Firefighting Made Simple: Hit It Fast, Keep It Small

In the 16th-floor war room, Jean Rodgers began diverting firefighters and aircraft to the most threatening of the blazes feeding on the sizzling California afternoon.

The state Department of Forestry was running out of everything, forcing the Emergency Command Center chief to reroute some of the pumpers, hand crews, helicopters and fixed-wing air tankers to the wildfires that threatened homes and humans rather than just undeveloped land.

“Anything that goes beyond the initial attack dispatching has got to be processed through the region or Sacramento level,” Rodgers said, as the pace eased up. “The reason is that these particular resources are few in number, critical to operations and can be moved around rapidly.

“Our job is to maintain the balance of these resources within the state, to pick who goes and move a crew in to cover (a station) if we’re creating a hole somewhere.”

If California suffers the firestorms officials fear this summer, decisions that shape the outcome will be made in the Emergency Command Center at CDF. The agency says it is the nation’s largest fire department and one of the world’s best at what it does.

Dispatchers sit in front of microphones that are their communication links to CDF forces scattered throughout the state, including many in remote regions, so response times will be as short as possible.

They move chips representing aircraft and ground crews around huge maps, and file cards to further keep track of movements.

Rodgers glanced up toward a wall map.

“It’s not unusual to have 10 or 15 fires going on up there at a time, and there would be no way you could remember everything being messaged around from one of those to another one,” he said.

As fires are first reported by any of 72 lookouts or the public in the 40 million acres protected by CDF, dispatchers in the 22 individual ranger units send out initial attack forces from 531 stations.

The arsenal includes 864 engines, 58 bulldozers that ride on flatbed trucks equipped with red lights and sirens, and rangers in pickups that act as fire chiefs at the scene.

Rangers can request a few of CDF’s 21 air tankers and 11 helicopters for retardant drops from the closest of 22 air bases scattered across the state.

About 180 California Conservation Corps and inmate hand crews also are available.

The common goal is to cut a firebreak around the flames, then extinguish all fire within the perimeter. Backfires are sometimes used to rob the blaze of vegetation within the lines.

Equipment from rural fire districts is often summoned, as well as trucks operated by CDF under contract with rural districts.

But as a fire grows, the 24-hour Emergency Command Center takes over.

Five-Truck Task Forces

Five-truck CDF task forces are sent in from areas not suffering fires, as are state Office of Emergency Services engines, operated by city and county departments.

Camps are set up where firefighters eat and sleep when they are rotated off the lines.

In the early stages, “our policy, in general, is that any new breaking fire has got precedence over an existing fire,” Rodgers said.

“The idea is to keep fires small. If we keep working on the larger one, then we’re going to end up with two large fires instead of one large one and one we put out.

“The policy doesn’t mean we abandon one fire and go to work on another. We maintain the ground resources, but we will divert aircraft and even ground crews in order to accomplish the task.