Last November's California wildfires prompted former Gov. Gray Davis and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to appoint a 34-member panel to make recommendations on how to prepare for the state's inevitable fires each year. The Governors' Blue Ribbon Fire Commission made 48 proposals, available at www.oes.ca.gov. Panel member Ronny J. Coleman says the recommendations don't apply only to California.

The information contained in the report is obviously geared toward California. How do you see it affecting those outside of California?

There are two elements of this plan that have broader perspective than just California. First off, it's the essential idea that the only way we're going to successfully bring the loss record down on the issue of wildland-interface fires is to do more in the fields of mitigation and fire protection practices, having to do with things like vegetation management, defensible space, emission-resistant construction. Those aren't California problems; they're wildland-interface problems.… As you are well aware, the urban-wildland interface isn't just a California phenomenon. It exists in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Utah, Florida, and those kinds of problems are much broader-based.

The second element of it is that the commission report essentially starts addressing issues of massive coordination of resources. Just today, I received a questionnaire from another state. They don't have a statewide mutual aid system and they are starting to organize one. Some of the testimony you'll read in that report — mobilization efforts, accountability issues, incident command issues — I believe that those kinds of fires are going to be just as critical in other areas in the years to come.

What was the most astounding fact that came out of this report?

I would not necessarily say this was the most interesting, but I'd say one of the most profound things that came out of this report was there were not a lot of new lessons to be learned. The issue is that we've heard these lessons over and over again and they haven't really resonated strongly enough to obtain public policy resolution.

We've been talking about defensible space and vegetation management and mobilization techniques for 40 years. The stunning realization of this plan is that it's about time that we finally do something about these things. It wasn't so much we learned a bunch of new lessons, it's that we took the final exam on the test all over again.

Do fire departments need to find a new way to deliver the message?

We don't need a new delivery as much as we need a system-wide approach to it. There needs to be a bipartisan/bi-professional approach to these issues. When smoke's in the air, everyone's looking for fire trucks. The resolution of these problems is in the decisions made years in advance of an actual fire event. That was pretty clear to the legislators and to the regulators who sat on the board of this commission.

What was one of the most frustrating issues of being on the commission?

All of these solutions have cost factors to them, and I mean severe cost factors. We're not talking about something that can be fixed with a twist of a wrist or a flip of the hand. These are things that have political capital and capital investment to them. The discouraging part of the discussion was that there were so many price tags. The encouraging part is that maybe if we start whittling away and making incremental improvements, we might be able to reduce some of that over time. A term I use is scheduled compliance. As a former fire marshal, what I tell people is that if you can't fix everything today, fix what you can today and fix what you can tomorrow. The frustration was having so many things that have multi-million dollar price tags, and yet so many of the things are not always just resolved with cash; they require political investment.

What should our readers do with the information in this report?

“Think globally, but act locally.” The readers of Fire Chief ought to be saying that this may never happen to me, but if I've got a risk or a scenario in my community where it could happen to me, what am I doing to prepare for it? What lesson can we derive from the experiences of these other folks? Should we be doing more in vegetation management? Should we be doing more in public education or ramping up our mutual aid system for deployment?

I think that it's pretty clear that the urban interface fire is probably one of the most challenging overall scenarios for fire departments to engage in because no one fire department can handle it alone any more. The fact is that the Blue Ribbon Commission, after receiving all of the testimony and collecting all the information, really placed a lot more emphasis on the need for all us to work more closely together if we're going to solve the problem.