than any other nation's entire navy, and we had two of them on the way to taiwan. so, i was confident that no one was going to challenge the fleet that we were sending there. this -- and in fact, they did not challenge it even before our two carrier battle ships arrived in taiwan, the crisis was over and the maneuvers had been subsided. this positive result was possible because of the military capability of our navy and because both carrier battle groups were battle ready and able to steam towards their destination in less than 24 hours. so, why were we able to respond so effectively? certainly one important reason, because the technology in our ships was the best in the

world. the results are true, that the training and the spirit of our sailors was superb. and we had absolutely first-class leadership in the navy. you will hear later today from admiral gary some examples of just how impressive that leadership is. the operational readiness of the fleet was a result, first of all, of having bases all around the world. but secondly because the strong program of exercise we conducted. the exercises were not only conducted on military scenarios, but we had an extensive set of exercises involved in humanitarian response. during the time i was

secretary, we had a disaster response very similar to the one they're doing here in san francisco today. we bought naval forces from the united states, from russia and japan all to honolulu where we had simulated a tsunami disaster. and these three great nations brought their fleets to honolulu exercising how to respond and alleviate that disaster. well, that was then. how about now? last year the united states released a new security strategy. most of you probably have not even heard of that, but i have to tell you this was a big deal. it was one of the fifth american security strategies that we have issued since the civil war.

among the highlights of that security strategy was a strong statement that the united states had the highest economic and security interests in the asia pacific region. not in europe as has been for 100 years prior to that, than the asia pacific region. secondly, that we would maintain freedom of access throughout that region. in particular, we would maintain the sea lanes in that area, whatever the challenge might be. even as we reduce our defense budget, therefore we must maintain and would maintain a powerful navy, and that that navy would be charged with maintaining the freedom of those sea lanes. we had, of course, to be

concerned as to whether there would be a challenge for that. we observed that the rise and shine has more energy needs for more energy than they can produce themselves, and to maintain the economic growth which they believe is essential. we observed that the south china sea is a potential source of energy supplies for china and that there is a contention among the nations in that region as to where the ownership and rights of access are to the south china sea. and this is conceivable that china might seek to reestablish its claim there by military coercion and that could lead them into a confrontation with the united states' desire to maintain free access. the best way of avoiding that

military conflict is what we should see because the military conflict with china would be catastrophic for both nations, indeed for the whole region. so, we want to avoid that. i believe the best way of avoiding that is by maintaining a -- continuing to maintain a strong naval presence in the region, and by having an unambiguous commitment to doing that. i believe that our new national security strategy is that unambiguous commitment, and i believe that the u.s. navy is capable of maintaining that unambiguous military strength. as we sit here this morning aboard the uss macon island, in san francisco bay, looking out to the pacific, it is easy to believe that the united states

is, in fact, a pacific power and that to keep it that way we will maintain the best damn navy in the world. thank you very much. (applause) from secretaries and generals to marin county search and rescue over there to nert members, it's a great mix of people and i think that integration is crucial because when we're preparing before during and after a disaster response, everyone in this room has a role to play in one way or another. and it's a great mix. and having been a former fire fighter this topic is important to me. when you think about

one point, 1 million fire fighters around the country, they take 2 million calls a year or more to help people in times of need. 63,000 wild fires get beyond their initial attack capability every year, burning over 6.7 million acres. there are over 95 percent effective, they do a great job, but every so often you get that season or that issue that is going to escape or go beyond their ability to stop it right away and right now currently the u.s. forest service that helps provide a lot of air resources and seasonal fire fighters is at the point at the end of that season where every pay period they have to justify keeping those air aviation contracts in place. when you come to the end of the season like this, they are going to have to start taking reductions on the rest of the year for those air tankers, those

