fighting a major wildfire requires a huge amount of coordination between local, state and federal departments. under a single command. but private crews get their orders from their own company dispatcher. and ultimately, the insurance companies. the commander of the black forest fire has mixed feelings about the growing trend. rich harvey likes the idea of more fire trucks, more firefighters. but then how do they fold in to our organization? because they don t really work for us. they re kind of out there, and i don t have direct control of them, yet i got ultimate responsibility for the fire. reporter: and if those private crews got into trouble? harvey says, of course, he d send help. but that s part of the dilemma. if i m helping them, because they got in trouble, i m diverting resources from my primary mission, to help somebody that s supposed to be part of the solution. reporter: and about that other question, you know the one, what would those private firefighters do if t
so i think you re really seeing it here in the west because we do have the drought, we do have the higher wildfire risk and wildfire exposure and customers are looking for these types of avenues to further protect their property. reporter: according to one industry executive, 10% of the insurance policyholders in western states have the private firefighter service as part of their homeowners insurance. by next year it could be 20%. in a big fire, having your own private fire department right in the driveway. i mean, who wouldn t want that? but there are questions like what would they do if your neighbor s house caught on fire? anything? or, what if this crew got in trouble? fighting a major wildfire requires a huge amount of coordination between local, state and federal departments. under a single command. but private crews get their orders from their own company dispatcher. and ultimately, the insurance companies. the commander of the black forest fire has mixed feelings about the
effort. rich explained the next few days, gave some insight into what he and firefighters plan to do. take a listen. how do you deal with this fire over the next couple of days? what do do you? the perimeter work is done. now we re focusing interior to make sure the heat that could create sparks are done. we call it mop up. search and destroy. find any piece jt heat and put it out. reporter: that s the good news. it held the perimeter and going inside. at some point we ll move on to the next step and learn the cause of this fire from investigators and eventually the recovery part where people go back into the neighborhoods. d8uncertain. it could be several days before that happens. thank you so much. just take a look at those firs and the car that was ablaze.
but private crews get their orders from their own company dispatcher. and ultimately, the insurance compani companies. the commander of the black forest fire has mixed feelings about the growing trend. rich harvey likes the idea of more fire trucks, more firefighters. but then how do they fold in to our organization? because they don t really work for us. they re kind of out there, and i don t have direct control of them, yet i got ultimate responsibility for the fire. reporter: and if those private crews got into trouble? harvey says, of course, he d send help. but that s part of the dilemma. if i m helping them, because they got in trouble, i m diverting resources from my primary mission, to help somebody that s supposed to be part of the solution. reporter: and about that other question, you know the one, what would those private firefighters do if the neighbor s house caught on fire? i wanted to ask the insurance company just that in an interview that we had all lined up. a
lightning strike. they re looking at everything. we know there s an arson investigator here along with several others. when you consider how big this fire is they have a lot to look into. more than 15,000 acres of scorched land. we know some 483 homes were destroyed. right now áhe focus is on fire suppression. until that s concluded, we ll still have people waiting to get back into the areas but after that they will determine the cause of this fire. you ve been talking to the fire commander about the strategy for the next couple of day, when people can get back to their homes and that sort of thing. right. rich harvey is the incident commander. he had some good news. he said the fire is 65% contained. that s great news when you consider where we came from. on friday it was 30% contained. then it went up to 45 and 55% and we had a lot of weather come through. the rain helped with this fire