Fighting fire with fire: crews on the front lines
Workers wielding modern tools contain aggressive blazes with controlled burns
GUINDA, Yolo County — The flames would be here soon, thought Mike van Loben Sels as he drove across an undulating, not-yet-blackened ridgeline. Maybe not for 48 hours, or perhaps 96, but soon.
For nearly a week, the County Fire had blitzed the deep canyons and razorback ridges north of Lake Berryessa and west of the tiny community of Guinda. The blaze, sparked June 30 by what authorities described as an improperly installed electric livestock fence, had become California’s biggest inferno amid a frightening early fire season that had crews scrambling.
Now, van Loben Sels crisscrossed the parched landscape in an all-terrain vehicle, plotting Plan B.
He was overseeing the state’s contingency operation, also known as the worst-case-scenario plan. Vanquishing the fire while protecting life and property would, paradoxically, mean setting additional fires on purpose, in order to burn away what are often referred to as receptive fuel beds.
As more destructive wildland blazes ignite across California, firefighting officials say they may have to rely more and more on this aggressive strategy. The tactic, dating back to Native American land management, uses controlled fire that is sparked at times by hand torches and at others by chemical “pingpong balls” that burst into flames soon after being dropped from helicopters.
The burns last week helped crews declare 97 percent containment of the County Fire as of Friday night, after it had destroyed 20 structures, crossed into Napa and Solano counties and racked up more than $35 million in response costs. But the action can be precarious.
“As much preparations as we do, there’s still a risk,” said van Loben Sels, who directed the so-called firing operation for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire. “There can be wind changes or an ember can get thrown over the (containment) line. It only takes one tiny thing for 96 hours of work to be lost in a matter of seconds.
“Sometimes,” he said, “that’s just Mother Nature’s way of saying she’s the stronger one.”
The operation went off on rugged and often inaccessible terrain in a California that is intrinsically fire-prone and becoming more so as the climate warms.
In 2002, 518,000 acres of state and federal land burned. In 2017, that number rocketed to 1.77 million acres — roughly the size of Delaware. The state’s most destructive fire season killed 46 people, destroyed 10,800 structures and cost more than $10 billion.
Hope for a reprieve this year has been scuttled, at least so far. The conditions in recent weeks have been especially dangerous due to warm and dry weather, high winds and vegetation that is highly flammable — some of it living, some dead — in the wake of the five-year drought that ended last year.
As of Friday night, the County Fire had spread across 90,288 acres. Typically, about half that amount of acreage burns by early July across all state land in California.
The explosive conditions — only expected to worsen through the late summer and fall — were on firefighters’ minds as they sought the upper hand with the most effective method they knew: setting two more fires.
The idea was to scorch away trees and brush and grass within their containment lines, blackening the earth while the weather and wind conditions were favorable. That way, the land wouldn’t burn at a more inopportune time, when an ember might catch a gust and breach the line.
The planned blazes are distinct from emergency firing operations, when a trapped crewman in the path of flames lights a fire around himself as a defensive buffer.
“We had to burn out that area because of the inaccessibility and the safety concerns,” said Cal Fire spokesman Chris Elms, of the 5,000 acres south of the main conflagration, near the Putah Creek State Wildlife Area, and a 700-acre patch to the north, near the community of Rumsey on Highway 16.
If that didn’t contain the blaze’s advance, Cal Fire had plans to burn even more land.
Normally the deputy chief overseeing the three-county area of Madera, Mariposa and Merced for Cal Fire, van Loben Sels spends most of the summer traveling from blaze to blaze across the state. He missed the Fourth of July with his three children in Los Banos (Merced County) last year because he was at the Alamo Fire in Santa Barbara County, and this year was no different.
He always hopes the next summer will be slower, but it never is.
Riding the vehicle known as a side-by-side — essentially a tricked-out golf cart bred with a four-wheeler — in Yolo County on July 5, he pointed to a hillside near the fire’s north edge. The fire break, a strip of bare dirt carved out by bulldozers as defensible space to halt the flames’ advance, would go there, he said. And over there, crews would ignite the chamise and grass with flare-like fusees, drip torches and fire pistols, then stand back.
Two days earlier, crews had burned 5,000 acres to stop the fire’s southern spread into Solano and Napa counties. Now they were focused on the north.
Stephen Pyne, a fire historian and professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, said of the preemptive tactic, “When the wind is blowing, you’re just not going to stop a wildfire from growing. Not by putting people on the front, not by using equipment or airplanes. You’ll just get burned out.”
He noted that as firefighters got better at “direct attacks” in recent decades, they used controlled fires less frequently.
“It meant the next fires would be worse because there was more fuel to burn,” Pyne said. “Now we’re seeing state agencies having to use good fires to fight the bad fires more often.”
Plan A was to halt the County Fire’s northern surge at Blue Ridge, near where van Loben Sels was driving. That would have required Cal Fire to send crews into the area armed with hand tools, but the access was dangerous — too steep, with no roads. So officials had to think of a new strategy.
The plan became to burn a thick ring around the County Fire, essentially starving it to death. The agency had 48 to 96 hours to do it before the flames arrived, blown north by the wind.
On the afternoon of July 5, planes and helicopters dropped water and pink flame retardant onto the fire to slow its spread. The measures were stopgaps, buying the agency more time to plan its northern backfire. Meanwhile, bulldozers plowed more than 5 miles of firebreak — a snaking highway across ridges so remote they don’t have names.
Fingers of smoke filled the air, and the whir of helicopters pierced the quiet. Firefighters worked 24-hour shifts, urinating in the brush and sleeping in the dirt under trucks.
“Each fire is its own beast and has its own way of being done,” van Loben Sels said. “The challenge is trying to establish a control line over something you have no control over.”
Containing a wildfire isn’t all adrenaline-fueled action, as depicted in movies like “Only the Brave.” It’s often a slow slog of planning and getting the right signatures. Officials monitor winds, humidity and temperature every half-hour before sparking a backfire.
They might isolate a quarteracre of vegetation, and light it to see how it burns, before embarking on the real burn operation.
That happened the night of July 9 when crews ignited 700 acres just west of Highway 16. They had planned to do it earlier, but the winds flared up.
The crews used fusees, drip torches and fire pistols. If the terrain had been even more rugged, they would have resorted to flame-spitting helicopters and delayed aerial ignition devices, which resemble pingpong balls and are filled with chemicals that ignite on impact, setting small fires. Thousands can be dropped at a time.
Firefighters waited in cleared-out, defensible spaces as the flames burned around them. They used hoses to mop up stray sparks along the containment line.
“You want everything within the line to be black,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science and co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Forestry. “Otherwise the fire can hop over it.”
Even after decades of firefighting, van Loben Sels gets nerves executing a firing plan. One of a firefighter’s greatest fears is doing damage with a controlled burn that was intended to avoid just that.
“The day you lose your nerve,” he said, “you become complacent and shouldn’t be doing this anymore.”