‘Just one little sparkler’
Firefighters demonstrate risk from July Fourth fireworks
David Woods lit a sparkler, knelt in the dry grass in Antioch and watched everyone’s favorite July Fourth firework turn the golden fields into an inferno, complete with a plume of smoke.
The sparkler quickly laid waste to a patch of brush off Mountain Ridge Way on Tuesday. Woods is no arsonist, though. He’s a captain for the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District who was demonstrating the danger of fireworks at a training exercise for local firefighters. They quickly put out the blaze.
“It was about 5 to 10 seconds until it grew to a point that if somebody at home had started this, it would be beyond the point of being able to put it out with a garden hose,” said Woods, as firefighters using hoses and a bulldozer doused the flames behind him. “That was just one little sparkler.”
Fire officials are worried that they might be in for a repeat of last year — the most destructive fire season in California history. The brush is already as dry in many places as it was last fall when fastburning blazes killed 41 people and wiped out nearly 9,000 homes and other buildings in Sonoma, Napa and other Northern California counties.
The pressure is on to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. That’s why the Contra Costa Fire Protection District gathered five crews together, including a group from the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District, for a 10-day training on privately owned grasslands.
Their biggest fear are the thousands of fireworks that
will be unleashed on Independence Day in the hot inland communities of Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Sonoma and Napa counties, which have plenty of dry hillsides.
“Fireworks are responsible for literally hundreds of fires in the weeks before and after the Fourth of July,” said Capt. George Laing, supervisor of fire investigations for the Contra Costa Fire Protection District. “When people have handheld sparklers and they give them to their children and they think that that’s the safest and sanest way of celebrating the Fourth of July with a patriotic sense of America, we really want people to think again.”
Fire crews practiced lighting fires in the field next to the Park Ridge housing development and then pounced on the flames. The idea, Laing said, is to judge the wind, terrain and conditions and to test different firefighting techniques so crews are ready when fires break out this summer and fall.
The crews have already fought several small brush fires in the region, and fire officials expect a busy season.
Laing is urging residents to to clear brush and weeds, and create “defensible space” around their homes to help firefighters.
“California is a fire adaptive ecology,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before a fire occurs.”
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is also getting ready, beefing up seasonal firefighting crews in hazard areas and equipping them with new suppression gear, including a fleet of civilian Black Hawk helicopters.
Large-scale tree removal and prescribed burns are planned with new funding from state and federal coffers.
Fire warning systems are also expected to be better across the state. State emergency officials are making sure more people will be alerted by phone of an approaching wildfire, having learned from Sonoma County’s failure to send out Amber Alert-style messages as October’s Wine Country fires bore down.
Notifications had already improved by the time fires broke out weeks later in Southern California.
But the issue right now, fire officials say, is to get past July Fourth without catastrophes.
“The fuels are dry, the winds are up,” said Woods, standing in the field he had just set on fire with a sparkler. “Any old spark out here, as we have just seen, will light this vegetation.”