Fierce winds spread fires
Aid pours in: From all over, firefighters arrive to help out
LOS ANGELES — For the firefighters of Northern California, it’s time to repay a debt.
Dozens of fire engines from more than a dozen Bay Area and Wine Country fire departments arrived in ritzy Bel-Air early Thursday to pitch in at the stubborn Skirball Fire — and flames, smoke, sleeplessness and urgency aside, they all said they were mighty glad to be there.
“We’re just repaying the favor,” said Sonoma Valley Fire Department engineer Bryan Carlson. “These guys helped us during our firestorm. Now it’s our turn. It’s what we all do.”
The names on the sides of the engines parked on Moraga Drive at the roped-off entrance to one of Southern California’s toniest enclaves read like a Bay Area atlas. There were red trucks from Richmond, El Cerrito, Geyserville, Glen Ellen, Santa Rosa, Crockett, San Ramon and a half dozen others.
And that was just in that one spot. Those crews were among the hundreds from throughout Northern California — from Lake County and Lake Tahoe to San Francisco and Monterey — that dashed south this week to help fight the firestorms here.
In Bel-Air, all the engines waited in a long line, as vehicles in Los Angeles tend to do, to be dispatched to relieve the Los Angeles fire units that had been working overnight. Some crews had been on duty since Monday. Most were dining on breakfast burritos, a morning foodstuff of choice handed out at such times by volunteers to tired firefighters who aren’t sure which mealtimes they’ve missed.
Mutual aid has been pouring in steadily from not just the north, but all over California and at least eight other states — a welcome contrast, state officials say, to the slower response that came in the initial hours of the Wine Country fires. Fewer than half of the 305 engines requested in the early hours of the Sonoma and Napa county blazes in October responded to the call, although that aid picked up dramatically as the days went on.
“Just two months ago, the city of Los Angeles had firefighters up in Northern California fighting fires, and now we’ve got Northern California firefighters here on this incident. We have neighbor helping neighbor,” Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Office of Emergency Services, said at a news conference in Los Angeles Thursday.
OES records showed that more than 1,000 engines, trucks and other pieces of firefighting equipment had been
sent or driven in from throughout the West by Thursday to aid the firefight. That equipment is accompanied by at least 3,000 mutual-aid firefighters.
Unlike in early October in the North Bay, rains in late October and early November put an end to the functional fire season, making it easier to send crews south without leaving local departments dangerously understaffed, officials said. That fortunate circumstance has firefighters on both ends of the state grateful.
After all, fighting fires and saving lives and property is what they say they are all about. Whether it’s in Santa Rosa or in Bel-Air.
“We’re going to go up in the hills — up there,” said Capt. Jim Kracke of the Glen Ellen Fire Department, pointing at a white-columned Bel-Air palazzo of the eight-figure variety clinging to the hill above.
“We’re going to try and clean this thing up and put it to bed,” Kracke said. “Our main concern is the erratic winds.”
The Santa Ana winds that stream into the Southland unrelentingly, like aspiring actors — the bad-guy kind — are every firefighter’s main concern. On Thursday morning in Los Angeles they were fairly calm, but forecasters were expecting them to pick up and begin blowing embers, those chunks of sizzling debris that cause fires to metastasize. And that’s just what they did as the day went on.
But at the Skirball Fire, Kracke said the blaze “looked bad initially,” but that Los Angeles crews seemed to have gotten the upper hand — for the moment.
“It’s still a wait-and-see game,” Kracke said. “That’s the job.”
El Cerrito Fire Capt. Joe Castrejon said he and his crew drove down overnight on Interstate 5, stopping at a fastfood joint before crawling up the Grapevine like most every other motorist.
The southbound fire trucks could have turned on their red lights and sirens to make better time, but Carlson said fire trucks don’t usually do that on freeways.
“It can cause confusion,” he said, “and there’s already confusion.”