helicopters and the seasonal fire fighters. when you talk to kim sakaras back there, the cold front that is about to hit us up here means hot dry winds in state of california. that fact is no stranger to people here on the panel. it doesn't take much to fan hot, dry vegetation that has been soaking in that hot sun. when i say soaking, it means it gets the moisture level so low where it's kindling in the forest. you have more people moving in, more vegetation growing, it's a recipe for nature trying to do its thing and people in the way. so with this, it takes a lot of support whether we're

talking about the fire lines, behind the fire lines or been above the fire lines to provide that support. it takes a whole mix of people whether it's the department of defense and even fema having roles to play in that. bob fenton, the assistant chief of fema, used to be the division chief in division 9. he is no stranger to this area, born and raised here, this is his home and so he does have a care and an interest in this community and beyond. and so with that it is hard to fill being his replacement at the regional level because not only to fill his shoes all the great work he did in this region, but also because when you see the size difference, it's a little hard to fit in there. but this this i want to introduce bob fenton, the response head for fema coming

in from dc to help support this and moderate the panel. thank you. (applause). >> well, appreciate it. appreciate the opportunity to be back with friends and back in san francisco. and i appreciate the opportunity to be your lunch speaker. as i always say, lunch is one of may five most important meals of the day so thank you for that. let me introduce my panelists. here to my left, we have a great group here to talk about stories from the field with regard to fire and 10 years of lessons learned being applied. first to my left, ray chaney, cal fire incident battle xwrupb chief. to his left, colonel laura yeager, 40th combat aviation brigade. to her left, commander steve everett, to his

left lieutenant colonel dana, marine corps installation west. thank you. let me go ahead and start off by talking a little bit and just going back over some of the discussions yesterday that i think are going to play into this discussion. we had vice admiral beeman talk a little bit yesterday about capabilities and vice admiral zunkoff talked about partnerships, unity of effort, unity of command. mayor lee talked about dod efforts, expertise, community efforts and as we go into all those discussions today you will see best practices applied during the 10 years from those fires. i have the pleasure of working for administrator fuget in fema

headquarters. fema's role is to coordinate response between state and local governments and his focus, his direction to us really comes down it 3 things. he asks us to always plan for the worst case, the maximum of the maximums and it's go to see the department of defense is incorporating this within the catastrophe policy that was spoken about a little earlier. no. 2, he asked us to sppbld and are able to stabilize an incident within 72 hours. his mantra is think big, go big, go fast but not fast. 3, he asks us to do this within a whole community approach, not only it make sure we utilize the whole community in the response because there's much more responders past the federal-state responders. there's the public being

responders and there's many others, private industry need to be in that so we try to integrate that into a whole community concept. and also to make sure when we respond we respond to take into account the whole community. not everybody looks like me and you but we need to be able to take into account and service our elderly, infants and others that may need special assistance. with that, the purpose of this working lunch is to present vied a forum to discuss lessons learned and corrective actions taken over the past decade with years of focus on dod support to civilian authority with relation to wild fires. populations continue to spread into formerly wild areas i want to focus on how our capacity on wild land fire has improved over the past decade.

in getting ready for this discussion, i did have the opportunity to participate in the 2003-2007 wild fires, i went back and looked at a lot of lessons learned, the governor's blue panel commission report looked at also a lot of those kind of things and what i did was just put a picture up there to show you the 2007 wild fires. when we get to these major wild fires, we're talking about multiple wild fires and almost what you would call a fire storm. a lot of the lessons learned there are in bullets from just 2007. why this discussion is important and lessons learned up there, the 2007 fires burned a little over 500,000 acres, destroyed over 3200 structures and caused 10 fatalities. so why this is important, as you start to read the fire

weather reports that justin talked about as we go into this fall, the experts are predicting above normal significant fire potential across the northwest quarter of the united states. those of you who live in southern california are used to a phenomenon called the santa ana winds. when you take into account dry conditions, we're in the part of the year when those winds start to change directions, we do have the opportunity for significant fire events throughout the california area. so, with that, what i'd like to do is kind of focus our discussion on 3 major areas.. command and control, relationships and resources. with that, let me start off with the first question, we got a lot of discussion yesterday about command and control. i just wanted to give an opportunity for our panelists to talk about when a fire occurs within california and what is the system that you respond on in california and who is in charge of that fire

