Wildfires can be difficult to understand for those who live where fire departments respond almost exclusively to structural fires at homes or businesses.

Western Reserve Joint Fire District (Poland) Chief Chip Comstock said one of the major differences from a firefighter’s perspective is that even the worst structure fires are more predictable and generally easier to control and contain.

“I always tell people, from my perspective, if something goes wrong, what do I have to be concerned with?” he said. “The parameters with a house are finite. We’re trying to look for the nearest exit or make a hole in the building. You’re never more than 10 to 15 or 20 feet from an exit. But with wildfires, being acres or even a mile away from an exit point, wind and flames may overrun you and you have no way to escape.”

Structure fires can get out of control, Comstock said, but even then experienced firefighters know how to adapt to the scope of the situation.

“You have to make certain determinations,” he said. “You can’t save this one house but maybe you can save the house next door. So you draw lines and try to create breaks and save the houses from that point forward.”

Topography is another factor that rarely influences structure fire management, but it is a major factor in how wildfires move.

“Things behave differently, and fire moves differently with incline and decline,” he said. “You also have to worry about factors like humidity, fuel loads and wind.”

High winds have driven the Los Angeles wildfires to consume entire neighborhoods with firefighters helpless to control the spread.

Comstock’s colleague Dan Taafe grew up in Canfield.

He has since retired from the St. Albans, West Virginia, fire department as a captain.

During his time, Taafe also was a squad boss for the West Virginia 1 crew that the state would send to aid Western firefighters with wildfires. The volunteer unit was activated in 1994, and Taafe worked on it until 2017.

As a squad boss in charge of a troop of five men, Taafe focused on structure protection and cutting lines in the fire, and he often was transported into high-pressure zones by helicopters when trucks couldn’t reach the target area.

Taafe said the landscape and nature in the West are simply different, making wildfires a much bigger risk and much more difficult to manage.

“It’s pretty simple. If you divide the United States, in the East we have hardwoods and leaves, so here we have ground fires,” Taafe said. “Out west it’s mostly softwoods, lots of piney trees. And with the winds, the fire comes up into the crown and travels a lot faster there with the wind.”

But that does not mean the ground is not a factor. Quite the contrary, Taafe said.

“Because of the root systems with those types of trees, it also burns below ground in the root system. When you have heavy winds, all the heat is ahead of the fire and preheats the ground, and because there is low moisture in the atmosphere, everything is already dry, so it’s a tinderbox,” he said. “It’s like a freight train coming through there, and there’s really nothing you can do with Mother Nature. You have the Santa Ana winds in certain areas, and the oceanic winds and the gulf stream do not help either.”

Taafe said the wildfires reach temperatures of 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The rapidly changing atmosphere also makes wildfires difficult to predict and control.

“You have to watch your weather because it’s a key factor in any incident,” he said. “On a slow day, with low winds, you might get a hold of it, but if it picks back up it can jump your lines.”

One major tactic employed in fighting wildfires is eliminating sources of fuel.

“They hope to build fire breaks, remove fuel, start backfires to eliminate fuel so the wildfire has nothing left to burn when it gets there. They use bulldozers where they can to dig trenches to take away fuel,” Comstock said.

One of the most specialized — and most dangerous — jobs in fighting wildfires is smokejumping.

Comstock and Taafe said smokejumpers are dropped into areas with no easy vehicle access.

When the fires get too bad, though, as they have in California, Taafe said, there’s very little that can be done.

“You evacuate everybody and let Mother Nature take its course. And then clean up the aftermath,” he said.

Taafe said he expects these fires to last at least until spring. Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland will send crews to help battle the blazes. They will work in two- to three-week stretches and then rotate out.

Taafe and Comstock said California authorities do what they can to protect homes and neighborhoods, but they also place responsibility on homeowners.

“One thing in the West that’s a problem is that people want to build in the hills, forests and mountains, and you have what they call the urban wilderness interface,” Comstock said.

He said state and local authorities have advised homebuilders and owners to watch what materials they use to build houses, what kinds of bushes are around the house, keep brush cleared away and avoid building too close to heavily forested areas.

He likened it to building houses on lowlands near the ocean in Florida when it comes to hurricanes and flooding after major storms there.

“What do you do to minimize the risk?” Comstock said. “They know what houses they cannot save based on that, and they will work on saving other homes where they’ve taken more precautions.”