Groundhog Day: The 60-Year LA Wildfire Loop

Are we actually making progress in disaster readiness, or are we just reliving the exact same emergencies over and over again? 

In this episode of Dismantling Disaster, we expose a shocking historical loop. While staying in a hotel room, a chance viewing of C-SPAN uncovered a 1962 Los Angeles Fire Department documentary titled "Design for Disaster," detailing the 1961 Bel Air fire. The footage is striking: citizens packing trunks, loading kids into backseats, and hitting gridlocked highways. It is the exact same scene played out during the 2025 Palisades and Eden fires. We have been fighting the exact same wildfire loop for over 60 years.

We break down how the Incident Command System evolved from California's 1970s FireScope commission to national policy post-9/11—proving that while agency frameworks adapted, personal readiness stagnated. 

Discover the danger of the "Red Backpack Illusion"—the false sense of security that comes from buying a pre-packaged survival kit from a big box store without ever opening it. Hear the real-world story of dumping a pre-made kit upside down live on television to expose expired batteries and inedible "hockey puck" rations. Learn the definitive "Buy It, Try It, Don't Rely It" philosophy, and why the government should be viewed like ice cream: nice, but entirely optional. It's time to break the loop, reassert personal control, and truly design your life for resilience.

Inside this episode:
00:00 - The C-SPAN Discovery: Overhearing 1962 in Indianapolis
01:45 - "Design for Disaster" and the 1961 Bel Air Fire Reality
03:10 - The 60-Year Loop: Why 1961 Looks Exactly Like 2025
04:40 - The Evolution of FireScope and the Incident Command System
06:15 - Why Every Major Disaster Shares the Exact Same Weakest Link
07:30 - Exposing the Red Backpack Illusion
08:45 - The Live TV Audit: Flipping the Pre-Made Kit Upside Down
10:15 - The RV Subculture Tour: Unzipping a Dead Flashlight at a Campground
12:00 - Confronting the "Hockey Puck" MRE Challenge
13:30 - The "Buy It, Try It, Don't Rely On It" Rule of Equipment
15:00 - Why the Government is Like Ice Cream: Nice, But Not Necessary
16:15 - Breaking the 60-Year Loop and Reasserting Personal Control

Make sure you are subscribed to the channel to catch our multi-part series testing real-world disaster engineering, including our upcoming lab-test of a wildfire shelter built entirely out of school supplies!

Empowerment Architecture means refusing to relive the same evacuation mistakes of the past. Prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.

#DismantlingDisaster #DisasterPatrick #GroundhogDay #WildfireHistory #EmergencyManagement #IncidentCommand #PersonalReadiness #DisasterKitAudit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:29

