The Million Year Romance
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 Eight:
Fire Camp
Pete Shaw and his oldest grandson Todd, his daughter-in-law Jen and their two middle grandkids, Tom and Jen’s neighbors and their three kids, and Bell and Donnahoo’s Bald Mountain fire engine all pull into the parking lot at Sierra High in a four-vehicle caravan.
At the edge of the lot, by the glare of the football field’s lights, Pete sees Mary over near the gym, with Tom and Jen’s two youngest — Melissa on her right hand, Jeremy on her left. Has the power been restored? Pete wonders, seeing the lights. Or is everything here just on back-up generators?
Once the caravan has pulled in, Pete and Todd get out of Pete’s truck and join Mary and Jen and the rest in hugs all around.
“Tom isn’t with you?” Mary asks.
“He was working late and didn’t hear about the fires,” Jen said. “By the time he left Clovis, the Highway Patrol had shut down 168 above Academy. Pete just got to our place when Tom called.”
“On the phone I told him to get a hotel room back in town and wait it out,” Pete says, “while we take care of everything up here.”
“Friant and Auberry roads are both closed to everything but emergency vehicles, too,” Mary says with a nod. “We already knew that. Well, at least Jen and the kids are all together with us.”
“Thanks to Pete. He was a big help getting us out the door and up the back roads — to here.”
“Glad it worked out,” he says. “I’m going to go check up on those firefighters who came in with us, and the injury case they were transporting. Want to come along, Will?”
His ten year old grandson, who is fascinated by all things firefighter, nods eagerly. Pete spots in the distance — under the football field’s lights — the two Bald Mountain firefighters, Bell and Donnahoo, helping paramedics load a man with a broken leg off a gurney and into a helicopter waiting on the football field. The chopper pilots are risking medevac night flights, it seems.
Together Pete and Will walk in the direction of the field. They traverse a space that feels like the midway of a fairground or carnival at night, only all the acts involve firefighting, evacuations, and emergency services.
A small city of tents, filled with logistics and support services, runs in impromptu alleyways across every open space around the school. Ambulances and fire engines from Cal Fire, Forest Service, Fresno County, and four volunteer fire companies are staging out of the Sierra High and nearby Sierra Oaks Senior Center parking lots. Motors are running. People in fire helmets, heavy boots, and yellow Nomex wildland gear are shouting and gesturing.
By the time Pete and Will reach the edge of the football field, the helicopter has spun up and is lifting off. Pete overhears Bell and Donnahoo, talking to a Battalion Chief about the injured man. Pete gathers that the man started a fire while trying to salvage “product” from his meth lab.
The Chief gives a weary shake of the head and sends the men off to see a dispatcher near the main base tent. As they move away, the Chief calls after them, suggesting they try to get some sleep when they can. It’s well after midnight and tomorrow will be a long day, he says.
Pete suddenly recognizes that it’s Battalion Chief Tolmie he’s been listening to — the same man who did the fire inspection at his house.
“Excuse me, Chief Tolmie,” he says. The Chief turns. “I don’t know if you recognize me — ”
“Shaw, isn’t it? From Twin Ponds?”
“That’s right. I just drove the back roads into and out of the Gooseberry area to get my grandkids and their neighbors out — ”
“Yes, Donnahoo and Bell mentioned something about that,” Tolmie says. He nods to the boy, who glances shyly at his feet. “And this is one of those grandkids, I presume?”
“Right.”
“Should I see to it that you get a medal — or that you get arrested?” Tolmie asks, giving him a frowning look that slowly changes to a tired smile. Now it’s Pete’s turn to glance down at his feet. “Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, eh, Mister Shaw? You’re lucky to be alive. We’ve already lost a family of four – caught in their car in a burnover behind our lines. Normally I’d turn you over to law enforcement, or at least the Public Information Officer, but my PIO seems to be MIA at the moment.” Tolmie turns toward the Logistics base tent. “We can talk while we walk. Well? What did you see? What do you have to report?”
“More fires snaking up hillsides below Gooseberry than I’ve ever seen. It’s moving through the treetops.”
“Crown fire.”
“Right. I even saw things that looked like fire tornadoes.
“Flame vortices.”
“I suppose so. I never thought it could get this bad.”
“Never has before,” Tolmie says. “Low-intensity fires regularly cleaned out the understory of the western forests, burning up what was dead and down and overcrowded — until a century ago.”
Pete and Will both nod as they follow the Battalion Chief toward the base tent.
“What happened then?” Will asks.
“Full fire suppression became the policy. Zero tolerance for fire. After too many decades of that, though, the fuel has built up. The fires that sweep through the west now are anything but ‘low intensity.’ Throw in more severe drought, and more severe thunderstorms when storms do come — due to human-induced global warming, or natural cycles, or whatever — and you get fire events like this one.”
