How Not to Die in a Wildfire – Epi-3902

The Survival Podcast

In this episode of The Survival Podcast, host Jack interviews Peter McIsaac, a seasoned wilderness firefighter and wildlife specialist with

Key takeaways

• Evacuation during a wildfire is often unreliable due to overwhelmed systems and delayed response times.
• Wildfires move faster and with greater intensity than most people realize—grass fires can burn through structures like telephone poles in seconds.

Main topics

• Wildfire survival myths
• Homeowner preparedness

Notable quotes

"Most people think it's open flames that are the danger, but it's radiant heat and smoke inhalation that kill most people."

Conclusion

Peter McIsaac emphasizes that surviving a wildfire requires moving beyond the

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:05) Of Speaker 2 (0:25) the Survival Podcast, we've made this week up the hump day to a Wednesday. That means it is time for an interview show. We've had a pretty cool week so far. We led off with a crazy Monday mayhem. We had a pretty good business just jack show yesterday on Picking a Business. Today we're going to talk about something that directly fits the title of the show, though, right? The Survival Podcast. How about how not to die in a wildfire? Now, I've been saying for 18 years, the number one rule of survival, wake up not dead tomorrow. Right. So not dying right in the ethos. We haven't really talked about wildfires much since I had a guest on this spring. We talked about some of the California wildfires, the reasons behind them, the poor forest management and some of the things that you can do to protect your home. But it is something we should probably talk about more. And I'll tell you why. To me, wildfire. It's a lot like flooding, even though you're not firing water. But what I mean is there's so many things that people worry about more that kill less people. And so whenever there's a storm, everybody thinks tornadoes. And I live in Texas. Tornado alley, baby. I've had them right there. I've seen them without them touching my house, fortunately, so far anyway. Yes, they're dangerous. But floods kill more people. And likewise, when you look at... casualties, both, you know, dead or seriously injured, wildfires have a very high hit rate. And it's because I think people underestimate them and, oh, it's over there and now it's here. And I've seen, even in my area where we have more grass fires than forest fires, I've seen a grass fire burn through, and I mean straight through like a blowtorch, through a telephone pole and left the telephone pole hanging by the wires between the two poles that didn't get hit. A grass fire. The speed, the intensity, and there's more ways than one that fire can kill you. So having an evacuation plan, knowing what to look out for, things like that is a great way to not die and obey that first rule of survival. We're going to have our guest on, Peter McIsaac, in just a moment, who knows a lot about this because of his background. Before we do that, let's go ahead and hear from our sponsors of the day. Sponsor of the day number one today is Start9 Sovereign Computing. Look, guys, do you know that there is no such thing as the cloud? The cloud is like it's up there. No, it's not up there. There is no cloud. It's just somebody else's computer somewhere else you're connected to on the Internet, which means they have your data. They can control your data. They can cut you off your data. They can sell your data and they can be a breach for your data. Oh, and by the way, breaking into a database on a site like AWS servers like because that's happened or the credit bureau because that's happened or any other place like that. where there's thousands or millions of people's information, that's a high-value target. If I'm a hacker, that's worth going after. My guest, Peter, I'm not going to try to hack into his house as a hacker. He doesn't have enough stuff to make it worth the effort. So that's called like a – it's not really a honeypot, but think of it as that way, right, because that's a different thing in tech speak. But it's like this honey hole that if Speaker 1 (3:36) you get in there, you get all this Speaker 2 (3:37) data. So by having much more secure data for yourself, for all your information, everything that you store, et cetera. plus being kind of all by yourself and then hidden on the dark web, yes, because it does use Tor to access remotely, you have much more security of your data when you maintain it yourself. You can also run a Bitcoin node, a Bitcoin lightning node. You can do end-to-end encrypted, military-grade encrypted level messaging that people can't even see, let alone decrypt unless you invite them in. Start9 is a tool for digital sovereignty. Check them out today, and remember, they do a discount for members of the MSB as well. Next up, totally different. We're going to go low-tech now, okay? KnifeKits.com. I want to tell you something about KnifeKits. KnifeKits.com first reached out to me and said, we want to sponsor your podcast, and you want to guess when? 2009. 