Miramar Brush Fire

  New phone application gave us real-time notifications of fire activities

Event Report 20250113

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The Experience

We live in San Diego.  On a canyon.  In a year that has seen very little rain.  We had been watching the wind-driven fires in LA on the news and given that the wind here was strong and dry, our angst was peaked.

The morning after the start of the Palisades fire in LA, my buddy told me that I should get a copy of the phone application called Watch Duty.  It was free and provided something that we never had before - real-time notification of the existence of a fire.  Both Kathleen and I downloaded and installed the app and then began to get a feel for the utility of the technology.  The company has a 3-tier model for the app, but the free version had everything that we needed.  As a side note, in the end, I purchased a subscription exactly because we live on a canyon and in the event of a large fire, advance notice is the difference between being able to effectively evacuate and roasting to death in a horrible manner.

We had been getting many pings a day, but happily for us, these notifications were from the fires in LA.  But, we were both checking every single event to determine relevance to us (the app allows visibility into other areas besides your "home" county, so while that is interesting and informative, it also increases the notification rate).  This creates the classic dichotomy of false-positive to false-negative rates.

Then, slightly after noon, we got another notification that showed there was a fire on the Miramar airbase.  Given the wind patterns of the current Santa Ana event, Miramar was upwind of our position and therefore close enough to put us in danger should the fire expand.

The photos below tell the story of that afternoon.




I got the Watch Duty notification on my phone and inspected it carefully.  To my surprise, the notification was NOT about the LA fires, but one within line-of-sight of our home.  I checked the location using the map-in-the-app and determined it required our immediate attention.  I walked to the front door and saw the smoke plume and immediately returned inside to advise Kathleen and get my camera.  Walking the 50 feet to the canyon overlook I saw the twin smoke plumes above.  The color of the smoke carries plenty of information about the state of the fire.  The color indicated that it was early in the growth cycle.


By the next time I checked Watch Duty we heard the choppers over the airfield.  Since Miramar is an active base, we have learned to "tune out" the noise of their daily operations.  But, each aircraft type has a unique acoustic signature and we could tell that it was not a "normal" sound.  I checked the app and saw the photo above.  By the time I grabbed this screen shot, the fire chopper had made 2 full passes on the fire.  The fire strike base is only about 2 miles away from Miramar and they were dispatched immediately upon discovery of the fire (presumably by the control tower or personnel at Miramar).  The app shows heat signatures in dual-band Infrared, but these are updated every 6-12 hours (by satellite pass) and therefore are not indicative of actual conditions on the ground.  The orange "bloom" is heat-of-decay from materials in the Miramar Landfill.  Due to the infrequent satellite passes, the orange represents "yesterday's news", literally.  The actual fire area is in the upper right of the photo above and a close look will reveal an aircraft husk there in addition to other "stuff".  I believe this is a firefighting training site for the military personnel.


I went back outside for another photo and saw that the color of the smoke had darkened, indicating an evolution of the type of fuel that the fire was burning.  Note the two distinct plumes.

  Back on Watch Duty, the screen shot above includes the identifiers of the responding aircraft (there were 2, but only one can be displayed at a time).  Note the flat path at the bottom of the photo shows the approach and departure from the re-fill site.  This operation sucked water from the ponds at the southern border of the site - these are the dark areas in the photo above.  Only 3 passes have been completed by this chopper.


Awhile later, I returned to the canyon rim for an update.  Note that the color of the north (left) plume has lightened due to the water drops and the south plume is nearing extinction.  But, the wind remains strong.


The heat from the atmosphere and the wind was causing substantial distortion, but  I was able to get a reasonable shot of choppers heading for water.  Sadly, the camera chose to focus on the aircraft avoidance globe on the power lines rather than the chopper.

Progress is being made.  This track history is only for Copter 3.

The second chopper came into view briefly.

I was able to get a shot as it was departing the filling pond.


The runs are starting to accumulate, but progress is being made.

Each water drop caused a change in the color of the plume.  The north plume is still dark.

The southern part of the fire is almost out.  Look closely at the photo above and you can see landfill personnel on the crest of the hill (in the orange safety vests) and the dangling snorkel of the fire chopper.

Based on the rate of progress and the amount of hardware that was thrown at the fire, we began to relax.  SDFD has been very responsive to fires and has historically mustered massive responses to brush fires, particularly those on canyons.  The city's collective experience of the massive 2003 Cedar Fire was still in the fore-brain and was guiding decisions.  Kudos to the responding personnel for getting this potentially ugly situation under control in only a few hours.

The cause of the fire was never released, but I am guessing that it was due to "left overs" from a training exercise given the location of the burn.  We'll likely never know and at some level, it is irrelevant.


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