Monday, April 7, 2025, 2 p.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Public Safety Committee
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