2009. It's 2026. They're still here. They're a loyal sponsor. They build some, or they... provide the stuff you need to build some really amazing knives, whether you're a master bladesmith and you want to work with things like buffalo bone or mammoth tusk. Yes, mammoth tusk, they have that. And a lot of other really cool exotic materials. You can get it there, the micarta, all of that, complex steels, et cetera, or just some really cool kit knives that you can, you know, do the final fit and finish, put the scales on yourself, pick your own scale material. Really, really cool. They have some really cool kit knives like that that are like Damascus steel. And hey, you want a family legacy? Build one of these with your son, your daughter, your grandson, your granddaughter, you know, your niece, your nephew, et cetera, what have you. Man, if I had a knife I built with my granddad, I would never part with it. I wouldn't care if it was like half-assed compared to some other knives I own. It would be the most valuable knife that I have because I built it with my granddad. Build a legacy with KnifeKids.com. All right, with that, guys, let's go ahead and bring our special guest on, Peter McIsaac. Peter, man, welcome to the Survival Podcast. Speaker 1 (5:34) Really looking forward to this, sir. I did some background checking in you. You've got quite the impressive resume, Jack. Honored to be here. Speaker 2 (5:43) Well, thanks for that. Like I said, I've been around a while and the beard alone, I think, attests to that, just the amount of gray. I was watching some stuff that we did a few years back only. And it's like, who stole all the color out of my beard? And I think it was my grandson when we homeschooled for like five years. Accelerated the move to gray. But man, thanks for that. I want to start out with, instead of just diving into the topic itself. Tell us about your professional background, like, you know, the elevator speech version, but go back to like you get out of school and you got to figure out what to do with your life. And I mean, part of what you've done, among many other things, is being a wilderness firefighter. How does one go from like, you know, you're spaced out in a study hall trying to figure out how to ask a girl out. And then next thing you know, you're fighting wilderness level firefighters, fires. Speaker 1 (6:35) Well, it's an interesting story, Jack. I started off at six years old when I got my first bow and arrow and a BB gun. And I started running snare lines and hunting with my dad. And I shot my first deer when I was 12. Then I ran a trap line that paid for most of what I did till I went to university. So when I get out, I was looking for something that would be exciting and keep me out of an office. My dad did everything he could. He wanted me to go into business and make sure I got a good job. And I was determined to find something that would keep me in the outdoors and keep me away from an office as long as possible. And looking back on it, it might not have been the most profitable thing to do. I had more fun in a lifetime than a man should be able to have. So when I graduated from university, I initially worked at a pulp and paper company as a supervisor doing forestry operations. And then a job opened up in our Department of Lands and Forests. It was called back then here on the east coast of Canada in Nova Scotia. And really, to be honest with you, I thought I was hiring on to do a lot of technical work in the woods. One of the first things they did was slap a contract down in front of me where I had to swear an oath of office and become a game warden. And game wardens in the winter and fall, we have a lot of work to do. But in the summer and springtime, it's fighting forest fires. So I got a 29-year background now in fighting forest fires, being a game warden and a wildlife specialist for the province. And it's been one heck of a ride. It was a lot of excitement. But I've seen the good side of things. And over the last 20 years, I've seen the downside of what's been happening inside the field. And that compelled me to write this book after I watched what happened down in the Palisades in 2025. Speaker 1 (8:20) So on that, I Speaker 2 (8:23) have seen a lot of mythology around fire is a thing, but certainly as far as fires. What would you say the single biggest myth the public tends to still believe about, you know, forest fires? Speaker 1 (8:39) Most people think that it's open flames that are going to burn your house down and eventually kill you. Well, the reality of it is, Jack, is 91 % of forest fires that take out houses, open flames never make it to the house. They're burnt down by embers. And for people who are not up on this, embers are small pieces of burning debris that blow out in windstorms ahead of a fire. I've seen ember fires three, four, five miles. I'm talking miles rather than kilometers we have up here in Canada. But spot fires, that'll start that fire out. And so... when I was watching what was happening in California, I was basically predicting every single thing as it was happening. And I could see a bunch of