Thread: Teaching Illegal Immigrants Fire Safety

Teaching Illegal Immigrants Fire Safety
Reported by: Elex Michaelson
Email: elex.michaelson@sandiego6.com
Last Update: 12:12 am


Randy Lenac said ever since he moved to Campo eleven years ago, he's lived in constant fear of fire. "As long as [illegal immigrants] are coming through this area, the threat of fire from their campfires is going to persist."

Up to 50 immigrants a day travel onto Lenac's property. "We live with a daily intrusion of illegal immigrants on our property...it looks like a military camp when they leave."

He worries that one will start a camp fire and not put it out properly. Lenac has spent $40-50,000 on his own fire extinguishing system, just in case. "I'm prepared" he said.

Cal Fire Battalion Chief Pete Scully said during the mid-90's there was a prevalence of campfires along the border region.

He said in mountainous regions near the border, illegal crossers would hide under trees and light huddle by a fire to keep warm. "When we walked these canyons we would come across these very large encampments which would sometimes be 50-60 feet across, with the closed canopy so they wouldn't be visible from the air, there would be fire rings, there would be significant amounts of trash."

Sometimes, the fires would be left unattended. "The winds would come up, or the weather would change and it would become drier and then the campfire would escape control."

Scully believes the reason was a lack of information. "A lot of them came from very wet regions where there wasn't a likelihood of a vegetation fire starting. It was a lot of ignorance of people coming across because they had never dealt with the conditions we have in Southern California."

At times, the fires would become deadly. "We actually observed many people running in front of the old fires as the fires would take off in the old canyons. There's no way a human being is going to outrun a fire as it is coming up one of these canyons" he said.

Scully thinks 2007's Harris Fire were likely started by border crossers. "There is a very good likelihood that [Harris] was started by migrants."

(Harris Fire of 2007)

Recognizing how big a problem this was becoming in the mid-90's, Scully's Cal Fire joined several other government agencies in creating the Border Agency Fire Council in 1996.

The group's website said the collaborative organization was formed because of a "dramatic increase in wildlife activity in southern San Diego County."
Public Awareness Campaign

Scully described the Border Agency Fire Council (BAFC) as a rare example of government agencies coming together effectively. "[It was] truly an across the board effort. Any agency that had any reason to be involved was involved. Everyone really pulled together."

Among the member organizations of the BAFC: Cal Fire, Office of the Governor, U.S.D.I. Bureau of Land Managment, U.S. Border Patrol, California Highway Patrol, San Diego Fire and Rescue Division, US. Consulate General Tijuana, and several more.

The group came up with a public relations strategy that included developing "public safety messages in Spanish that were played as radio spots, as television spots, and played on loop on tourist buses."

(Clip from Public Service Announcement that aired in Mexico.)

Clay Howe, a Battalion Chief and Fire Mitigation Specialist with the Bureau of Land Managment, was a founding member of the BAFC. He said the commercials showed potential immigrants how to start a fire, extinguish it, and that firefighters were not an enemy.

"What we needed to do is try to transfer the fire safety education we give to the American public since we were children, try to transfer that to a people that might not be familiar with those messages" Howe said.

According to Howe, the spots worked well. "We noticed immediately there was a reduction from 355 fires back in 1996 to far fewer fires back in the 30, 40 range for the next decade...Even though the immigration numbers were up, the wildfires were down."

It is not clear how much money was spent on the videos. In 2006 Congressional testimony, Steve Borchard of the BLM said the "BLM shot most of the footage and contributed $25,000 to the California Association of Independent Commercial Producers to complete the project. The video was produced in both Spanish and English and distributed to to media, schools, and various public institutions in the U.S. and Mexico."
"Mixed Messages"?

Carl Braun, a national leader for the Border Patrol Auxiliary and the San Diego Minutemen, supports much of the work of the BAFC but not the commercials.

"Its sending mixed messages to the people of Mexico. What it is says is that on the one hand, its illegal to come into Mexico, don't do it, but on the other hand, we're teaching them proper fire etiquette."

He continued, "It makes as much sense to me as if the Mexican government spent millions of dollars in the United States about how bad marijuana is but then teaching our kids in that campaign, if you are going to smoke, here is how you roll a joint."

But Scully said border crossings are a reality that must be addressed. "We assumed that they were going to cross the border--which was the truth--all we were doing was #1 trying to reduce the life threat caused by that, not only to the migrants themselves but to the surrounding communities."

"The money we spend on prevention is less than pennies on the dollar if we can prevent a large fire from happening" he said.

Scully continued, "A life is a life regardless of where they are from, whether they are breaking the law or not, they are still a human being, and we are the fire service and it is our job to protect everybody."

Laura Castañeda, a San Diego City College journalism professor, made a film profiling victims from 2007's Harris Fire. In her film, "The Devil's Breath," she interviewed some of the family and friends of the three illegal immigrants who died in the flames.

(A clip from "The Devil's Breath")

"You can see the burns on their skin, but you can't feel the pain that they felt on the inside...Whoever wants to pretend that they were not part of this community can go ahead and do that, but the truth is they were living their lives in this community...I don't think you can look at the faces of the women and the children of the victims and the survivors and not feel something" she said.

"Nobody, and I mean nobody, deserves to get trapped in a wildfire and lose your life that way" Castañeda added.

But, she does not think fire education through a public service announcement is the solution. "It should be one of the last things...I don't think that's the right answer. It starts with the whole immigration situation in this country, there are a lot of layers."

Campo resident Randy Lenac also does not think the ads are a good idea. "I think its pie in the sky to think you can properly train illegal immigrants to properly burn fires and expect it is going to reduce the fire danger."

Howe and Scully would each point to statistics that show fires being reduced by several hundreds along the border.

The one thing that all sides agreed on was the need for comprehensive immigration reform so the need for campfires is not as great. Although the problem--there are little agreements on the specifics of what that reform would look like.
http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/sto ... sIf4g.cspx

"It makes as much sense to me as if the Mexican government spent millions of dollars in the United States about how bad marijuana is but then teaching our kids in that campaign, if you are going to smoke, here is how you roll a joint."

That hit the nail on the head! It's bad enough that the Mexican government gives them pamphlets on how to break American laws, now the American government is telling them the same thing and giving them a free pass. Good post cvangel!