By Robert Salonga
The Contra Costa Times
CONCORD, Calif. — The scenario: It’s a hot, semi-windy day, and a wildland fire is quickly consuming surrounding grasslands. There’s a bunker that could be quickly under siege by the flames unless swift action is taken.
The mission: Save the structure from the fire. Weapon of choice? More fire.
Those were the conditions of a training exercise conducted by the Contra Costa Fire District on Monday, when firefighters practiced laying down protective fire lines around long-abandoned bunkers at the weapons station, known as “Bunker City.”
The training is essential as the number of wildland fires in California has risen precipitously, from 215,412 acres burned in 1998 to an all-time high of approximately 1.6 million acres in 2008, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. An ongoing three-year drought has been directly linked to a recent spike.
A similar, more expansive simulation was held in Camp Parks in Dublin on Wednesday and Thursday in what might be considered the Super Bowl of wildland fire training sessions. The Army base was the site of a massive exercise involving 450 firefighters from agencies across all nine Bay Area counties and some from out of state, including the Contra Costa Fire District and Alameda County Fire, along with San Jose, Fremont, Montecito, San Francisco, Oakland and Reno fire departments.
Whereas urban firefighters are accustomed to directly attacking structure fires, Alameda County Fire Battalion Chief Jeff Ramsey said wildland firefighting takes longer, is more drawn out and can often require a longer-term strategy. That could mean a less-direct approach that may let the fire burn while firefighters take a more protective focus, such as creating fire breaks and lines to cut a fire off from eventually threatening property.
At the Concord weapons station, with Engine 381 out of Bay Point following, Contra Costa firefighter Charles Stark uses a fuel torch to light some of the grass while other firefighters stamp out flames and embers he leaves behind. In his wake, crackling, popping and sizzling sounds can be heard as the grasslands wilt in the approaching flames.
“Don’t come off the line,” shouts Contra Costa fire Capt. Richard Sonsteng, warning that a wayward line could actually spark more fire rather than prevent it.
The heat from the fires Stark is setting quickly rises past 300 degrees and then 400 degrees, thick smoke quickly fills the air, and soon, it’s impossible to see anything around.
Despite the appearance of things, everything is under control for now there’s no approaching wildland fire. But if there were, these torched grasses would be the end of the line for the blaze. There’s no more fuel in the scorched grass.
“We’re using fire to fight fire,” said Contra Costa fire Capt. William “Sparky” Ericson. “It’s not traditionally something we do.”
The burn tactic is seldom used in Contra Costa County, where urban structure fires and mild grass fires are the norm. But because ConFire like neighboring fire districts in Alameda and San Mateo counties is increasingly relied upon to provide aid at out-of-area wildland blazes, there has been a push in recent years to get all firefighters up to speed on fighting the larger conflagrations.
On the scorched hills of Camp Parks, firefighting crews from throughout the Bay Area were engaged in chasing fast-moving flames, dragging hose lines up steep hills and doing the backbreaking work of digging fire lines with Pulaski axes and McLeod rake hoes.
“This is realistic, it’s real fire, and these are real-life situations,” said Ramsey of the Alameda County Fire Department.
Ramsey said the training is a chance to coordinate with firefighters from neighboring agencies, many of whom they’ll see again on the same strike team in a mutual aid deployment. It also gives firefighters who usually work in urban environments a chance to sharpen their wildland skills.
As recently as five years ago, local fire officials said, it was relatively rare when an out-of-county fire grew to the point where the state Office of Emergency Services called Bay Area firefighters to lend a hand. Nowadays, local fire districts get that call as many as a dozen times a year, said Contra Costa battalion chief Dave George.
“With the advent of these superfires, there’s a growing need for massive cooperation,” said George, speaking from a command post in Camp Parks. “We really can’t think of ourselves as our own little county. It’s sobering to think that year after year, these big fires have become more and more common.”
A recent study, headed by the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, used Cal Fire data and found that the confluence of flammable vegetation and hot and dry conditions was increasing in the Western United States.
According to the report, while areas along the Southern California coastline have long experienced bouts of wildland fires, researchers expect wildfire hot spots to begin rising up near the California-Nevada border.
Cal Fire partly attributed the upward trend in fires to the many homes that have sprouted up in previously uninhabited wildland areas north of Sacramento and inland Southern California. That has put people at risk, since many of the affected areas are ones where wildland fires were once nature’s way of clearing out brush and other fuels, said Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant. The situation also has put an increased burden on state firefighting agencies to clear brush through techniques such as controlled burns, but the state’s so large, it’s hard to keep up, he said.
So when a wildland fire inevitably occurs, the need for mutual aid from agencies throughout the state has become increasingly vital.
“We exercise it so often,” said Berlant, who said his agency made about 1,000 mutual aid calls in 2008. “It takes all that to handle these natural disasters, contain them quickly, and protect people.”
Most recently, both Contra Costa and Alameda County firefighters were sent to fight the Jesusita fire that burned in May in the Santa Barbara area, scorching more than 8,700 acres and threatening 500 homes. Other fires that required Bay Area help include the Angola fire that ravaged South Lake Tahoe in June 2007.
What was once rare is now an everyday reality for local firefighters, who must be ready to go, said San Ramon fire Capt. Don Armario.
“We’re always on call,” Armario said.
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