The Million Year Romance
Dragon in the Land:
People and Mega-fire in California
- Episode One:
Lightning and Smoke - Episode Two:
Remembrance of Fires Past - Episode Three:
Red Ball Sun - Episode Four:
The Running Battle - Episode Five:
Evacuations and Destinations - Episode Six:
Maze of Chaos - Episode Seven:
The Dragon in the West Village - Episode Eight:
Fire Camp - Episode Nine:
Man-dragon - Episode Ten:
Percent Contained - Episode Eleven:
Smart Work, Dumb Luck - Episode Twelve:
What To Do Before The Nightmare Comes True — Again
What's New
Writing
Dragon in the Land:
People and Mega-fire in California
by Howard V. Hendrix
Episode Six:
Maze of Chaos
In the Bald Mountain Fire truck that swept past the Shaws and everyone else in the stopped traffic on Highway 168, Captains Allyn Bell and Cam Donnahoo wonder just what kind of mess they’ve gotten themselves into as they make their way through the Gooseberry road system.
It was supposed to be an easy, show-the-crisp-uniform-and-shiny-engine kind of day. Then the dry lightning storm swept through and all hell broke loose.
This isn’t even their service area. Sure, their district has mutual and instant aid agreements with other nearby fire departments. Along with Bald Mountain’s Water Tanker 63, their Type I engine can be automatically dispatched to structure fires, wildland fires, and large-scale motor vehicle accidents. While en route to Gooseberry, however, their engine and the water tanker have already been split up, which means that no other local or more appropriate resources are immediately available.
Bell and Donnahoo see the red-coned flashlights guiding them into the staging area next to the Gooseberry command post. A woman in a white Fire Chief’s helmet strides toward them. Her name is Penman and she’s the incident commander for the Gooseberry area.
“I know you volunteers usually do structure protection,” she says. “But this is a huge event and I need you on Medical/Fire as a first-in unit. This isn’t going to be an easy one at any rate.”
“Oh?” asks Bell.
“Electricity’s out. What little illumination you might have counted on will be pretty much gone now. We just got a call for a medical emergency, right up here where Gooseberry climbs toward the top of the ridge and becomes Loper Valley Road — we think. Here’s the address number, but it might not be much help.”
“Why’s that?” asks Donnahoo.
“Besides being narrow, steep, very rough, and unpaved, the roads and their addresses pretty much have no rhyme or reason to them,” Penman says, spreading out a map and holding it into the beam of her flashlight. “Gooseberry and Pennyroyal split off from each other and come back into each other at odd intervals. At points one or the other of them changes its name to Lynx Lane. Parts of all three have brush and scrub trees arching all the way over the road.”
“Somebody local to Auberry might do better with this,” Donnahoo suggests.
“Don’t I know it, but you’re at least more acquainted with the area than the Utah and Nevada crews that’ll be coming in. You’re the only ones I can spare, at the moment. The rest of my crews are on their way toward this area, here — between where Loper Valley tees into Nicholas, and down here where it hooks up with Ashlan Avenue. We’ve got to get crews in to stop the main fire front there, or we won’t be saving anything clear to Lodge Road. Our tactical radio channel is TAC 8. Keep an open line. Good luck.”
The trip through Gooseberry is everything Chief Penman promised — and worse. Given their lane-and-a-half width, their missing street signs and incoherent address numbers, the roads back here would be a chore to navigate even in midday with no traffic. With power out and citizens fleeing in private vehicles through the night, Bell and Donnahoo just hope they don’t become another accident statistic.
When they get to what should be the location of the medical emergency, there is nothing — no house, not even a barn.
“Now what?”
“Let’s push on a little farther,” Donnahoo says, looking at the map. “The top of the ridge is still a ways away, I think. The place has got to be around here somewhere.”
Perhaps a quarter of a mile further on, a young woman with a baby on one hip steps out into the road, waving them down frantically.
“My husband’s in that barn there! He heard about the evacuation! He was just trying to salvage some of his stuff! He was in a hurry — and somehow a fire started round back! One of the floorboards broke and his leg went through! I couldn’t pull him out! Then I couldn’t get to him on account of the smoke!”
Bell and Donnahoo back their engine in, doing their size-up of the situation in the process. Sure enough, the barn is at least partially involved in fire, and that blaze is threatening to spread to the surrounding brush and oaks. Donnahoo grabs a fire axe and Bell pulls a Halligan tool off their rig. Each of them snatches up his self-contained breathing apparatus, or SCBA.
