Episode 390 - Jim Prabhu

Summary

Cleared Hot: Episode 390 - Jim Prabhu

Release Date: June 9, 2025
Host: Andy Stumpf
Guest: Jim Prabhu, Los Angeles City Fire Captain

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Introduction and Background

In Episode 390 of Cleared Hot, host Andy Stumpf welcomes Jim Prabhu, a seasoned Fire Captain from the Los Angeles City Fire Department (LACFD). With over 25 years of experience, Jim shares his extensive background, including his military service, jet piloting, mountain climbing, and entrepreneurial ventures in fitness and public speaking. His diverse experiences have shaped his approach to leadership and resilience, emphasizing the importance of embracing discomfort and fear to drive personal growth.

The Palisades Fire: A Harrowing Experience

Jim delves into his firsthand experience during the devastating Palisades fires, which raged for 72 hours. He describes the ferocity of the winds and the relentless spread of flames, likening the scene to a horror movie.

"Seeing just the velocity of the wind and the completely bent over flames and sparks that were looking like flamethrowers was unbelievable." [00:57]

Pre-Fire Planning and Warnings

Jim explains that despite the annual occurrence of Santa Ana winds—a common weather pattern known for creating fire-prone conditions—the team was unprepared for the unprecedented severity of the Palisades fire. Recent maintenance on a local reservoir had already strained the water supply, limiting hydrant pressure when it was most needed.

"We knew about it. We were very, very concerned that something like that would happen again and we would have to evacuate people." [47:32]

Fire's Progression and Operational Challenges

As the fire intensified, Jim recounts the chaos that ensued. With limited water pressure and an overwhelming number of requests for assistance, the fire engines struggled to keep up. The fire's ability to create its own weather system, including ember casts and rapid reignition of houses, made containment nearly impossible.

"The problem was that ember casts get ahead of the fire front and start creating spot fires that eventually turn into the bigger fire." [78:46]

Impact of DEI on the Los Angeles Fire Department

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the influence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the LACFD. Jim expresses concerns that DEI efforts have led to a decline in hiring standards, resulting in less qualified firefighters. This issue, he argues, compromises the department's ability to effectively respond to emergencies.

"I think that lies are hell bent on getting statistics that mirror what they want and what their agenda is. When at the end of the day, you need to hire the most qualified people to do the job." [24:12]

Homelessness and Fire Risks in Los Angeles

Jim highlights the intersection of homelessness and increased fire risks in LA. Overcrowded living conditions, use of open flames for cooking, and the prevalence of vacant buildings contribute to the heightened danger. The department faces unique challenges in evacuating and protecting vulnerable populations amidst limited resources.

"A lot of our calls are EMFs—emergency medical functions—because of the homelessness issues. It's a very violent area down in South LA and there is definitely a lot of gang activity." [08:45]

Budget Constraints and Resource Allocation

The conversation touches on the critical issues of budget constraints and inadequate resource allocation within the LACFD. Jim cites an audit revealing the need for 60 additional fire stations to meet national coverage standards, a demand the city is ill-equipped to address.

"Our budget should be like $1.5 billion. And I think we're $800 million, which is a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to what we need." [105:14]

Community Resilience and Personal Preparedness

Jim emphasizes the importance of community resilience and personal preparedness in mitigating the impacts of wildfires. He advocates for home hardening measures, such as non-combustible siding, ember screens, and strategic landscaping to reduce fire ignition risks.

"You have to start taking ownership of what you can do to protect your house. What little things can I do to make my house more defendable?" [116:02]

He also discusses his side business, Fire Defense Service, which focuses on educating homeowners on wildfire preparedness and implementing protective measures.

"Our company is growing. We do some home hardening stuff, some assessments of the properties. Really it's about educating the homeowner on what you can do to harden your home during a wildfire." [137:08]

Emotional and Mental Health Challenges for Firefighters

The emotional toll of firefighting is another critical topic explored in this episode. Jim shares personal anecdotes about witnessing traumatic events, the constant pressure to save lives, and the high rates of suicide among firefighters. He underscores the necessity of mental health support and open communication within the department.

"Mental health is probably a huge issue for us right now. More firefighters are dying nationally from suicide than actually job-related incidents." [130:06]

Lessons Learned and Future Recommendations

Jim concludes with lessons learned from the Palisades fire and offers recommendations for future fire management in Los Angeles:

1. Enhance Resource Allocation: Increase funding to meet the required number of fire stations and maintain apparatus.
2. Strengthen DEI Practices: Balance diversity initiatives with maintaining high hiring standards to ensure operational effectiveness.
3. Promote Community Preparedness: Encourage community-based fire defense initiatives and personal home hardening to enhance resilience.

"We have to start thinking like that. You have to start planning for the future, whether it's wildfires or urban firefighting." [105:14]

Conclusion

Episode 390 of Cleared Hot provides an in-depth look into the challenges faced by the Los Angeles City Fire Department, particularly in the wake of the devastating Palisades fire. Through Jim Prabhu’s experiences, listeners gain valuable insights into the complexities of firefighting in a densely populated and resource-constrained environment. The episode underscores the critical need for adequate funding, effective DEI implementation, and proactive community engagement to enhance fire safety and resilience in Los Angeles.

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Notable Quotes:

• "We need to prepare ourselves to be our own first responders in most situations." — Jim Prabhu [02:00]
• "Ember cast can rain down on communities, igniting houses before the fire front arrives." — Jim Prabhu [78:46]
• "Mental health support is essential for firefighters dealing with constant trauma." — Jim Prabhu [130:06]
• "Balancing DEI with hiring the most qualified individuals is crucial for operational success." — Jim Prabhu [24:12]

Resources:

• Fire Defense Service: www.firedefenseservice.com

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For more insights and detailed discussions, visit firedefenseservice.com and follow Cleared Hot on your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Zoe Saldana]

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[Jim Prabhu]

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[Zoe Saldana]

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[Jim Prabhu]

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[Zoe Saldana]

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[Jim Prabhu]

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[Zoe Saldana]

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[Jim Prabhu]

If you pay off earlier. Cancel mobile.com. good morning, welcome back. Kind of near and dear ish to my heart today on the episode my guest is Jim Prabhu, LA, City Fire Captain was at the Palisade fires for 72 hours and I like anybody who didn't live in that area, watched it on the news and it was, it was almost as if you were watching a horror movie. Seeing just the velocity of the wind and the completely bent over flames and sparks that were looking like flamethrowers was unbelievable. Near and dear to my heart because I used to live in southeastern San Diego and the Santa Anas for those of you who don't know, are winds that come from east to west. They're blowing offshore and just east of San Diego and the LA basin is largely the desert and it just turns into this hair dryer and inferno. And have family in the fire service. My brother in law is a San Diego city fire captain. I remember him getting mobilized with just about every firefighter in that area during those time periods. And they say busy because it's a very common occurrence. We don't have Santa Ana's up here where I live in Montana. But literally right now outside visibility extremely Restricted smoke is just pouring in from Canada, which I think it seems like the entire country is on fire at this point. But it's an issue kind of everywhere. More so today, though, for this episode in the LA area. Jim, fantastic episode. And I love talking about people who work their way up from the very beginning, the changes they've seen in the fire department, the impact of DEI inside of the LA City Fire Department, and just the amazing story of those first 72 hours nonstop trying to save whatever they could in the Palisades. You know, in addition to calling 911 and hoping for the fire brigade to show up. And he'll talk about the ridiculous number of engines and the personnel that surged that area and how it wasn't enough. The question is going to be what can you do for yourself? And, you know, prepare to be your own first responder is the best answer that I can give you in most situations. Jim's got a company on the side. Firedefenseservice.com I'll put the links down in the show notes. It's specifically hardening your house to fires so you could either fight them yourself or wait till that higher level of care arrives. So that's my guest today for episode 390. Before I get into that, give me two minutes, let me pay the bills and we're off onto the show. Here we go. Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. Here's the best advice I can give you. Go to montanaknifecompany.com and just scroll through. I'm looking at it right now. Everything that they have to offer. I mean, they have chef's knives. They have knives for, if you're working on a ranch, they have knives for skinning. If you're into hunting everyday knives. In my fanny pack here somewhere, I have one of their mini war goats. I their mini speedgoat was the knife that I carried. It's actually just directly behind the camera right now. I do a lot of knife fighting with envelopes with that in packages. I've won every single one. It's not a big deal. The reason I say go over there is take a look at their site, what they have to offer. And the advice I'm about to give you may sound ridiculous, but it'll help you. You need to practice checking out because the demand for these knives is un believable. Thursdays and Saturdays, I believe they release knives and it's not uncommon to see their releases be gone in 60 seconds. 120 seconds. Josh has said he's been on the podcast a few times, many times, that they're trying to keep their knives in stock at all times. Good luck with that. There is a small selection right now, though, that I can see when I am online. The reason I say go practice your checkout, though, is you can save your payment information. I've had multiple knives taken out of my cart as I was slowly manually entering in my credit card information. The brand's awesome. They're just down the road in Frenchtown right now. They're gonna be moving into Western Missoula. Josh is the youngest master bladesmith in the US probably the world. I don't know if that last part is true, but I'm gonna tell people that it is. Good friend of mine comes up often. Saw him last week, actually. We sell the knives in the shop. However, we can't ship them to you, so you're gonna have to go to montanaknifecompany.com for that. Somewhere in that checkout portal, they're gonna tell you or ask you, where'd you come from? Do me a favor. Say Andy Stumpf or cleared hot. That helps me, and it helps them back to the show.

[Zoe Saldana]

Okay, I got the red smoke north to south, west of the smoke, west of the smoke.

[Jim Prabhu]

Okay, copy.

[Zoe Saldana]

West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Oh, wait a minute, baby. Give it to me. I mean, it cleared hot. Coffee cleared hot.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, because we're professional. We have sound, soundproof equipment and stuff.

[Zoe Saldana]

So professional. I forgot my mic was muted.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's all right. Did I ever tell you once I recorded an entire Friday episode and forgot to turn any of the stuff on. It was such a banger, too.

[Zoe Saldana]

Damn.

[Jim Prabhu]

I feel like I asked. I answered most of life's most difficult questions.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, probably.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. And immediately forgot the answer. And I think I actually stormed out. I was so pissed.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'll do it again. That's awesome. Another day.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's what I did. I'm like, I'm not. I'm not redoing this again. I'll do it some other day. You have notes?

[Zoe Saldana]

I got. It's funny because some people knew that I was coming on here, and I've had people like, see, that's a mistake sending me quotes.

[Jim Prabhu]

Why'd you tell them?

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, just close people, like guys I work with, things like that. Guys are like, hey, Cat, what are you doing your four day? I'm going up to. I'm going to Kalispell, Montana.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, yeah?

[Zoe Saldana]

What, are you going up there? Well, I'm gonna be on a podcast. What? So it's been pretty funny. People have sent me.

[Jim Prabhu]

They sent you quotes.

[Zoe Saldana]

They sent me some quotes or just some stuff. It's.

[Jim Prabhu]

Let's fire off with some quotes. What do you got?

[Zoe Saldana]

This is a good one. I like this one. It says when a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king, the palace becomes a circus.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, fuck yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

I thought that was good. I'm like, if that doesn't sum up the city of Los Angeles right now, I don't know what does. Let me start with this actually. The views and opinions I expressed in this podcast are of my own and do not reflect the city of Los Angeles.

[Jim Prabhu]

To include the one you did prior to that. Actually, that was a quote, it wasn't an opinion.

[Zoe Saldana]

It wasn't also including the Los Angeles Florida City Fire Department department. These are my own opinions.

[Jim Prabhu]

How are things going in the old. What would that be?

[Zoe Saldana]

Lafd yeah. So you have. I know on one of your podcasts you talked about you had the sheriff on that used to work in NLA County Sheriff, yes. So you have LA county proper that has LA County Sheriff and LA County Fire Department. And within LA county you have LA City Fire Department, lapd. So you. And plus you have some smaller departments. Santa Monica, Culver City, Beverly Hills.

[Jim Prabhu]

I went down there, I went down there recently, was able to do ride along with the LAPD helicopters.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Holy. Because we were talking about that there's the city, then there's the county and then there's fd, then there's PD the I, I think they were monitoring five radios. I don't think they were. I don't hear any fire calls. I'm sure you guys could call them if you needed to, but there probably wasn't more than a 20 second gap between people talking on the radio. Maximum for three hours.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, 100.

[Jim Prabhu]

That helicopter was just. And there was one for, I believe the north of the city, one the south. I don't know how they delineated, but it was just like, go orbit, go orbit, go orbit. That was just the PD side. And then they were telling me, yeah, LA FD has got helicopter. Holy shit.

[Zoe Saldana]

Guys, there's a lot of radio channel. And then like our. We provide fire and EMS for our department, so we have paramedics and whatnot. And our busiest channel is our metropolitan channel 4, which is like downtown Central, L. A, the west side of L A and down into San Pedro, the harbor in South L. A.

[Jim Prabhu]

Okay.

[Zoe Saldana]

And it's just nonstop EMS Just calls one, the dispatcher doesn't stop talking at some point.

[Jim Prabhu]

I was going to say definitely ems because I don't, I mean how much stuff is really, well strip away earlier this year? How much stuff is really burning in.

[Zoe Saldana]

LA that other than what happened on January 7th? Yeah, I'd say 80 to 85% of our calls are EMFs.

[Jim Prabhu]

Now that checks out from what I hear with my brother in law in San Diego too.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it's the same. It's the same. And I know they have a big homeless population down there. Yes, big homeless problem. We have the same problems in Los Angeles, which I'm sure everybody's well aware of.

[Jim Prabhu]

You know, if they haven't been there and seen it themselves, it's hard to actually describe it and I, they may be aware that people say that, but there's a difference between people saying that and going and actually seeing it with your own eyes.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's the, it's actually very depressing. Like you see a city of Los Angeles that at one time was really, really great. And it's just, it's gone downhill so badly. There's homeless everywhere. You've got businesses that are pulling out. I mean it'd be hard to run a business when you have some homeless guy that's slept in front of your store the night before that's pissed and his pants and now you got to go out there and hose down so that your, your customers can actually come in the building.

[Jim Prabhu]

My brother in law Jason was talking about and I don't know how recently this was. I think it was at, it was either in, under a bridge or it was on the sidewalks on the top of it. They couldn't ask them to leave, but they asked them to all at least go to one side so they could empty the tanks on the truck and wash down all the human excrement. Because there was a hepatitis A outbreak.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Jim Prabhu]

And then they all came back to that side and they repeat, repeated the same process. That's fucking insane.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's insane and it's not getting any better. They have a bunch of programs they're trying to run. If you really want entertainment, I would go right now. The city is obviously in a budget crisis and now they have been holding a bunch of meetings with the city council to figure out where they're going to spend their money. Watch the one that they have with the lady that's in charge of housing and the homeless. And one of the city council women asked her, hey, you have this program, I think it's called like Angel Card or something, where they take, basically give a voucher for a hotel room stay for people that need it. And she's asking her basic questions, hey, how many of these Angel Card programs, rooms are we currently being used? I don't have that information for you right now. Okay, well, how many are there available to us? I don't have that information right now. And she gets pissed. Tracy Park, I give her credit. She gets really pissed off and talks about like, hey, it's like this every time you come in front of us. You don't have any sort of accounting for where this money's going. We're pouring billions of dollars into homeless, and nobody seems to know where it's going. And it's really, really pathetic. And you have obviously a lot of very left political alignment in Los Angeles and California, but now you're getting a lot of pushback from a lot of those people on the left. A lot of people are like, hey, where's all my tax money going? You know, I pay $850 to register my F150 truck.

[Jim Prabhu]

Is that what it costs? That's what it costs.

[Zoe Saldana]

It cost me $850 to register my truck in California.

[Jim Prabhu]

I want to say it cost me $8.50 here just to be an asshole. I don't think it was that cheap, though. I think it was like 100 bucks.

[Zoe Saldana]

But it's like. But you look at that and you're like, okay, well, where's all that money going? I mean, that's a lot of money. When you start looking at everybody in the state, it's not going to the roads because the roads suck. You know, where's all that? And there's a lot of people asking questions about accountability. And that's just a big picture. Like, my fire department's the same way. It's a microcosm of the problems that are in California. And you see it right now with my union. My union, the United Firefighters Los Angeles, the national body has had to come in and they're a conservator now over our union because there's some account unaccounted for spending that they've been doing, and somebody finally brought it to their attention, and now it's under investigation.