I was in a hotel room in Indianapolis right after the fire started, and it was, I just couldn't find anything on TV to watch. It'd been a long day. I'd already been speaking, I'd keynoted, and I'd done this big workshop, and I was really tired. So I just crashed down the bed, and I was just flipping the channels, and I got to C-SPAN of all things. So if you ever watch C-SPAN, C-SPAN is a station that covers government affairs. So they'll do a live feed when Congress are voting on something really important. When there's some really important vocal coming up, they do that. They also cover really great speeches. So people who are speaking for like a national prayer breakfast or someone who's speaking at the National Press Club, or they'll cover interesting academic panels on topics that are of interest to governmental fairs, something on foreign relations, or they'll give, or they'll show a speech in British Parliament. They'll do the weekly British Parliament, though they have question time where they're everyone questions the Prime Minister. They cover that too. And they'll actually air that. On that day, I happened to turn to C-SPAN, I saw something very strange on the screen. I saw that it was basically a cartoon on there. And you're thinking, do I mean a cartoon? It was like a cartoon. So when I was a kid, I watched Sleeping Beauty. And in Sleeping Beauty, what happens is there's a series of events that occurs, but essentially what occurs at the end is the prince tries to get to Sleeping Beauty and he can't get there. There's like a forest of like thorns that comes up, and there's like a raging fire, and he can't get there. So it has this really old style animation. And so when I was watching, when I was watching on C-SPAN, that cartoon had that same style of animation, and I thought that's really weird because they would never use that animation style today. Like it's all very dramatic, like practically the flames are practically licking through the screen. It's it's they have these really sort of sharp tones. Anyway, it's just a really old style of showing flames, and I thought, I wonder where this is from. And so what I did was I went on my phone and I found out that what they were airing was a video that had been commissioned by the LA Fire Department. They commissioned a video in 1962 called Design for Disaster. And that video covered the Bel Air fire that occurred in 1961. It was actually a really interesting video because what it was trying to do is it was trying to demonstrate how the fire was able to cover the hillside, how it was able to prevent people from evacuating. It covered, you know, what people were, it showed people in their cars. Cars that were built in the 50s and early 60s, and people were throwing stuff into their trunks, and they were putting their kids in the back of their cars, and there were long, long lines down the freeway. People couldn't get out. And people were being told by Airhorn, please evacuate, and people were racing to grab as many things they possibly could, and they were doing everything possible to create as chaotic a scene, I think, as they could have. So then I thought back after I watched that video to news that I'd watched the previous weeks before, when the fire had first started, because this because this occurred in late January. I was in Indianapolis, and in those weeks coming up to that, there was all kinds of coverage on the fires, obviously. And you know what I saw in the video from January 2025 in Los Angeles? People taking their stuff and throwing it in the trunks, people taking their kids and putting them in the backseat, people hearing air horn alerts and trying to leave, and long traffic jams all the way down Los Angeles. So anyone who could have watched that video designed for disaster in 1962 would have seen a fire continuously burn for 60 years. 60 years. We are still fighting a fire that lit in the early 60s. Now I don't mean that in the literal sense, where there's a literal fire. But what I mean is we are still fighting the same battles that we are in the 1960s. The fires in Los Angeles, the wildfires in Los Angeles, got so bad that in the early 1970s, California created a commission called Fire Scope. Fire Scope was designed to answer one question. How could agencies interact and communicate better? How could they better improve their coordination? And they came up with a series of recommendations. They said we need to coordinate how we communicate. So in other words, our language needs to be the same. Because like when I was in EMT, there were codes that we used. Those codes were not used by law enforcement. Law enforcement used codes, fire didn't use. Fire used codes, DMS didn't use. And what Fire Scope tried to do was, in they said, in a disaster, we're going to ignore those codes and we're going to speak this common language. And that common language evolved into something we call the incident command system. That incident command system was designed after the September 11th attacks when President Bush came out with a series of presidential directives, and he created the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and he made all the recommendations that came out of Fire Scope, the rules, the regulations for agencies working in disasters. These were recommendations that had come out 30 years earlier because 9-11 was obviously in 2001, and Fire Scope was in 71, 72. And those recommendations were because it was an implicit recognition that we are repeating the same problems over and over and over and over again. And watching Design for Disaster, I challenge you to watch it. It's fabulous. It's not campy, it's not awful. It's a really interesting video. And it's interesting, not because of the graphics. It's not interesting because of that. Although I will say, for its time, it's pretty sophisticated. And the analysis that they provide to people was very sophisticated. But in watching that, I said, we are running into the same problem. And I will tell you that wildfires that California has had, and they've had everywhere else, and disasters we have had everywhere else, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, you know, hazmat spills, where there's chemical spills, you know, you know, everything. