This is Rodney with ZebraScapes, where creativity grows. I have Conrad Jackson here with the fire department. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

What brought what brought the bus? He says, a new position just started. Yeah, what brought that into place was there issues or so?

So that fire i south of Prescott, up there by hazely, north of that one came across. How many years years ago was that? Oh, the Indian fire, yeah, yeah. So that, I mean, that was close.

So yeah, that one that was, that was right when we were really, really building up speed for as a wild land player and dealing with wildland fires Gotcha. So it was right about that same time where we actually got grant money as a city, as a department, to start that brush crew that would eventually become the Granite Mountain. Hot Shots, oh, really, yeah, it took a it took a decade to get there. Gotcha like the movie kind of portrays it happening very quickly, but it it took the better part of the decade for those guys to go from being just a brush crew that was going around neighborhoods, knocking on doors, going, Hey, would you like us to improve your property? Yeah, to being the the the national resource that they ultimately were at the time of their passing.

But wow, I didn't realize that. So, like, the control burns all that stuff you I mean, it's very important that, are you overseeing that stuff. So

I'm the city of Preston does not currently do any of the prescribed fires. Gotcha, that's largely, largely the Forest Service we do. We do these big meetings where we talk about where we bring all these cooperators together. We sit in a room together and we look kind of like we look at the map of the region of the basin and look and see who's working where, and we look at opportunities for if the state's working on a piece over here, and the Forest Service can work on a piece here or here. Well, shoot, let's have them work here. So it kind of creates that continuity. So it's it's good when you bring all those players together, and then we are obviously, as the city, working on our side of the fence, but we have such good relationships with, say, the Forest Service, and state that there's occasions where the Forest Service will come to us, and we have a standing contract to do this. Forest Service says, Hey, can you come over here and help do this area? Over here? Yes, you know, they short on manpower or whatever, and they, they foot the bill. They really, they pick up the tab. They're utilizing our resource forestry crew. Those guys are just wrapping up a multi year project working the Goldwater area, everything from like the Lobo lodge all the way down to the lake and over towards schoolhouse. So our guys have been instrumental in helping the Forest Service accomplish their. Their resource needs and their project goals in that area. Awesome.

So closer to hit home. You know, there's a lot of fires that fire happening right now in California. You know, as a landscaper, people call and I'm sure they call you office and panic, yes, what are some of the big things that you see are very simple, that the homeworks can take care of, and stuff that needs to be addressed to prevent the sleepless nights and the fear of what could happen.

So there's two parts to that. One is, you know, what's causing, what's causing the unrest, the unease, and it's not knowing. Okay? And so how do we how can we resolve that? Education we get people to understand. So that's what we're hearing this conversation for sure, right? But there's things you can do in a preventative fashion that will give you peace of mind, because you know that you've taken proper steps, yeah. And some of that is, is home related, vegetation related. Some of that is, is access to information and and knowing that you're going to get notification if, if things go sideways. So I tell people there's three digitally related things that I highly encourage people to do. One is to go to alert Yavapai, which is why CSOs registration for notifications. And in there, you can put in how I want to be contacted for an emergency by by the sheriff's office, whether or not that'd be a phone call or an email or an email or a text message. Okay? And also if, like, you have limited mobility or something like that, and you wouldn't, you're in a position where you wouldn't be able to evacuate yourself, and you need assistance. You can document there. It's, it's not public information, but it's sheriff's information, really. So that way they can send a sheriff's policy rep to come over and assist you. Maybe you've got a paraplegic mother that you're taking care of, or something like that, and you can't get her out on your own. So,

so do you're telling me, if there's a fire in an area and you already registered, you did all this stuff, it'll alert you that this like we the I mean, will the fire department contact this person through the the email or whatever? So that

one's not through that's not the fire department, that's County Sheriff's Office, okay? And so whatever notification procedure that that individuals indicated that is what the sheriff's office is going to use. It could be a text message, it could be an email, it could be a phone call, whatever they've indicated that that's how we want to be.