[Jim Prabhu]

So do you think that la. So in California, there is one city that I would say is probably a little bit farther along in the policies, and especially when it comes to homelessness as well. That's SFO San Francisco. You want to talk about major businesses leaving, the fact that they have an app designed to track human shit on the sidewalk.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Have you ever looked at it?

[Zoe Saldana]

No, I don't think I want to.

[Jim Prabhu]

Michael, you have to understand the volume of human shit on the sidewalks and streets of San Francisco. This is about to blow your fucking mind.

[Zoe Saldana]

I mean, who would want. Who would want to live there? Who, if you're a young family. Oh, my God.

[Jim Prabhu]

Stand by, stand every dot. San Francisco Poop map Alpha. This is Poop map Alpha. There may be a Bravo or Charlie.

[Zoe Saldana]

Wow.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, Just scroll around. Oh, my Lord. Now, I don't know how long a historic poop stays up here. I'm not going to claim to be an expert. Maybe some of these.

[Zoe Saldana]

Look at that.

[Jim Prabhu]

Human or animal waste. I was going to say maybe some of these are being misdiagnosed, but damn.

[Zoe Saldana]

That'S a lot of poop.

[Jim Prabhu]

They. And you know what was amazing? Do you remember when the Chinese delegation rolled through San Francisco?

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

And they instantly cleaned it up in the areas that they wanted to.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

It's not that they can't do it. There's just a misaligned incentive somewhere that's preventing them from doing it.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, it's just. It's.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's what LA will look like.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Because, I mean, again, this is my personal opinion. I've been out of California for a while. San Francisco is kind of the front leading edge of where those policies will lead you if you let them.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes.

[Jim Prabhu]

And then I think LA is smaller or no, I'm sorry, LA is bigger and a little bit behind them. But if you don't change course, maybe you could have poop Mount Bravo.

[Zoe Saldana]

And I think that's. I think a lot of people in L. A are afraid of what happened in San Francisco happening in L. A. So now they're like, well, what do we do? How do we prevent that? Who do we have to put in there? I know that Karen Bass won the election last time around. The mayor, I would be hard pressed to see if she actually wins again because Mike Caruso, who's a businessman, is running again. And I think a lot of people see, well, we need somebody like that in charge to change la, change the landscape, change the mindset, change the policies that we have that prevent LAPD from doing their job. Like a lot of police officers, they don't want to go out. They're not going to go out there and. And try to shoe some homeless guy off the streak because one he's gonna get. He's gonna get a complaint put against him. And next Thing you know, there's a whole complaint that he's got to deal with. It's a pain in the ass.

[Jim Prabhu]

How much does that stuff impact you guys on the fire department? Is it the same struggle? People can complain against you guys as well? And it goes to the same investigative process 100%.

[Zoe Saldana]

So we go into somebody's house and they're like, hey, John, Smith was. Was rude to me. And they call the fire station, they gotta file a complaint. I gotta. I gotta. I gotta run that complaint through the process. They've got done a better job now of allowing me as a captain to. Okay, I'll take care of it. I'll handle at the station level. The members been counseled, but there's still a backlog of complaints in the. Against the lafd, and our professional standards division is just overwhelmed. So it's. It's a problem. It's. It's a problem. And I think that obviously the fire department gets a lot of love. And I, I learned this very. From the very moment I set foot in south la. When I promoted as a captain, I was at Fire Station 57 on Vermont. It was one of the busiest engines in. In the city at the time. And we'd be running all day and night and with lapd, and we'd go to a call, and this guy would be the police. You know, you pig. You're a piece of. And then we roll up and this guy was just like, hey, man, what's happening? How you doing? I'm like, oh, my God.

[Jim Prabhu]

Complete chief shift in attitude.

[Zoe Saldana]

Complete shift. And then he would go back to the PD and be like, you guys. And these cops are just taking it. And I'd be like, hey, you guys realize that these guys are here to keep everybody safe? They're here to help everybody out. Man, fuck those guys. I'm just like, all right, whatever. I'm sorry, guys.

[Jim Prabhu]

Sounds like cops should go undercover as fire department officers.

[Zoe Saldana]

I think they all want to.

[Jim Prabhu]

I mean, there's so many jokes around that, you know, what is every fireman. You know, what a police and fire have in common? They both wanted to be police. You could just switch it back and forth depending on who's sitting there. Yeah, it gets rough for sure. How'd you find your way into fighting fires?

[Zoe Saldana]

So obviously Backdraft 100% saw that, and I was like, I'm in.

[Jim Prabhu]

I've watched that movie so much.

[Zoe Saldana]

I was born and raised out in Malibu. Not a rich kid, just a small, little sleepy surf town back in the day when My parents bought the house in the 60s. My dad immigrated here from India and became a structural engineer. My mom worked for him, and that's how they met. I had two uncles that were Los Angeles city fire captains. So that was always around them and talking with them. And my older cousin is a retired Santa Clara city captain. I went away to UC Santa Barbara for college. Had the opportunity to go to Europe and play volleyball over there for a couple years, kind of figuring out what I was going to do with my life. My two older brothers are in commercial real estate, suit and tie. And that just did not appeal to me at all. And I was like, well, you know what? Let me see if the fire department thing is something that appeals to me. And it really did appeal to me, because you're out there helping people, obviously, which everybody likes that aspect of it, but you're also physically fit. You're outside, you're constantly learning new things. And I think that really appealed to me was that you're always learning something new on the job. Every single day, you're learning something new. So I took some fire science classes, ended up getting pretty lucky. I worked as an EMT in la, just. Just getting some. My boots wet, and finally got picked up by the fire department. And I've been doing it for 25 years.

[Jim Prabhu]

That seems like a pretty common pathway. They go back to the ambulance until they get some experience because they're working with the firehouse a lot of the times, it's right there with them, and then they hop over to the fire academy.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. So I'm sure it's different all over the country, but for our department, you know, they really like you having that EMS background, that EMT skills that eventually can parlay into a paramedic career if you wanted to. But you just kind of get the idea of how you work with the fire department. Like, I worked for AMR Ambulance back in the day, and Louisiana County Fire Department had the contract with la, with AMR to provide transport to the hospital. So we were running calls with these firefighters, and you get to learn, you get to talk to them, you build a relationship with them, and they eventually start helping you out. Hey, you know, you got an interview coming up. Let's help you out. Come by the firehouse and we'll go through some interview prep for you. So it worked out really well. And it's a pretty common pathway of getting into the fire department. When I took my written Exam back in 1999, it was at City hall or the convention center back in. Down in downtown LA and there were 15,000 people taking the exam. Nowadays they can barely fill a high school.

[Jim Prabhu]

Really?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, they're having a really, really hard time finding people that want to be firefighters and they're hiring the wrong people. Unfortunately, there, there's some great firefighters, but there's also some, some young firefighters that just, you know, will spend money and send somebody to a fire academy. They go all the way through the fire academy. They come out and there was one report of a guy that like, well, I didn't realize I had to work a 24 hour shift. So he quits and it's like, well, how do you not know that with all the time and experience we put in you? And it's just that to me is just hiring the wrong person. You have to have, you have to be able to hire somebody that understands what the job is, that we've done a poor job of vetting the individual that we're trying to put in there.

[Jim Prabhu]

Man, you find yourself in this place, then where you hire, you have no choice or you tell yourself you have no choice except for to hire. Well, we have to hire somebody because we need a body. And then you end up with a bunch of people like that.

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, dei, I mean, had a big role to play, of course, in that if. And I think unfortunately, what has transpired with DEI for my department is that you've seen a, a plummeting of qualified individuals to actually do the job that are, that are capable of actually doing it. I mean, there's a video of our chief, you know, the chief that talks about having to carry the husband out of the building. Well, if your husband got himself in there, that's his problem, not mine. It's like, well, that's a poor example to set.

[Jim Prabhu]

If also that's an inside voice thought. Yeah, you don't say that when the cameras are there.

[Zoe Saldana]

When I saw that. Well, to me, as an administration, as soon as you see that video, you're like, we need to take care of this.

[Jim Prabhu]

As somebody who struggles with control of their inside voice.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

And literally two days ago, used my inside voice as an outside voice. As my wife just puts her hand on my shoulder and lovingly said, what the fuck? And the people that were there that knew me were just laughing. And she was too. And I was like, what, you guys don't feel that way? And she said, no, no, many people feel that way. They just don't say that. I struggle with it. I always have. And it was a joke. I have seen that video. She wasn't joking.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, 100%.

[Jim Prabhu]

And that's the problem. And if you do believe that, I mean, I don't advocate for being a liar, but don't get on national TV and say some shit like that.

[Zoe Saldana]

No. And if you were to ask any of the firefighters in la, men, women. There's some badass women in my fire. There are some really, really. I have a captain right now on my department, my station, and she's not the biggest woman, but she knows her limitations. She knows how to do her job. She trains her ass off like she's in the gym every day when she's at work, just trying to maintain that strength, get stronger, and she knows how to do her job. I think that if you were to ask anybody on the fire department now, they don't care if you're black, white, purple penis, vagina, doesn't matter. Can you do the job?

[Jim Prabhu]

That's actually all that matters.

[Zoe Saldana]

That's all that matters. And when the public calls 911 on their worst day, that's all they want. They don't care if it's a black firefighter showing up at a black person's house, a white firefighter showing up, they do not care. And I've experienced firsthand, having done it in south la, they don't care. They're just happy you're there because they need help.

[Jim Prabhu]

When did you. Can you pinpoint when you started feeling that creep of the dei, and did it lower standards as well?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes, I would say it has. There's been probably within the last 10 years, you've seen a big DEI push on my department. They wanted to really get more racial diversity in the department. They wanted to get more females on the department. There's a. So we have the la. We have the Board of Fire Commissioners that is appointed by the mayor, and the Board of Fire Commissioners oversee the running of the fire department. There's. I've only watched a couple of the videos just because it's embarrassing to watch. Like, you watch them talk about, oh, yeah, they have like an open forum at the very beginning of their meetings. And this meeting, this one meeting that I watched, they. They said, oh, hey, did anybody happen to go to the academy graduation the other day? And they're like, oh, yes, Bob, I did. And I noted that there were only four females that graduated the academy. And I'm just like, in my head, I'm thinking about, what about the other 38 individuals that busted their ass to get through that academy? You don't want to know. You don't want to Congratulate them or you don't want to like highlight their achievements? I think that to me is the problem is that people are so hell bent on getting statistics that mirror what they want and what their agenda is when at the end of the end of the day, you need to hire the most qualified people to do the job.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, I don't know, maybe I'm in the minority in the belief, but I don't think there's anything more important than standards.

[Zoe Saldana]

No, I think there has to be a standard. There has to be a standard.

[Jim Prabhu]

Real life. I mean, I can understand how the term dei, diversity, equity and inclusion, I can understand to some people, they hear that and they go, that sounds great. I think people believe what you want, live your life however you want to. It might sound great, but the world, in my experience, at least limited experience for what I've seen and the jobs that I've held, none of the environments really care what color your skin is or like you said, the gender that you are or happen to identify with. You can either do the job or you can't do the job. And that's the litmus test. And if you start modifying the standard to mess with the ratio or the statistical outcome, in my personal opinion, which counts for nothing other than that you're, you're on a pathway to the long term destruction of your organization, regardless of what your organization is.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, 100%.

[Jim Prabhu]

I think that your organization though happens to directly involve like rescue welfare being able to respond. I mean if you're not that you should like suck as a mortgage broker, you know, But I don't think anybody comes in to get a mortgage on fire, you know, that would be odd. I would deal with the fire first, you know, so I mean, sometimes it'll have a different outcome. But in environments like yours where not only are people, I mean when people call 91 1, it's you have a no fail job, essentially, people expect you to show up and handle whatever's going on. But you also have to be responsible for the people that you're there with too. And we used to have this conversation all the time inside of the SEAL community because it was a common talking point external to the Seal community. How come there's no women? And my answer for a while was, well, they don't even allow them to sign up because that was the case, which I had no impact on that decision. They changed that. And it's been open to women for quite some time now, to my knowledge. I don't even know if anybody's ever even made it to the first day. And the reason for that is, is that the standards are blind, and you can either meet the standard or you can't. Just like the battlefield is blind, or when you guys respond to a call, it's blind. You either meet the standard or you need to find another job.

[Zoe Saldana]

Exactly. And that's the problem, I think that. That we're running into right now is they're trying to lower the standard. We've had rookies that have been unsuccessful. So you go to three houses. You go to an engine house, a truck house, and then your third house is either an engine or an ambulance house.

[Jim Prabhu]

Everybody goes through that progression.

[Zoe Saldana]

Everybody goes through that progression. So we've had rookies that have failed in their first house, failed in their second house, and then failed in their third house. And you have those captains at those stations providing documentation. This is what they were deficient in. And there's pages upon pages of deficiencies that they look at. They're just not meant to do this job. And they send it up to the administration, and the administration just says, no, we're not going to terminate them. We're going to keep them. We'll find a spot for them.

[Jim Prabhu]

What would happen if that same person who failed those three houses, for whatever reason, I mean, it sounds like the administration would probably try to stuff them somewhere where they would have less impact. But let's say that for whatever reason, they weren't stuffed there and they are involved in something that terminated in a loss of somebody else's life because of their inability to meet the requirements and the standards of the job. I mean, who eats that liability?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that in the city's mind, they're like, well, we'll just put it on that. We'll send a paramedic school, we'll put them on an ambulance somewhere, but that's fine. And Danny. But our paramedics respond with us to structure fires. Our paramedics respond with us to brush fires. You know, if there is a firefighter down or a citizen down and that paramedics, the only one there, or they arrive first on scene, the expectation is that, hey, you go to work, yeah, you go affect a rescue, you figure something out and you go in there, you make a rescue, and if you physically can't start a chainsaw, how are you able to even perform your job?

[Jim Prabhu]

I don't know. And how could that even be extrapolating this out to somebody not receiving the cure that they needed to or that would Be reasonably expected from a first responder, loss of life, family, sues. And in the discovery process, they find out about all of this. I feel like there's more risk to the city, to the department, to the reputation in that potential than there is in getting rid of somebody. If you get rid of somebody. Yeah. In the world that we live in, they might see you and say it was discrimination, whatever it may be. And you can fight that battle. I'd rather fight that battle than try to justify why somebody died because you were unwilling to get rid of an individual man or woman that just couldn't meet the standard. And it's been papered. We had to do the same thing. We would get rid of a guy about every two years. And it was an incredibly difficult process because you had to paper it because of the time, energy, effort, resources that were put into getting that somebody there. But it was worth doing that as opposed to having somebody else lose their life 100%.

[Zoe Saldana]

I think it's. And I think we're seeing that now with, with my department. You have, obviously our. The fire chief, Kristen Crowley was let go from the fire chief, but she's still on the job. She's now a chief out in the Valley Bureau.

[Jim Prabhu]

They just go from chief to chief at that point.

[Zoe Saldana]

So now we have an interim chief.

[Jim Prabhu]

No, what I mean, it's like from her. Well, if she was at a chief, she'll lateral to just another chief job somewhere.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's kind of weird. Like, it would be.

[Jim Prabhu]

We call that the kick the can down the road philosophy.

[Zoe Saldana]

So it would, to me, it would be really weird. Like, okay, I'm the fire chief, but now I'm. I'm just a, an assistant chief or a deputy chief somewhere. It would be, it would be weird. And I don't know as far as.

[Jim Prabhu]

A career trajectory that might take a slight. It's a slight angular turn.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, yeah. But there has been a. We've moved a lot of the chiefs that she put in certain positions. A lot of those chiefs have been moved out. A lot of the. A lot of what? You would say that I guess the DEI type chiefs are being moved out and different chiefs are being put in there. Whether it's going to be better or not, I don't know. I think that our department is trying to maintain a standard. We have wooden ladders that are heavy as. Whereas a lot of departments have aluminum ladders. Our department's very, very set on keeping the wood ladders. Like, if you can't throw this wood ladder, then you shouldn't be able to do the job.

[Jim Prabhu]

Doesn't wood burn, sir?

[Zoe Saldana]

It does, it does. But if you're throwing the ladder, if you're throwing the ladder into a burning building, you're doing something wrong. So if you burn the ladder, something has gone wrong.

[Jim Prabhu]

I mean, based off the documentary that I've watched hundreds of times, which is Backdraft, I feel like you put the ladder directly into the window that the flames are coming out of. I believe that was the technique.