A helicopter with an enormous bucket hanging from its belly sweeps past overhead, followed a moment later by the deep rumble of an air attack fire bomber, higher overhead. They stop outside the base tent.
“Things look really busy,” Pete says.
“Too busy,” Tolmie says. “Given my ‘druthers I’d have a different command structure set up. Incident Command Post, Staging Area, Fire Camp, Helibase, and Logistics here — I’d prefer them serving their different functions in different places. Spread out, not all bunched together like this. Especially not with a major evacuation center practically in the middle of it.”
“Why here, then?”
“We didn’t have much choice, given the nature and number of incidents, and the local topography. Incident coordination for the Valerie to Gooseberry fire line, on what’s now being called the Corlew fire, has been turned over to us. We’re playing backup dispatch center for fires in Jose Basin and Shaver West Village. All more unorthodox than I’d like, but there it is.”
“How is it . . . going?”
“Take a look,” Tolmie says. They stop beside him in the entrance to the long, brightly-lit pavilion tent that serves as command, control, and communications hub of the larger fire camp.
Over radios and throat mikes, dispatchers and tacticians are receiving calls from and making calls to incident commanders, air attack units, police, sheriff, highway patrol and ambulance services. District, local, tactical, air-to-ground, and command channels are all abuzz with activity. Meteorologists drone reports on conditions. Voices are so interwoven with crackle, tone-outs, and scanner-static that, from the entrance, it’s hard to tell where the human parts of the process end and the electronic parts begin.
Three television monitors, their sound muted, sit on wheeled carts on three sides of the main tent, one monitor tuned to The Weather Channel, the second to local news, the third to CNN, all of them featuring Special Report footage.
The Weather Channel footage shows satellite shots and Doppler radar of cloud passage during the previous day’s dry lightning storms. The storm’s lightning-strike counts, indicated by white triangles, are overlaid atop most of California and western Oregon.
Local news cameras feature shots taken at sunset showing column after column of thick smoke rising into the twilight, grey pillars whose fiery bases become more obvious with the fall of darkness. Snakes of flame wind their ways across grassland and up hills, bursting into tornadic fire amid brush and trees.
Then CNN shows an infrared shot from a satellite in near earth orbit. Within moments The Weather Channel and the local news outlet are carrying the same image: an immense shape of fire sprawled across the west.
“That’s how it’s going,” Tolmie says. “The only hope the forecasters are holding out is some calming in the wind. That should last until another line of monsoonal flow comes through during the next day or so. If we’re lucky there’ll be more moisture in the next wave — and not just more lightning. Until then, what you’re looking at is what we’re up against.”
Pete and Will stare at the screens. On one screen, the triangles that indicate where lightning has struck — especially over the higher elevations — are so thick they look like an armor of overlapping white scales. On a neighboring screen is the same general shape, only made of smoke and fire.
“They look like a dragon,” Will says.
“Yes, they do, now that you point it out. A dragon made of dragons. Nearly every triangle there is a fire in the wildland. No one has the staffing for a disaster of this magnitude. We’re stretched beyond thin. There’s nowhere to divert resources from — at least nothing from less than two hundred miles away. We’ve got crews coming in from Nevada, Utah, even Montana.”
A dragon made of dragons. With a jolt, the words remind Pete of something his brother Joe, the physicist, once told him: “A fire exhibits self-similarity across widely different scales of measurement.” He didn’t quite understand it at the time. Looking at the TV image of a fiery dragon tattoo sprawled across the western end of the continent, and thinking of the likeness of the lightning-strike graphics to an armor of triangular scales, Pete Shaw begins to understand.
“Is there something I can do to help?”
“Lend a hand to the Red Cross and Emergency Services people at the evacuation shelter over in the gym. They’re way too short-staffed to handle something like this. Now, if you’ll excuse me. . . .”
Pete and Will nod. Tolmie dons a headset. As Pete and his grandson turn to go, the Battalion Chief calls after them.
“Oh, and Mister Shaw, no more freelancing behind the roadblocks, okay? Son, you make sure he doesn’t — right? We don’t need any more burnover victims.”
They promise. He and Will walk toward the gym. Even before they get within fifty feet they can see people waiting in line to get inside.
“The house, gone! The horses, gone! Even the dog!” cries a woman before collapsing into great, racking sobs.
Pete hustles his grandson away, wanting to shelter him from such scenes. Even as he does, he knows he will not succeed. The gym must already be near capacity, yet more evacuees are coming all the time. Too many of them, he suspects, will arrive already bearing the burden of similarly horrific stories.
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.
Spears of God
Howard's latest book—Spears of God—is in stores and online. Check it out today.
