COVELO — “Godzilla …” says Jimmye Turner, a man who has spent 25 years fighting forest fires.
“Did you ever see that movie? Well, that”s what it will remind you of when you see that smoke come over the hill,” Turner continues. “I will never cease to be amazed by what a fire can do. When you meet people who fight forest fires they”ll talk about it like they”re hunting a very large and dangerous animal. It”s a surreal experience.”
Each fire, he says, has its own characteristic and the people who fight them speak in terms of what a fire does, using descriptions such as “laid low,” or “ran this way or that.”
Turner, whose regular outfit is the Walla Walla, Wash., Ranger District, served as an information officer for the 16,296-acre Hunter Fire near Covelo in mid-August. He wasn”t a member of the group that ultimately gained 100-percent containment of the blaze, the Southern California Incident Management Team, but assigned to the fire to communicate with the media and public agencies.
Turner explains that firefighting groups are assigned to a specific blaze for 14 days, after which the personnel will be given two days off. At the Hunter Fire, the Southern California group replaced the Arizona Incident Management Team after 14 days. The Southern California team had just completed another 14-day term at a major fire in the Palm Springs area.
This process went on at the Hunter Fire from July 23 when lightning ignited the scrub oak, pine and white fir in the lush and panoramic McCoy Ridge area, the Hunter Fire”s location.
It is one of an uncommonly high number of forest fires in Northern California, which has been under siege throughout this long, hot summer, and one of several fires ignited by the July 23 lightning storm.
“So far it”s been a severe summer,” Turner agrees. “California was getting pounded for a while. We had a bunch of them going here. There have been 17 or 18 major incidents and as people (forest firefighters) get finished here they”re going to move on to other fires.”
It”s a fire, but it could be a war, because it has a great deal in common with the way wars are fought. There are comprehensive battle plans issued daily, a commanding general in the field the incident commander and a Cobra helicopter sends back real-time aerial views of the fire to a flat panel monitor at the spike camp. Using infrared technology (“FLIR” camera) to probe beneath the thick gray smoke, the two-man helicopter crew air attack officer Tony DuPrey and pilot Chuck Taylor also pinpoints the hottest part of the fire. Incident Commander Norm Walker uses this information to reconnoiter his personnel.
“The military uses it (infrared technology) a lot,” says Johnny Miller, the lead information officer. “You can aim a laser at where the hot spots are, so people don”t spend much time looking for them. Before this camera and laser range finder, you had to get into position to see them or you”d have to rely on the smoke.”
Says Walker: “Infrared technology in itself can cut a week off a fire. When I came into this organization in 1972, the only way to find hot spots was to walk around and use your bare hand. When you found something, you dug it out. Now these guys are finding it and telling the crews where it is.”
The Cobra helicopter, itself, is one of nine that were purchased as surplus from the U.S. military for $1 each, Miller says. In addition to the one used by the Southern California firefighting group, there”s one in Redding. Some of the copters are being used strictly for spare parts to keep the others flying. Freshly painted, the Cobra no longer looks like menacing weaponry.
Communications with the helicopter crew usually involves the helicopter pilot establishing a landmark to more closely pinpoint the location of the hot spot, and Walker”s instructions for aerial pictures he needs to see, live and in color, or infrared.
Another critical element of modern-day firefighting used by the Southern California team is a game plan for each day, more specifically a comprehensive 29-page incident plan. The plan includes an instant meteorologist”s report that provides the kind of wind conditions and speed, heat, moisture, etc., crews will be dealing with each day. A fire behavior analyst will take this into account in recommending personnel deployment, as well as what each division of the firefighting team will be dealing with under prevailing conditions.
“If the weather changes, the fire changes,” says Turner.
The report also includes a map of the fire, a close recording of man hours expended and equipment used, and on-site frequencies and cell phone numbers of firefighters.
A contractor, Northstar Fire Incident Management Support, compiles the report.
“It”s a great amount of integrating information and people,” Turner says of the incident plan. “Before Northstar a group of firemen would descend on a place and literally take over a copy machine at some office and do the report by hand. We”d have to work till 2 or 3 a.m. And it took six or eight hours. Now, this report takes about three hours beginning to end.”
The fire”s spike camp and command post is located in the tiny town of Covelo, population 1,100. The spike camp is a portable village where you”ll find just about anything needed to fight, track and compute a fire. There”s a safety office, a medical office, an information technology office to keep computers running, a commissary, a lunch room, even an ecological environment protection office, which works to ensure that water contaminated by use in fighting the blaze doesn”t run into the Eel River, which flows in the vicinity.
In front of one portable trailer there”s a ponderous stack of used batteries.
“We go through a lot of batteries and cell phones,” Turner explains. “… And every firefighter will go through three gallons of drinking water a day.”
The firefighters subsist on two warm meals and a brown bag lunch daily. They sleep on the ground in small tents for their 14-day tour of duty. Turner estimates he”ll spend a cumulative month sleeping on the ground each year and confided that once in his years of firefighting he and the group he was working with spent 89 consecutive days under such conditions.
What sort of men and women choose this kind of career?
“That”s hard to say,” says Turner. “A fire call is different for everyone who answers the bell. Some people see it as a way to make money, some see it as a way of helping out their country, others as a way of doing something they really enjoy doing they like the challenge, the physical aspect of it. I kind of bounce around between all of these reasons, myself.”
Typical of a forest firefighter with a lot of years in the ranks, Turner has had the experience of being trapped in a fire and overcome by smoke inhalation. But also speaking in terms that are typical of veteran firefighters of his ilk, as soon as he had recovered he went right back to work.
There are yearly casualties, but to a degree the dangers have been lessened by improved safety measures. Each firefighter has carried a portable fire shelter since 1988.
“There are safety officers at each fire,” Turner adds. “Their job is make sure that everything is done in a safe manner whether aerial stuff or on the ground, they inspect everything.”
Watching the billows of smoke rising on the west edge of the Hunter Fire, Turner observes,
“Fires are not all bad. Fire is an important part of the ecosystem. Things grow better after a fire.
Ashes go back into the soil as nutrients and minerals and it becomes healthy and more vibrant. Animals will come back into the area, because ashes are a natural flea, tick and lice repellent. The land is remarkable at healing itself and it”s a wonderful thing to see.
“You come back here in a year or two and you”d be surprised how well it”s doing.”
Contact John Lindblom at jlindblom@record-bee.com.