[Zoe Saldana]

It takes a lot for a wood ladder to burn. It's pretty thick wood. It takes a lot.

[Jim Prabhu]

It takes more for an aluminum one to burn is all I'm saying. I get it. I mean, stay with the legacy stuff. How are they for the chiefs that are being moved, how are they phrasing that? Are they being open about what they're doing or are they kind of flirting around the issue of why they're being moved?

[Zoe Saldana]

I think they're taking advantage of, taking advantage of the fact that you have a new fire chief, an interim fire chief in there. So here's your opportunity to move some of these individuals out. And I know that the budget, they are eliminating the. We actually had a DEI branch of our department. They've eliminated that and they're kind of just rolling them into recruitment or other parts of the, of the, of the department, which makes sense. You don't need to have a separate DEI bureau. I think that they are moving people out because there is some pretty outspoken members of the community that have voiced their frustration with the appointments over the years. And, and why are they in there? Why is that person there? I mean, our, our chief that was in charge of professional standards division shows up to a zoom call with all these other chiefs and she has a black eye. And it's like, well, how do you have a black eye? And suddenly questions several ways that you questions start getting asked.

[Jim Prabhu]

Maybe she does jiu jitsu.

[Zoe Saldana]

Next thing you know, she was involved in a domestic violence incident. Incident. And that's the chief that's in charge of professional standards, which is like our internal affairs. Like, how do you allow that to happen? And that. And she stayed there for years. And for the individuals like the members at the fire station, it's a, it's a joke. It's like, well, obviously you don't take her. You don't take us seriously, so why should I take you seriously?

[Jim Prabhu]

I feel like on that day I might have left my camera off.

[Zoe Saldana]

I think I would have to.

[Jim Prabhu]

I can think of creative solutions to real world problems we all face at time to time.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. Makeup.

[Jim Prabhu]

So my wife is a jiu jitsu player, and she was telling me she went to get her driver's license picture taken, and she was. She, I think, did two amateur MMA fights, and she said her storytelling of the story is great. She's like, I opened the first one by just getting punched in the face.

[Zoe Saldana]

Like, God damn.

[Jim Prabhu]

She went to go get her driver's license picture with the shiner. And the woman's like, are you in a safe place? Are you okay? She's like, no, no. I'm like, I'm okay. But, yeah, it's. You know, makeup helps tell people you're an MMA fighter. Turn the camera off. It's funny, though, how many times people in those roles, you are responsible for the ethics of this organization and you do a little research, and they're the most fucked up individual in the organization. That is a story as old as time.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's sad. It really, really, truly is sad because, like, when I first came on the LAFD back in the day, we were the shit. We were like one of the top, most respected departments in the country. And you look at us now and it's, like, embarrassing. It's like, man, we are really, really plummeted as far as our reputation and how we do things. We were cutting edge in the time we. We were a very aggressive fire department. The other day, I was at my station in the back just looking at something. I was on the phone and I looked around and all the cars that were there, not one guy, not one member had a sticker on the back of their car. Just like a little helmet, the little fire department helmet shield that we try to get out of a ticket with, but doesn't really work.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's actually what I was going to.

[Zoe Saldana]

Describe it as, but nobody had it. Nobody had anything, like, not even really. Not one little helmet that says lafd, lacd, fire. And I think that to me was like, well, that right there shows you that the members don't take pride in the organization anymore, that they're just showing up to do a job.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the times they want to have that on there, whether they're trying to get out of a ticket or not. It's just pride with being associated with that organization 100%, man, that's wild.

[Zoe Saldana]

It was crazy. And it was one of the first things that really I. The first time I've ever really seen it with my department, I'm like, wow, look at that. The one person wants to show their Pride for. For being in that organization.

[Jim Prabhu]

What in LA these days? Firefighter parking lot. I mean, up here we're talking lifted trucks, for sure. They never go off road. What are you guys. You guys rocking some pre.

[Zoe Saldana]

What do you guys got a lot of Teslas? Actually, there's quite a few Teslas in the parking lots now in the lafd.

[Jim Prabhu]

Well, you guys have an infrastructure not exactly designed for. I mean, it's funny that, again, the California push, all electric vehicles, but you guys know your power grid is not doing amazingly well in the summertime as it is, right?

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Now you want to plug all these vehicles in. I'm not. I'm not an expert in electricity, but let's not put the cart in front of the horse. I could see it. Some Teslas, but gone are the days of the lifted truck and the handlebar mustache.

[Zoe Saldana]

There's some spots that still have the handlebar mustache and there's still some lifted trucks. There's definitely some lifted trucks out there. Like the young guy that I'm. That I. You and I were talking about that. That's at my station, has a year and a day on the job. He's got a lifted truck. He's got a big old mustache.

[Jim Prabhu]

Good man.

[Zoe Saldana]

So, yeah, sometimes he's got some tattoos that he's. That he's putting on his body.

[Jim Prabhu]

The bigger question is, does he tuck his ears under his hat?

[Zoe Saldana]

No. I can't stand that.

[Jim Prabhu]

Why do people. Does anybody in your generation do that? Michael? No, I don't think you know what I'm talking about.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

[Jim Prabhu]

Is that just so you can, like, add miles per hour as you're moving through the day or. Why do people do that?

[Zoe Saldana]

Don't ask me.

[Jim Prabhu]

Lemp does that at the coffee shop.

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, yeah, that's. That tracks.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. For a variety of reasons. So we can leave off the show to not embarrass him, but I don't.

[Zoe Saldana]

See how that's comfortable.

[Jim Prabhu]

Like, I don't know either.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'm bald. I'm. I'm bald. So wearing a hat is like a priority for me. But. But I couldn't imagine tucking my ears under because eventually your ears are gonna end up with an indentation.

[Jim Prabhu]

Maybe that's what they're going for. I don't know. I just assume they're like. They're in their speed configuration to cut down drag. I don't know how. How after your academy, when you first started looking back now as a captain, 25 years on how prepared Were you for your first day as being a firefighter?

[Zoe Saldana]

They do a pretty good job. It's a pretty extensive academy. I had done a private fire academy before, before I got hired and I, and I knew what the job entailed. But nothing prepares you for going into that first structure fire where you are in it, it's hot. It's not like backdraft where you can see clear and there's flames on the corner and you got to go put it out. It's dark, it's hot. Smokes banked all the way down to the, to the, the, the ground and you have to crawl in and figure out where you're going.

[Jim Prabhu]

And you have to do some of that in the academy. Right. But it's all, it's simulated, it's simulated, it's simulated. Find spaces.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes. You learn how to do a right wall, wall surge, left wall surge, whatnot. But it's all with smoke machines or I mean especially trying to get a burn with the Air Quality Management district is. Good luck with that.

[Jim Prabhu]

Those are diametrically opposed organizations.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. So it's like, it's like you have to have a smoke machine which, which does a pretty good job. But it doesn't, it doesn't give you that heat aspect of it because the heat is really what you walk in. You're like, holy. It's like wearing your turnouts in a sauna, turning the lights out and all of a sudden, okay, figure out what you got to do.

[Jim Prabhu]

How long, how many years? Because I imagine it has to be a matter of years. Do you think it takes for somebody to become a well rounded firefighter?

[Zoe Saldana]

At least five years. At least five years. And it really kind of depends on the assignment that you're at. I'm very, very lucky. The state I'm in, Bel Air, I'm in a very slow, quiet spot. We never go to fires other than the gigantic brush fire that we had. But like when I, when I promoted a couple years ago to captain, I went down to South LA and I went to more fires in two years than I did in 20 years.

[Jim Prabhu]

What was starting them.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's a lot of, just a lot of it's homeless, a lot of vacant buildings down there. It's lower income families, a lot of heaters, candles. You have multiple families packed into one small little house and something lights off. A lot of it was homeless. A lot of it's rubbish. Fire in the back that eventually spreads into the house and now next thing you know the house is running or they're vacant. Buildings down there that the homeless are living in, they're cooking something or whatever, and next thing you know, that thing goes. There's. There's buildings down there that have burned dozens of times that keep burning. And eventually it's like, okay, well, there's nothing left to burn here. What are we going to do?

[Jim Prabhu]

If it burns once, is it more susceptible to burning?

[Zoe Saldana]

It will. Yeah, absolutely. Like, they'll come back and they'll burn again, or there'll be a hole in the roof. So now you have an airflow. So air is coming in and it's accelerating the growth because there's so much in those things, it's. It's gross.

[Jim Prabhu]

Well, if you find a. Like a log in a fireplace outside or whatever that's partially burned, it always seems easier to light it on fire the second time. Oh, yeah, if it's burned a little bit. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Zoe Saldana]

So if. If you are at an assignment where you're going and you're getting sets and reps, it almost becomes second nature for you. Like, you go. Because it's a huge rush. Like, you get the. We've changed our dispatching. We're now at. Say it's a computer voice that comes over that tells you, oh, structure fire. At so and so, back in the day, the dispatcher would be a. A man or a woman. They'd get on and be like, structure fire. And it would just scare the. Out of you. You'd hear a long ring, like, structure fire. And you would have to just. Everybody's jumping, just sprinting to the rig. Because it's a race. It's. Yeah. You.

[Jim Prabhu]

What are you racing for? First in.

[Zoe Saldana]

First in.

[Jim Prabhu]

Okay.

[Zoe Saldana]

You do not get beat in your first in. And it's.

[Jim Prabhu]

Is that like the individual or the truck that wants to be there? The first in.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's everybody.

[Jim Prabhu]

Okay.

[Zoe Saldana]

Everybody is.

[Jim Prabhu]

There's many awards here, many prizes.

[Zoe Saldana]

If your engineer doesn't beat that the. The adjacent company into the.

[Jim Prabhu]

Which is the truck driver, by the way. Right. Why can't you guys fucking call a medic?

[Zoe Saldana]

It's very confusing because it's not a fire truck. It's actually a fire engine.

[Jim Prabhu]

I know, but you hear that and you assume a guy's up there with one of your legal pads, like, working out, like, the Pythagorean theorem. He's not actually doing structural engineer stuff.

[Zoe Saldana]

They're doing water engineer stuff when they're turning dials and making calculations, I guess.

[Jim Prabhu]

But yeah, when I heard that, I'm like, that's weird. You guys Are doing science on the back of the truck. Brother knows you're an idiot.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Okay, so. So it's a truck driver. Like, you want to be there first.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's a ra. It's on. Like that. That tone goes out. They used to have an app called Pulse Point, or they still have the app, but they used to allow it where you would get a notification right. When that 911 caller gets it and starts putting in things into the computer. So guys would just start racing to the rig, and you're like, what the fuck's going on? Pulse. Or somebody would get on the speakerphone. Pulse Point. And you knew, like, there's a structure fire. We gotta go. So they've since done away with that. Now they've eliminated that where you're not getting your pulse point notification. But it's still. It's still on. It's still a race to. To beat that other company in. It's a friendly race. If you. If I beat. If, you know, again in my district, plenty good. I'm not.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

Blowing through an intersection and trying to kill somebody just to get their first on scene, but.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. But you guys are keeping square again.

[Zoe Saldana]

We are, absolutely.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's. It's an unwritten, unwritten score that we're keeping.

[Jim Prabhu]

I imagine it's much like my old job where you bounce back and forth between things that could be utterly horrendous and then also the funniest you've ever seen in your life. And you almost can't do your job because you're laughing so hard you can't see through the tears.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. If the people. The public and I. I'm violating a firefighter code here. If the public only knew the conversations that we had on this headsets when we're driving around, some people would be so offended and mortified, but it'd be like, you go to a dead body or you go to a cardiac arrest. You work some guy up, and of course the guy's naked and he's got some huge pube fro, and he's got no dick. Micro dick. And there's no.

[Jim Prabhu]

And so that things are noticed.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'm just saying that comment gets made on the rig. Like, hey, you guys, you see the size of that guy's package back there? Like, man.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. I actually think it's a good. For just men in general, it's a good idea to keep recording devices away for most of your life.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Some dumb gets said.

[Jim Prabhu]

Well, it's just. It's just dudes who are Going to say dude things, most of them with better inside voice control than I have. Yeah, I get it.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah. The most entertaining thing for me right now is riding around on the rig and having conversations with our young firefighter and just talking about his life and what are his goals, his aspirations, what's his dating life like? And it's just so.

[Jim Prabhu]

I have the same conversations with this one over here.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it's. It's an interesting life these guys live.

[Jim Prabhu]

They're living in a world I don't understand.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

And I, I am glad that I missed it.

[Zoe Saldana]

Me, too. I, I, I tell my kids, my kid, all my kids, I have five kids, and all my kids want cell phones. My younger ones all want cell phones. Like, my son's 10, my daughter's 9, and my youngest is 7. Daddy, we want a cell phone. We have a cell phone. Like, you guys have to realize you're never getting a cell phone ever. You guys can get a cell phone maybe when you go to high school. Dad got one when I went to college, and it was a flip phone.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, that's because they didn't have cell phones before that.

[Zoe Saldana]

That's. So you guys are gonna get yourself flip phones. But it's, it's an interesting time. Like, I don't know how they do it. Like, the, the, the apps, the dating apps, social media. It's, it's pretty stressful. I. Gone are the days where you meet somebody at the gym and you just go up and talk to them. Now you got to, like, friend them on Instagram and hope they get back to you, or you dm. DM them on Instagram. And it's just, it's a foreign concept.

[Jim Prabhu]

So you guys are driving around in the truck, and you got this young firefighter just telling you about the world of today.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's, it's, it's an interesting world that he lives in and his mindset, it's. And most of the guys at my station are married or they're divorced because they've gone through their practice firefighter marriage. But it's very interesting. His take. He's just living life in the moment. And God bless him, he's like, he's got a great house, he's got a great apartment with some three other firefighters down in a coastal town in California and just living life. Like, yeah, we're just gonna go out this weekend and go party and hang out and barbecue, go down the beach.

[Jim Prabhu]

I feel like you and I had that phase, too. Maybe it was shorter. I feel like they'll eventually swing back around and they'll have to start looking at things a little bit differently.

[Zoe Saldana]

I think they will. Yeah, I think they will. I think eventually they'll find someone that is. Wants to be in a long term serious relationship. And then you start getting external pressures. Well, you got to get married, have a family, whatnot. So I think, I think it eventually will catch up to them. But right now he's living in the moment as.

[Jim Prabhu]

I mean, I think people should try to live as much of their life in the moment as possible. Don't lose track of the bigger picture either. That's not for me to set the ratio, but I think you have to have both.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

At some point.

[Zoe Saldana]

All right.

[Jim Prabhu]

Palisades fire.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes, it was, it was quite a day.

[Jim Prabhu]

Which is actually. This is originally how you reached out to me too. And I was like, yes, I would love to sit and talk with you because I mean, I'm. I'm familiar with the area. I've been there not a bunch, but familiar with what? The area is very familiar with the Santa Anas and the impact it had on my sister's husband. I swear, I remember times when they knew it was coming and they're like, all right guys, it's probably going to be a two week stretch. And they just gone, you know, working all over the place. And for people listening, Santa Ana fires. Well, actually, why do they call them Santa Ana fires? I know they come from east to west. It's basically. And this is a shock to some people too. Most of California is not beach, just inland. Specifically where I lived in Chula Vista, you go up into the rolling hills and just after that we're talking desert. And in nuclear hot wind or temperatures that going from east to west, from my understanding, makes your job a little bit harder.

[Zoe Saldana]

It does. And you get this high pressure system. Next thing you know, you get some, some winds that come down through the Central Valley.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

And when you look at Southern California, Southern California has some ridges and some mountain, mountain ranges and then there's just canyons. There's canyons that kind of like the.

[Jim Prabhu]

One at the entrance to the north entrance of Palm Springs. Holy shit.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, exactly. So you have that wind just getting funneled down onto the coast. And having grown up in Malibu, you know, I went through multiple fires growing up. I remember getting evacuated by my parents. My parents saved their house, ours house back in the day with, with trash cans full of water and gunny sacks just going out there like you had some little Indian man out there just hacking away and Putting out embers that hit the wood shake shingle roof at the time. So maybe that's where I got my firefighting background from with my dad. But, but so the Santa Ana winds, we knew about these Santa Ana winds.

[Jim Prabhu]

They'Re drier too, right?