things that should have been done and people dying that didn't have to die. And so, you know, everybody was thinking if, if, if the wall of fire is not here, I'm, I'm safe. That's the biggest myth. Speaker 2 (9:33) Yeah. I've seen that lead to other myths and conspiracy theories too. Like when the Palisades fire, like, It's the, I don't know, it's the space lasers from HAARP that are burning down selected houses because, look, this house isn't burned down and this house is, or look, all the trees around this house are fine and this house burned down. And, you know, I've tried to get through the thick skulls with that and understanding that the ember cast, like you're talking about, is what burns down most buildings. And my understanding is it gets into the eaves of the home, into the attic, and then... That might actually not go really quick, but we all know what happens with a structure once the roof goes. So once it gets enough fire to open that roof up, it is going to burn like a freaking rocket stove. Because now you've got the top up and the sides insulated, and it's going to go like hardcore burn to the ground ashes. And my understanding is that you can buy a little product called Ember Guards and install those, and that alone may save your house. Speaker 1 (10:38) One of the cheapest things you can do to save your house, Jack, other than it will go into the different zones and stuff, but is a roll of duct tape and roll a duct tape. You can seal every dent or every vent around your home. You can seal the gaps under the doors in your garage around your house before you leave. There's a whole series of things that you can do. And it's all, you know, I've got it all. I can save Speaker 2 (11:01) my $300,000 house with $30 worth of duct tape or less. Speaker 1 (11:05) Probably less. Probably $10 worth of duct tape can save a house. Speaker 2 (11:10) That's crazy because the ember guards, I think, are a good step. But like you're bringing up, there's multiple ways and it takes one. It takes one good ember to get in the right place. And, you know, I kind of now I'm kind of looking at this like as a former beekeeper, like day to day, I would go out with like a half half suit and a veil on. But like when the bees were pissed off because they got infected with a hot bee or something, I take this like. all the way to the ground, tape the suit up, gloves, the whole nine yards. And when you're dealing with a forest fire, you should think of it like dealing with a hot beehive. Seal off all the ways that things can get in. Speaker 1 (11:48) Yeah, because it's just, I forget the name of the theory, but if it can go wrong on a forest fire, it will go wrong. And most what you'll learn, or that I learned over the years, there's a lot of common sense things, but you're not taught them. And then the other biggest myth that people, number two myth, I guess, Jack, would be that people think the government is going to save them. Speaker 1 (12:14) this hope and pray and evacuate stuff is nonsense. And I watched 29 years of it. And instead of getting better, it's actually getting worse. And we can dive into that throughout the show. But the reality of it is there's a multitude of things you can do in the next hour around your property to harden it, to make sure that even if you evacuate, when you come back, you're probably going to have a house standing. And that's what they call a zone one. And zone one is the first five feet. around your property what's there yeah Speaker 2 (12:46) let's let's start there because that's where i was going next like there is this you call it evacuate and pray and i think it's exact and to be fair to the news in the government which i i don't like to do either one anymore than i have to but sometimes it's warranted you're trying to get, you know, 10 million people to leave an area. If you get them to leave, you've, you've, you've gotten the bigger part of the job done as far as they're looking at it. But it is kind of what they're saying, like, just get your stuff and go. But. You go through how a prepared homeowner should actually do and what they should do in the first 30 to 60 minutes when you know there is a threat. Not before it's here, not before it's clear that it's going to hit, but it's possible. It's like when you look at a hurricane and you're in the cone, you might be on the outer edge of the cone, but you're in the cone, you should start taking hurricane precautions. And so you just gave us one like, hey. tape up because you would not live that way 24-7 but that's something you can do very quickly especially if you have the equipment and you know what to do what are some other things people can do in that first 30 to 60 minutes that they become aware of a potential need to evacuate eventually Speaker 1 (14:01) Well, even prior to the need to evacuate, Jack, there's a whole series of steps that people should do to prepare. If you live in any area in North America at all, you could be susceptible to the effects of a forest fire. You need to start planning right now for next spring. And the reason why is right now between