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Every disaster boils down to the issues they identified in design for disaster. And that is we have not taken full responsibility of our own disaster response. We haven't done that. We haven't done that. One of the things that happens is that people decide when they sort of get a kick, because I've discovered this in my lifetime, that every once in a while people will get a kick and decide, you know what, I need to be more disaster prepared. And they say, okay, fine. So they'll go to Walmart or they go to Home Depot or some big box store, or they'll go on Amazon or something, and they'll order a red backpack. Got it. Got what I needed. And so then that disaster backpack will come and they'll open it up and that disaster backpack will come and they'll say, Congratulations, I'm disaster prepared. You're disaster prepared. Well, I have this backpack and I it has everything I need in it. And that annoys me. That never ceases to annoy me, and I will tell you why. Because that is simply surrendering your disaster preparedness to something else. In Design for Disaster, people were relying on someone else to tell them when to leave, someone to say when to evacuate, and by then they hadn't prepared at all. They hadn't done anything. In Design for Disaster, they talked about how people simply didn't prepare. They didn't prepare because they felt like someone else will take care of it for them. Someone else would handle it for them. The belief was that the firefighters would take care of the entire wildfire for them. They didn't feel like they were enough in a threat that they could take over their own disaster response. So, when I see this going on in 2025, I see we are fighting that same wildfire. We are fighting that same disaster because we haven't taken responsibility for our own disaster preparedness. Because we're still throwing clothes in trunks, we're still putting our kids in the backseat, we are still sitting in those long traffic lines because we haven't asserted our own responsibility for our own disaster. So here's what people do. When they buy that red backpack, they assume that they're all prepared now. What they don't realize is they have just shifted it to a backpack. They have simply said that substitutes any other disaster preparedness that I need to do in my life. I'm just going to use that. That's all I need. And what they don't realize is that's not what they need. So one of the things that I tell people is that your disaster backpack should be the center of your disaster preparedness. And that would seem like I'm just contradicting what I just said a minute ago. And it's not. Because when I talk about getting prepared with a disaster backpack, I mean I want you. We need to. What I mean is we need to take full responsibility for our own disaster backpacks. I have a series of videos on this channel 30 days. I start you with an empty backpack on day one, and we end with a full backpack on day 30. Day 30. We have a full disaster backpack. And every single day that we do this, when I'm walking you through these things, and I hope you go through all the videos, because I challenge you. Because you know, we're filling the backpack every day. I say, you know, get flashlights, let me tell you what kind of flashlights, let me tell you how you need to pack them and what they need to be. And I walk you through that, and then on the weekend, I give you a little training. I'll say, make sure you've been trained on this and that, and then Sunday I give you a little challenge, something you've got to do with the equipment. You're not shifting responsibility to that backpack, but instead, what you were saying is, I'm buying the equipment, I'm taking responsibility for what's in there, I'm taking responsibility for my own disaster preparedness. That's what I do when I create my own backpack. When I don't do that, I'm giving it up for someone else. I'm doing that for someone else. I'm letting someone else run my disaster response. And you say, Well, what do you mean? In that red backpack that you buy from Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, whatever, you have essentially said, I'm allowing some random person, some random company to sell me this backpack pre-filled with food I've never tasted, water I've never put past my lips, what flashlights I've never assembled, and you don't know anything about it. I was at a campground once, I was doing a disaster plan for the campground, and I had these people come up to me and said, Hey, listen, we're taking our RV and we're driving around the country. And I will tell you something, the RV subcommunity, I'm sorry, the RV subculture is incredible. It's a fascinating culture of people. There are folks that they'll live in our RV and they'll literally be driving from campground to campground to campground year-round. I've actually met a number of folks who that is all they do. They don't even have a home anymore. They live in the RV, and the RV, and these RVs are really nice. And they will go from place to place to place to place to place to place based on the month of the year. Spend January in Northern California, they'll spend February in Southern California, they'll spend March in Arizona, they'll spend, you know, May over here and June over here and July in Florida, and they'll literally like make a circle around the U.S. and they'll keep doing that. So one group, and this couple comes up to me and says, We want to do that. We want to do this. We want to have a disaster backpack and we're going to put it together. And I said, Great. They said, We pre-bought everything, and I said, Okay. And they said, Will you assess our disaster repairedness? And so I pulled out a knife. I had this pocket knife, and I carry it with me, especially when I'm on campgrounds, and I cut off the zip tie because they hadn't even taken the zip tie off the thing. And I cut the zip tie