[Zoe Saldana]

They are. It drops the humidity. It makes it a red flag event. So you're getting single digit humidity, you're getting hot, hot temperatures and you're getting gusts of anything above 25 miles an hour is what we consider a red flag event.

[Jim Prabhu]

Let me ask you this. Before you get into the fire that day as an organization or at your firehouses, had you guys ever talked about an event like this occurring? The one that did happen in the Palisades fire, because the Santa Ana's are basically every year, so you guys are seeing it at least to some degree. It would, it would always increase the fire danger. Even where I was down in the southeast, damn near I would physically see the actual border wall from one little hill away from my house. I'd have to imagine you guys had game plan something like this or at least talked about the potential that it could happen.

[Zoe Saldana]

I don't think anybody realized how bad the event would be. And I would say that it was an anomaly. But it seems like, like fires nowadays in California are turning more like this. Like in 2018 you had the, the Woolsey fire that went all the way from Simi Valley all the way to the coast in Malibu. Eventually. All these brush fires that start somewhere in the east side of the west side of la, inevitably they all end at the ocean. It's a great big ocean firebreak. It's nothing else to burn. So we had game plan for it. We were well into wintertime. We still had not had any sort of precipitation. I think it had been like eight months since we had had rain. And the prior winter was a very wet one for us. So you had a lot of growth of vegetation. They had had a fire in Malibu called the Franklin fire in December. It had burned some houses. So it was on everybody's radar. Hey, there's a, there's a fire potential. We had a fire in the Palisades area on New Year's Day, New Year's evening, they had a firework that had gone off and it burned some acres, didn't burn any houses, but the potential was out there. And we didn't have that bad of a winds at that day. But we knew going up to it and the weather casters were telling you that they, they not only did they give you a red Flag warning. They gave you a extreme hazard severity projection where you're going to have incredible winds, 60 mile an hour, damaging winds. Even if there's not a fire, things are going to get damaged. So they knew this going up to it. As an organization, we had pre deployed resources, but we had done what we'd always did. We had a strike team of engines that we pre deployed at our fire station in west la. Other than that, we had no other resources. I'm sure some people have seen the, the footage of our fire engines down at the, down at the maintenance shop that are just, just sitting there. They're not being maintained. We don't have the budget to pay for the mechanics to go and maintain those apparatus and get them back out in the field. And that was a big problem that we had at the Palisades fires. You had firefighters showing up off duty, not even getting recalled. They just showed up, hey, I want to help, I want to, I want to see what I can do. They had nowhere to ride, they had no apparatus to put them on. So sorry, man, there's nothing we can do. So we knew going into this event that it was going to be bad. We had the recent fire in New Year's Day, New Year's Eve that we were aware of. They had kind of sat on that for a couple days and then the newscasters forecast a very, very bad event coming in. So that morning of the 7th, I had talked to our battalion chief, I mean in my office. The area of Bel Air that I'm at, that I work in, it had a big fire that burned in the 1961 and ran through those canyons on a Santa Ana wind day. And There's a great YouTube video that talks about the devil winds of Santa Ana. And it's really well done. It's just an old, old video, but it talks about the Bel Air fire and how it went ripping through that area and, and did a lot of damage. So we knew about it. We were very, very concerned that something like that would happen again and we would have to evacuate people. The problem that I have in my district right now that I'm working with some of the, the homeowners associations, especially after the Palisades fire, they're very, very scared of what's going to happen. And our role will basically be not trying to put out the fire. It's going to be trying to get people out. Yeah, get people out. Life before property. We're trying to evacuate as many people as we can down some of these canyons. Some of These canyon roads are very narrow. Stone Canyon, we're to my district. There's a huge reservoir up top there, but it's one way in, one way out. And then you drop down onto Sunset Boulevard and you can imagine LA traffic on a daily basis. There's a lot of people on the road already. Now we got to try to clear everybody out and, and that's what we ran into with the Palisades fire. So I, I had gotten off, I talked to the chief, we, we kind of game planned loosely, hey, this is what we're going to do. We're going to try to get everybody out. We'll shut down Sunset and just get people out and, and go to firefighting after the fact. So we knew that evacuation would be our priority, especially with a wind like this and the weather that we had because it was hot and dry. You walk outside, you're like, wow, it's bad. And I remember at 10 o' clock in the morning, I'm sitting at my desk in my office and I already talked to my crew that, that morning when I had morning lineup, hey, if we get anything, be prepared. Make sure your brush stuff's all ready to go. Make sure you guys are ready to be deployed for multiple days in a row.

[Jim Prabhu]

You guys wear different equipment for structure versus we do.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. So your structure, turnout, gears, that big heavy stuff. You don't ever want to fight a brush dryer in that you die from overheating. It's just, it's insulated, basically material to keep you from the radiant heat. When you go into a building and you have to be able to fight fire, it's, it's got like a heavy quilted liner on the inside and it's basically layers of, of air gaps that protect you from the heat.

[Jim Prabhu]

Makes sense.

[Zoe Saldana]

In a wildland, you're just wearing Nomex pants that are flame retardant and you're wearing a Nomex shirt because you're not meant to be right there in the fire. And a lot of it's just bright yellow for identification so you can see each other. It's a very, like I tell, like for my side business, I tell my clients, hey, if you're gonna stay here and you're gonna fight fire, you just need a good pair of boots, a pair of jeans, like a good long sleeve shirt, a bandana, good mask and some goggles and a hat of some sort and you'll be good. If you are in a bad situation and you're feeling the heat, then you're in the Wrong spot, you need to move. It's the same thing with firefighters. Like, on a wildland fire, if we're in a bad spot, then. Then we gotta move and get to a safer area. So I remember I got the Pulse Point notification brush fire, and 23's first sandwiches in the Palisades. So I immediately got on the pa. I told my crew, hey, brush fire. The Palisade start suiting up. So these guys would start getting ready.

[Jim Prabhu]

At this point, though, no like, crazy indication that this was gonna turn into something different?

[Zoe Saldana]

No, not at all.

[Jim Prabhu]

And then did they say how it started? Cause I was curious about that, too.

[Zoe Saldana]

So the Altadena fire that they had in Pasadena area, they just have Video of the SoCal Edison Power lines that. That drop down and spark the fire. And I think the SoCal Edison has confessed to the fact that, yeah, we. That looks like that's how it started with our fire. It now looks like the Palisades fire may have been a rekindle from that New Year's Eve fire.

[Jim Prabhu]

Interesting.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes.

[Jim Prabhu]

It had survived just almost nearly dormant.

[Zoe Saldana]

Until then it did. And it. It. And you get, like, layers of ash on top of it, and it just gets blown off. And next thing you know, there's wind hitting those little sparks. And there's a video of. And I'll give you the. So you can put it in the notes for the podcast. But there's some really good YouTube videos that people have done. LA Times did a really good one. And it's got a camera. UC San Diego has cameras all over California now that monitor wildfires and smoke indicators, and there's one that shows right where that fire was that evening of New Year's. You get a smoke column coming up that morning at 10:03 in the morning.

[Jim Prabhu]

It's crazy. It can survive dormant like that.

[Zoe Saldana]

It fires, brush fires, the wildland fires, they burn. They burn the plant up top and they start burning down into the roots. They go underground and it'll sit there dormant for. For months.

[Jim Prabhu]

What?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, that's why a lot of those, these wildland firefighters, they'll go out and they'll dig them out. They'll dig up stuff. There's certain plants that, you know, okay, we got to dig this guy out.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

And get it out of here. But it's pretty phenomenal how. How it's able to survive in that environment down there and just smolder around. So when we got the Pulse Point notification, we had not been toned out yet for the call. Some other stations in the mediate Area, they sent a brush initial brush assignment. I went out to the rig, I turned on the rig, so it turns on all the radio so we can hear the radio traffic. And then you hear the captain from the station in the Palisade. Same Metro fire from Truck 69. We do have a loom up in a loom up to smoke column. We have a loom up in the Palisades area. Give me 10 additional engine companies right off the bat. I mean, I'm talking one minute, this guy's out the door, he turns the corner, he sees the smoke. Okay, we got something. Just knowing that the wind conditions, the weather conditions we had were gonna. It was gonna be bad. It was gonna be bad. And so then a few minutes later, you hear the battalion chief say, metro fire from Battalion 9. Give me 20 additional engine companies. So they asked for many, many engines from the get go. That pre deployed task force of engines that they had before that they normally do, like on a Red Flag event. They were at a small little brush fire already in the Hollywood Hills. So they were out, they were gone. And the next couple minutes, all you hear is them asking for more and more resources. By then we had gotten toned out for it. We were suited up. We start going down Sunset boulevard across the 405. We go through Brentwood and we pass the fire station in Brentwood. And you kind of make this turn down toward Mandeville Canyon. And as soon as you make that turn, you can see the smoke and you're like, okay, this is going to be bad.

[Jim Prabhu]

Was it just bent over from the wind too?

[Zoe Saldana]

Completely horizontal? Yeah, just getting blown all the way out to the ocean. You knew, okay, well this thing is just going to make a run all the way to the Pacific. And the way that that community is, it almost, it faces south, so to the west is Malibu. So the winds are blowing that way and the smoke is going that way. So you know that it was going to eventually blow into Malibu. The thing that really got to me was when we came into downtown Palisades area. It's a great, it was a great little town, great little community, small town feel in the middle of la. Obviously very affluent, but it was a really, really nice little town that they had been there for years. We're rolling past the station and the Palisades and you could see the smoke going that way. But the fire is now burning against the wind. And it's coming down toward. It's burning upwind, it's burning downhill against the wind. Wind.

[Jim Prabhu]

Whoa.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it was gnarly. It was like, wow, that and it's just, and stuff's just getting thrown down.

[Jim Prabhu]

And it's, it seemed like it defied the laws of physics almost.

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, it's just, it's, the vegetation was so dry and so dense that it just went from plant to plant to plant to plant and just kept going down. So we roll up to where our staging location is. We pass the battalion chief who had set up the, their operations center at the fire station right there at the bottom of the hill. They eventually had to move because that fire station caught on fire. So we roll up to staging and we're sitting there in staging and there's LA City Resources, LA County Resources. They've sent the world to this thing. Louisiana county sent a full brush assignment. Louisiana City sent a full brush assignment up on top of additional resources. And we're the address of where the fire originated. It's a one way row, one way in, one way out. Canyon Road, Palisades Drive goes up miles and goes up and curves her up into this upper development community. There's a fire road that you can take and that's kind of how it is up there. There's, there's one way access points that could take you in and out. So we come and there's thousands of people that live up in that area and at 10 o' clock in the morning a lot of people will be home. We show up there, we pull up and there's people funneling out on the right side of the street coming down. We're waiting for an assignment. The chief is just trying to wrap his arms around this thing and trying to get an idea of hey, where's this thing going? We have helicopters in the air. I think the helicopters were some of the first that were able to get a bird's eye view of it and relayed information to our chief on the ground saying hey look, this thing's right now, it's about 20 acres. You do have a very strong wind coming out of the east. It's going to push to the west and you're going to impact homes within minutes. And this thing has a potential to be 200 acres within 20 minutes.

[Jim Prabhu]

Surprised? They actually fly the helicopters that had to be close to their envelope for wind.

[Zoe Saldana]

It was. And they eventually, I think at that time the winds were maybe 40, 50 mile an hour gust.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's sporty in a verge.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. Once they got up to like the 60 mile an hour winds, aircraft were grounded and I think that had a huge, huge role into why this thing eventually went from the. The wildland urban interface, or the intermix. The interface is where you have, like, your development and you have the hill and you have all the brush right there. That's your. That's your wildland urban interface. You have an intermix, which means that there's houses, like in Malibu, you have houses that are in the hills in these canyons where. Where before, you know, an aircraft would be able to come in, the super scoopers or whatever, and they would be able to paint a line, a Foss check line right there, and. And keep it from getting into that development, which they did on my brother's house where he lives. They just painted the ridge top, and it kept that fire from getting to them. So we show up there at Palisades Drive, and we're sitting there and we're waiting for an assignment. We're waiting for an assignment, and all of a sudden the fire is cresting the hill right here at us. And we're like, oh, shit, this thing's really on top of us now. And there's a small little shopping center there with some. A restaurant, a Starbucks, coffee. And all of a sudden, you see it jump. It jumps over the canyon. And now it's ripping up both sides of this canyon. And you're just looking down, and it looks like Hell's Gates. It's just fire everywhere. And you start to see people panic, and you see people. One car starts coming down the wrong direction that we're trying to go up. Another car starts coming down, and next thing you know, there's multiple people just trying to get out. One guy drove across the center median in front of us and drove right into the wall of the shopping center. Just got out and started raining. And I'm just like, what the fuck is going on right now? I tell my engineer, I go, keith, go. We're gonna get stuck. Just go. I didn't have assignment. We're just gonna go. So we start driving up. We get past all these cars coming down, which eventually they blocked traffic completely, so they. They didn't allow the fire engines from going up because traffic was so backed up. You had all these. These cars trying to get down a central corridor to an artery down on pch. Well, PCH is packed. Sunset Boulevard's packed. Nowhere for these people to go. And we eventually get up to. We drive through the fire. We get up to this town home complex, and I get waved down by somebody, and they're like, hey, there's some people in here. There's some old people that can't get out. So I'm like, well, here we go. Let's go in here. So we turned in that. Into that development, talked to the. The older people that were there. I said, hey, look, we're gonna. We're gonna post up here. You guys are now gonna. We're sheltering everybody in place because there was nowhere for them to go. The people that live in that development or in a traffic jam, just trying to get down onto Palisades Drive. Nobody's going anywhere. So tell everybody in their car, hey, just stay in your car. Roll your windows up. If we need to get you guys out, we're going to pull everybody out, and we're going to go into this house that was kind of set back like this one little condo complex. If worst came to worse, I'm going to bring everybody into one house, and we're just going to try to protect them as best we can. We had hydrant pressure at that time. We. I told my young cockbrush firemen, the hook up to the. The hydrant there and start hitting that backside with the big gun trit that we have on top of our rig. So he's lobbing water over, just trying to. To prevent any of the conduit saturating. It just saturate. We're going to saturate the snot out of it. We're trying to keep this thing from burning or start igniting any of these townhomes. And then now we're trying to protect the area that we're in because I had people in these buildings that now I have to account for. By then, I started having some more fire engines that were pulling in from my department. One of the captains that I knew, I kind of explained, hey, look, Brett, we got people in this building here. We're going to shelter them in place. This engine is going to go take the northern part of the complex. You and I and the other engine are going to stay down here and try to protect this area. And that's what we did for the next probably four or five hours, is just keep that fire from lapping into the. Into that structure on the other side of the hill. We had houses on top of the ridge. One house was under construction. It was like a cantilever house under construction. That thing came tumbling down the hill. I didn't see many aircraft in that area because the. The smoke and the winds in that area were probably too extreme. They were more up on the ridge line up at the top of Palisades Drive that like the one or Two times that I saw them. They were way up there. So we. We eventually were able to get everybody out of the complex. We had some police officers come in and help us escort the elderly people out. We got everybody out. We had done enough firefighting that the. The. The community was now safe. That townhome complex was not going to burn unless some random little ember got into the one of the houses. We had done a really, really good job of hardening the homes, prepping the houses, prepping the complex, making it so that it was going to get there. And then this was in the evening time by then. We now transitioned into the neighborhood above the high school in the Palisades. And we really didn't know what we were getting. We didn't realize how bad it was. We had this one little.

[Jim Prabhu]

This all sounds like chaos. Like you had your little micro battle going on.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh my.

[Jim Prabhu]

As a war is like raging around.

