Monday, April 7, 2025, 2 p.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Public Safety Committee
The Public Safety Committee met on April 7, 2025, and approved the minutes of March 31, 2025, without objection. The committee received two briefings. First, the Austin Fire Department Wildfire Division presented on its wildfire mitigation and response strategy, covering the national cohesive wildland fire management strategy, home hardening and structure ignition zone evaluations, evacuation planning (including a plan due June 1st), and technology efforts such as fire and traffic modeling. Council members asked about training deployments, evacuation routes in one-way-in/one-way-out neighborhoods, and district-level outreach gaps. Second, the Austin Police Department presented on community outreach and the Office of Community Liaison, including its programs (Safe Place, National Night Out, Operation Blue Santa), staffing and facility challenges, and plans to centralize community engagement. The meeting adjourned at approximately 3:25.
0:03 Folks, it's two o'clock.
0:04 Uh, good afternoon. I, I will call the public safety committee to order.
0:08 It is April 7th, 2025, and it is exactly 2:00 pm.
0:12 Uh, we are here at City Hall, located at 3 0 1 west second street, Austin, texas, and we have
0:17 a quorum present. And our, uh, well, welcome first, welcome everybody.
0:21 Our first, uh, item is the approval of minutes from March 31st, 2025.
0:27 I will accept a motion to approve these minutes made by Council Member uchin, seconded by, and the
0:34 second by, uh, by Council Member cadre.
0:37 Uh, do we have any discussion?
0:38 What, what's a funny, I I, I, I'll tell you later, I'll tell you later.
0:41 It doesn't need to be on record, um, without objections.
0:45 The minute the minutes are approved.
0:47 Uh, colleagues, we have a couple of briefings today.
0:49 Um, hoping not to keep us too long, though I'm not rushing anybody that's going to be making
0:54 these briefings. Um, item number one, we have a briefing on welfare issues and the activities of the
0:59 Austin fire department wildfire division.
1:02 Uh, and we'd like to welcome them up.
1:03 Thank y'all for being here.
1:09 Thank you. Hello, good afternoon.
1:11 I'm carrie stewart. I'm the division chief for the wildfire division for a fd.
1:14 And I'm gonna go over a presentation that we delivered several years ago to this same committee.
1:21 Uh, just a little bit of new information within it.
1:24 And for this first slide, you'll see pictures from each of the parts of the national cohesive wildland
1:30 fire management strategy, which is how we organize the wildfire division office.
1:35 So on the very left is a picture from some wildfire response we made a couple years ago
1:40 that was out in hayes county.
1:41 So that's our effective firefighting.
1:43 And the middle is a presentation for a firewise status to one of our neighborhoods.
1:47 So that's our fire adapted communities work.
1:50 And then on the right is a picture from one of the prescribed burns that we do with
1:54 our partners here in the city.
1:56 So that's some of our fire resilient landscape work.
1:59 Next slide, please. And this is another look at that national cohesive strategy.
2:05 So again, it's fire adapted communities, fire resilient landscapes, and effective fire response.
2:11 And we want balance between all three of those sections within our office and across the city.
2:17 So you'll see a lot of different documents surrounding that.
2:20 Our 2017 evacuation plan, some operational guidelines, hs I and homeland security and emergency management, special operations plans,
2:31 and our community wildfire protection plan, which is gonna be updated this next year.
2:35 So throughout the city, when we generate documents, we wanna make sure that they have wildfire mitigation and
2:41 wildfire response integrated into those policies and procedures for all of our departments across the city.
2:48 And as we go through each of these steps, we can kind of think of this in terms
2:53 of how we prepare and how we would respond to a wildfire event.
2:57 So first, we can do risk assessments.
2:59 Those can be across the city, across city departments, across neighborhoods, or with individual homeowners.
3:04 So we might do a structure ignition zone evaluation with an internet individual homeowner.
3:09 As we develop our cwpp, we will do risk assessments for each of our city departments.
