After close call, residents in Talmadge and surrounding neighborhoods unite to fend off future wildfires

From the sweeping views of his Talmadge backyard, Michael Pound spotted the column of black smoke. It was perhaps a half mile away, in the vegetation at the bottom of the canyon.

Not particularly worried, Pound headed back inside to change, just in case. He poked his head outside a few minutes later to find his neighbor’s backyard trees on fire. He grabbed his things and evacuated.

Several houses away, Sarah Axford saw the billowing smoke. She, too, cleared out. As she left, a police car drove past, siren on, warning people to evacuate. “It was very frightening,” she said.

That was Halloween 2024. Before the day was over, what became known as the Montezuma fire chewed through canyon land, starting roughly at Fairmount Avenue and heading east along Montezuma Road. Several homes were damaged. One was destroyed.

Officially, the fire’s cause is undetermined, but authorities note there was evidence of a homeless encampment at the site. And residents say they continue to find encampments in the larger general area.

The fire reached about 40 acres in a spot where brushy canyons, ridges and thick palm tree groves meet with hilltop communities. The blaze was big enough and close enough to snap residents in several surrounding neighborhoods to attention. A year on, some remain frustrated about chronic encampments, and others still want answers as to why evacuees found themselves crawling through traffic gridlock.

Beyond that, they are also looking ahead.

“It’s very easy to direct outwards and say, well, people are camping in our canyons, and that’s the source of ignition, and somebody should be protecting us from that threat,” Axford said. ”I think that’s true, but also what is within my control? My home safety begins at my wall and goes out.”

In the year since the Montezuma fire, five new groups known as fire safe councils have come online in the surrounding area, including one that Axford and Pound co-founded. The councils — grassroots and volunteer — are designed to bring neighbors together to identify and address the area’s specific risks. The councils educate their communities and help them take practical fire prevention steps.

This past weekend marked the Talmadge council’s first community event: a “dumpathon” where they will provide a dumpster to haul off cuttings and brush that residents have cleared from around their homes. And the area also got a recent boost from San Diego Fire-Rescue, which sent out a crew this Halloween to spray roadside brush with a fire inhibitor designed to slow the march of flames.

Neighbors taking more collective ownership in fending off large fires is on the rise in the region. In the last year, 15 communities in the county have or are forming fire safe councils.

‘A big realization’

Axford and Pound each said the fire scare prompted them to attend a meeting put on by the Kensington and Alvarado Estates fire safe councils, hosted within weeks of the fire. It was well attended, with more than 300 people.

“There was a big realization that other neighborhoods needed to do this,” Pound said.

Emails started flying around their neighborhood. People were motivated. A series of smaller meetings followed, and soon Axford and Pound — strangers when the fire hit — founded the Talmadge Fire Safe Council. “I’ve always wanted to do something to give back, and I just never found it. And this was very personal,” Pound said.

Axford said she realized she didn’t know her neighbors as well as she should. “That has been one of our goals — helping blocks to coordinate, encouraging blocks to help each other.”

Their council is responsible for outreach to an area of roughly 1,200 homes. They send out email blasts and hand out information at the neighborhood’s monthly food truck nights over the summer, as well as the annual community block party. They share tips on ember-resistant vents (to help protect or “harden” a structure against fire), talk about removing flammables within 5 feet of a home (known as zone zero in fire-speak), and encourage neighbors to download the Genasys app, which local agencies use to announce evacuation zones.

Across the canyon, north of Montezuma, sits Alvarado Estates. Karen Austin is co-chair of their 3-year-old fire safe council, which she said offers personalized home assessments with tips specific to each property. There is also a program to help residents get ember-resistant vents installed. Even though the fire was south of four-lane Montezuma, the home that burned was on the north side — the victim of an ember, or “flying fire.”

Once a month, Austin said, residents from Kensington, Talmadge and beyond collect trash along the Fairmount and Montezuma corridor. They also monitor homeless encampments — including one they came across recently during a cleanup with Mayor Todd Gloria. It was in a different location than the ignition point of the 2024 fire.

“Gas cans, propane cans, pots and pans. It’s so egregious,” Austin said.

Austin also remains frustrated about the gridlock residents north of Montezuma faced as they routed through San Diego State University, and that palm trees that fuel fire are again thriving where the fire started. She is pressing for answers.

The neighborhood fire safe councils are under the umbrella of the Fire Safe Council of San Diego County, which refers to the groups as a “neighborhood watch” for fire safety. Morgan Dioli, a program manager with the umbrella group, said this week that the Montezuma fire “really brought people together. They saw a bad thing that happened, and they made good things happen out of it, which is just inspiring,” she said.

She also suspects January’s deadly and devastating Palisades fire in Los Angeles spurred other San Diego neighborhoods into action. Dioli said 12 local communities formed councils this year, with another three on the way, including neighborhoods in or around La Jolla, Del Mar, Carmel Valley and Rancho Santa Fe.

“I think a lot of our coastal communities saw Palisades, and it was like kind of looking in a mirror for them — that could be us,” Dioli said.

‘Any given day’

San Diego Fire-Rescue Assistant Fire Marshal Alex Kane is the department’s wildfire program manager, and he sees wildfire as a year-round risk. The 2024 Montezuma fire, he noted, happened on “any given day in San Diego — 75 degrees and beautiful, humidities in the 50s, nothing odd about it.”

On Oct. 31, a small crew of firefighters drove slowly around Fairmount and Montezuma, spraying a citrus-based fire inhibitor known as Citrotech on brush within 10 feet of the roads. The area is an evacuation route, Kane notes, a pinch point. The hope is to keep the roads open by keeping fire and intense heat at bay.

The cost to buy Citrotech is covered by a nearly $367,000 grant from the San Diego River Conservancy. San Diego Fire-Rescue bought about 4,000 gallons to use in the area of the San Diego River watershed. Other sites the department has hit over the last year include Tierrasanta, San Carlos, Allied Gardens and in the area of Mission Trails Regional Park. They sprayed about 50 gallons worth in the Montezuma area.

Gloria’s office recently announced that the city is making Citrotech a permanent part of its wildland management.

As his colleagues worked spraying brush along the road, Kane looked at the larger area through a firefighter’s eyes. He pointed to hillsides along Fairmount and explained how the topography creates “chimneys” where a fire would want to run uphill into Kensington.

He also pointed to cacti and succulents intentionally planted high, halfway up the hill, underneath vulnerable homes. “That’s good,” Kane said. “That’s providing defensible space. These people know what’s going on.”

Kensington Fire Safe Council has been a model for others in the area, from its monthly litter removal along roadsides to “dumpathons,” where a large trash bin is plopped onto the street for a day so neighbors can dump brush cleared near homes.

Kane is all-in with supporting neighborhood fire safe councils.

“We’re not helpless,” Kane said. “We can get involved and actually make huge differences to protect our property, our families, and the community as a whole.”