[Zoe Saldana]

You, and you could hear it in the communication on the radio. So I have two radios that I monitor. One of them, I was just in communication with the captains that were on the other engines in the immediate area. But I'm hearing like, other things, like, hey, I've got houses on Bienvenida that are burning. I got St. Matthew's parish school that's on fire. I'm trying to get kids out. I've got Palisades High School's on fire. I've got fire on El Medio. Fire everywhere. Like, you start hearing all these streets that you recognize that we drove past, like, wow, that fire is now down into the city. It's now in these communities. So we transitioned. We got a new assignment. Hey, report to Temescal Canyon. We drove out, and we drive out. We see all the cars that everybody had just. Just gotten in, just gotten out of and abandoned. They had to have one of the. The bulldozers come in and push the cars out. So it looked like a scene from, you know, a zombie apocalypse where you're like, what the happened down here? We eventually got up to the neighborhood where we had our assignment, and there's fire everywhere. Everything's on fire. Everything is on fire. And there's, you know, there's fire engines racing here and there. But we're all spread very, very thin. We're doing what we can. There's police officers running all over, trying to get people out. There's homeowners that are still trying to evacuate. And this is well into the incident. We finally pulled up onto El Medio where we were where we had our assignment. And there's multiple homes that are on fire. And the problem with the Palisades was that you had old, smaller, 1800 square foot ranch homes that somebody had come in, they had torn it down, and they had put up this 5,000 square foot beast of a home, Beautiful home, but they're all now right next to each other, almost like zero lot lines where they are just very, very difficult. And when you had that wind blowing, and I think I sent you one of the videos where you had fire that was completely. You had flames touching the house next to it, and it would just be one after the other after the other. And we would spend. We spent hours just trying to save a house and trying to prep it, and. And it would just. It would hopscotch the house we were trying to protect, and it would move down to the next one. And then we just keep going down the next one, the next. We watched whole blocks of houses just go up in flames. And literally there was nothing we can do. When we first got there, we did have good hydrant pressure. Then we hooked up to the hydrant. I told my young firefighter again, I said, hey, get up on that gun turret and just put a water curtain between the house. There's two really big houses. Put the water curtain between the two. We don't want the big one there to go up because the wind's blowing away. Maybe we can save it. And I'm gonna walk down the street and see what we got down here. And as I'm walking down the street, next thing you know, it's raining on me. I'm getting drenched, and I'm like, what the. This son of a. Is spraying me.

[Jim Prabhu]

And I turned, which is also kind of awesome.

[Zoe Saldana]

It would be awesome. It would Props if Russell had the balls to do that 100. Good job. But I look back and I look at the. The stream of water. It's a good stream of water under high pressure. High pressure. 500 gallons a minute. This thing goes 300ft. It is going up in the middle of the air, and it's doing a complete right end bend. And it's coming right back in the middle of the street. We're just. We're watering the street. And I'm like, well, that's not gonna work. So I run back to the engine, tell him, hey, shut it down. That's not gonna work. Grab a handline. Grab a handline. Go stand at that corner between that two houses and stand there for the next four hours. Don't move. And he did. So I knew right away that this was gonna be a different kind of a battle, different than anything we'd ever been prepared for. You know, you had to kind of to revitalize your tactics and strategies and how we wanted to try to protect the most homes. We had gotten most people out of the area. There was one old lady that was. That didn't want to leave. And I remember this because I did a face to face with one of the captains that was there. And we look over and there's some old lady just in her little 1,800 square foot ranch house that she had bought way back in the day, and this bay window, and she's just looking out. And I'm like, hey, Brett, do you know about that? And he goes, yeah, we saw her. We're trying to work on getting her out. And she just didn't want to leave, probably because she had nowhere else to go. She had no family. So we knew about her. We knew everybody else was pretty much gone. And now we're just in firefighting mode. And it was so frustrating because we are so used to going to a fire, putting out, putting out a fire, and then we're good to go. This thing would not go out. And it's just marching from house to house to house. And you know, the thing that sucked is you would go into these backyards and you'd see like, playsets, kids, bikes everywhere, and you're like, oh, fuck, these kids are losing their house. What can we do? And it just kept going house to house to house until eventually it just got all over the ocean. There was nothing else to burn. And it really, really took almost to the next day when we. We were there for three days straight without sleep and just trying to put fires out. And we. It eventually dawned on us like, hey, we can't stop this thing. This thing's gonna go. No matter what we try to do, it's gonna go all the way to the ocean. So what can we do? How can we. How can we protect the most number of. How can we save the most number of homes? And finally, just like I had my, my back to these, this development behind me, these row of homes, this little pocket, this island. I go, okay, guys, we're gonna write off all those homes on the other side. There's nothing we can do. We can't stop it. We are going to protect the homes that are behind these here and do the most we can for that area. And it was hard. You know, as a firefighter, you want to do your job, you want to prevent houses from burning. You knew kids, houses were burning, kids were going to come back to a pile of rubble. People had been had to evacuate in just a matter of just minutes. So they had minimal amount of time to grab whatever they could. But there was really nothing we can do, even though we had hydrant pressure back then. They're just, just a typical structure fire. You get, you know, four engines, a truck company and a battalion chief. That's kind of your standard operation for a day to day, everyday type of structure fire. We had maybe three engines on this block of homes with probably 30 homes and all of them were on fire. So we knew that there was nothing we could do. That wind was so strong, the humidity was so low, the environment was just, just primed to burn.

[Jim Prabhu]

It looked like a torch.

[Zoe Saldana]

It was, and that's really what it was.

[Jim Prabhu]

Just the embers, you could see those channelized areas and the embers were whipping by so fast. And I remember asking myself, Today's episode is brought to you by Fabric by Gerber Life. It is term life insurance. This is a very easy ad read for me because I have people in my life that I care about and I'm aware that from an outsider's perspective, I may participate in things that other people think are riskier than most. I disagree. I spent a lot of my time analyzing, assessing and mitigating risk and I'm not really more risk tolerant than anybody else. Having said that, I have a wife that I love more than I have words to describe. I have children that I have so much love for that my vocabulary is just ridiculously incapable of describing it. And the only thing that I would want for when I am no longer here, and hopefully that's at the age of 180 years old, is that they were taken care of. And one of the best ways that I can think to take care of your loved ones, kids, family, whomever it may be, is by thinking about life insurance. I'm going to read you some bullet points about Fabric by Gerber Life. And if they inspire you to do so, click on the link down in the show notes. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done right from your couch, all online and on your schedule. You can be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. Fabric has flexible, high quality policies that fit your family and your budget like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. Fabric has partnered with Gerber Life, trusted by millions of families like yours, for over 50 years. And there's no risk. There's a 30 day money back guarantee and you can cancel at any time. They have over 19005 star reviews on Trustpilot with a rating of excellent. And it was designed for busy parents like you and me. And it's more than life insurance. They have free digital wills, access to investment accounts to invest in your kid's future and more. You can manage it all from your phone. That' world that we live in. You can join the thousands of parents who trust fabric to help protect their family. You can apply today in just [e-mail] Cleared hot. Again down in the show. Notes that is meat fabric.com Cleared hot. Mike echo echo tango fabric.com Cleared hot. Policies are issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company. They're not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Let's get back into the show. Is there even anything you can do other than get people out of the way of that?

[Zoe Saldana]

And that was really the message that the. I'll give the chief props for this. Like at the very initial moments of the fire, he was like, hey look, we are not in a property profile right now. We're not trying to save houses. We need to try to get people out. We're in a rescue profile, get people out of the town. We got to get them out of the area. Because they knew that people would, people did pass, people did get killed. But I think it would have been a lot worse if people had tried to stay behind.

[Jim Prabhu]

So when you're describing this, I mean you're talking about what you could see, like your own little fighting unit, if you will. Is there somebody somewhere like this old school World War II table with a stick, pushing fire engines around, keeping track of where all you guys are? How are you guys keeping track of all these assets and where, where certain people are? I mean, it just seems like basically every fire truck known to man was out there. Who's keeping track of that?

[Zoe Saldana]

The command post tried to. And they, they try to track about. And the computers nowadays everybody has a GPS locator on their, on their engine so they can kind of see when they pull up on the map. Oh, okay. For the most part, this engine is in this area. That engine's in that area.

[Jim Prabhu]

That had to look like a nightmare.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, just a nightmare. Yeah, but, but also now you don't. You had other resources. I had Santa Monica, Beverly Hills. You had LA county fire engines showing up. The, the battalion chief's only looking at LA city resources. He only knows where they're at. And he could see him all over the map. Like, when I first described where I just went, I didn't have assignment. I just, I just went. I just went and to go try to help and see what we could do, get past the cars that were coming down. And I was unaccounted for for probably a good couple hours, just sheltering people in place, trying to protect this houses from burning down.

[Jim Prabhu]

Did anybody ask where you were during that time?

[Zoe Saldana]

No, nobody knew. No, they knew I was on the incident, they knew that I was on the dispatch incident. And they could probably see me like my map. Like, yeah, they could probably pinpoint on the map, hey, this is where you are. And it wasn't until the other, they had formed up a, a task force, they call it, which is three engines. They'd formed up a task force and they had showed up. And that's when we all started talking and they really, they really had the information. Hey, just be advised, Engine 71 is here with us. And they were like, oh, perfect. Okay, let's write that down.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. Oh, we've been looking for them. Wink, wink.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, they didn't, but they. I think that I got on the radio when we were at the bottom of the Palisades Drive and I started seeing people coming down the wrong way. And I told the, I told the incident commanders, hey, be advised, people are coming down the wrong way of Palisades Drive. You got gridlock, you're gonna have a hard time getting apparatus up. And he was, he to his credit, said, hey, don't stop at staging. Just go, go start deploying. We'll figure out where you guys are, we'll form you guys up after. And by that time it had burned down and now it was, it had gone over the hill and now it's going down into the, into the city, the Palisades community. So you had fire on multiple, and plus it's pushing to the west. So now you had, you had fire burning into Topanga Canyon, down on the pch, down into Malibu, which is LA County's jurisdiction. But now they had sent all these resources to help the city and they're like, oh, now we got to backfill. So it was just controlled chaos. There was, there was no minimal organization. They had broken it up into branches and divisions of where everybody was and areas they were trying to protect. But it, we were not stopping this thing. Once it had gotten down off the mountain and crossed over Sunset Boulevard and gotten into the, into the neighborhood below, there was nothing we can do. It just, it had no rhyme or reason. It would just depend on which way the winds were blowing, and it would rip through a certain row, a certain street, and then the street right next would be fine. Nothing. It was so odd. It was crazy. I remember sitting there at the. The first night we were on, sitting on the street, spraying water, trying to save that one house. And there was a grove of pine trees and eucalyptus trees. And next thing you know, that thing goes up and it sounds like a freight train. This thing is ripping. The whole thing just goes up like a bomb. 200 foot flame lamps. I'm like, holy shit, that's hot. And that thing just showered the neighborhood below us with embers. And that's the biggest thing that wildfires prevent. The problem is that it's not like a wave of flames that are coming down. It's the ember cast. It's an ember cast ahead that's hitting the houses that's starting all these small little fires. There was little tiny mulch, like dry mulch in front of people's houses. And they had tiny little fires burning everywhere in people's backyards that eventually it would light off, off a wood fence that would creep along and burn down into the neighbor's yard. And next thing you know, a tree catches or a bush catches, and now it's getting up into the houses. Or you have ember casts that are getting inside the house, inside the attic spaces, inside the building. Once it, Once the fire gets inside the house, you're not stopping it, you're not putting it out. There's nothing you can do with the wind like that. It's like blowing on a campfire. It just keeps stoking the fire and it just goes. And all the synthetic materials and building materials that we use nowadays, they burn hotter, they burn longer than your typical brush to your chaparral brush that we have in California. And that was a huge problem because now you had ember cast going miles in advance, way, way. So once houses started burning, you had this much, much greater ember cast affecting and dropping down into these communities that we had to, to try to put out, and you just couldn't.

[Jim Prabhu]

You mentioned the hydrant pressure a few times. Did it change throughout the course of you guys fighting this?

[Zoe Saldana]

It did. So by day two, the morning of the second day, we started noticing we didn't have any hydrant pressure.

[Jim Prabhu]

This may be a stupid question. Where does the water come from in the hydrants?

[Zoe Saldana]

It's come from the mains, just the water mains.

[Jim Prabhu]

There's just like the community water mains.

[Zoe Saldana]

Essentially okay, so it's come out since the fires that there was a large reservoir in the Palisades area that, that was having maintenance done on it, so it had no water in it. Did that have an impact? I think it did not day one, but probably like in the sequential days afterwards where we didn't have water because now water is just getting brought in from elsewhere. But the LA county chief, I give him credit, he was talking about like the Altadena fire that they had because LA county had that fire out there as well. He was at a community meeting and everybody's angry and he, he said, hey look, you people need, everybody needs to realize the municipal water supply and the hydrant system is not designed for a fire like this. It's designed for everyday operations, house fires, maybe a commercial fire where you have enough pressure. It's not designed for hundreds of homes on fire where everybody's trying to tap into a water source and use water now to spray their houses down, or the fire department's tapping in, trying to fill their apparatus. By day two, there were like maybe one or two hydrants that had water. One was off of Sunset Boulevard where it's a larger water main that comes in from the main feed that we would drive out. A fire engine carries 500 gallons of water. So we would drive out there, we'd fill up our 500 gallon tank and we come back and now we're just patrolling the area, just trying to put out, put out fires. I had one guy that his coal plunge had caught on fire and had melted to the ground and it had started to get the door frame to the garage and it was on fire and it started to get in the garage. So we used our 500 gallons and we, we put that out and prevented that from burning, but that was about all we could do. There were certain houses that were fully ablazed. We couldn't stop it. We couldn't stop it. And we knew that we tried to prevent the house next to it from going. We'd spray, spray, spray, and then we, we'd leave, go fill up our tank, come back, and by then that house next to it would be on fire.

[Jim Prabhu]

So I remember Trump says some wild shit sometimes. I want the administration to be successful. You know, he struggles with his inside voice sometimes too. He does sometimes. Wildly entertaining. I remember them talking about there was all this water locked up in Northern California and they were going to release it and basically open it up for you guys to be able to use it. That's not how that works, is it?

[Zoe Saldana]

No, it's not. It's not. Yeah, it's not. I think, and I'm not a subject matter expert in that, but my understanding is that the Central Valley of California used to have a large lake, a large area of water. That would have not played any important. It wouldn't have impacted us at all in Southern California. It's not designed. Your hydrant system is just not designed to withstand a conflagration where an entire neighborhood is on fire. And I think that's where people now, they're aggressively trying to rebuild the community of the Palisade and get it back.

[Jim Prabhu]

Are they?

[Zoe Saldana]

They are.

[Jim Prabhu]

Are they having any hard time getting fire insurance?

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, I can guarantee they're not going to get fire insurance. But. But I, but I think that what they need to do and they need to take a step back and say, okay, yeah, we're going to rebuild, but we now have to build in a manner that is fire resistant. You have to start thinking about that. What can we do as a, as a city and a community to build a, a wildfire resistant community now that we know that? Because I guarantee that the street that I was on, those people that lived in that houses never in their wildest dream thought that their house would get burned down from a fire because they're not even close to the mountain. They're probably a mile away from the closest mountain that goes up to the heavy brush.

[Jim Prabhu]

And that was just all from the ember cast.

[Zoe Saldana]

It was the amber cast. It's the amber cast that just came raining down onto the city below. Yeah. And it just started lighting off. Once you, you would have a house here, a house here, a house, and it's. You're playing whack a mole. You're trying to just catch up and, and get on top of these houses. Even with the number of resources we had coming in. You had one fire engine trying to put out a house that you had a wind behind it just ripping, touching the nascal next house. Now that goes on. That goes on. So it was very, very challenging to try to keep up. We did not. It wouldn't have mattered how many fire engines we have had or how much water we had. You really, really needed massive an air attack, an air campaign. But they couldn't fly. They couldn't fly because the winds are too strong. You would have had to paint. If they were able to keep that fire from crossing over Sunset Boulevard, we may have had a chance. But I think with the amber cast just coming down, it just rained. It rained and rained and Rained. And now you're pushing the fire onto PCH and Malibu, and it burned down houses that are on the water. Yeah, right there on the water. And I talked to a county captain that I know, and they were out there and they had a good. They were doing a good job trying to prevent the, the, the fire from spreading. But next thing you know, the boulders from the hillside above, because there's nothing holding it back. Now all of a sudden you have boulders coming down and boulders are, Are raining down on these guys on the ground. He's like, yeah, I can't do this. I'm gonna get one of my guys killed. I didn't consider that, but now they had to move. So. And I experienced this in 2018 when they had the Woolsey Fire. I was at my mother in law's house in Simi Valley, and my brother calls me and says, hey, Aunt Pat and Chris can't get out. They're stuck on Point Dume in Malibu, which had never burned before. Never burned. So I had a sprinter van at the time because I got a buttload of kids. And I start going down Canaan and I'm driving through the canyon and I get to the checkpoint at the one, and I show the sheriff my id. I go, hey, I. I'm just trying to get my family out. And she goes, good luck. Hands me back my ID and sends me on my way. And it's probably one of the most harrowing experiences I've ever had where I'm driving through this canyon. There's fire raging on both sides of me. Power lines are down, so I'm having to dodge power lines and not get knocked out by one. And then you start noticing the boulders coming down and they're crashing in front of you and just running off. They're crashing down, and now they're going off into the canyon. I'm like, holy, that thing's gonna hit me and I'm gonna end up in the fucking canyon. And I'm white knuckling it. And I'm looking and I'm like, it is a good thing my wife cannot see what I'm doing right now.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

But eventually made it down there. And that fire was the same way where you come down and there's houses on fire all over the place, and there's no fire department to be seen. The fire department spreads so thin. And I think that's the big message here is. And I think a lot of people had to learn the hard way from the Woolsey fire and the Palisades fire and all fires that we've had. The way the mountain fire in Camarillo in Ventura county recently that, you know, the fire department is great day to day operations. We are fantastic. We do a great job. Ems, fire, we do a really good job. It's once you start getting these large scale disasters that first responders and resources get spread very thin. And now it's incumbent upon the neighborhoods and the homeowners and the communities to have built in some sort of like community resiliency. And they have had to, to take measures. Especially if you live in Southern California, wildfires happen all the time. Bill Maher I, I, somebody sent me this video. Bill Maher. Bill Maher had a great quote. He said wildfires in California is like boob jobs in a strip club, inevitable and they're only going to get bigger.

