California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE)’s Post

Transcript

When I look at 2024, across the department, we have had some significant successes. It's about this team, all of our employees, the women and men working together across this department to accomplish the goals and to serve and protect the people and resources of California. Another great year for Cal Fire Aviation 2024, we got one of our big ones was we got to see 130 project onboarded completely where we're actually flying the C130 on fires, addition of NVG goggles capability in our fleet. We started in our Hawks, we got our day cruise transitioned in the night, which was a lot of work, a huge step and we're beginning to see the improvement and and advancement and our capabilities of being able to continue past. Working into the night, it's really expanded our ability to to keep the fires as small as possible. The opposite day Fire Marshall has seven different divisions and really each one of those divisions has hit some major milestones this year. Our pipeline safety division received 100% score on our federal audit in our ability to inspect petroleum and hazardous liquid pipelines. Our community wildfire preparedness mitigation division has continued to really work hard in preparing California communities in all Californians for Wildfires, our state fire training division. Has continued to increase the number of California firefighters that are being certified and receiving diplomas. Class congratulations. Amongst the training centers, we've graduated approximately 500 company officers. It's about the same number of firefighters, increasing staffing. It just means there's more bodies to fill in those vacancies. So there's not a forced situation where people are on for extra long period of time and having a part in shaping those future employees that will carry on the legacy of Cal Fire that was left to us by our forebears is the entire reason we came to the department. Our website is probably the number one way that we interact with Californians and so, you know, it really has to be clean, polished, and our information has to be accurate and fast. This last year we've implemented a whole lot of new information on the site that was never there before. We partnered with groups like Alert CA for the cameras and then we have live stream cameras up and all of our incidents. We have a bunch of new flight tracking information that we never had before evacuation zones. So the hacker program has been very busy this year. This year it started out pretty early with a lot of initial attack in the in the early, late spring and it rolled right into fire season full on in June and then well into July where come middle of July we were doing back-to-back 21 day assignments. The hand crews are vital to actually extinguishing the fire so their hands and feet touch almost every inch of the fire. What am I most proud of? The obvious one, I am proud of the women and men of Cal Fire. I am proud of their relationships that we have built with our partners around us, the interagency work that we're doing, that we're successfully mitigating emergencies, and that people are coming home at the end of the day.