Canada and the U.S., there's been over 55,000 wildfires so far this season. That's a lot of fires. hundreds of thousands of people that weren't prepared with even the basics. So there's major strategies, but let's say you haven't prepared at all and you get a one-hour warning. One of the first things that you can do to save your home is in the next 20 to 30 minutes, there's a zone around your house called zone one, and that's five feet away from your home. And if you've got dry grass or brush or firewood or anything that's packed up against the side of your house, That stuff has to be moved, and that can all be done in short order. Same thing with propane tanks. Speaker 1 (15:01) deck furniture, cushions that burn. You can, you know, you can shut off your gas. You can shut off your propane. You can clear that five foot area. And so what a lot of people don't realize until they start trying to clean stuff out is that the mistake they made by having mulch up to their house rather than pea gravel. Because here's what happens. So in the urban wildfire, what they call the urban wildfire interface is where you see. you know, millions of dollars in property, billion dollars of property burned down. When fire teams arrive, they look at your house and they do an immediate triage on it. And if you don't have that five feet cleared next around your house, they just drive on to the next house. Your house becomes a statistical write-off for them. They don't have time to help you. They only have time to help people who have taken time to help themselves. So in that first hour, what you're trying to do is you're pulling out your written plan. Right. You're organizing your team. You've made sure your property is cleared out. And I'm saying you only got an hour. And, you know, if you haven't been prepared and been preparing for months or even a year in advance, there's still steps that you can take so that you don't lose your house. And that five foot zone is the big thing. And then take that duct tape, seal off all your vents, make sure there's nothing that can actually make it up to the siding on your house. You know what? If you didn't know better and you've got cedar shingles, you're going to lose your house. It's that simple. If you've got a roof that's not fireproof and you didn't have time to clean your gutters and you might not have time in that hour, you're probably going to lose your home. So there's a whole series of decisions that cascade from one decision on top of another. One bad decision in the early spring can burn your house down later on in the summer because you overlooked. some minuscule thing that you didn't think was important. And there's basically three, there's three different zones around your house. There's that five foot zone. And then your next zone is your five feet to 30 foot zone. And then there's the 30 to a hundred foot zone. And if you've taken, taken preparations that you fireproofed those sections of your property, when the, you know, when the government boys show up to actually try to help save your property, odds are they're going to pick. your home is one of the ones that survives. Yours won't be the one that's just a pile of ash when the guy beside your house who cleaned out that five foot zone and that, and that five to 30 foot zone while their house is still standing. You know, I've never heard Speaker 2 (17:39) anybody talk about that before, but it makes perfect sense to me. Speaker 2 (17:44) that I'm a, let's say I'm like a captain of a fire department and I have my guys going out to a task that there's going to be failure. Like you can't save everyone. It's impossible. It cannot be done. So who do you pick? You pick the people that you can actually save. It is absolutely no different than the cert training you get with triage where you tag individuals in a mass casualty event. And it's like, This guy needs care right now or he's going to die. This dude's alive, but he's dead anyway. Yeah. This guy's walking wounded. Send them that way. This person should go home. They're hurt, but we don't need to be dealing with, they need to go somewhere else. Go to care now, you know, five pounds over or something. You're, you're not who we're here to help. And there are in those scenarios, sadly, people that you just say, we can't put the resources on this one person who, you know, a thousand to one, maybe we saved their life. But 20 other people die while we're focused on this one. And that's kind of what you're saying. Like the house has cedar shingles, shit piled up against it, wood piled up on the back porch. This isn't going to make it. So that dude over there, I'm going to go help. So it's like a form of triage, but it's a structure triage instead of a person triage. Speaker 1 (19:02) Yeah, it's a combination of both because here's what happens. Once you've hardened your property and trained your family. into the incident command system. And for folks who don't know, incident command was initially started in the U.S. when folks were stepping all over one another in major emergencies. And incident command is how strategically all