And they know, they that there's a, you know, handicap person, or they know what the needs are. Yes, that's impressive, yeah,

and that's so that's a great thing. And so that's just like, one and done. You go to register, all right, so the second thing I tell people is to use the Genesis protect app. So Genesis, it's spelled G, E, N, A, S, y, s, as opposed to s, I S, but it's Genesis protect and that is the platform that we're using for evacuation purposes, the county, the cities, are all doing it. We have, we have the entire region broken into little zones. And so what on my side of the coin, what happens is say we have a captain shows up on scene pro wildland fire. And we all know where the wildland fires, you know, they definitely given the forest road or the intersection or wherever, and they see that it's getting up and running, and they're like, oh my god, we need to evacuate. We on my side of the coin, I can open up the Genesis System and just start selecting the zones that are downwind of that. And I can bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, send them all the same, a mesh message. Evacuate immediately. You know, head to Yamaha college for the Red Cross Station, whatever. Wow, whatever. Messaging. And it can be done in just a couple minutes. It's really, really fast

if you're, if you're registered and, and that's the

catch. So, so the Genesis on your side as as a user, you have two options. You can put it on your phone that way. It's just like quick and easy to get to it. And you can open it up and look at it anytime and see what's going on. Or you can have it be active, and because it's active and your phone knows where you are all the time, if, if Conrad goes and toggles evacuation notice for the zone that you're in. Your phone knows what zone you're in, and if it happens to be a being, your phone's going to go off and say, evacuate immediately from zone, you know, 127, so you like you said, you have a choice. You can do it passively, or you can do it actively. I do it actively. I want to get the messages as they come out. And I actually utilized that app during as the LA fires were starting to happen, because I have friends that live just right down from Dodger Stadium that are the kind of Echo Park area. And at that moment I didn't know, yeah, so I was able to go to my Genesis protect. Yeah, open up the map, slide it over and look at LA, because there's parts of that region that use Genesis also. And I could see who was being evacuated, who was being put on set notification, like, Hey, be ready radio and see. And I could tell, actually, by where the zones were that he was still, he was still okay, but he had a clear view of the Hollywood fire all along. Yeah, so they were sending us pictures. Well, how long has that been out? Yeah, we the county started using it. Probably, gosh, six, six months, nine months even ago. And the city, we got our piece of it done probably the end of October. That's brand new then, yeah? So it's bright. It is brand new. So that's why it's really not on a whole lot of people's radar. So it's really good we're having this conversation. Yeah, so and just, it's intended for evacuations. But if, if we only touch that program, me as an operator. If we only touch that program when we had an evacuation, I would forget, right? I mean, how often do I do evacuation and Preston? So we've actually to maintain our skill set with it. Have utilized it for some of the other stuff, like closing down Mount Vernon and the country club area during Halloween. Awesome. So we go in there, and we can put road closures in there. And everybody that's in that neighborhood gets a note. If they're on Genesis, they get a notification says, Hey, these roads are closed. Use these roads and set we used it for the parades, for Fourth of July, for veterans parade, the Christmas parade, elements we use for the dog music for veterans and the Christmas Yeah, you guys, Lacher night, yeah, that's

awesome. So, because I was on the Granite Mountain fire, I was right in Granite oaks. Then they came over to me and they're like, Hey, we might be evacuating. You know, I thought, man, if it jumps. But so you give notifications out. We got a fire. This is where, you know, week, a couple days we could be here and you

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we get that notification and when, by the same token, when it becomes okay to put people back in there, you get, you will get that notification again that says it's okay to return. Please be aware of this, or give you a web link to say, hey For more information, click here and take you to a place. You know, because we only have so many characters we can use. But you get on a really, good point. There is a huge misconception that a Fire Department representative or a sheriff's officer is going to come knock on your door, yeah. And if you think just, let's, let's look at the LA scenario, the palisade fire 20 minutes, it went 200 acres and wow. So it for for for people who don't have like that mental pictures. What does 200 acres look like? The grid iron, the actual grid iron of a football field is about an acre. So 200 football fields in 20 minutes, how many houses would that entail? And it's active, live fire that's rolling, and it's not like it went 200 acres and stopped, yeah, 200 acres and it's still going and it's wide, and to have the idea that a police officer is going to go knock on a door and and have a 32nd conversation with you about being evacuated right now. It we can't do it. It's not it's it's just not going to happen. We don't have the personnel, and it's a safety issue. Oh, yeah. So that's why we really, really want people to engage with the both the alert, yeah, notification system and the Genesis PROTECT system and and then the third thing that I tell people is that they should, if they're really concerned about wildland fire, is to look at that watch duty app. There's a non profit group that created this app that monitors all the wildfire activity, and they're starting to expand nationally. But I mean, obviously there's a Southwest has a bigger concern to it in the West in general, yeah. So they've got a strong presence across the West. They have volunteer staff that monitors all the radio traffic, puts very, very, very timely notifications. So even even if the Genesis alert goes out, they will be on that and add that to their watch duty app also, and so they're just really Johnny on the spot, and you can see all of the contemporary data that's coming out off and in fact, I mean, I've been using watch duty for six nine months or more, and especially for this past while that season. But the word spread so fast about watch duty, that on the day that the LA fires took off, yeah, it overloaded. They had, they had 600,000 uploads of that program to people's phones. How'd they know about it? Just word

word mouth, media, yeah, Social.

