Fire crews watch a sleeping giant

The flames are gone, but that doesn’t mean the work is over for Elwood “Woody” Enos.

A battalion chief with the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, Enos faces weeks more effort to make sure the fire is cold.

He is responsible for such diverse tasks as gauging wind conditions and checking for underground hot spots.

A blaze like the Jesusita wildfire, which threatened thousands of homes, destroyed 77 houses and prompted more than 30,000 people to evacuate, draws thousands of firefighters from across the state.

But when the dramatic flames and smoke clear, evacuations are lifted and the news cameras leave, local firefighters like Enos remain on duty.

They are the first to respond and the last to leave.

“We can be here for weeks, even months, depending on how bad the fire is,” said Fire Capt. David Sadecki, a spokesman for the department. “Even though there’s no smoke on the hill anymore, there’s still a lot going on.”

On Monday, Enos, 49, a 20-year veteran, roved the rugged fire roads of the oak- and brush-covered hillsides northwest of Santa Barbara in his white and blue SUV.

Although the fire was inactive and all but a few hundred people were allowed to return home, this edge of the 8,700-acre blaze was still uncontained.

“What you don’t want is complacency, where people think we are wrapping up and everything’s fine,” he said. “In an instant, the wind could come back, we could get embers and we could just lose it.”

So Enos monitors five radio frequencies and his cellphone. When the radio chatter picks up, he knows to listen for changes in weather, conditions or resources: Fog lifting. Winds shifting. An island of heat or plume of smoke.

Enos first experienced a truly scary blaze as a young firefighter in the 1990 Paint fire, a fast-moving, wind-driven inferno that destroyed hundreds of homes around Santa Barbara.

Although he’s never had any close calls or mishaps, he said he is conscious of the danger. Nearly 30 firefighters and equipment operators were injured in this fire.

His SUV’s back window bears a decal in memory of the five firefighters who died in the 2006 Esperanza fire in Riverside County, and he wears a purple bracelet, also in their memory, that reads “Wildland Firefighter.”

His vehicle reached a ridge top, a perfect vantage point from which to watch the conditions below: slowly dissipating fog, rising temperatures and light winds.

He tied a neon pink plastic ribbon around a 6-foot plastic pipe, leaving it to flap in the wind and serve as a makeshift wind gauge.

He stationed himself next to Capt. Mark Linane Sr., 65, who was in another truck serving as a lookout.

Linane held a pair of binoculars, watching his 28-person hand crew work its way down the hillside with chain saws, axes and shovels, mixing dirt into hot spots, and cutting out and scraping down blackened wood.

“We inherit this fire, and we stick around to put it to bed,” said Linane, a 46-year wildland firefighting veteran. “At the moment, it’s kind of like a sleeping giant. And if the wind wakes him up, it could get pretty nasty again.”

Some efforts to keep the fire from coming back are large scale, like dropping red fire retardant on the brush from helicopters, but other tactics, like “cold trailing,” in which fire crews feel the bare, ashy soil to make sure it is cold to the touch, are hands-on.

Firefighters hope to fully contain the blaze by Wednesday. But their work doesn’t stop, even then.

Weeks from now, aircraft will swoop over with infrared cameras, searching for lingering hot spots.

And months after a fire, recovery crews, which sometimes include geologists and hydrologists, will go through to rehabilitate the landscape.

They will smooth over hastily bulldozed fire lines to leave the earth looking less scarred, clear debris from water channels and spread mulch on steep slopes to hold the soil when the rains come.

On a day like Monday, when the air is clear and there are no open flames, it might seem almost relaxing to be a firefighter, in comparison to the chaos of last week, when the fire descended on dozens of homes.

But Enos, coming up on a week of fighting the fire, said he will not rest until it is history: The Jesusita fire of 2009.

“For now, you just need to know what’s going on: what’s happening to your right, below you and to your left,” he said. “Right now, we’re the safety net.”

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tony.barboza@latimes.com