Locals battle wildfires
Crew battled forest fires in California for two weeks
Ten state firefighters are welcomed home after spending two weeks battling massive forest fires in California. The 10, all trained in combating woodland fires, helped preserve the 85,000-acre Hoopa Valley Reservation from one of the enormous wildfires that have been ravaging California. Federal authorities estimate 2 million acres have burned on the West Coast.
During two weeks of battling massive forest fires in California, 10 Connecticut firefighters never escaped the smoke.
“We never saw the sun the whole time we were out there. It was completely obscured,” said Rich Scalora, leader of the unit that arrived back in Connecticut on Saturday morning. “All day, every day. When you sleep in your tent, there’s smoke.”
The 10, all trained in combating woodlands fires, helped preserve the 85,000-acre Hoopa Valley Reservation from one of the enormous wildfires that have been ravaging California. Federal authorities estimate 2 million acres have burned.
“The Red Salmon Complex fire, when we left Tuesday, was 110,000 acres — to put it in perspective, that’s one of the smaller fires in California,” Scalora said Saturday. “We have another crew member out on a fire that’s over 800,000.”
Scalora and his team returned late Saturday morning to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s offices in Marlborough, where they’d deployed from on Sept. 4.
After arriving in northwestern California, they lived in tents alongside the Hoopa Fire Department. From 2 p.m. until 2 a.m. each day, they created managed fires ahead of the approaching wildfires to cut off the fuel supply and stop the advance.
“We were watching this fire progress every day,” said Scalora, who said it was rewarding to help protect people on the reservation, where poverty is widespread. “The people there rely completely on the land of the reservation.”
The Red Salmon Complex fire demonstrated the persistence of large, wind-fueled wildfires; it was set off by lightning in late July and is still burning. The reservation’s popula
tion never had to evacuate, but a community nearby had to leave their homes for a week.
Scalora’s unit includes five firefighters hired on special contracts for major disasters as well as a Rhode Island state worker. The other four are full-time DEEP employees, including Scalora, whose regular job is handling hazardous chemical spills in Connecticut.
DEEP officials greeted the
team on its arrival in Marlborough to thank them. The unit includes Jeremy of Roxbury, Allan Waterman of Moosup, James Bryan of Voluntown, Mark Lewis of Shelton, Patrick Marcoux of Sturbridge, Mass., Margo Murphy of Middletown, Alan Olenick of Lebanon, Paul Rego of Winsted and Derek Wnuk of Berlin.
Scalora, 50, has deployed to forest fires in Minnesota, California and Canada in the past.
He said he was eager to be back home; he and his fiancee are scheduled to be married in two weeks. She, too, is a trained wildfire firefighter, and was sent by DEEP to California in an
earlier wave of assistance in July.
“The work they did was absolutely incredible and inspiring,” said Deputy Commissioner Mason Trumbull of DEEP.