and what happens when those fires grow into multiple fires as we've seen in 2003 and 2007 and how do you manage multiple fires and get the resources to the right place and organize that not only at the fire but the operations centers that support that? so if i could look down my panelists and maybe, ray, if you want to take a shot at that. >> can you hear me? thanks, robert. from a california perspective with respect to wildland fires, interestingly enough in 1991 the largest fatal wild fire incident occurred just down the road here in oakland with a santa anna wind event. some of you may be familiar with that. within california we utilize an approach of local jurisdictions, state jurisdiction and federal jurisdiction, depending on the area and whoever has authority.

with respect to cal fire, we are the third largest fire department in the nation and the largest in california with over 7,000 uniformed employees. we also have the largest aerial fire fighting nreed in the world. so typically when a large disaster type fire occurs, we are usually rendering aid, not asking for aid. so when we get into a situation when we get to that level, what we call mega fires is the new term we're using, we're reach a certain draw down level or certain criteria, we reach out to our military coordinators, hence our agreement with the third nraet and the one map locally in san francisco under ir cal fire prides itself on a statistic that we contain 97 percent of all wild fires in california with 10 acres or less and we do this with an

aggressive report of incidents, even with a 911 call of smoepk with land, air and ground attack. once fires become to a large enough scale we call mue tour aid, california lass a great mue tour aid system. i think it's looked at nationally because we have souch excellent cooperation with our cooperating agencies. once it reaches that point, the team will come in and assist the local jurisdiction to run that incident. when we start having multiple fires in a certain area, then we get into what we call area command. i think that provides the overview. >> i talked a little bit about mou's and relationships with the marines. maybe we can talk about how is the national guard and dod resources and

capabilities integrated into the command and control at the fire and also the supporting ops centers whether it be the gac or other centers down there. maybe our military personnel can talk about that, or ray. >> it's important to note that we are the supporting effort to cal fire and we get called in when they are basically out of assets. we are working for cal fire, they are the incident commanders, we follow their coordination, typically we're the last ones in and the first ones out. we do have an on-going relationship with cal fire, i'm in contact with cal fire all the time. we have good situational awareness what's going on in the state of california. they normally put us in an alert stat us so we're prepared to respond in an attack mode. i don't often

work with chief chaney in southern california, about a month ago we had 9 aircraft at our peak working fires throughout northern california if that answers your question. >> any other responses? >> i wanted to touch -- can you hear me now? i wanted to touch on that last topic as far as the command control because what we have here in the marine corps is similar to the navy. we have the installation, the regional installation command and also partners with the operational foresite. we allow the operational foresight, we maintain those but then we coordinate, cooperate, with the operational foresight once the call comes in for support. so we're able to do that obviously through memorandum of

understandings and we have agreements and our wing operating orders allow for the fact the operational control, at least under operational response, maintains with the operators. the third aircraft wing maintains operational control but we send our operatives out to be controlled by the civic sight. we're comfortable with that and that's matured a lot in the last couple years. >> talked a lot about command and control and agreements and moving resources. one other question that came up yesterday we were discussing yesterday is how do communications occur specifically with regard to when we start talking about air ops and moving air resources around, how do we ensure that we have that interoperatability that we discussed so much yesterday between the different

components. >> can you hear me now? perfect. it all begins with preplanning and strategic planning ahead of time. how our agreements at a local level were born was out of the 2003 cedar fire. the cedar fire was about 280,000 acres. as an example, i have the dubious distinction of being one of the first chief officers at the scene of that incident. just to give you an idea, at peak the cedar fire was burning 30,000 acres an hour. so that's about 9 acres a second. so something probably as large as this ship in one second. so after post-cedar fire, we recognized the navy had assets and the marine had assetness region that we should capitalize on, so i was tasked by my chief to organize a local letter of agreement so that we could, with the objective,

