By Alayna Shulman
The Record Searchlight
REDDING, Calif. — A cigarette butt discarded in a plastic bucket started the fire that destroyed part of a Redding motel Sunday afternoon, fire officials said, and the blaze brought to their attention how dangerously understaffed the Redding Fire Department is.
Craig Wittner, an inspector with the department, said the cigarette butt thrown into a plastic bucket on a wooden deck outside America’s Best Value Inn & Suites on North Market Street started the fire.
Although the bucket usually was partially filled with water, Wittner said investigators don’t believe there was any water in the bucket Sunday.
The resulting fire brought out 17 engines and one truck from firefighting agencies throughout the county.
But even that many fire crews couldn’t safely attack such a blaze, said Redding Battalion Chief Shane Lauderdale, and three firefighters were hospitalized because there weren’t enough firefighters to rotate shifts.
“That’s directly related to the fact that I didn’t have enough people here,” Lauderdale said. “They couldn’t get cooled down quickly enough.”
The three have all since been released from the hospital, Lauderdale said, but the fire still sheds light on the department’s staffing shortages.
“The reality is the fewer people we have, the more we are challenged when we get an incident like this,” he said.
In the past several years, the Redding Fire Department’s operating staff has shrunk by around 28 percent, he said. While most three-alarm fires call for five county engines to assist, Lauderdale said he requested 10 for Sunday’s fire, although that still wasn’t enough for firefighters to share the work safely.
“What really compounds it is the potential for injury that we are starting to see with our firefighters,” he said. “And that’s a huge concern.”
Firefighters rotate shifts to recuperate, but it’s not always enough with a reduced staff, Wittner said.
“For safety measures, we try and monitor how long the crews work at any particular task and rotate people with fresh crews. It reduces the amount of injuries and accidents if we can do that,” Wittner said. “However, you only have so many people to work with; you need quicker rotation, and there’s greater stress on your body.”
Firefighters remained at the fire, which started just before 1:30 p.m., for nine hours, Wittner said. One person stayed at the site all night to monitor the area and make sure it was ready for inspection Monday morning. While no one in the two families staying at the motel was injured, the owner, Ashok “Allan” Patel, 51, said he had to slam shut a hall door to shield himself from the flames.
“I just came and tried to open this door, and flames just shot through,” he said.
Patel and his family have lived at the motel since they bought it in 2001. Another family was staying in the part of the motel that burned, Wittner said, but he hadn’t seen them return to the motel as of Monday afternoon.
John Tasello, disaster services coordinator for Shasta County with the American Red Cross, said the organization will help anyone displaced by the fire, though the Patels opted to stay across the street at the TraveLodge because they know the owners.
Patel had just turned the motel into an America’s Best franchise within the last month, he said. “Now I realize how other people feel when they have a disaster,” he said.
The fire destroyed seven units, a two-car garage, a laundry room and three vehicles, said Patel’s daughter, Nimisa, 23.
A framed picture of Nimisa Patel’s 11- yearold brother in his Little League uniform sat among the few salvaged items the Patels found Monday morning, but all her old videos, photographs and possessions were destroyed.
“My childhood stuff is all gone,” she said.
And while the damage to the structure is estimated at $200,000, not counting the family’s three vehicles and possessions lost in the fire, Patel said he won’t abandon his business.
“Life goes on,” he said. " I can’t just walk off.”
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