Bell sniffs the air before he dons his SCBA. He detects a pungent, chemical scent.
“Smell that?”
“Yeah,” Donnahoo says, nodding. “Meth lab?”
“Smells like it.”
They don their SCBAs and fire helmets. As they approach the structure, they see that the woman has put the baby down.
“I think he’s still in the second room on the left.”
The firefighters nod. The woman sets to work frantically — switching back and forth from using a duff hoe called a McLeod and a wildland firefighter’s axe known as a Pulaski — trying to keep the fire from moving into the surrounding landscape. Bell and Donnahoo switch on the air from their tanks. They get down on their knees and then down on their bellies, crawling along low beneath the hot smoke billowing out of the burning structure.
Bell keeps his left hand and arm in contact with the wall, while with his right he sweeps his axe handle out in arcs across the floor, searching in the dark for obstructions and obstacles. Donnahoo does the same with the wrecking-bar Halligan tool in his right hand, while with his left hand he holds on to Bell’s boot-clad left foot. Together they keep in constant communication informing each other of corners and doorways.
Before long they hear the sound of a man moaning in pain. When they reach him, he begins gasping out, again and again, about how he thinks his right leg is broken. Disentangling that limb from the hole in the floorboards, while at the same time trying to keep below the smoke and close to the floor, is not easy on any of them, but at last it’s done.
Threading nylon straps under the downed man’s arms and shoulders, Bell and Donnahoo manage to reverse their route in — Bell’s right hand and arm on the wall this time. Bell wishes he had more hands as he and Donnahoo try to keep hold on their fire tools while at the same time they drag the injured man along the floor. After what seems like forever they are back through the doorway, then through the next room, and then out the main entrance at last.
Once they’re clear, Donnahoo runs for a backboard and splints to immobilize the man and his broken leg. The downed man (and presumed meth cooker) is in shock from his injuries, and fading in and out of consciousness. They lift him, carry him, and slide him onto the long seat at the back of their rig’s extended cab.
The man’s wife, meanwhile, has unfortunately begun to lose her battle to prevent the meth lab fire from spreading into the surrounding landscape. The entire building and several surrounding trees are soon engulfed in flame.
“Ma’am, it’s no use,” Donnahoo says. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“But my car’s back behind the barn!”
“Leave it,” Bell says. “There’s no one else around the property? No other children or adults?”
“No.”
“Then you can ride with your husband and us.”
By the time they’re rolling, the fire is rolling too. As they come around a tight turn, they see that it is sweeping up the dell beyond the barn — right toward where brush and trees make a highly combustible canopy clear over the road. Bell glances at Donnahoo.
“Go for it.”
Bell guns the engine. The fire is coming on fast, spreading with the swiftness of dragon’s wings — and the truck seems to plunge uphill with almost painful slowness. The canopy of bull pine, oak, and scrub begins to catch fire as they pass under it. In the rearview mirror, the canopy of trees bursts into an arc of intensely orange flame, but they’re through it.
Donnahoo gives Bell the thumbs up, and both smile tiredly. Donnahoo radios in to say that they are transporting an injured person, and gives as best he can the location of the fire that began in the meth lab.
Their triumph is short-lived. Moments later, although they are well away from the fires, they are also well and truly lost.
They are stopped at an intersection of eroded gravel and graded roads, when headlights appear. A caravan of three vehicles pulls up.
“You boys looking for a way out of this rat’s maze?”
“That’d be a help,” says Cam Donnahoo.
“Saw you go in earlier. I can get you out to Lodge Road.”
“Thanks, Mister — ?” Allyn Bell asks.
“I’m Pete Shaw. My grandkids and their neighbors are in the other cars. Long story, but here we are.”
“Thanks, Mister Shaw, but we’ve got an injured person to transport.”
“CalFire and Forest Service were setting up a fire camp at Sierra High when I left. Helicopters — you know, Life-Flight, all that.”
“That would be a help. If there’s enough light at the camp – and the winds aren’t oo bad – “ Bell begins.
“— they might be flying patients out, even at night,” Donnahoo says, completing his thought.
“Lead on, Mister Shaw,” Bell says. “We’ll be right behind you.”
All episodes were originally published in 2007 as a fire education series in the Mountain Press, the Sanger Herald, the Snowline Tiimes, and their sister publications covering the central California portion of the foothills and Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Spears of God
Howard's latest book—Spears of God—is in stores and online. Check it out today.