wildfires are fought in North America today. And it's like a military operation. And you can scale it as big as you want to thousands of people or down to you and a couple of your kids and maybe two or three of your neighbors. Sometimes ICS is just you fully prepared. And so. Once you've got the basics down and then you understand how triage is going to work, there's a whole series of things that you can do to make sure that when they're picking a home to save, they're picking yours. For example, if they're driving down the road, Jack, and you've got a sprinkler system set up that you've got turned on and it's pumping water full time on your home and your property, you're getting saved. Speaker 1 (19:59) Right. If you've got over trees overhanging your property and propane tanks on your deck, you lose everything you have. So all of these things are easy to plan for. It's much like in that first one hour again. Fill up, fill every sink in your house, fill your bathtub, fill every water supply you can, because in a lot of places on a major fire, once you lose power and, you know, even if you're on a well, you're going to lose your water supply. A whole other series of other steps that a person can take. But ultimately, there's a system in place called ICS or Incident Command. And my book teaches you how to use ICS for a small group of folks or your family and take all the same skill set and all the training that gets applied to the professionals when they roll in and try to get a job done. And nine times out of 10, they're going to be overwhelmed, understaffed. And unfortunately, since beginning in the 90s, up here in Canada, at least, we've had I don't know if you want me to go into this, but we've had a lot of DEI hiring. And as a result of that, we got a ton of folks in positions that they shouldn't be in making decisions that get people killed. Speaker 2 (21:09) Yeah, I remember when the Palisades thing went down and there was clearly some DEI going on out there. And there was this fire chief woman who didn't look like she had Speaker 1 (21:19) business being the chief of anything, just to be honest. Speaker 2 (21:23) And somebody said something to the effect of, if my 200-pound husband was incapacitated, could this woman carry him out? And she said, maybe he shouldn't need to be carried out. I saw that. Speaker 1 (21:36) I'm sorry. That's your job, right? I'm sorry. That's Speaker 2 (21:40) what you signed up for. That's your job. I know you don't know that because your mayor was off in Kenya, but that's Speaker 1 (21:46) your Speaker 2 (21:46) freaking job. And I think that we do. I don't think this is isolated to fire and rescue either. Like, I think we have a whole shitload of people who are responsible for very important things for helping and protecting the public who have been infested with this disease. And we need to be our own first responders. And I think that was always true. It's just now because of that, it's more true. Speaker 1 (22:10) Yeah, I had to put a whole chapter about that in my first book, Red Dead Conservative. I've got to remember these books that I put out get me shadow banned and the Canadian government really has a hate on for me up here because I expose a lot of corruption and a lot of government policies that lead to some of the stuff that I had to write about in these books. The problem is I was inside government for 29 years and then when I retired. I got involved with political parties for 12, naively thinking we could help change the system, Jack. And, you know, Speaker 2 (22:40) we do Speaker 1 (22:42) have a bit of a solution. But you know what? I'm going to, later on, if we have some time, we'll come back to that. But we do have a solution, and I'm involved in a Supreme Court case up here in Canada right now that may change the political system here in Canada. That'd be great. Well, it'd be a good thing. Speaker 2 (22:55) Let's Speaker 1 (22:56) stick with the stuff on the fire, Speaker 2 (22:57) though. Like, you detail specific defensible things like space zones and... Home hardening techniques. Which of those actions give you the highest return for the average rural suburban property owner when it comes to time and money? I mean, like expand to on things like you said about the sprinklers, because that's something I've always thought made sense. Yeah, the power might go out, the well might shut off, whatever, but it's there while it's there. Speaker 1 (23:22) Yeah, so here's the thing is that goes back to that five foot zone again. What's the cheapest, most productive thing you can do in one hour? Seal off all your vents, clear everything away with a minimum five feet away from your home. Duct tape off any places sparks can get in. Turn off all your vents that may suck one individual piece of, you know, one ember inside your home. And then make sure you've got if you have a water supply in that last half hour, spend your time. soaking down everything that you could possibly get soaked down. And most people have a sprinkler system. And the key to it is you make sure that you use weeping hose, which is a form