By Roger H. Aylworth
The Chico Enterprise-Record (California)
BUTTE COLLEGE, Calif. — Wednesday night, after securing permission to turn the Butte College campus into a massive firefighters' village, Ron Myers, deputy incident commander for the Humboldt Fire, made the school's president a promise.
At the campus administration building, he assured President Diana Van Der Ploeg, "I will make sure this building will not burn."
It was a promise that proved more difficult to keep than anybody could have guessed.
Myers is part of a command team imported to Butte County to manage the Humboldt Fire. He is chief of the North County Fire Protection Authority of San Mateo County.
Tuesday he briefed the Butte College Board of Trustees on the blaze that consumed more than 23,400 acres, and burned to just across the street from the administration building.
Myers told the board he was in Paradise when the conflagration began to make a run at the campus Thursday. While the campus was the command center, all of the hundreds of engines fighting the monster fire were elsewhere.
He called a deputy operations chief and told him to "make sure you get some engines" to the school.
In addition to his vow to Van Der Ploeg, another motivation was avoiding a major firefighting faux pas.
"It's kind of funny. We've only been run out of incident bases once in a while where people have to scoop up and run from fire. It's not really supposed to happen that way."
Fire engines were lined up along Campus Drive to protect the structures, but the college had already taken steps to protect itself.
The day before the flaming assault, college staff had reinforced a bulldozer-carved firebreak around the north side of campus, adding a second dozer-blade of width.
Myers called that action "really, really important."
"You had a lot of buffer around here and that made all the difference."
He said the "two-blade-wide dozer line" pretty much marked the maximum southward extension of the blaze and it pretty much stopped" there.
He said the total acreage grew slightly after that point, but that was mostly due to backfires ignited to stifle further southward progress of the fire.
Myers said the fire was officially declared contained meaning a line had been cut around the blaze's entire perimeter as of Monday.
He predicted that the Humboldt Fire will be declared "controlled" by Thursday. Control means the fire is with- in secure lines that should not be breached.
But he said there will be fire crews patrolling the fire area for weeks before it is officially out.
The trustees were not the only ones getting a special briefing at the command center Tuesday.
State Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Grass Valley, whose district covers Butte County, was also at the incident command center. Also, Butte County Supervisors Jane Dolan and Maureen Kirk, both of Chico, and C. Brian Haddix, the county's chief administrative officer, were on hand for briefings and bus tours of the burned area.
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