>> FIREFIGHTERS BRAVE THE CONDITIONS DURING ‘INSANE’ NIGHT.
Crews from Sacramento trapped for 20 minutes with fire on both sides
HEALDSBURG >> Firefighter Bryan Farrell knew not to call his wife when he and more than a dozen other firefighters on five engines were trapped halfway down Pine Flats Road on Sunday morning.
The Cal Fire operations chief from Truckee and father of two school-age daughters learned early in his career not to worry her.
But there he was, hunkered down on a wide dirt patch amid an epic firestorm devouring parts of Sonoma County wine country and surrounding him and the crews from Sacramento. A wall of flames raced up a canyon and shot 200 feet high, then spread up the slope behind them.
But it was the wind, that hot, howling, historic-strength wind gusting in parts of the hills north of Healdsburg up to 93 mph that propelled the fire around their temporary hillside refuge.
“Insane,” Farrell said Sunday morning after surviving the scare when an opening in the flames finally emerged. “It was just insane.”
And that was just the start of the unforgettable night for Farrell, one of two chiefs in charge of the firefight and about 700 firefighters who would continue into a 40-hour shift. More rescues and futile stands against the blaze were still to come.
Many of the more than 2,000 firefighters battling the Kincade Fire had fought the Tubbs Fire in 2017 that wiped out two Santa Rosa neighborhoods and killed 22 people, or the Camp Fire in Paradise to the north that killed 88 mostly elderly residents.
But this one was different.
“We usually don’t see wind like this. It usually comes up gradually,” Marin County firefighter Randy Engler said after dousing a fire at the end of Old Barn Road north of Healdsburg on Sunday that claimed a hillstop estate. “But this one was like turning on the switch. It started spotting and then it was all around us.”
This time, they were prepared. The National Weather Service had predicted “historic” winds, and fire officials had warned of “worst-case scenarios.”
Cal Fire had time to plan its attacks and assemble crews and put contingencies in place. PG&E shut off power to tens of thousands of customers that prevented the wind from downing live power lines that could ignite fires, and fire officials ordered epic evacuations of Healdsburg, Geyserville, Windsor — along with all communities toward the coast — that gave firefighters more time to pay attention to the fire and less to saving people.
Neither the Tubbs nor the Camp fires had any of those advantages. Both were wind-driven catastrophes that came with so little warning that, instead of fighting the fire, crews launched into rescue mode.
By Sunday afternoon, with crews from up and down the state bringing bulldozers, engines and hand tools, the towns of Healdsburg, Geyserville and Windsor remained spared. No one had been reported injured.
But that didn’t mean the Kincade Fire didn’t have problems of its own that no amount of planning could alleviate — or that the fire couldn’t take another turn for the worse.
There was no combatting the wind.
“We can knock heat out of fire, we can put out a roof
“We usually don’t see wind like this. It usually comes up gradually. But this one was like turning on the switch. It started spotting and then it was all around us.”
— Randy Engler, Marin County firefighter
on a burning structure,” Farrell said, “but we have no tools that can counter the wind.”
Trapped on the hillside with flames all around him after midnight Sunday, he choked on smoke blowing in through the vents, smelled burning plastic from somewhere on his truck and cringed at the sound of propane tanks exploding all around him.
They waited 20 excruciating minutes for the fire to calm down enough to plow ahead — and on to the next crisis. An hour later, despite multiple fire engines and resources lined up, the fire hopped Highway 128. Embers were flying 2 miles ahead of the flames.
“We try to make every stand our last stand,” firefighter Mark Gradek from the nearby Geyserville Fire District said Sunday afternoon. “The winds aren’t being cooperative.”
About 2:30 a.m. Sunday, Farrell encountered a couple in their 40s who had left their vehicle at a roadblock and hiked into their property off Chalk Hill Road.
“The lady had a garden hose out, but there was no water pressure,” Farrell said. “She was panicked. I told them to climb in the back.”
The bench seat was covered with his gear, so they laid on top as he gave them a ride back to their car.
There are nights like this that every firefighter remembers and will look back on as a symbol of how absolutely perilous their work can be.
These days, they are becoming too frequent. Like many firefighters, Farrell shot some photos of the Kincade Fire from inside his cab early Sunday.
“I learned not to show my wife pictures either,” he said.