[Jim Prabhu]

Bill has some good ones.

[Zoe Saldana]

He has some good ones. I mean, I don't watch a lot of his stuff, but yeah, but somebody sent me. It's actually pretty entertaining. The little bit that he did on the Palisades fire and just the ineptitude of the city and the handling of it after the fact and everybody blaming everybody. He hits a rat on the head like it's, look, we have to do a better job. We have to learn from the past to prepare for the future. And I'm afraid what's going to happen is that there's so much political pressure just to build the Palestinians back, build Altadena back, put all these communities back where they were so that people can move back in that they haven't really taken a step back and said, okay, now what are we going to do with these homes and these communities? It's happened before. The Palisades burned down in 1978. They had some houses that burned down. But eventually what happened is money came in, developers came in and they developed the Palisades Highlands, that area up there. You know, money has a big, big role into play into making a safer LA and a safer city to live in. But I think the homeowners have to look upon themselves as well and say, okay, what can we do to make our community better? And a lot of it is just neighbor on neighbor. Malibu nowadays now has. In the Woolsey fire you had a group of surfer guys that I grew up with, they called themselves the Point Dune Bombers. They, they went around, they had shovels and buckets and they were saving houses and stuff. And one of the guys had military background, so he, he was like the comms guy that sat up on top of the hills and he Was, you know, telling guys where to go with some handy talkies that they had had and they were, the community was so stoked with what they'd done. They raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and became like a non profit group. Had their own little brush patrol, LA county fire saw that and they were like, well obviously these guys are going to be here. Let's figure out a way to use them and make them an asset and not a liability. So they put them through a whole training course. They're now the community fire brigade out in that area which is huge. And I think that, that, that more communities in California need to model that what they've done out there and start incorporate. The fire department doesn't want you there. The fire department does not want anybody from the community that doesn't have proper training or whatnot to be there. There's always people that stay behind. There's always able bodied men and women. Whenever brush, whatever brush fire I've been to, there's always somebody there and I always put them to work. I say hey, okay one, I gain situational awareness from them. Hey, you live here? If I am not familiar with the area, what's it like? I was on a fire in Santa Barbara and he's telling us about the, the sundowner winds that they get every day in the afternoons about three o' clock it kicks up and sure as shit, yep, they kicked up. And the fire environment changes. Well, you have to now start embracing this concept of it can't just be the fire department's responsibility. It has to now start looking at community resiliency. The homeowners have to take a part in it. And that is hard because now you got neighbors and neighbors helping each other. A lot of neighbors don't have good relationships. Whether you got to build a relationship. I get phone calls all the time right now at the station I'm at, well, my neighbor has an overgrown tree on his property or is there anything we could do with it? I'm like, well no, he's complying with his brush clearance around his property. I can't tell him what to do on his private property. So people have to be willing to work together. People have to, to, to have a similar mindset as far as keeping their, their community safe. And I think that's the challenge moving forward that we're going to run into.

[Jim Prabhu]

You know another question I heard a lot of people asking is why didn't you guys just use saltwater like your hydrogen pressure was low, but the ocean's right there. It Is right there, which the scuba planes probably would have used if they could have fly.

[Zoe Saldana]

And they do those two big yellow Quebecs that we rent from Canada every year. They go down and they, they, they skim on the bottle, they scoop up the water and then they go out. It's just not. I mean, you have to realize the beaches, Some of the beaches in California are hundreds of feet. You got to pump. I, I can't drive my fire engine down there.

[Jim Prabhu]

I feel like you could if you wanted to.

[Zoe Saldana]

If I really want. Yeah. You could, you can, you can, you can hazard it off.

[Jim Prabhu]

The four wheel capable. Maybe.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. No, it just, it's just not. It's a good idea. And, and maybe in the future they'll have a way of tapping into that resource for augmenting the, the, the hydrant system. I don't know.

[Jim Prabhu]

Would it mess your guys gear up though? Because salt water destroys everything.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'm sure it would. And we probably put some rigs out of service.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

After the fact. But you would have to, you'd have to really flush them out. It's no different than we have inline adductors that we can tap into and use a pool. Pool water with a piece of equipment. I have my fire engine, but. But the area that I was in, in the Palisades, nobody had a pool. There were no pools, no bodies. Other than the cold plunge guy that melted his cold plunge.

[Jim Prabhu]

It's going to really impact his morning routine.

[Zoe Saldana]

Probably screw it up, but it has to. There's a lot of like, there's got to be a better mindset when you rebuild these communities. As far as community resiliency and wildfire preparedness. I think a lot more people are taking a lot more seriously. I know that the area that I service, they are in the process of trying to become a firewise community where everybody's kind of on board with brush clearance, brush mitigation hardening of homes. And there's a guy named Jack Cohen. Jack Cohen was a scientist for the U.S. forest Service based out of here in Montana. And he had a big warehouse down in Missoula. And back in the 90s, I think it was, they built houses and they had these ember cast machines and they learned what construction materials and what types did better than others. And now they would translate that. And he's since retired, but he was one of the forefathers of home hardening. And he talks about like the home ignition zone, the area immediately around the house, zero to five feet around the house being important. Anything that's Combustible within that area is potentially going to cause your house to catch fire. Your insurance company now calls it zone. They call it zone zero, but Jack called it the home ignition zone. Just to point the picture that like, hey, prevent that area from catching fire. You do a really good job. You have a non combustible siding, you have a non combustible roof. You've done some landscape maintenance and you've put ember screens on your attic vents or attic space. You know, a sixteenth of an inch or smaller, you're golden. Your house has a much better, much better chance of surviving the ember cast storm that's going to come versus if you didn't do that. Next thing you know, the house next to you is on fire. Your house is on fire. So it's, it's simple little measures that we can do. And that's what, like my little side company that I have with my family, that's what we, we do. It was born out of the woolsey fire in 2018 and, and my experience with my family's property out there and what my cousin had done with just a basic swimming pool fire pump and some old fire hose it had from his old department. And we used that and saved the homes around them and our friend had saved their house and the neighbors around them. And we kind of just dominoed that into the small company that we have. But it was, it's funny, like a lot of people in the Palisades did have some swimming pool fire pumps, because your swimming pool, most swimming pools in California are 10, 15, 20,000 gallons. That's a lot of water. You know, it's a lot of water that we could tap into. And, and my company, we come out there, we measure around your house. I provide you 360 degree coverage with hose that goes all the way around your house. I'm not a big proponent of sprinklers on top of roof lines. I just don't think it works because with the wind like that, that water is just getting sprayed wherever you want. You almost have to strategically place the nozzles, which is what we do, where you want them to go, where you anticipate the wind's going to be. And now you're using the water from the pool in a fog pattern to create like a curtain, a blanket that kind of encompass. And now I'm using the wind to blow that water toward the house the way I want to. But it also is a way for us to access the hose lines and spray the water. Swimming pool fire pumps became A very, very hot topic after the Palisades fire, because I think people finally realized that there is an untapped resource on. On these properties that you can utilize.

[Jim Prabhu]

What was it like after the three days of being up there? I mean, it wasn't out in three days. Right. But it had burned through most of the fuel that it was going to. And the point I'm getting to, or the question is, when you step back and saw the absolute destruction that was what used to be the Palisades. I mean, what was that like?

[Zoe Saldana]

That was gnarly, I think. So we. We were in the neighborhood, and I think I sent you the video of us. When we're driving on my engine. We were running out of fuel. We had to go back and fuel up. And we had gotten word that there was a fuel tender down on PCH at Will Rogers Beach. Okay, we know where that is. We're going to drive through downtown Palisades, get down there and fuel back up and come back, keep fighting fire. And as we're coming up to the downtown proper Palisades area, you're like, holy, Everything's on fire. And it was just. It was incredible to see, like, every. The high schools free burning. Nobody there trying to put it out. And you would hear people, hey, the high school's burning. The chief's like, just let it burn. Just let it burn. Every house around the station in downtown Palisades was on fire. You know, this fire station was still standing, but it's built like a. Like a brick shithouse. It's all just cinder block. It's not gonna burn. Yeah, a couple of the houses they had saved around that. But you would drive downtown, and there was one shopping center that was owned by. Mike Caruso is a big developer. He's the guy that's running for mayor, I think this year he had brought in his own private firefighters with water tenders, and they had saved that development. But all the other little. All the banks were burnt down. The supermarket was burnt down, A lot of the homes around, everything was burnt down. Everything was on fire. And you would have maybe one or two fire engines here or there. Everybody's in the community. Everything was on fire. And we. I think in our minds, we're like, oh, well. Well, maybe it's bad where we were, but maybe the wind was pushing that way, and it didn't get into the downtown area. It dawned on us at that time, and I think the video I took was at like, midnight, like 12:30 in the morning, when we're going to get fuel. And we're like, holy shit. This thing's a lot bigger than we thought it was. And I didn't. We didn't even know about what had happened in Malibu down on the coast, how everything had burned down on the coast, and all the homes up in the hills that had burned down, too. So I think that was when we fully started wrapping our. Our minds around, like, wow, this is really bad. Bad. This is really, really bad. We knew it was bad, but we didn't really know how bad until probably the next day. That morning, we're still hopping around from street to street, trying to put out hot spots and houses that are on fire to try to protect, but the wind is still whipping. That one video I sent you is on day two. It's like a house is fully involved in the flames are touching the house next to it. And you knew that every house in that row, it was just gonna be gone. We were gonna run off that block.

[Jim Prabhu]

Michael, you got those videos? Yeah, I want to see these. Kind of talk us through it. And he can pull up the whole thing. Yeah, he can make it so the viewer can see it as well, too.

[Zoe Saldana]

Let's see. I'm just gonna try and find.

[Jim Prabhu]

These are.

[Zoe Saldana]

These are all still images, though. So this was.

[Jim Prabhu]

There's a movie. The bottom row. Looks like movies start on the far left. Michael, why would you go into the middle like that? What kind of psycho picks the middle picture?

[Zoe Saldana]

So this was. This was the first night when we were there on that little neighborhood. And that's the young firefighter. I told you to stand there for a couple hours and don't move. But you could just see, like, this house is free burning. You can see the wind and how it's just stoking. All the embers are just getting cast everywhere. Let me see.

[Jim Prabhu]

Where does this weird thing where he has to pull it back every time, and then it doesn't want to come to the middle. We can't figure it out.

[Zoe Saldana]

So this was when we were driving into the downtown Palisades area. And this is us in the downtown area just realizing that everything is on fire.

[Jim Prabhu]

Michael, for the love of God, move your cursor off of that.

[Zoe Saldana]

But you can see, like, every. And this is literally right across the street from the fire station.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's a wasteland.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's a wasteland. It was gone. Like, the entire neighborhood is just gone.

[Jim Prabhu]

Except for, like, that house.

[Zoe Saldana]

That house? Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

And that house, too.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Holy cow.

[Zoe Saldana]

Everything was on fire. Fire. And it just. It was incredible. It was one of the most incredible experiences ever that I think a lot of firefighters ever faced. Just because of the drought conditions that we had, the temperature conditions that we had, and the fuel that we had, that normally we deal with wildfires in the hillsides. Well, now we're dealing with a community conflagration. Now the. Now the homes are on fire everywhere. So how do you deal with that?

[Jim Prabhu]

Good God.

[Zoe Saldana]

I think I sent you. Let's see here. Oh, I see the. I see the one. I'll show you. This is just another one where we're just. So this is actually driving up from the community that we're about to pass the high school here. And you can just see the glow from up above.

[Jim Prabhu]

Is the high school burning or the.

[Zoe Saldana]

High school is off to my right here?

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

The glow that you see is the downtown area that's on fire.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, man.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. So image 3396 right there in the middle. That movie right there. That one. This will give you an idea, and if somebody recognizes their house burning and watches your podcast, I apologize. A lot of the videos and stuff that I took wore for training purposes. This is day two. This is the morning of day two. My God, look at the wind. So the wind is just literally making the town the.

[Jim Prabhu]

Michael, can you rewind that? I believe I saw a massive cock in that guy's front yard.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes. Yes. Yeah, the cock didn't make it.

[Jim Prabhu]

I have a few questions.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Damn. Okay. I'm not gonna tell people how to live their life. You know what I mean? I don't know what their mascot is.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'm sure their neighbors really appreciated having a giant. A giant cock in front of this house.

[Jim Prabhu]

Well, they don't have to worry about it anymore, But I don't know if insurance covers that. Maybe they have too much know.

[Zoe Saldana]

Maybe they do.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. All right, what else? These. These videos are unbelievable.

[Zoe Saldana]

It was. It was really, really gnarly. So, like, if you click on the top, top right, photos there on the right. That one right there? Yeah, that one. So this is us driving into the Palisades area. This is what it looked like from our vantage point. So this is the downtown Palisades before. Now it's gone. And you can see the smoke columns.

[Jim Prabhu]

Being blown out, the things in this picture, vaporized.

[Zoe Saldana]

All gone. Wow. All gone. This whole. This whole shopping center on the right hand side, that. That's all gone. The hardware store on the left, I believe that stayed. But like all these other little shopping centers behind it, they're all gone. There was a There's a Ralph's Market here. Just to the left of this little taco truck. In there, there was a Ralph's Market. That thing burned to the ground. Click on the image. It's right next to it. That 3363. That one. So this is one of my favorite pictures that I took. And I. It.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, Michael and I were talking about this.

[Zoe Saldana]

So I. The. The townhomes that we initially saved are right there. You can see the roof line of it. I wanted to get an idea of how close was that brush coming down and going to impact us. And there was this fire road that split up. So while my guys are working, I'm kind of gaining my situational awareness, doing a quick 360, seeing what we have. And I'm walking up this fire road, and the hillside's burning. It's coming down. And there are thousands of rats. Thousands of rats coming down off the hillside. And I'm literally walking through kicking rats out of the way, trying to get a better idea of what I got. And I found this one little guy up on this hill, up on this wall, just kind of chilling and relaxing. Boxing and couldn't give two shits that I was there. Was just like, holy, I made it out of there.

[Jim Prabhu]

He's the guy who's been around the block a few times.

[Zoe Saldana]

He's been around the block? Yeah, he's. He's the. He's the seasoned alpha there. Like, get up on the wall, dummies.

[Jim Prabhu]

I was telling Michael, I probably shot this in portrait mode and blurred out everything in the back. Really screensavered it up, you know.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Michael, do you have the video of the fire tornado? It might be that 588 right there.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes. So this was actually from.

[Jim Prabhu]

This is wild.

[Zoe Saldana]

This is gnarly. So this was the. The 2018 Woolsey Fire. And this was taken by our friend Kirby, that's a good family friend that used our pump that we had at his house, the first iteration of our pump. And you could just see the conditions that they had. That thing's coming down on his house.

[Jim Prabhu]

And that's all at that point. The fire is kind of creating its own weather system there, right?

[Zoe Saldana]

It always does. Any sort of wildfire will create its own system. You get these erratic winds built into it. Anytime you see something like that or you see spotting spot fires ahead of it, it's an indication of erratic fire behavior. It's one of the things that we look for as firefighters. Like, hey, this is a dangerous, dangerous situation right now we need to be prepared.