essentially, was to streamline access to dods assets in rapid fashion and by rapid i mean within hours. if we're dealing with the level of incident that i just described, the cedar fire was essentially over in 12 hours. it started about 5:00 that night, it actually took off and started running at 11:00 at night, by 9:00 that morning it was at the gates of marine corps station miramar and it was essentially stopped. dska is an excellent tool but we needed to go a rapid route, which is ir we'll talk about training later, but that's a big component. and the colonel hit on a good part about we use persistent forecasting and weather forecasting to look at when we have these fire weather red

flag warning stand in the wind events. i start reaching out to my counterparts with third fleet and lieutenant colonel demigan giving them a heads up. we (inaudible) navy and marine corps assets when we have severe weather events take place because we know if we're going to have that severe weather event, we could have one of those mega fires. we have a complex air space management tool. i'm the equivalent of a fact a, i fly in the ob10 bronco as a fact a and my job is to coordinate air space. we're dropping water and fire retardant instead of

bombs and rockets. we work closely with cal guard, navy and marine corps aviation. we do that with squadron training. we still have khal lefrpg wills, i'm not going to lie to you. we have issues where tactical to air communication is difficult. cal guard, we purchased the radios for national guard aircraft and they installed them in their aircraft so we have robust communications with california national guard, with navy and marine corps it's still a work in progress. we have a work around with that with respect to tactical communications and we use coordinating helicopters to handle air to ground tactical situations and that is relayed to the aircraft that are in trail. it's not perfect but it's a work around and it keeps everybody in the fight.

>> prior to 20011 2011 the navy fire fighting capability was concentrated in one squadron. in 2011 it began to expand to other helicopter squadrons. one consequence of that would be multiple squadrons providing aircraft to cal fire to support the fire fighting effort and one somewhat simple but very effective solution was the use of defense connect on line, the dco chat room. basically cal fire personnel, along with all the individual squadrons, all connected realtime able to communicate and coordinate both from the squadron and also on scene. >> well, thank you. let's go ahead and move into relationships. we had a significant discussion yesterday about relationships and again the highlighted and

supervisor chiu's comments this morning. how do we ensure they are enduring past the past couple years. >> as general speese said yesterday, we are here for the long time. on the installation side which we coordinate with cal fire and the navy we have annual exercise and we hit that every springtime prior to the fire season. i think what's also, it's important to remember that although it was stressed, the military members are members of the community as well so let's not forget that as far as active duty. although we're transient in nature, sometimes we're in deployment, many of us are home owners and we live in that community. we are part of that community as well. just like the guard, we have an interest in protecting our

friends and neighbors. sustainment is, it's important to us and we'll maintain it especially on the region side. we're able to have these long-standing relationships while the operating force side goes forward and supports the on-going efforts, we are able to stay back here and sustain those relationships. >> just to follow on that, the navy squadrons that provide fire fighting capability are a combination of active and reserve components. one benefit of reserve components is more longevity is pilots in the squadrons. you may have people who have been there for 6, 7 years and have seen multiple fires. that mutual trust is absolutely essential to this capability. >> a couple things that come it mind real briefly, we're talking about wild and land

fires primarily but rest assured amongst the group here we're always thinking in an all rest capacity. cal fire's mission is we are the state's fire department. we are thinking about all risk missions whether it's fire, flood, natural or man made disaster, whatever the case may be. some of the great dialogue we had yesterday, one of the scenarios i envision, there's a couple scenarios that i have heard before keep me up at night and one of those is the 7.8 in the la basin. conceptually one of the things we could look at is a mass of casualties to decompress the la hospitals in that event. so we're thinking in an all risk capacity. relationships are about mutual respect which we covet, especially in the dod realm. we do that through training and