Dragon in the Land:

People and Mega-fire in California

• Episode One:
  Lightning and Smoke
• Episode Two:
  Remembrance of Fires Past
• Episode Three:
  Red Ball Sun
• Episode Four:
  The Running Battle
• Episode Five:
  Evacuations and Destinations
• Episode Six:
  Maze of Chaos
• Episode Seven:
  The Dragon in the West Village
• Episode Eight:
  Fire Camp
• Episode Nine:
  Man-dragon
• Episode Ten:
  Percent Contained
• Episode Eleven:
  Smart Work, Dumb Luck
• Episode Twelve:
  What To Do Before The Nightmare Comes True — Again

What's New

Writing

Dragon in the Land:
People and Mega-fire in California

by Howard V. Hendrix

Episode Four:
The Running Battle

As the sun slips toward night, the struggle to save the community of Shaver Lake has begun in earnest. Volunteer Firefighter Joe Shaw, in full, yellow nomex personal protective equipment, takes a break from tossing firewood away from where it’s been wrongly stored—beneath the stairs and decking of a four thousand square foot “summer cabin” in the Musick Falls development, south of Shaver.

The house is built beside a rock outcropping at the end of a ridge. From the outcropping, Joe can easily see into the distance, toward Redinger Lake and the Valley. What he sees there is half a dozen columns of heavy smoke rising from separate wildfires, fanned by erratic winds and downdrafts in the wake of the big dry lightning event.

Closer at hand, in the bowl of air above Jose Basin, he sees the air war and hears the ground war underway. An air tanker drops retardant along the approaching fire-front.

Joe counts at least six fires visible between where he’s standing and the Valley floor. He realizes how thinly stretched regional fire-fighting resources must be. If the same situation is happening all over California, there’s not going to be nearly enough equipment to share around. He knows how lucky he and everyone in Shaver is, to have any air support at all.

The sound of bulldozers, clanking like tanks in the forest, echoes up from almost directly below, between the Dogwood subdivision and Musick Falls. Another piece of luck: The heavy equipment and its operators were on their way down the mountain from a fuel-break job up near Big Creek. Having stopped at the Hungry Hut for supper, the operators, along with their equipment, were dragooned by Cal Fire and Edison personnel into bulldozing fire breaks, once the severity of the fires in Jose Basin became clear.

Only a half hour earlier, Joe and his fellow crewmembers were in the thick of that fight, just below Dogwood, in an area the local residents call “Dogpatch.”

Clearing and thinning efforts in Dogwood have been slowed by obstacles to the funding of their fire project, despite the best efforts of the folks there. The residents of Dogpatch, in contrast, have been able to accomplish much the same clearing and thinning work that Joe and his neighbors have also done.

In Dogpatch the firefighters can make a stand, but they have to be careful. If the fire managed to get through the line at Dogpatch and into Dogwood—with its steep roads and thickets of trees and brush—there was a danger that the firefighters’ escape routes would be cut off, potentially exposing them to a dreaded burnover.

As they drove through Dogwood and into Dogpatch, Joe and the rest of his SLVFD crew saw that at least the evacuation was proceeding—if not perfectly smoothly, then at least less chaotically than Joe expected. He silently thanked heaven that someone had had the foresight to develop and implement an evacuation plan for Dogwood and Dogpatch. Such preparation might well save some lives, now.

Once on the fire line, Joe and his fellow crewmembers learned that Captain Mark Glass of Cal Fire was their division supervisor. Glass had assigned them to structure protection in Dogpatch.

Reaching their assigned location, they parked their engine—still running and facing in the direction of their escape route, and with its wheels left unchocked, in case a sudden getaway became necessary. He and the crew did a quick hose lay around to the back of the Stinson house.

Joe found himself in the role of nozzleman, facing downslope in the direction of the smoke and approaching fire. From below, the prolonged roar of flames was punctuated by persistent loud popping sounds as a flood of fire surged toward them.

The trees on the slope below them started to quiver, waver, and burst into flame. Burning firebrands wafted toward them like constellations of falling stars, igniting small spot-fires where they reached the earth.

Joe turned from dousing spot-fires to face the wall of crowning flame approaching from below. A thought rose into his mind, unbidden.

“Do we really want to be here? Why can’t we just drop these hoses and hightail it? Why aren’t we already back at the truck, cutting these hoselines loose with our axes? Shouldn’t we be putting pedal to the metal and getting the heck out of here?”

He returned to the work of suppressing yet more spot fires, telling himself, over and over, “I’ve been trained to do this. I can do this. If this fire’s going to be stopped, somebody has to do this.”

Turning back to glance at the main fire-front again, he saw the fire reach the area that had been thinned and cleared below the house. The flames, deprived of much of their fuel, began to lay down and burn with far less force. The water from his crew’s hoses was enough—barely—to slow the fire-front’s advance.

Just then, the world went orange. After a moment, Joe realized with relief that it wasn’t an explosion of flame. Instead, one of the air-attack planes had scored a direct hit on them and their truck—with fire retardant.

They were still working on spot fires when a Cal Fire patrol unit pulled up.

“The incident commander says to redeploy your engine to the Musick Falls area,” the Cal Fire engineer told them, breaking out of his radio traffic. “Here. Let’s hose as much of that retardant off while we’ve got a minute, then you’re off to your next location.”

Before he returns to removing the last of the firewood from below the “cabin” stairs here in Musick Falls now, Joe takes another look from the rock outcropping. The wind seems to have shifted again—slightly and unpredictably, but enough that the fire is headed more strongly up-canyon, casting its firebrands in a more northerly direction.

With just that small shift, the threat to Musick Falls has become considerably less. Joe breathes a sigh of relief. He also knows, however, that he and his crew probably won’t be left in this area long. He suspects their efforts will be needed elsewhere, and soon.

Moments later, he’s proven right. Word comes down that they’re being redeployed—this time to the West Village, where Joe and Yolanda make their home. He knows that too many sections of the Village are a firefighter’s nightmare...

Scaring myself again, Joe thinks. He reminds himself that he lives in what is probably the safest part of the West Village. Yet, as he and his crew drive up Highway 168 toward their new location, he cannot help wondering, again and again, how his wife is doing, and whether their own home will make it through the night now quickly falling.

All episodes were originally published in 2007 as a fire education series in the Mountain Press, the Sanger Herald, the Snowline Tiimes, and their sister publications covering the central California portion of the foothills and Sierra Nevada Mountains.

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