off and I took the backpack and I do something I do with every red backpack I ever find. So if you ever hand me a disaster backpack that is a red backpack that's pre-filled and zip tied, be prepared for me to take it from you, cut the zip tie off, and turn it upside down after I unzipped it and spill all the contents onto the table. I've actually done this on television before. I actually was on a news station, they asked me to do a segment on disaster preparedness, and they handed me the red backpack. And they had no idea what they were in for. I took the backpack, I flipped it upside down, and I poured all the contents out on live TV in front of everything. And I did that because I wanted to prove a point. That we don't know what are in these backpacks. So I pulled the disaster backpack out, going back to the campground. I took their backpack and I poured everything out onto a table, just like this one right here, and I looked at it, and I saw that there was food that they couldn't eat, water that they weren't prepared to drink. In fact, I actually took the knife and actually I cut the what I call I call it hockey puck food. It's basically MREs. And I opened it up, I cut it open, and I cut into pieces, and they said, What are you doing? And I said, I'm making you lunch. We're gonna eat this right now. And we found out they couldn't eat it, and then we looked at the flashlight, and the battery didn't work. It was amazing. I ended up buying the backpack off of them because I'd never seen a backpack that was so ill-prepared. But you know what? They are fighting that same battle from 60 years ago. From 1961, they are still fighting that same wildfire because they are surrendering their preparedness to someone else. They are surrendering their preparedness to forces beyond their control. We can't control wildfires. Wildfires are gonna happen the way they're going to happen. There is simply nothing that we can do about those, to a limited extent. We can create defensible space around our homes, we can try that, but even in those instances, you're gonna experience a wildfire of some kind. You're gonna still deal with smoke, even if it's not, even if your home's not gonna burn, you're gonna have smoke, you're gonna have heat, you're gonna have a lot of things, and the areas will be dangerous. So maybe your house is prepared, but your work is closed, your school is closed, or you can't go in town, or whatever. All those things are gonna have a massive impact on what you are doing. And when you don't have control, and when we do not have control of our own disaster preparedness, that is what occurs. Each time we surrender our control of this disaster, that's when the disaster continues. It doesn't stop. It is a cycle and it is continuing. There is no way for us to stop that unless we break it by saying we are going to take control of our own disaster response. We are going to ensure that we fill that backpack. I have a rule that I institute with all equipment, supplies, technology, everything I put in my backpack. And this is what I tell everyone. This is the philosophy I tell them. You buy it, you try it, don't rely on it. Seems like a strange thing to say for a guy who believes that the disaster backpack is the center of your preparedness. You buy it, you try it, don't rely on it. Here's what I mean by that. You buy it, meaning you buy every component of that backpack. You buy every single component. You buy everything, the flashlight, the batteries, everything. You put all of that in there. You try everything, you pull everything out, you make sure it all works, you make sure it all happens. Because you have to do that, because if you don't even open the thing, how do you know the stuff's even gonna work? You don't know it's gonna work or not. And then don't rely on it. And I say don't rely on it because you should always have backups. If you expect something to do something, that's why I always say to people, have three different kinds of flashlights, have whatever. You've got to be able to draw that out. That's what comes through in these reports is when we surrender our control, when we surrender what we do to something else, that is when the wildfire really rages on because we have given that up. We have given up the capability to control our own disaster response. So we have to put ourselves in a position that when we are looking at some element of our own disaster response, we have to assume that we're taking control of it on our own. I actually say this to folks all the time. The government is like ice cream. Nice, but not necessary. And that's the philosophy I want you to take. I want you to take the philosophy that you buy it, you try it, you don't rely on it. Because when you do that, then you force yourself, you force yourself to open that backpack. You force yourself to ensure that it has everything you need for your own disaster response. You force yourself to say, this is my backpack, this is my disaster response, and I'm not going to parcel it out to anyone else. Because when we do those things, then we can finally extinguish that fire from 60 years ago. We can finally not, we can finally get to the place where we're not throwing things in the trunk, where we're not putting our kids in the backseat, trying to race down and deal with that massive traffic jam. Because what happened at the Bel Air fire in 1961 is exactly what happened in LA in 2025, the same elements that caused one caused the other, and it's buried in this report so deep. But it's a given. We have to recognize that it is these things that make a massive difference in how we respond to disasters. Because when we truly design ourselves for disasters, we design our lives around our own disaster preparedness, then we really are designing for disaster. We are designing our evacuations, we are designing our options, we are designing our capabilities, and that is how we put away those fires. That is the way we end those disasters and reassert control for ourselves. This is disaster, Patrick, and remember prepare for a disaster and you'll never experience one.