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 Seven:
The Dragon in the West Village

Shaver Lake Volunteer Firefighter Joe Shaw is in the West Village — and in the midst of every firefighter’s nightmare scenario. All around them, he and his fellow SLVFD crewmembers hear the wail of sirens, the blaring of fire-engine air horns, the bleating of car horns.

Finding one of the rare spots where they can pull their rig into a driveway without blocking the road, Joe jumps out of their engine and strides toward one of the several choke points in the local road system.

As he makes his way downhill, amid the sparsely street-lit pandemonium, he can’t help doing a quick size-up. Beneath the starlit skies, he sees that the real danger is silent, at least so far. That danger comes from all the older cabins, stacked cheek by jowl hereabouts, along a labyrinth of roads that are steep, or narrow, or winding, or dead-ended. Sometimes all of the above.

Too many of those cabins are roofed in untreated shingles of old-fashioned cedar shake — tinder dry, matted with pine needles or blotched with moss. No matter how quaint and picturesque that might be in the winter and spring, now, in the back end of August, every moss-covered, needle-strewn, shake-shingled roof is a receptive fuel bed for the smallest windblown firebrand, the least falling spark.

Too many residences here are also “screened” from their handshake neighbors by brush and trees. Such privacy cover often comes all the way up to and over the cabins’ rooflines, and makes perfect fuel ladders from ground to building to roof.

With much shouting, whistling, and gesturing, he does his best to direct traffic out of a place which has far too few routes in and out, all of them too easily blocked, all too well-suited to trapping a line of traffic, or a fire engine and its crew. . . .

Best not to think about it. Enough to keep him busy just unraveling this traffic snarl. People aren’t generally at their best in emergency evacuation situations. They tend to spook, like cattle, steering and braking and panicking, bulls and cows and steers in metal boxes full of flammable substances.

He manages to get traffic moving through his particular intersection, and has largely cleared that intersection when he notices that traffic is backing up again — uphill from him, in the direction from which he came. Jogging back through the dark, he passes where his crew and their rig are parked, lights whirling. Less than a dozen yards beyond the rig, he comes to the source of the bottleneck.

On a more or less straight but single-lane street leading out of the tract, a car has stalled, facing uphill. It won’t restart. He and the rest of his crew begin signaling the drivers of the cars behind the stalled vehicle to back down the hill. That takes some convincing, but eventually he gets enough of them moved back so that he and the crew can use the fire engine to push the stalled vehicle up the hill, over a short curb-wall and into a tiny front yard.

As he jumps out of the truck again, he sees the driver of the stalled vehicle, standing in the yard and looking unhappily at the damage to his vehicle. Joe’s heart does not go out to the man.

He jogs back down the hill, waving the rest of the jammed vehicles up the hill and past him. He starts to cough. His chest begins to ache with the thickening smoke now billowing his way.

The last vehicles to come through “his” intersection are a Sheriff’s Deputy in his SUV, and Captain Glass in his Cal Fire rig. The lights on both vehicles are still going, but their sirens silent. They too have been directing vehicles out of the West Village tract, it turns out.

“We’ve got everybody clear, as near as we can tell,” says the deputy.

“That’s good news.”

“Yeah,” says the weary deputy. “We can use some of that, about now.”

As the deputy’s vehicle pulls away, Captain Glass and his crew pull their rig up beside him.

“The fire’s chimneying up a draw due west of here,” Glass says. “We’re in triage mode. We’ve got crews down nearer the south end, where things look more defensible. You see anything hereabouts worth staking a crew to?”

Joe’s head is awhirl with his thoughts.

Triage mode.

Structures and neighborhoods with strong defensible space cleared around them, constructed from fire-resistant materials, or out of the direct path of the fire — such structures and neighborhoods are likely to survive on their own.

Structures and neighborhoods with decent defensible space and at least moderately fire-resistant construction, but more directly in the path of the fire, will need saving and might also actually be savable, so they’ll get a crew or two to work them.

Structures and neighborhoods lacking defensible space and fire resistant construction, and in the direct path of the fire, will not get crews to protect them because the firefighters themselves will be exposed to great risk for little or no potential benefit. No matter how much such structures and neighborhoods might need saving, they will not be saved. There are simply not enough crews and equipment to go around.

What of his wife, and his own place? They are nearer the south end, they have defensible space and fire-resistant construction. Maybe their place is out of the direct path of the fire, too.

But here? Around him?

“Nothing worth risking a firefighter’s life for, here,” Joe tells Glass. “Little or no defensible space, combustible roofing, narrow roads. It’s a death trap.”

Glass gives him a grim nod.

“Right. If these homeowners had wanted us to save more than foundations, they wouldn’t have let things get so bad here. We’re going to pull back to protect defensible structures near Highway 168. You and your crew need to be out of here. Now.”

Joe nods and begins jogging up the hill toward his rig. No sooner has he reached it than, off to the west, in the direction from which he came, a long, whirling roar blots out the stars with a glaring stain of red-orange light. A house is just going up.

From a structure totally involved in flame, a swirl of sparks moves out on the gusty wind, a swarm of burning bees from a hive of fire. Firebrands — those constellations of slowly falling stars, again — nestle onto roofs and into trees. A moment later, someone else’s home flashes skyward to oblivion as well. The process repeats itself, accelerating as it goes. A dragon spewing napalm would be hard-put to outpace the rate of destruction.

As they drive away, Joe remembers ashes on smoking slabs, lone chimneys, ghostly burning and flaring gas. The nightmare he saw in Santa Barbara has come round again. He prays a silent prayer for windless air and more fire crews.

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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