolutely paramount to me and the members of your fire department. I can assure you that the firefighters that work for this fire department are some of the absolute best in the business. They are world-class at what they do. They base their decisions on science, they base it on facts, and they base it on decades of experience."
Gardner announced new measures to learn lessons and change the way they monitor previous burn areas. They include conducting an independent, third-party review of operations on the Balcom Fire and implementing new policies for monitoring previously burned areas.
It’s taken a year to investigate the cause, but it will take many more for the community to rebuild.