[Jim Prabhu]

So it looks like the wind is actually blowing uphill at this point. So, I mean, I'm assuming things burn faster uphill than down. They do, depending on the wind, but.

[Zoe Saldana]

So what happened here? And I don't think I sent you the video, but eventually, eventually that fire crest the hill there. Right behind him is pch and across from that is the ocean. Okay. This thing just eventually you see the ember cast coming down, you'll start getting these embers that start falling down.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, you can totally see it hucking those things.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's hucking them down. And now it's starting to burn the hillside down below where that flame, that flame front is. And that's what happened is these embers get ahead of the fire front, front and start creating these spot fires that eventually turn into the bigger fire. So those spot fires end up in these neighbor's yards on the sides. And that's really what impacts the houses.

[Jim Prabhu]

Damn.

[Zoe Saldana]

How.

[Jim Prabhu]

How did the firefighters. The boots on the ground guys, how are they feeling about how the finger pointing was going on in, like, the national media from. I didn't follow it too closely. However, it kind of tracked along with what you normally see. Like, we were prepared. Our department's the best. We did nothing wrong. How do the guys, boots on the ground feel about that?

[Zoe Saldana]

I think that we were. It was actually worth it the first time. And we were really proud of the chief for speaking up when they kept pressing her, hey, did the budget cuts impact you? Did the budget? She kept saying no and no. Finally she said, yeah, you know what they did? They inevitably did.

[Jim Prabhu]

How could it not?

[Zoe Saldana]

It did. You can look at the apparatus that we have down on our maintenance yard that are out of service. You can look at the number. They did an audit recently that said, hey, how many fire stations do we need to build in the city of Los Angeles to get to a national standard that the NFPA has set for coverage. Coverage standard. We need 60. We need 60 more fire stations in the city of Los Angeles to adequately serve and provide fire protection. There's no way we're building fire at 60 fire stations in the city.

[Jim Prabhu]

Well, then you have to also hire.

[Zoe Saldana]

You gotta hire, hire.

[Jim Prabhu]

You need the machines as well.

[Zoe Saldana]

All of those things, all that stuff. It's just, it's. Our budget should be like $1.5 billion. And I think we're $800 million, which is a lot of money, but it's just. It pales in comparison to what we need to have to be an Effective fire department for the city of Los Angeles that we govern, that we provide coverage for. You look at like we right Now, I have 3, 500 members on my department. In 1960, they had 3, 500 members in the department. It hasn't grown, it hasn't gotten any bigger. We've maybe in my time on the job, I think we've put two brand new stations in the service. That's it. Even though the city has grown rapidly, exponentially. It's like as a lawmaker, you have to start looking at that. Okay, well what are we going to do? Do? They're building in West LA right now, they're tearing down a neighborhood and they're putting up some giant condominium complex. There's no plan at all to put a fire station in that. And they should be telling the builder, hey, that's fine, you're going to do this, we're going to, we're going to sign you off, you're going to get the permits for it. But you need to build a fire station. Even if we don't staff it right now, it's there for us to use in the future. That's the forward thinking, I think, that we lack and I don't know, I'm not sitting on these meetings or whatnot. But you have to start thinking like that. You have to start planning for the future. Whether it's wildfires, whether it's urban municipal firefighting, you have to be prepared and start preventing, you know, large scale disasters from happening like this and preparing LA to be, to have the coverage that it really needs. Because right now firefighters, we make it work, we're guys are getting throttled, we're getting run into the ground. I'm very, very lucky. At the station I'm at, we're not very busy at all. But other parts of the city, those guys are running 25, 30, 35 calls a day. Like you don't rest. Like the station that I was at in south la, we would go on a meet, we would go on a call, we would come back and then we'd go, right? We would barely even be able to back in. Sometimes we wouldn't even back in. We would just pull up to the station and get another call. Okay, now you're going out on another call and you'd be doing that all day, all night. So the next day when you go home, you're a wreck.

[Jim Prabhu]

It's a young man's game.

[Zoe Saldana]

It is. I tell my wife, I go, it's if you want me to do anything today, you gotta tell me right now, because as soon as I stop moving, I fall asleep wherever I was.

[Jim Prabhu]

What's. I mean, that is obviously a catastrophe at a size, scope, and scale that is hard to fathom. What are the lessons that you guys can pull out of it as firefighters?

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, I think that there is a limit to what we can do. When you get into those conditions, you have to be willing to accept the fact that you can't put out everything. You're gonna. You're gonna have to write off certain areas. And I think that was the hard thing for a lot of us with. With that event was, no, we're used to going to a fire. We're gonna put this fire out and we're gonna save this community. There was no saving that community. There was nothing we could have done to prevent that thing from marching all the way down to the ocean, which it did. I think that there's a. And that was the hard part for us, was we really had to learn the hard way of watching every house burn after we had spent hours trying to protect the one next to it. And next thing you know, this thing's going up like a bomb. Okay. And that's when we stopped and said, okay, we can't do anything anymore for that row of houses. Let's just save this house. And now I think I'm sure that my department would do a much better job with pre deploying resources and really bringing it home. Like, hey, hey, if we need to evacuate people, we need to get them out early. And I think that's what right now, my station that I'm working with, the Bel Air association of trying to make sure that we have access up to these houses, but also like, hey, where. How are we going to get these people out? Are we going to work with the traffic signals and try to just have everybody shut down? We're going to shut down Sunset Boulevard. We're going to have everybody come down and everybody's going to have to get out. How are we going to do this? That. Or are we going to send them north to get up the Mulholland? And now they're dropping down in the San Fernando Valley. There's a lot of logistics that need to take place. It's. It just takes time. And my fear is that this thing's going to happen again. It will. We'll have another brush fire somewhere in LA this year. Whether it's as bad as the Palisades will kind of depend on the weather conditions. You know, any wildfire depends on. It's all fuel. Weather and topography. You know, the chaparral burns really, really heavy. The brush right now I have in Bel Air is really, really dense. It hasn't burned since 1961. Topography, it's all very, very steep canyons and hillsides with the Santa Monica Mountain range that we have even out in Malibu, you know, the Woolsey fire burned through in 2018. That's all grown back. It's like, smaller. It's not quite as big as dense, but there's small, flashy fuels that are out there. There's grasses that have grown. The fire is a natural phenomenon. You know, it's. The Indians, Native Americans used to use it to their advantage when they would clear areas where they would want to bring in deers to hunt or they'd want to fertilize their gardens. And what we've done as a society is we've done a very, very poor job of embracing it and utilizing it. We need to start having prescribed burns. You need to start limiting the amount of fuel that you have in certain areas. Can we burn off a swath of the Santa Monica Mountain range and prevent that fire that starts further down from hopping into, you know, the. The communities? We're gonna have to. There's no way. There's no way around it. But the problem we're gonna run into is now you're looking. You're running into getting a permit, dealing with the Air Quality Management District. You know, homeowners. Homeowners aren't gonna wanna fire in their area. No. They're gonna be too afraid. But you're gonna have to do it. You're gonna have to figure out a way to mitigate the fuels, whether it's. I know. Ventura county fire. Ventura county fire. Right now, they're using goats. They fire goats.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's what I'm talking about.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's awesome. They have the Ronald Reagan museum out there. And every year they. They unleash the goats, and the goats just mow down the vegetation. Just take it down to almost Middle.

[Jim Prabhu]

Earth, see creative solutions to real world problems. Do they get issued a bat badge?

[Zoe Saldana]

They probably do.

[Jim Prabhu]

Can you find images of fire goats, Michael?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, I'm looking right now. They should. They should have a badge.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

But they're.

[Jim Prabhu]

Or at least a patch or brand. A unit identification.

[Zoe Saldana]

We're gonna give you a little quick brand. Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

And maybe they don't get turned into lamb chops. You know that. Because they're needed.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

So I'm shocked to hear you say that. They are racing to rebuild. I get the Idea from an optic perspective. But if you don't change anything, the same shit's going to happen.

[Zoe Saldana]

Same exact shit's going to happen.

[Jim Prabhu]

And literally, I mean, it was. It was tongue in cheek when I said, how are they going to get fire insurance? But that's actually real. I can't imagine. I mean, I was looking at or listening to or reading the national news about how people were already having policy. Policy issues anyway in that area. There was a limit that they were able to go to. And beyond that, I mean, how are you going to get a construction loan without having the ability to get insurance?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it's a huge problem. There's a tremendous amount of political pressure that they're saying, get these homes rebuilt. Get these homes rebuilt. The government came in and the EPA did what they had to do and they cleared a lot of lots. They've cleared quite a few. And they actually are starting already to build new homes up there, which let.

[Jim Prabhu]

Me just tell you, that's a little bit faster than the normal building permit process in that area.

[Zoe Saldana]

It is. Oh, 100%.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. It's going to take about 24 months.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. And I think that that Trump being out there probably put a lot of pressure on the mayor and the. And the city council. Like, hey, we need to fast track this permitting process. You know, you have multiple. Multiple entities. You have the, the. Yes, there you go. Putting goats out of work.

[Jim Prabhu]

They don't look very disciplined. No, I don't see a. I don't see a leader out. Look at that. They're just confused. Those two were laying down. They were. Holy.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Okay. Those things are gonna murder vegetation.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, they. Yeah. Acres. They take out acreage. It's amazing.

[Jim Prabhu]

God, goats are such funny looking little creatures.

[Zoe Saldana]

So.

[Jim Prabhu]

I'm sorry, did that caption just say they're gonna treat them as hourly employees? Can we run that back just a second here. Back a little more. Correct me. Hourly employees, which they are going to be able to be making more money, but at the same time, if they aren't able to hire. Oh, okay. They're talking about. Damn it. They're probably talking about the people watching the goats. I was pumped for the goat.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. Be difficult to negotiate time to be.

[Zoe Saldana]

A goat farmer in California.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's actually. I mean, that's a bad idea.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's not. You actually have to start embracing these ideas. Like, like, hey, they can. They can clear a lot of. Lot of land in a relatively short amount of time.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

The way that you'd want to. Plus, you're not having to send guys out there with chainsaws that are, you know, potentially could get hurt, cut themselves, whatnot. Yeah, it's a good, good option.

[Jim Prabhu]

What would you change about your occupation? If you. And first off, how much longer do you think you got?

[Zoe Saldana]

I don't know.

[Jim Prabhu]

How long can you do it? Do you guys time out at some point?

[Zoe Saldana]

Point? Typically it's about 30 years. 30 years, 35 years. It used to, when I first came on, guys would do 33 years, and then they would. They would retire. Now you're seeing more and more members kind of pull the plug early. The hard part right now with our job is time away from the family. And that's really the difficult thing is trying to find that work, life balance, being at home. I have a bunch of young kids, so I miss a lot of things. And that's just part of. And my kids understand that's just part of being a firefighter. Like, hey, yeah, we get cool Thanksgiving dinner at the firehouse, but maybe dad's not going to be there on Christmas morning. We got to do something different. Maybe we'll do it on Christmas Eve. I love my job, and I still truly have a passion for going to work every day, being a station commander and having fun with the members at my station, the crew that I have. The guys that retire always say, you don't miss the circus, you miss the clowns. And that's really, truly what it is. You build a bond, you build a relationship. And they're like your second family. They really, really are. And you get very tight with a lot of them. So I've had some really, really great relationships. One of my best friends that I met on the job, I love it. I really, really, truly love it. I love kind of what I'm doing now where I'm tailoring it into this little side business that I have with my family, where now I'm going out, I'm educating people on what they can do, because a lot of people just have no clue. People have this false sense of security with the fire department. Fire department's gonna show up. The fire. Fire department's gonna be there.

[Jim Prabhu]

In perfect world, that's how it's supposed to work.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's supposed to work, but in a.

[Jim Prabhu]

Perfect world is the emphasis there.

[Zoe Saldana]

Exactly. And unfortunately, what happens is, like I said, is just. It just doesn't happen. You have to start. You have to start taking ownership into what can I do to protect my house? What little things can I do to make my house more defendable, more advantageous? For the fire department to show up and want to put the time and effort into saving your house.

[Jim Prabhu]

So if you were your final Twilight tour, they're going to give you a week. You're the head of all firefighting operations in la, but you can only do three things, like three lasting changes. Got to put some boundaries on this a little bit. Where would you start?

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, gosh. Wow.

[Jim Prabhu]

There's got to be one that's at the top of the list.

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, our department finally changed our tattoo policy. We were very, very stringent. Like, you couldn't show any tattoos for a long time. And finally they did. They did a survey of the members and they finally realized, well, the public doesn't really care what you have on your arms as long as you don't have something on your face. You know, they just want you to show up and do the job.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

So I think a lot of that comes into play a lot. The uniform standards. There is a uniform standard, but it can be relaxed somewhat. Like, there's station shirts that we have with show station pride. You're not supposed to wear those. You're supposed to have an official Los Angeles City Fire Department shirt or a bad shirt. Whenever you go out, there's little things like that. The county. The county runs their department. A lot more relaxed, I think, than my department. We're very, very stringent and very rigid. Very almost militaristic, I think. And I think there are some pros and there's some cons to that. I think that we can do a much better job of kind of relaxing a little bit. Like, hey, it's okay. We're going to be okay. The. The big things for us, obviously, I think they're in the works, I think, DEI and kind of dissolving dei, keeping the standard. Keeping the standard that they've set for years when I came on the job, keeping that standard. As we go into the future, making sure that that standard is met. And maybe this job's not for everybody. Maybe we do actually terminate somebody.

[Jim Prabhu]

Maybe I think you can take the maybe out of that.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, maybe we do. Maybe. Yeah, I think we do terminate people that can't do the job, that are unable to perform the most remedial tasks of starting a chainsaw or starting a rotary saw. If you don't have the physical strength, hand strength to do that, then you shouldn't be on this department or you shouldn't be on any department. Department. Maybe fire department is not the way you should go.

[Jim Prabhu]

I mean, if you can't start, don't get me wrong, I'm not an expert at starting a chainsaw, but I have one, and I can. If you can't physically start a rotary saw or a chainsaw, how could you be expected to pull somebody out of a structure?

[Zoe Saldana]

You can't. You're not. The expectation is that you would not. And that's the sad part, is that.

[Jim Prabhu]

Except for the person dialing 91 1, their expectation is that you. That you will.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes. And I think the public's perception is that we're going to do that, that we would go there and do that. And I think that's probably the most disheartening thing is the people that I talked about where those captains wrote a lot of information in the evaluations, and then it just gets, why am I putting all my time and effort into this if my expertise and my value and my opinion is not being valued for, hey, this member, this person's not fit to be a firefighter, why are we continuing to let them be an employee of this fire department? And we're going to find them somewhere and they're going to put them somewhere else? Like, that's just not right. And I think that is the hard pill to swallow for a lot of the older members coming on the department. And that's, I think, why you're seeing a lot of the older members. Like, you know what? I'm done with. I'm done with the politics that come into play with the fire department. I don't like it. I don't. I don't align with it. It. I'm not going to be part of it.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. If they, if they can't change the system and they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, sometimes the easier choice is to just get out of the tunnel.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

What are the favorite. What shows firefighter shows. Do firefighters watch? Because I know you are in there. I feel like you're watching Backdraft once a week.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, 100%.

[Jim Prabhu]

I mean, what, what are Chicago. Is it Chicago Fire. I'm not even a firefighter, and I look at that show, I'm like, I don't think that's right real.

[Zoe Saldana]

I don't. I don't watch and I don't. I don't watch any of those shows.

[Jim Prabhu]

You know, that stuff's on at the firehouse somewhere, though. What are you guys into?

[Zoe Saldana]

No, we watch. There's a lot of, like, a lot of. We watch a lot of sports. I know that I don't see too many of the shows that my guy. I try not to see too many of the shows that my guys are watching. I have my own captain's quarters that I kind of retreat to every now and then. We'll have like a, like a movie night or whatever. We'll watch something. But there's some, there's some guys out there watching shows on. Because everybody now has an iPad or something.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, for sure.

[Zoe Saldana]

So they're in their bed at night. I'm sure they're binging on, you know, the Chicago Fire or whatever they're going to watch. Gosh, LA9LA911 or whatever that one is.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, God.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

The problem is there's so many of them out there we could never actually list them.

