Lodi firefighters fight fire with fire
Dressed in yellow fire-retardant pants and jackets — lighter and easier to move in than their usual turnout work for urban structure fires — firefighters from two Lodi Fire Department engines and one Liberty Fire District engine conducted their annual wildland fire training behind the Lodi Wine and Business Center on Tuesday afternoon.
“Sometimes in a wildland fire, we use fire to fight fire. We create a back burn, eliminating fuel ahead of the main body of the fire,” said Lodi Fire Battalion Chief Michael Alegre.
While two firefighters used drip torches to drop a burning mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel along a patch of dried grass near a fence, two more firefighters used wildland hoses — smaller and more maneuverable than hoses used in structure fires — to prevent the fire from spreading too far from the fence or engulfing trees or power lines.
“When you arrive on scene, sometimes power lines have dropped and caused the fire,” Alegre said. “Other times, the fire will drop the lines and guys will step on them and get electrocuted.”
The firefighters continued along the fence, some of them using shovels and large rakes to clear away brush and bring soil to the top to create a “scratch line” and stop the fire’s path to more fuel, just as they would in a real wildland fire.
“Sometimes, you can walk for miles on end on a fire line, just scratching line,” Alegre said.
Although Alegre said Lodi does not have many wildland fires, the fire department occasionally responds to fires in lots and river bottoms, many of them starting in homeless encampments, and the Lodi Lake Nature Area is another area they pay close attention to.
“That’s our biggest concern, down by the river and the nature area. A brush fire can spread to houses pretty quickly if we don’t get there in time, so we keep a close eye on that area,” Alegre said.
As part of the Office of Emergency Service’s Mutual Aid System, Alegre said, the Lodi Fire Department could be called upon to send a four-man team with an engine as part of a five-engine strike team from the county to anywhere in the state at a moment’s notice, so they train regularly to keep their skills up to par.
“I’ve been down all the way to San Diego, and some guys here have been out of the state,” Alegre said. “Part of being part of the OES system is that you have to have a team ready to go anywhere in the state, and leave in 20 minutes.”