3:14 We're working very closely with hsi and our other city departments right now on evacuation planning.
3:19 So those are all part of that risk assessment that we May do across the city.
3:23 Then building ready and defendable communities, that's some of our fire adapted communities work.
3:28 So whether it's establishing a firewise neighborhood or doing those individual structure ignitions zone assessments with individual homeowners
3:35 or property owners, we wanna build defendable communities.
3:39 We don't expect for our work to avoid or completely keep us from having a wildfire event, but
3:46 we do wanna be able to recover from those events as easily and as readily as possible when
3:50 they do happen. Leveraging that mitigation into operational advantages that can look like if a, if a homeowner
3:58 goes out and hardens their home against wildfire in advance, that are, those are steps that our, our
4:04 response crews, our first responders, don't have to do in the middle of an event.
4:07 So if someone has cleaned their gutters, made sure that their property is going to be resistant against
4:13 embers and other events or other happenings during a wildfire event, then that's more in, that's more work
4:20 that's done on the front end that our first responders don't have to do.
4:23 So those become operational advantages for our firefighters, maintaining situational awareness.
4:28 So again, making sure that all of our first responder agencies understand how they're gonna respond and incorporate
4:35 into a wildfire event.
4:36 We're working on a situational awareness tool and platform to help provide that situational awareness across all of
4:43 our public safety agencies.
4:45 And then doing training and pre-planning for dynamic wildfires and wooey response.
4:50 So again, this evacuation work that we're doing, pre-planning those events as much as we can, doing training
4:57 within the fire department as well.
4:59 And also training our community members what their actions will be during an evacuation or during a wildfire
5:05 event so that they are educated on the front end as well.
5:09 Priority driven response. Our incident priorities are always the same.
5:13 Life safety first, then incident stabilization, and then property conservation.
5:18 And this also factors into the real expectations that we should have as a community.
5:23 So if incident, if life safety is always our first incident priority, that means if we're doing evacuations,
5:30 we May not engage in firefighting until all of the life safety concerns are taken care of.
5:35 So if we have a large area to evacuate, we want that to be very smooth and very
5:40 efficient so that we can get people out, make sure they're safe, so that we can then engage
5:44 in the firefighting. And again, realistic expo expectations of outcome and recovery.
5:50 What should we expect as a community during one of these events?
5:54 And I'll give you a little example.
5:55 We've had a lot of questions lately about our water supply in the city after los angeles happened,
6:01 and our response to that has been, if we have a large devastating event like this, so think
6:06 tornado, think wildfire, we should expect to have challenges with our infrastructure.
6:12 A more specific example is, if you're familiar with the marshall fire that happened in colorado several years
6:17 ago, they had a grass fire, 80 mile an hour winds had a large ember cast into the
6:23 middle of town, and it started build, uh, burning down homes, costcos lots of different structures as those
6:30 buildings burned, the pvc pipes melted, and they had lots of leaks within their, their infrastructure for their
6:38 water supply. It's no one's fault, but they couldn't maintain pressure because they had lots of leaks just
6:44 because they had structures burning and leaks in their system.
6:47 So something they couldn't foresee.
6:48 They're trying to handle that as they rebuild, but we should expect to have challenges and understand what
6:55 those might be and how we would respond to those.
6:57 Next slide. This is a picture from 2011.
7:01 The bastrop fires as seen from the city of Austin.
7:04 And if you'll click one more time for me, and this is what we should expect locally for
7:08 our austin's wildfire threat, we would expect multiple simultaneous starts when we have conditions that are receptive for
7:16 wildfire, that being low fuel moistures, low humidities, high temperatures, extended periods of drought, we will expect to
7:25 see, we will see multiple simultaneous starts.
7:28 So although those little red dots, there are the 2011 fires and the number of incidents we had
7:34 over a two day period when steiner ranch, the bots drop complex and the pinnacle fire happened.