[Zoe Saldana]

I can't.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

And I, to be honest with you, I've never even seen any of them. So I couldn't tell you you if they're good or bad. If they're accurate. I would assume that they are not very accurate based off the advertising commercials that I see where, you know, there's the school bus that goes into the hospital and now the hospital's on fire and. Yeah. Could it happen? Yeah, sure. But it doesn't happen every day.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. What else you got on the notepad?

[Zoe Saldana]

These are just some of my, my notes. You know, a UCLA 2022 UCLA led study showed that the, the two fires from 2020 wiped out 18 years of carbon reduction in the state. So I can only imagine what the Palisades fire and the Altadena fire did this with carbon reduction in the state. So it kind of makes you want like right now in California. I wanted to, I needed to buy a new chainsaw. You can't buy a chainsaw in California. A gas powered chainsaw.

[Jim Prabhu]

Are you serious?

[Zoe Saldana]

They're all battery. California has banned every, has banned small engines, small motors, gas powered motors. So their expectation is that everyone's going to be going with a battery pack. Well, that's not realistic. With, you know, the landscapers, the gardeners, whatnot. Yeah, these guys that have the little, the blowers and stuff.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, that's gonna have to be industrial.

[Zoe Saldana]

No, they're not going to have like a battery pack in their car, their little pickup truck where they just change out batteries every time because it's expensive. It's just not cost effective. Effective for them. It's wild.

[Jim Prabhu]

Two fires, nearly 20 years of the.

[Zoe Saldana]

Carbon offset just gone. I know that you guys get, you guys get the smoke that comes into.

[Jim Prabhu]

The, you know what nukes us. The Canadian smoke.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yes.

[Jim Prabhu]

We're gonna tariff them on that smoke. This year though.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, we should. Well, it's gonna be a stay pretty soon so we could just tariff it.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh God, I. People are losing their mind over that conversation. I don't know if he's serious or not. I can't figure it out.

[Zoe Saldana]

I just think it's entertaining. Like Greenland, Greenland's like Denmark's losing their mind because we're threatening to take over Greenland.

[Jim Prabhu]

I tell you who doesn't think the 51st state is hilarious? People in Toronto or Vancouver, Albertans. I seem, I think they get a chuckle out of it but they have maybe have a little bit more of a refined sense of humor. The more left leaning cities are pretty pissed. Oh yeah, yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

Fuck.

[Jim Prabhu]

I can't tell what else you got on there.

[Zoe Saldana]

That's it. I just had some stats from the Palisades fired. We had no, no rain for eight months that led into the, to the disaster that we ran into 12,000 homes in the highlands and the surrounding areas. There's some pretty good, like I said that LA Times little article that they did on YouTube. There's another one. I think PBS has done some. They've had a couple little shows, documentaries from the Palisades fire that talk about the problems that led up to it. That how we just haven't learned from the past. We haven't learned from our past fires. And it all came to a front in this fire that we ran into. You know the one way access in the development that they allowed to occur in the Palisades area. That was a big, big part of cost. $25 billion in damage. 6,000 homes burned, 105,000 people evacuated. I think the last thing in memory for me was was once that fire jumped over Palisades Drive and started ripping up both sides of the canyon. You could see everybody's panic in the car that's trying to evacuate. You could see it on their face. People were getting out and running down the street and that was, that was, that was pretty gnarly.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, I can only imagine. What are you gonna do after you hang up the uniform? I mean obviously you have your side business.

[Zoe Saldana]

I got my side business. I got fire defense service and we still. And like I said, it's not because I still get to go out. I started with my brothers and we get to interact a lot. So I see them, I probably talk to them more than I ever would have, which is nice.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's cool.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'll probably. Once I retire from the fire department, I'll keep doing that. I know we're thinking about maybe Trying to franchise or grow. Because right now we're pretty much just in the Southern California area. And I think that's the hard part for us is just coming up with a business plan to kind of grow.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

Because we've got a lot, a lot of inquiries from, obviously this, from all over. I've got people from Colorado calling, people from Oregon calling. So logistically, we would have to figure out how to create a larger corporate entity that would kind of go into that.

[Jim Prabhu]

It's a solvable problem. And largely, I am very pro. People controlling as much as they can.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

You know, up here, it's also interesting if you ask the random person, how many cops do you think there are on duty right now?

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

In la, the number is much larger up here. People, their eyebrows go up a little bit when they hear the actual number. So let's say a couple things might be going on. Whatever. Let's just say that there's a call that requires a little bit of a surge in one direction. I mean, I have stories from my, even my cop buddies up here. You know, response times of 30, 45 minutes.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Or backup not coming for them. 30, 45 minutes. I mean, I think we should have the expectation that when you dial 91 1, people are gonna head your way as soon as possible. But there's a large gap between when that happens and when they show up. And the more you can control, the more prepared you are, the better off you're gonna be. So I fully support people going down that path.

[Zoe Saldana]

People have to. People have to, like, start taking. Taken responsibility for themselves, for their families. I've been on calls in, in west la, where I'm at right now, and I need backup for from LAPD and they get there maybe 15, 20 minutes later. I'm like, hey, we're holding this guy down.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's a long time when you're in it.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah. And I think, yeah, it does. It's crazy. Like, luckily we have paramedics that can carry medication. We can sedate somebody so we can make it a little bit better. And then we justify it by. But it, it is pretty harrowing for that first couple minutes, for sure.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. I mean, I don't think jiu jitsu is magic, but I think people that touch other humans for a living should probably explore it a little bit.

[Zoe Saldana]

They should.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. I don't. I don't have any desire to wrestle with a naked crackhead. I don't know why they seem to be naked often. Meth. My buddy up here Is favors policy is if you're naked, you get taste.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's a good policy. Like tasing people.

[Jim Prabhu]

If you're running around with your dick flopping around, you're riding the lightning. Like, that's.

[Zoe Saldana]

I. I've had a handful of calls. I've had some interesting calls in my career. And. And I.

[Jim Prabhu]

Why are they taking their clothes off?

[Zoe Saldana]

I don't know. We. I had a guy in South.

[Jim Prabhu]

You never ask him.

[Zoe Saldana]

No, dude, they're so out of their mind, they're not able to have a conversation. I had a guy that was on pcp, I think, and he's butt naked running down the street. And finally, like, we stop him, we corner him, and he squats down and just starts taking a dump. And then he starts taking his hand and putting his hand down, grabbing his poop. Poop and putting it up in his mouth. And it was like, holy. And I'm sitting there, I'm standing back, and I'm like, oh, my God, thank God I'm not in the ambulance and I don't have to take this guy to the hospital. I can get back on my fire engine.

[Jim Prabhu]

I would just start using that hose, that cannon on top.

[Zoe Saldana]

Well, yeah, Optics are bad. You can't start cannon blasting people.

[Jim Prabhu]

No, you're just helping them clean.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, we know what we're doing. Yeah, we know what we're doing. But the general public. Public doesn't know that.

[Jim Prabhu]

I don't like crazy people who are naked.

[Zoe Saldana]

I don't like crazy people either.

[Jim Prabhu]

You know, some people are scared of clowns. I'm not saying I'm scared of naked crazy people.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

I just don't want to be around them.

[Zoe Saldana]

And they are. They're always. They're always sweaty, they're naked. They're. They're hard to wrestle, for one.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

If you have to wrestle. And they're really, really hard because they're slippery.

[Jim Prabhu]

I've heard it's easier if they have taser barbs in them. Just saying. Well, I'm not saying. I'm not trying to make policy for anyone, but I like my buddy's policy, and it seems to be effective.

[Zoe Saldana]

That would be an effective one. But. But you also have to realize that I'm sure every time lapd Taser somebo, there is a mountain of paperwork that goes into that.

[Jim Prabhu]

You know what surprised me when I was up in the helicopter was, you know, a lot of people will talk about the California gun laws, of which there are many, and they're restrictive in comparison to other states. Number of Calls that we went on involving guns or that I was just listening to over the radio was very, very high.

[Zoe Saldana]

Oh, it's very high. Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Probably because criminals don't follow gun laws just as a thought for people. But it was higher than I expected. Expected. And I don't necessarily know why. I guess it was because I was just used to, for a very long period of time understanding and knowing what, what you can have, what you can't. It was almost every call.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, it's very, very common. It's a very violent area down in south la and there is definitely a lot of gang activity still to this day. So you would definitely get. I went on multiple shoots. I had guys getting dropped off at the front of my station. You know, they'd ring the doorbell and the guy would be sitting there all shot up. So. So a lot, a lot of violence. You had some really, I think the Vermont Avenue right there where my, where that station was, where it sits. I think back in the 90s was like the murder capital of the United States because they had so many drive by shootings in that area.

[Jim Prabhu]

How is your department doing along the lines of suicide?

[Zoe Saldana]

Mental health is probably, is a huge, huge issue for us right now. More firefighters are dying nationally from suicide than actually job related. Yeah, I think in our past couple years we've had several members that have taken their own life and it's a battle within everybody. I had battle myself, just not suicidal thoughts, but just the mental health aspect of it because you show up on some horrendous, horrendous things. You've seen terrible. I've had a woman that was completely burned, over 90% of her body still alive. And she's in the back of my ambulance and I'm trying to pump her full of morphine to kind of take away the pain and all she can't talk, all she does is just looking at you. So it's things like that that haunt you for, for a long time where you see kids that are killed, you see, you see a lot of violence. A lot, a lot of violence. The hard one for me recently was when I would go to somebody's house and work up the. It would be a cardiac arrest say for an older lady. And the husband's there and the husband just, you know that they've been married for 60, 70 years and now his wife has passed away and now he's got nobody. And you can see that, the look of just emptiness that my partner is gone. That I hated to tell people, hey, I'm sorry to tell you, but your wife has passed away. And you see that energy that I'm sure they had one time in their life, and you see that, that, that, that light in their eyes just go out like, I'm done. I don't. You could either look on their face come back either. No. And. And the expression on their face was like, well, I don't want to be here either anymore. So the, There's. There's definitely a lot more. We're being a much more proactive as a fire department with the resources that we have. We have, I think, two or three clinical psychologists now that work exclusively with our department. A lot of guy. A lot of members from our department have reached out to them after the, the Palisades fire because we were in some really, really gnarly spots and some, A lot of them thought that they were going to die. But also, it's just that day to day, you're just constantly seeing. People are not calling us to go out to picnics or on good days. People are calling us on their worst day. And it's taken a long, long time to kind of come to grips with this. We're really good at pushing stuff down, down.

[Jim Prabhu]

It leaves the fingerprint, man.

[Zoe Saldana]

It does. And you. And for me, I like to go backpacking. I like to go cycling. I. I talk to my wife. My wife's a nurse, and so she's around it, so I'm able to talk to her quite a bit about it. It's important to find some way of talking to it. And I think that's the nice thing too, is when we're all together as a crew, we'll open up like, hey, I got no problem crying in front of you guys. I'll talk about, hey, that was a fucked up thing that we went through.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

You know, that's super healthy, though.

[Jim Prabhu]

And I feel like that wasn't part of the culture years ago.

[Zoe Saldana]

No, absolutely. You. Yeah, absolutely not. I. The problem, I. I cry a lot now. Ever since I've had kids, I cry all the time. I see a good commercial, I'm like, holy, hope the guys aren't watching. I know I am. But the hard thing then, the thing that I. That took me the longest to figure out was going from firefighter or fire captain mode, now transitioning into home mode life. And there's that. You walk in the door and you expect your house to be run like your fire station, where everything is dialed in, that there's no dishes in the sink. And inevitably with that, it would always Lead to an argument between my wife and I. It took me a long, long time to be like, okay, I need to take a few minutes before I walk into that house to transition into dad mode, to transition into husband mode. And it's a really, really hard thing to do. And there's a lot of times where you just bite your lip. You're like, you know what? What? She's dealing with five kids right now at the house. I can give her a break, you know?

[Jim Prabhu]

And I found a lot of success talking with people. Used to take a structured approach, the drive home.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

That in very intentionally, you can't just be like, oh, yeah, I drove home, and now I'm in a different mode. Like, you need to actually, in your mind, like at work, you change out from one uniform on the drive home. Like, obviously, you know, 10 and two on the steering wheel and make sure you're driving. But you can walk your way from that one mentality to another one. But you have to be intentional about it. I find that that helps a lot of people too.

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah, there's like a little grassy field right near my house. A lot of times, if it's been a long night or I've been work for a couple days, I'll pull over there, I'll get out, I take my shoes off and I just walk in the grass. And I walk in the grass and be like, okay, what do I got to do this week? What do I have to do this week for the family? Yeah, what can I do? And it's really, really helped me now transition. My wife would say I'm bull. It's bullshit. But she'll say I'm a pain in the ass. But it's helped me, I think, go into the house now and be a better dad and a better husband for sure. Because when I was in South LA and you'd be running calls left and right and you see the poverty and stuff. And then I go home to Orange county and I see what my kids have, and I see my kids asking for iPhones and I would lose my fucking mind. I'd be like, you guys have no idea how lucky you are to have what we have. I just went on some kid. I went to some house and there was some kid in diapers drinking a Gatorade, you know, at midnight, you know, there's got to be some. So that to me was really, really hard. And. And I've. I probably yelled at my kids a lot more than I did. It's not a proud father moment for me in Any way, shape or form. But it really, really has taken a long time for me to kind of be a better person when I walk through those doors and not be. Be. Not be a firefighter. You walk in my house, you have no idea that I'm a firefighter. There's nothing in there. There's like a small little in my closet. I have one of my original badges, and that's about it. That's the only thing I have, I think, that's healthier.

[Jim Prabhu]

It's what you did or do. It's not who you are.

[Zoe Saldana]

It's just a job. It's a job. And my. I'm an employee for the city of Los Angeles. I have an employee ID number. And that's all it is. That's all I am. Because when I leave, someone else is coming right behind me.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, yeah?

[Zoe Saldana]

Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

They're looking for what's called a heartbeat. They will.

[Zoe Saldana]

They'll find somebody.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah, they will. They will for sure. What do you want to close it out with? How can people find your business?

[Zoe Saldana]

So our side business, the side business I have in my family is called Fire Defense Service or Firedefense. Service.com www.firedefenseservice.com we're on Instagram, we're on YouTube. We're trying to do a better job of putting more content on Instagram and YouTube to educate people on what they can do to harden their homes during a wildfire. Really, really what it comes down to is we are a swimming pool wildfire defense company. Then we utilize whatever body water you have, whether it be a swimming pool, a pond. I used a pond up in Bonny Doon. You know where Bonny Dune is?

[Jim Prabhu]

Yes. I actually, that was where my parents were living when I was born, so.

[Zoe Saldana]

And when they had those Santa Cruz complex fires years ago, I took a bunch of my pumps up there because my cousin lives up in Santa Cruz and some of his friends are up in Bonnyton area, some of the retired firefighters that live up there. And we strategically set our pumps out in certain areas and neighborhoods to be a water source for all the fire stations that are fall off fire engines that are coming in. So now we were pumping water from the pool out to the street, and these fire engines will pull up, fill up their tanks, and they would go off.

[Jim Prabhu]

That's awesome.

[Zoe Saldana]

It was really, really good. So our company is growing. We do some home hardening stuff, some assessments of the property properties. Really it's about educating the homeowner on what you can do to harden your home the simple facts. Non combustible siding, non combustible roof. Ember screens mesh on things that are. You want to prevent the ember cast from getting inside your house. And then you need a way of putting out fires around your property. So that's kind of where we come into play. My cousin said a good. A good line to me one time was the time to prepare for the emergency is not during the emergency. Emergency.

[Jim Prabhu]

Oh, yeah.

[Zoe Saldana]

So I think that that really comes into effect now and in the future. People really have to be. Start being proactive, start thinking ahead. If you know there's going to be a Santa Ana wind event coming up, start preparing. Start putting a little bag together. Start talking to your family. Hey, if you guys are out, this is going to be the rallying point. This is where we're going to meet up. If we get evacuated, this is where we're going to meet up. This is what we're going to take with us. Because I felt really, really bad for a lot of people that just. Just didn't have time to grab something and they're losing, you know, cherished family heirlooms that are now ash. They're dust. So.

[Jim Prabhu]

Yeah. Impossible to replace. But you still have your life.

[Zoe Saldana]

You still have your life. Yeah.

[Jim Prabhu]

Well, cool, man. Thank you for making the travel out. I appreciate it.

[Zoe Saldana]

Thank you for having me.

[Jim Prabhu]

Hopefully we didn't get you fired.

[Zoe Saldana]

Hopefully. Right on. If not, I'm moving back up here to Montana.