As flames raced, crew was trapped

When firefighters square off against a blaze, there can come a moment when the enemy gains control, when the combination of wind and flame and tinder overmatches the hoses.

For the Corona Fire Department, that moment came at 9:23 a.m. Saturday, 22 minutes after the first 911 call reported a small brush fire in the vegetation off the 91 Freeway.

It was a distress call from Engine 5, the first truck to attack the blaze. Using a tactical frequency, the captain of the four-person crew -- three men and a woman -- cried out to battalion chief Mike Samuels, stationed on the freeway above:

“We’re completely surrounded. Send help.”

From his position, Samuels could see the flames tearing through the brush toward homes, pushed by 20 mph gusts of Santa Ana winds, the fire intensifying as it struck what he called “heavy fuels” -- 8-foot-tall patches of oak and chaparral.

“I’ve been in the fire service 21 years, and I’ve never seen a fire move out that fast,” Samuels would say later.

Other trucks were attacking the fire and one of them, Brush One, was heading to protect homes. Samuels decided to divert it to rescue the crew of Engine 5.

As Brush One fought its way through black smoke and heat toward the encircled firefighters, Engine 5 stayed on the radio, awaiting help and using its training to survive. A common tactic in such a situation is for firefighters to “get in the black” -- position themselves and their truck in an area that has already burned. To help, Samuels called in helicopter water drops.

The extrication of Engine 5 took 15 to 20 minutes, by Samuels’ estimate, and soon the four crew members were heading to hospitals for treatment of minor burns and smoke inhalation. They were all released that day. It was, in firefighter parlance, a “near miss” -- a narrow escape from death or serious harm.

The distress call signaled a “pivotal moment” in a fire that would soon spread to Yorba Linda, Anaheim Hills, Brea and Diamond Bar, destroying hundreds of homes, said David Waltemeyer, chief of the Corona Fire Department.

“We realized this was going to be a major incident that’s probably going to last us several days,” he said.

Motorists spot blaze

On that bright and clear Saturday, the first in a flurry of 911 calls came into the Corona Fire Department’s dispatch center at 9:01 a.m.

Motorists on the 91 had spotted a small fire right next to the freeway east of the Green River Road offramp. It was about 100 feet outside Corona city limits in Riverside County territory thick with tinder-dry vegetation.

Normally, Engine 5 -- stationed about two miles from the fire -- would have responded first, but it was busy on a medical call at the Green River Mobile Home Park.

At the next station over, Engine 3, about five miles from the blaze, took the call. Firefighters traveled west down the 91 and arrived at 9:08 a.m.

The chief said that freeway traffic, which became gridlocked later in the day, did not prove a serious hindrance for the first trucks. “We try to get units in within six minutes,” Waltemeyer said, adding that a seven-minute response time in such a situation proved good.

Engine 5 quickly cleared its medical call and arrived at the fire with its four firefighters at 9:11 a.m. As it happened, they were the first to position themselves to attack what would become known as the Freeway Complex fire. By 9:20 a.m., the Corona Fire Department had 24 firefighters and six trucks on the scene, pouring forth from six stations in all. By then, the fire had taken root beneath the freeway, climbed into Chino Hills and engulfed scores of acres. Soon firefighters from Orange and Riverside counties were racing up to join the effort.

In a battle for seconds and minutes, did Engine 5’s delay in getting to the scene allow the fire to spread? “I tend to think not,” Waltemeyer said. “Regardless of one or two minutes, it was a very rapidly developing situation, a very overwhelming situation.”

Compounding the difficulty, he said, was that the first 911 callers could not give dispatchers the exact location of the blaze. Firefighters could not isolate it until they arrived.

“It was an explosive situation,” Waltemeyer said. “There are flammable gases that emit from vegetation, similar to vapors from flammable liquid, and when conditions are just right these gases ignite. It’s a sound similar to a jet engine or a freight train coming through, and that’s exactly what happened. It just roared off to the northwest.”

The blaze soon spread through the Santa Ana River bed, jumped the 91 and climbed into Anaheim Hills. As the fire raged, residents in affected neighborhoods spoke of the homeless people who live in the wooded area by the river and sometimes build campfires.

Waltemeyer discounted a campfire as the origin of the blaze. Investigators, he said, “pretty much believe it was something coming off the highway, off a vehicle or something. Probably something mechanical, like a hot part or exhaust. That’s not confirmed yet.”

The distress call from Engine 5 came about the same time as firefighters realized that the fire was out of control. By then, Samuels said, “I was no longer in a mode to extinguish the fire. It was purely defensive.”

The fire, he said, decided when and where it wanted to go.

Rising to challenge

Days after the fire was finally contained, having scarred 30,305 acres in four counties and destroyed or damaged 314 homes, charred hoses abandoned by Engine 5 lay on a dirt road below the 91 Freeway. Samuels, the battalion chief, believes the crew of Brush One saved their colleagues’ lives.

“They fought a significant amount of fire to reach the crew,” Samuels said. “The guys in Brush One, they’re heroes.”

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christopher.goffard@latimes.com