When a plume of smoke rose over the Pacific Palisades on January 7, dozens of Santa Monica Mountains residents jumped on their fire trucks instead of evacuating. Residents were ordered to evacuate, fires at the scene were extinguished, and animals (including carp) were transported to safety.
As the fire garnered national attention, Keegan Gibbs, the brigade’s operations director, found himself speaking with , , and . Excited by what happened in January, local residents began registering in droves. The team of about 50 people received hundreds of requests to join.
Starting Saturday, the brigade, which officially became active, will begin training about 50 new recruits in classrooms hired at Pepperdine University, effectively doubling the brigade’s size. They hope to double again next year.
Gibbs sees the brigade’s high-profile firefighting efforts as a “Trojan horse” to recruit citizens to help with the “real work” of securing homes and preparing local wildfires. But some fire protection activists argue there’s no need to engage in dramatic, high-risk operations to change the situation.
“As concerned citizens, there are a lot of things we can do,” said David Barrett, executive director of the organization, one of many organizations that prepare for wildfires, like the Fire Brigade, but not fighting fires.
He told the brigade: “It’s great that you want to protect your community. How would you feel if your actions resulted in the death of a firefighter? What would you do if a car blocked the escape route and people couldn’t get out? What if you forced a firefighter to help?”
Guerrilla-style firefighting has a long history in the Santa Monica Mountains, where the old do-it-yourself spirit of ranchers still prevails, said Gibbs, a lifelong resident. But the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which Gibbs and longtime friend Tyler Hauptman fought to extinguish with a garden hose and shovel, sparked frustration among residents who couldn’t rely solely on the fire department to protect their homes.
So, after nearly five years of negotiations, the county agreed to formally form the brigade. The agreement gave the brigade significant access to fire department training and authority to operate in emergency situations. Meanwhile, fire departments are now able to meaningfully manage previously unplanned activities. Fire departments can now reject or remove certain individuals from their brigades, direct them to emergency roles, and ensure their activities do not interfere with professional activities.
Volunteers are also asked to be aware that by joining the brigade there is a significant risk of injury or death, and that the fire department will not be held responsible if something goes wrong.
Brigade leaders say they take safety very seriously. They have a rigorous vetting process for applicants (including background checks), regularly conduct professional-level firefighter training, and have strict limits on what they can and cannot do in an emergency, acting as professional logistics rather than being on the cutthroat front lines.
“There are a lot of things we don’t do because it’s too dangerous or we don’t have the equipment to do it or we don’t have the training to do it,” Gibbs said. “We have guardrails. This isn’t some frivolous, ‘Okay, just drive to the fire.'”
As the winds picked up on the evening of January 7, the power of the Palisades fire became horrifyingly clear to Gibbs.
One of the crew’s fire engines (a “Type 6” in short) blew a fuse and was left abandoned in the parking lot, causing a nearby house to go up in flames. The team dispatched another brigade member to resolve the issue. For an hour, the Pacific Coast Highway, where crew members were evacuated, was engulfed in flames.
By the time the crew got the truck back up and running, it was already dark. Gibbs drove off, lighting the way and listening to the crackling sound of the radio. The situation appeared to be out of control as firefighters began responding to another fire near Altadena.
At that moment, Gibbs felt a deep sense of responsibility for the lives of his brigade comrades. “It made me feel fragile and vulnerable to see how something as simple as a fuse could completely destroy a business,” he says.
It is this precarious reality that is of grave concern to Barrett. Becoming a professional firefighter typically requires hundreds of hours of training. Departments then undergo weekly training and ongoing medical examinations and requalification.
“California’s wildfire conditions are far too dangerous for civilians with modest training,” he said.
The enormity of the Palisades fire shocked both Barrett and the rest of the brigade, but as Hauptmann drove through the burned towns, he noticed a silver lining. Many of the homes the brigade inspected and helped residents enter were still standing in flames.
“One house in particular appeared to be unscathed, but it was high up in the Los Flores Valley and had some of the most extreme fire conditions I’ve ever witnessed,” said Hauptmann, who currently serves as the brigade’s mitigation director. “This is pretty much all the validation we really need to understand how powerful it is to prepare homes in local communities, because there’s only so much you can do in a real incident.”
Hauptmann said the brigade has completed more than 400 tests to date. The focus isn’t necessarily on the regulations residents have to abide by (though those are important, too), but instead on teaching how homes burn.
“Imagine you have a big box of matches and start lighting them,” Hauptmann says. “We’re setting the whole house on fire, the whole perimeter, and seeing what catches fire.”
For the Brigade, the name of the game is community buy-in. When top-down fire protection requirements such as home hardening, defensible space, and evacuation plans fail, whether due to lack of enforcement or intense public backlash, slowly building trust with neighbors and allowing them to start thinking differently about fire can go a long way.
It may not be cell phone alerts that convince neighbors to evacuate, but brigade members. Rather than a list of regulations from the state, it may be brigade members who teach residents how to harden their homes and brush away. And it may be members of the brigade, not local officials’ tweets, that convinced homeowners to pack up during a red flag warning.
“When you’re just hanging out with your friends or talking to your neighbors in the community, it’s received differently,” Gibbs said. “They start absorbing some of that in a way that they can’t if they’re told from the top down.”
