FIRE, as the term appears in The Bob Zadek Show, is not an organization. Across the excerpts the word names institutions and events: a state firefighting agency, a 2007 forest fire and the litigation that followed it, a municipal fire department, and the wildfire seasons of California and Australia. No excerpt describes an organization called FIRE, its founding, its principles, or its members. What follows is what the sources state about fire-related agencies and fires.
Cal Fire and the Moonlight Fire
In an episode on Joel Engel’s Scorched Worth, Bob Zadek introduces the book as the story of “a perhaps a spark from a tractor that resulted in 12 years of litigation and ongoing fines of hundreds of millions of dollars,” along with what he calls “unbelievable deceit and corruption by the government.” [[episodes/joel_engel_on__scorched_worth__a_true_story_of_des|Joel Engel on Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption, 6/3 (2018)]]
Engel describes a forest fire that began on Labor Day 2007 in the Plumas National Forest of the Sierra and burned about 65,000 acres. Two investigators, one from the California Department of Forestry, which Engel says is known as Cal Fire, and the other from the US Forest Service, set out to determine what had happened. Engel says that almost immediately, without really doing any investigation, they determined that Sierra Pacific Industries, described as one of the largest lumber suppliers in the United States, headquartered in Redding, California, was responsible, on the theory that one of its subcontractors had started the fire when the grouser of a bulldozer went over a rock, igniting a spark that landed in forest duff and spread. [[episodes/joel_engel_on__scorched_worth__a_true_story_of_des|Joel Engel on Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption, 6/3 (2018)]]
The excerpt breaks off at that point. It does not state what the litigation held, what claims were brought, or how the matter ended.
The Calimesa Fire Department
A separate episode features Jeff Hewitt, who describes a fight during his time as mayor of Calimesa over the local fire department. Hewitt says that many cities in Riverside County contract for fire service through the county, and the county uses Cal Fire, a state agency, to supply firefighters. He describes Riverside County as having the largest Cal Fire fire department in the state, with 100 different stations and over 1,000 firefighters. Commonsense COVID Response (2020)
Hewitt says Calimesa had one station and that the union was pressing Riverside County Cal Fire to staff all engines with three firefighters at all times, while Calimesa had always staffed two. He says the change would have added $750,000 per year to the budget without increasing safety, and that he refused to raise taxes through a one-cent sales tax or a utility surcharge, citing retired residents on low Social Security incomes. He describes convincing his colleagues and staff and fighting for a year. Commonsense COVID Response (2020)
Hewitt says the result came on January 1, 2017, at midnight, when Cal Fire drove its engine out with its crew and the city brought in its own engine. He says the city’s firefighters had 401(k) defined contribution pensions, that staffing was four rather than two or three, and that the city was saving a million dollars a year in current costs. He recalls that people told him everybody knows you cannot take on fire because firefighters are the heroes, and that he replied that if taking on fire is suicide, then in his book you have already committed suicide by not following your constituents’ concerns and giving in to a special interest. He says he is not the favorite of Cal Fire, and that he now sits on a board of five that controls the largest Cal Fire fire department. Commonsense COVID Response (2020)
Zadek draws a lesson about local government, saying that as an elected official in a small city in California, Hewitt had a more profound per capita effect on the people he represented than probably any single elected official in a county, a state, or a federal legislative body. Commonsense COVID Response (2020)
Wildfires in Australia and California
In an episode on the California and Australia wildfires, Myron Ebell, whom Zadek describes as handling environmental issues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says the global warming movement was quick to blame the Australian catastrophe on global warming, but that two factors are at work. The first is that Australia’s forests are mainly eucalyptus, which are very prone to fire in droughts. The second, he says, is that the environmental movement in Australia convinced successive governments, including the conservative Liberal Party, to stop and prohibit the policies that minimize and control fires. The main such policy, he says, is land clearing, which involves prescribed burns in strategic areas during the wet and cool winter so that a later fire will stop at what amounts to a big firebreak. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
Asked by Zadek why anyone would ban a practice he calls clearly demonstrated, effective, and inexpensive, Ebell answers that the theory is that whatever human beings do to the environment is bad, and that the environmental movement has sold that belief to urban people. He notes that Australia is heavily urbanized, with most people living in a handful of major cities. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
Ebell says the same thing is happening in the West and in California, where fuel buildup caused by what he calls gross mismanagement of public lands, including stopping timber production in national forests, has led to the same kind of catastrophe. If you do not cut the timber, he says, it eventually will burn down. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
On CO2, Ebell says levels have risen from 270 parts per million in 1800 to 400 parts per million today, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that the direct effect of higher CO2 levels is a greening of the Earth, since plants require CO2 to photosynthesize. He says the greening is indisputable and that satellite photography on the NASA website shows it, and that once a drought arrives without prescribed burns, the result is bigger fires than a couple of hundred years ago. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
Ebell says California has a climate similar to southeastern Australia, dry and subject to regular drought and wildfire, and that everything that could be done wrong in California is being done wrong. He describes two types of terrain: chaparral along the coast, where more people want to live, and where residents do not take the preventive actions necessary to save their homes. He says people need to be allowed to clear the land around their houses and keep it clear. In Australia, he says, the practice of protecting your own house if you are a rural Australian has pretty much been prohibited by legislation, and he recounts a story of a rural firefighter who cleared land around his house against the law, was fined $50,000 Australian with $50,000 in court costs, and whose house was the only one in the neighborhood that survived when the fire came. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
Zadek responds that fining a man $100,000 Australian for doing something on his own land to protect his family has to offend anybody who hears it, and that the man was fined just because he was not in the governmental program. Zadek then recalls a story he says he told on the show years earlier, about a landowner on a mountain in one of the Western states who collected rainwater off his roof into cisterns and tanks as his only water source, and who was fined and convicted of a crime for collecting rainwater, on the theory that the rainwater belongs to the state. Zadek says he thinks the state was Colorado but is not certain, and that firefighters said they used the water he collected when putting out fires in his area. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
Across episodes
Fire-related material appears in four episodes: the Moonlight Fire litigation, the Calimesa fire department fight, the Australia and California wildfire discussion, and the episode on Three Minute Therapy, where fire appears only in the example of being fired at work. The excerpts show no development of a single question across these treatments; each episode takes up a different fire-related subject, and no speaker returns to another’s argument.
What the sources do not cover
No excerpt describes an organization named FIRE, its founding, its principles, its personnel, or its activities. The excerpts do not state what the Moonlight Fire litigation held, which claims were brought, or how it ended. They do not give the legal basis for the Australian land-clearing rules or the rainwater prosecution, and Zadek himself says he is not certain which state was involved in the rainwater case.
Guests and episodes
4 appearances by 2 guests, 2011–2022.
- Harvey Silverglate (Co-founder and Chairman of FIRE) — Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011) — Erosion of free speech on college campuses.; The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022) — Abolishing the FBI and federal criminal code reform.
- Joe Cohn (Director of Legislative Policy at FIRE) — Do you know your rights? (2022) — Due process and Title IX on college campuses.; Joe Cohn on Title IX and Due Process on Campus (2022) — Title IX regulations and campus due process.