San Diego’s Fire Risk Soars as Brush Inspections Lag

Residents of Del Mar fled their homes earlier this summer when nearby Torrey Pines wildlands caught fire for still unknown reasons. That was early in the traditional fire season, a reality San Diegans increasingly face as the planet warms and vegetation sits unmanaged. 

San Diego is facing a potentially terrible fire season after two years of rain added massive amounts of greenery to the city’s canyonlands and open spaces – vegetation that the summer heat has dried, creating potential fuel. That plus skyrocketing development in recent years means more property could be at risk from wildfire. 

In California, the responsibility of brush management falls on property owners.

The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department is tasked with citing and making sure private property owners and the city are keeping up with brush management. But they’re behind on inspections. Fire officials say that’s because they don’t have the resources or staff to keep up.

The department’s backlog of inspections has already been the subject of multiple audits. But to make true progress, officials say they need more money. 

“If we’re not increasing staffing, we’re not keeping up with it,” said Tony Tosca, a deputy fire chief overseeing the department’s Community Risk Reduction Division, told Voice of San Diego.

Tosca’s team is made up of seven staff members, four of them inspect brush code compliance. He said they completed 7,411 inspections in fiscal 2024. At that pace, it would take his team more than six years to complete inspections on 46,000 canyon rim parcels in the city.  

The tops of canyons are the main culprits of urban wildfire in the city of San Diego. 

Southern California’s peak fire season begins in late spring and runs through October. In the latter half of the season, hot winds blowing west from the desert, called the Santa Anas, create prime weather conditions for fire spread. That plus the fact that San Diego experienced record-breaking back-to-back rainy winters in 2024 and 2023 set the city up for a hazardous season, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Brent Pascua said.

“What wildland fire needs is weather, topography and fuel,” said Pascua. “Wildfire runs and spreads uphill fast.” 

That could be even more dangerous in the wildland-urban interface, which is the area where human living and rural, undeveloped land meet, he said. That includes canyonlands scattered throughout San Diego’s urban core.

“Having that higher population density, it really leaves that potential for a greater loss of life,” Pascua said. 

The rest of California is on just as high alert as San Diego. Gov. Gavin Newsom warned in April ahead of the fire season that “dense urban areas pose some of the highest risks for destruction and loss of life from wildfires.” 

Tosca said it’s a challenge to keep up with brush management demands as more housing gets built and more parcels are reclassified as being in fire hazardous zones. 

“Not only have we increased density since 2009, we’re now looking at redefining these areas from moderate to high (fire risk) and high to very high (fire risk). So we could have almost an explosion of brush management needs” Tosca said. 

In 2023, developers obtained 11,673 building permits across the county, meaning more housing was built in 2023 than in any of the past 17 years across San Diego, according to the Union-Tribune. Tosca said he expects the state to classify more development in what’s called high fire hazard severity zone, meaning the fire department will have even more inspections to conduct.   

It’s up to Tosca’s Community Risk Reduction Division to make sure private property owners are managing the vegetation around their homes properly so it’s not a fire risk to themselves or others. And his division is also supposed to make sure other city departments are properly taking care of the city’s public open spaces. That’s another 3,200 acres or so of land to inspect. But the division lacks the staffing needed to inspect city property proactively, instead only inspecting after a resident submits a complaint. 

A 2010 performance audit criticized the Fire-Rescue Department for only completing brush compliance inspections on about 36 percent of the private land in their jurisdiction, blaming a lack of staff to do so. Of the 42,818 parcels of private land under Fire-Rescue Department jurisdiction at that time, they inspected about 15,000 parcels each year, the audit stated. That means each parcel of land is inspected about once every three years. That cycle doesn’t keep up with the vegetation that grows annually.

Another report issued after the devastating 2007 Witch fire said every acre of private land should be inspected annually. That fire burned 197,990 acres of San Diego County and almost 10,000 acres within the city of San Diego including 365 homes. But inspections have become more infrequent in the 15 years since. 

In 2017, the Fire-Rescue Department created a door-to-door assessment program that attempted to complete inspections on all 46,000 parcels on canyon rims. This proactive brush management program means the department goes door to door on houses in the canyon rim to inspect the properties and see if they are in compliance with brush regulations or not. But the department is seriously behind.

On city-owned land, the fire department doesn’t do regular inspections and instead relies on complaints from the public through their website or the city’s Get it Done app. Complaints get forwarded to the department that operates that land, such as the Public Utilities Department or the Parks and Recreation Department, which are each responsible for a substantial portion of the city’s wildlands. But even with complaints, there isn’t always a timely resolution. 

In early July, South Park residents were frustrated with the lack of city response regarding overgrown brush on a city land parcel despite seven requests to address it via the city’s Get it Done app. The city eventually tended to the issue after a story by NBC 7 San Diego but residents complained the city should be taking care of their own property and residents. 

The city’s fire-preventing departments need a coordinated approach to brush management, auditors noted. Without one, some high fire risk areas are susceptible to being overlooked. A 2023 audit echoed these same concerns. Tosca and the Parks and Recreation Department confirmed they’ve made improvements since then, like quarterly meetings on brush management responsibilities. 

Still, other communities are taking matters into their own hands. The University City Fire Safe Council, a neighborhood group formed in 1993 to help residents protect their families and homes from wildfire, hired a firm to do their own brush assessments in 2023 and 2024. Their consultant, Merkel & Associates, Inc., examined vegetation density on government-owned wildland within 100 feet of buildings near the Rose Canyon and San Clemente Canyon. The consultants determined that for the area examined, while 80 to 90 percent of the land was properly managed, the city still missed about 10 percent with a dangerous amount of vegetation. 

“If 10 percent of your boat had a hole in it, is that good enough?” said Louis Rodolico, University City Fire Safe council president.

The Fire-Rescue Department’s ability to keep up with the growing demands for inspections has been hindered by staffing limitations. In 2010, the Community Risk Reduction Division had seven staffers, an insufficient size to inspect all parcels annually, according to the audit that year. Auditors recommended a staff size of 14. 

But the division still only has seven staffers, confirmed Tosca.

More proactive monitoring on city-owned land by the Fire-Rescue Department comes down to more resources. But the division still hasn’t yet received any additional funding this last budget cycle to tackle its resource needs.

“It’s a balance of, how much do you invest in prevention versus operation,” said Tony Tosca, who manages the prevention side. 

Tosca said he’s made multiple requests for more positions in the past few fiscal years. In the last fiscal year the department requested four additional code-compliance officers, none of which were approved. 

But despite these financial complications, Tosca said the division has been using existing resources to work on solutions for their brush management shortcomings. Tosca and his team have begun working on internal GIS softwares to track parcels of land subject to brush management and come up with a new self-assessment tool for city departments to check their compliance. But these technologies can’t be implemented without further direction from the city’s chief operating officer.

Perette Godwin, a spokesperson for the chief operating officer’s office, said those rules on how the departments should coordinate, called administrative regulations, are “not even in its infancy.”