7:39 So we know they're gonna be happening everywhere because those conditions won't be receptive in just one area.
7:44 It will be many different areas.
7:46 We expect these to be relatively small wildfires.
7:49 So compared to what we see on the west coast or in the western states, think a hundred
7:54 acres or less for us, that will be a relatively small fire comparatively, but that'll be a pretty
7:58 big fire for the city of Austin with relatively large losses.
8:02 So even if we compare to the pinnacle fire, we lost 12 homes that day in 2011, that
8:07 was a big deal for us.
8:08 That was a lot of losses for us.
8:10 And we also expect more exposures than available resources.
8:13 So we know we will be overwhelmed as a city and as a department if we have all
8:17 of those little red dots going on again or when we do.
8:20 So that's why we maintain our mutual aid automatic aid partnerships, good relationships with texas forest service, so
8:27 that we can receive that outside aid just like we provide it to california and other areas around
8:31 the state when they need it from us.
8:33 Next slide. Again, we are doing a lot of work with ssim, all of our public safety agencies
8:39 for evacuations. We do have a current in place 2017 evacuation plan written when a lot of people
8:47 who are no longer here were in place.
8:49 So we are updating that plan now to make sure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities and how
8:54 they will integrate to this plan.
8:56 One of our failures previously, just as a, as a city, as a community, was that we, we
9:00 didn't really make sure that we developed internal policies and procedures for all of the players in this
9:05 plan so that they knew exactly what they were gonna do to implement their role within it.
9:09 We, uh, we all know that traffic on a blue sky day Tuesday in Austin is challenging.
9:14 So when we have evacuation events, we expect for there to be a lot of congestion.
9:19 We wanna be able to pre-plan that as much as possible to the point that if we can
9:23 pre-plan how many law enforcement officers at a given intersection where we know we have one way in
9:29 or one way out of a larger community, we wanna pre-plan to that degree.
9:34 So for afds role, we expect to be the ones down range, knocking on doors, initiating evacuations, getting
9:42 people out so that we can start that firefighting process.
9:45 And then we've also done a, a, after the 2011 fires and steiner ranch, they did an evacuation
9:50 simulation. What we learned from that is that you can't put people on the road to practice evacuations.
9:55 It tends to get hectic.
9:56 People run into each other in their vehicles, things like that.
9:59 So it's hard to, to know exactly what to expect.
10:03 But we have identified our areas in the city with 30 homes or more with one way in
10:08 and one way out.
10:09 We wanna start with those communities because we know we're gonna have congestion problems and ingress and egress
10:13 issues. So move forward with those.
10:16 This map on the right is an example of the community education that we wanna do, particularly in
10:22 those areas where we know we have one way in and one way out so that our homeowners,
10:26 our community members know what their options are during these events, and we can coach them and educate
10:32 them in advance as well for our effective response.
10:36 Again, we can think of that national cohesive strategy as a three legged stool, and we want balance
10:40 between all three legs of that stool.
10:42 So fired out to communities, fire resilient landscapes and effective response.
10:47 All of our firefighters are trained to what is called 1 31 90.
10:51 It is a basic wildland firefighting certification through the national wildfire coordinating group.
10:58 We also have a wildfire battalion, or you might hear it called battalion five.
11:02 So that is recently expanded.
11:04 It was started three years ago.
11:06 It is now eight stations that bracket the city with 10 frontline apparatus and brush trucks at all
11:11 of those stations. We do participate in deployments, both regionally in the state of texas and nationally.
11:17 We did have folks that responded to la to help with the palisades fire.
11:21 We've also done responding to the interface training.
11:24 So that is a hybrid course that's designed to teach structural firefighters how to work with their current
11:32 tools and equipment and apparatus in that urban interface environment.
11:36 We are the largest municipality that has put their entire department through that in the united states.
11:41 So it was a two year effort, but we have now trained all of afds frontline personnel, and