Media space probably had a big presence in that, you know, you got folks like me that say, yeah, there's three, three things. I mean, we're two programs you should have on your phone. It should be, it should be watch, duty and Genesis, protect, and then you should register. So just like I'm sure that was coming out over and over and over again, wow,

this podcast went different. I learned a lot. I was I thought I knew, but that's really good. That's out there, that people can get that information, and you're right when you get when you talked about, just like sleepless nights anxiety, have a list of if you just never peace of mind that if I go to bed at night, I'll get a phone call where my phone will go off, my alarm would go off if I did this. So you do it ahead of time, and that's that's impressive to have that system in place. It's just

to the wilder. Were you trying to get the word out making sure more and more people know about it? Well? And so that's the notification component. The other piece that's going to give you peace of mind is your personal preparedness in like, Am I ready to leave the house? Do I have a legitimate collection of three days worth of clothes, enough, bottled water, dog food, if you're taking your pet? Pets are the number one reason people won't evacuate. No, they don't have carriers, or they don't don't the they don't know where they would take their pet, so they're concerned that they wouldn't be accepted here, there, or wherever. And people will stay in their houses because they've got two, three dogs, cats, birds, snakes, whatever. The thing is, pets are the number one reason people will not evacuate. So start thinking about like, okay, where would I go? Do I have? Does my friend Susie have a corral where I could take my horse? We also have services in the event of evacuation that both for small domestic pets and lasers large, large animal shelter. So we already have those tools in place, so people shouldn't let their pets limit their choice to leave. You really do need to have, like the important papers, what things are already digitally backed up. So, like most of us, can get our birth certificates for us, or our kids, maybe the older generation, they don't necessarily have that digital backing. You can get your insurance, papers online, still, your passport. You might want to have that one, that one's a little bit bigger. Get return, you know, get that one replaced.

So like you talk about prepare, a lot of people like, well, it's gonna happen. I'll wait till I see something. If a fire starts anywhere in the avatar County, do you get an alert or only if it's in your area,

only if it's in your area, okay? So, like, when we look at the map, that's another cool thing on the operator side of the Genesis program is, if I know where the fire has started, I can actually get it to do a fire modeling for me where that says, can you tell me where this fire is most likely to travel in the next five hours? Gotcha. And so within a couple minutes, it will tell me, and it'll show me on my map like, these are the zones that we anticipate are going to be affected. And so we can go out there and click on those ones and say, Hey, you, you're you need to be in this in the Set Status. You need to be thinking, you need to be making sure you got your box of goodies ready to go, maybe load your car up so it's actually in there and ready for you to pull out and leave. So that that's an advantage of that program on our side, is to be have that kind of predictive capacity to figure out where it might go.

That's awesome, man. I that would give a lot of rest, because, like I said, when I was at the Granite Mountain fire, I would stay up at night, and they said, you know, stay tuned. And so if you got your phone on high alert, and you got the so you know it's coming. And then also get your animals, which plan for something, yeah, get going back to

dog food, yeah, or whatever, ready to go. Make sure you bring and you need to think in terms of, like three days, is what we tell people. I got much water with my dog, and I drink and my family days in three days, and have that many gallon jugs that would be appropriate and just have it all kind of set over on the side of the garage and ready to go and be thinking about those, those irreplaceable items we were obviously, we have this discussion on a somewhat regular basis, more so this week because of the LA fires, yes, it's on everybody's radar, like, what are the the irreplaceable paintings that we have in our home, like my wife's Anne painted a portrait of us in a fire truck. Yeah, that we can never get that back. She's passed. Let's, let's make sure we grab that. Make sure we grab our laptops, our hard drives and and beyond that. You know, if we get our people out and we've got a couple pieces of important documentation and irreplaceable items. Yeah, you know, we'll roll with that. Yeah, roll it

up. That's good to get that. Conrad, this is a great learning curve for me. I'd like to bring you back and the next time to talk about, like, the how to prepare on the structure around the house, the house, that part of it, and see how we can. Continue to help people to be be prepared and alert for when it happens to be at ease, because you know, when you when a fire starts, you're too late if you have nothing ready, correct

awesome. I appreciate it. Conrad, thanks for listening, and we'll put down the notes below of all the information, how to get a hold of the contacts, and anything you have questions that you want to come back to us, get back to us, and we'll reply and see what we can discuss next. Thanks.