Burning Ojai: Our Fire Story (2020) User Reviews

Powerful and disheartening at the same time

[paul-allaer · 7/10 · 29 October 2020]

"Burning Ojai: Our Fire Story" (2020 release; 41 min.) is a documentary about the 2017 wild fires in Ventura County, CA. As the movie opens, it is "December 4, 2017" and we are immediately plunged into the devastating footage of what we are told is California's largest wild fire up to that point. We then go to "Upper Ojai" as we get to know Michael and Noemie Milano, a recently married couple that is looking for a special place in California to raise their family. They settle upon Upper Ojai, and arrive with their baby girl just a month before the wild fires strike...

Couple of comments: this is a deeply personal account of what became known as the St. Thomas fires. The documentary is directed by Michael Milano, who lived through the experience first hand along with his wife and their baby girl. The documentary is a combination of TV station footage and Michael's own footage, and it makes for a very powerful experience that also sadly is pretty disheartening. The experts weigh in, including climate experts but also the Ventura County Fire Department guys, and the refrain is all too familiar: a lethal mix of strong winds, too much residential construction, and an out-of-date and questionable electricity distribution grid. Your heart goes out to the residents of Ventura County, but with now 3 more years of hindsight, we know all too well that this keep getting worse each and every year with these out of control wild fires. Meanwhile climate change deniers like the current POTUS claim with a straight face that it's all the fault of "local authorities". Yea, right. If there is one criticism I have, it is that at just 41 min. the documentary feels a little rushed. But the footage of the wild fires is what I will remember most of this documentary.

"Burning Ojai: Our Fire Story" premiered on HBO this week, and is now available on HBO On Demand and other streaming services. If you have any interest in better understanding how these wild fires ravage through communities and why a new approach is desperately needed, I'd readily suggest you check this out and draw your own conclusion.

Too short, not enough information

[jaredhower-00567 · 5/10 · 17 November 2020]

Some good footage is presented in this documentary, and if what they were going for is short and opinionated, then they succeeded. I feel more information would have been beneficial. Discuss the states policies on forest care and fire prevention, as well as logging and removal of debris. These, along with drought and man made hazards are all to blame in some part for these increasingly devastating wildfires. Southern California Edison has seemingly left areas like this on the waiting list for updated equipment for decades, leading to the rolling power outages the state has seen in years since this fire and others. One issue i found most appalling about this documentary is the lack of explanation as to why the fire department left houses unprotected. This is a simple explanation that could have been discussed in five minutes or less. On fires of this size and how active the fire was, there are some areas that are unsafe for anyone to inhabit, including remaining there to provide structure protection for homes where people are evacuated. If you don't prepare your home for the possibility of a wild fire, then it's too late when a fire starts in your neighborhood. My final problem, and the most egregious in my opinion, is not mentioning the men and women who fought this fire and rescued residents. The least that can be done is a thank you at the end of the film. Not to mention, the firefighter who died fighting this fire. A simple mention of the man who sacrificed his life to protect this community could have had an immense effect on this film.

Too short...wtf

[terrill_pearson · 5/10 · 31 October 2020]

It was interesting, but it was too short. Only 40 mins! This should've been at least 2hrs

Worst wildfire? California's has had thousands of larger wildfires over the past 10,000 years

[random-70778 · 29 October 2020]

This documentary is so astoundingly anti science it is incredible,. There are scores of dendrochronology studies looking the the past 10,000 years that show California has had a very large number of much worse drought periods and much more wide, severe and sustained wildfires and wildfire periods. When this film says "largest" they mean the most property damage because -- guess what -- there is ten times as much property value in California s 40 years ago, and thousands of times more property value than 200 years ago. Now if you go back 300 or 1,500 years, a blink of the eye in terms of climate, these fires, exacerbated by California farm, housing development, and ironically fire management polices we now know make it worse, they last 200 years has bene bad. But on the scale of 14,000 years there have been twenty periods, from a few decades to a to three centuries long, that saw over twice as many worse fires per year than today. newsflash: the continental west/southwest of North America has been experience desertification process for over ten thousand years, just like south west of Africa and also like the Sahara (which had rivers, and megafauna up tot 5,000 years ago