FIREFIGHTERS LEARN CALIFORNIA LESSONS
Smoke permeates everything. It turns the sky orange and blocks the sun so thoroughly that mid-afternoon shift changes occur under what appears to be the cover of night.
Even after Justin Schwersinske had been back almost three weeks from battling wildfires in California, his possessions still reeked of burned forest.
“I left some gear in my car, in the trunk,” he said. “I need to open all the doorsandthe trunkanddrive arounda bit. Everything smells like a campfire.”
Schwersinske and three other members of the Schertz Fire Department were in the vanguard of the scores of area firefighters who have driven or flown to California in recent weeks, part of a Texas effort to help out.
On the other side of Bexar County, Keith Haycraft, 46, also described days that were completely hazed with smoke and soot.
Firefighters among 60-foot pines hadtokeep bothnearanddistant land
marks in sight to avoid getting disoriented, he recalled about a week after returning to his San Antonio Fire Department routine at Station 53 near Braunig Lake.
“We were carrying at least 45 pounds at altitude, with all our gear on,” Haycraft said. “You have to be in great shape to do that work. You have to be a machine.”
More than 17,000 firefighters in all are deployed in California, where 29 people have died and thousands of structures destroyed in the more than 8,100 wildfires that have burned almost 4 million acres this year.
Schwersinske, Lt. Carl Schultze, Myron Boerger and Mack Melancon shipped out Aug. 22 for a twoweek stint that eventually stretched to three, part of a strike team of five pumper engines and a command unit.
“We convoy out and stay together the entire time,” Schultze said. “When we get there, we are assigned as a strike team to a particular division or branch. It just depends how they have it all set up.”
In his 18th year with the Schertz department, Schultze also shipped to two major fires in California in 2018.
“We’re assigned to a division supervisor, then we get our tactical assignments,” he said. “A division could be miles long. Your coverage area is huge. We’ll be assigned, whether it’s to patrol, or mop-up, firing operations, or any kind of hazard mitigation out there.”
The team members performed all of those chores at one time or another, Schultze said. Their first assignment was the SCU Lightning Complex Fire, about 25 miles east of Oakland, which consumed about 350,000 acres before being contained.
It was an hour’s drive from the base camp — and some firefighters dispatched to the other side of the fire spent a good three hours’ driving just to get to the point where they could begin to approach the blaze on foot.
“We’ll hike miles and miles up and down mountains with our wildland packs on,” said Schwersinske, who has been with the Schertz FD for 10 years. “It’s basically a backpack weighing 40-50 pounds” but with 5 gallons of water on top of that — “all the water you have out there.”
The wilderness aspect of the fires means much more digging and chopping than hose work.
“A lot of what we accomplish is done with hand tools,” Schultze said. “So when we go in, we’ll dig it, we’ll bury it, we’ll scrapeit, we’ll cut it down with chainsaws.”
Haycraft also had to hike an hour or more to actually reach the fire line. His crew stayed in the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino and a Holiday Inn Express near Oakhurst, waking at 4:30 most mornings and driving 50 to 100 miles into pine forests at elevations that reached 8,000 feet.
As elf-described “big ol’ country bumpkin” at 6-2 and 260 pounds, Hay craft knew from his first job out of high school on a cattle and ostrich operation in eastern Bexar County that he was destined to fight fires.
At SAFD, he became a wildland fire specialist and he, too, joined the Texas contingent to California in 2018, fighting the Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
This year, Haycraft and two other SAFD firefighters left Sept. 11 to deliver the stout, four-wheel-drive Ford F550 they had outfitted for brushfire work. They joined 2,000 others from across the nation trying to contain the Creek Fire, which as of this week had consumed 309,000 acres south of Yosemite National Park in the Sierra National Forest.
The Creek Fire now has been called the largest single fire in the state’s history. (The ongoing August Complex Fire in northern California, where many Texans also have been assigned, has burned some 900,000 acres, but it originally started as 38 separate fires.)
In addition to the standard hard hats, fire retardant pants, portable aluminum fire shelters, goggles and two-way radios, Haycraft knew from his first tour of duty to take such things as waterproof notebooks and pens that can write in the rain, extra pairs of shoelaces and duct tape for broken shoes.
“You took as much water as you could carry. AndIneverwent without my white chocolate and macadamia nut energy bars and beef jerky,” he said.
When they worked into the night, hewore a knit capandanextra sweatshirt.
Almost always, they worked with someone serving as a lookout who had a radio, binoculars and vehicle to monitor wind direction and make sure the team never was caught by surprise.
Haycraft and the Schertz firefighters alike expressed admiration for the resources and efficiency of Cal Fire, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“When we arrived, they had a Type 1 incident management team in place. California knows how to set those up,” Schultze said. “They have multiple base camps for a fire of that scale. They have everything from food, to laundry service to shower trailers, to sleeping trailer, toair-conditioned tents. Theypretty much have everything you need at one of those command posts.”
Shifts are 12 or 24 hours, followed by the same amount of down time. On a typical day, a 7 a.m. briefing gets things started.
“When we get up in the morning, we go to briefing, we’ll get our truck in order, and make sure we’re fueled up and watered up,” Schultze said.
The teams then go to “breakouts,” to receive “drop point” locations, line up their vehicles and head there for their final assignments. he said.
“California really has their stuff together in these fires,” Haycraft said. “They have drones, helicopters. They always knew what the fire was doing. That’s why we never really had any emergencies.”
The most dangerous task Haycraft faced was simply navigating a forest floor littered with giant dead trees and covered with decades of decayed bark and pine needles. It seems like a harmless, fine gray dust, but it’s a combustible fuel that can hide subsurface fires.
“You’d learn to put your bare hand on the soil to see if it was hot to the touch,” Haycraft said. “You’d spray water on it, and it may not showany signs of smoke, but you’d have to keep on squirting to turn it into a soupymess just to make sure it was truly out.”
Whenthey return to base camp, it’s basically lights out. The firefighters operate at the whim of incident commanders, who can recall them to the line at any time.
“You never know when you’re going to get your next bit of down time,” Schultze said. “We’re always trying to rest as much as possible.”
“Even if we complete a 24-hour operation period and we get off and have that next day off, the reality is that they could say, ‘I know it’s your day off, but we just had this new start over here. We need all of you to go over there.’ We go where we’re needed, when we’re needed,” he added.
His crewarrived back in San Antonio on Sept. 11 — just as Haycraft’s team and another set of Schertz firefighters were headed out.
“We’re eligible to go back and we’re ready to be recycled, if they need us,” Schultze said.
Aside from the universal camaraderie of a nation of firefighters doingwhat they love, Haycraft said the California duty gives him a sense of perspective when he returns to Texas.
“We hardly ever see anything in Texas as large aswhat theyhave, so this experience just helps me know to not panic when I see something huge. Every little bit of knowledge helps.”