‘When a Fire Gets to a Certain Size, You’re at the Mercy of It’

You don’t put out a wild-land fire. You perform a potentially deadly dance with it.

You coax it this way and that, or try to. You compete for its attentions with the wind. You alternately starve it and feed it, trick it and race with it and flee from it.

And all the time you try not to die in it.

Larger fires can take several days to control, and rely on planning, communications, logistics, courage and luck.

In Orange County, the fire agency responsible for the county’s wild-land areas, the Orange County Fire Department, is linked to other Southern California fire agencies not only through Firescope (a mutual assistance coalition organized for emergencies), but through a consortium of fire chiefs using a system called MACS--multi-agency coordination system--that decides where resources will go when the flames begin to rise. It is a complex interconnecting system that is sometimes taxed to the limit in severe fire seasons, said Capt. Dan Young of the Orange County Fire Department.

For instance, he said, last year, when more than 200,000 acres of California wilderness burned in 7,500 separate fires and 864 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, “everybody wants everything they can get. You have to set priorities.”

Even when many trucks and firefighters can be rushed to a wild-land fire, however, doing battle with it is a grim business, said Jon Anderson, the hazard reduction supervisor for the Orange County Fire Department and a veteran of wild-land firefighting.

“When a fire gets to a certain size, you’re at the mercy of it,” he said. “The fire’s going to go where it wants to and you have to try to cut it off in certain areas by using fuel breaks and by deliberately lighting off areas to burn off the fuel before it gets there. Water is just to put the hot spots out.”

When hoses can be brought it, they are, said Anderson, but large pumper trucks are unwieldy in wilderness areas, and most crews rely on lighter, more maneuverable--and smaller--four-wheel drive vehicles. Aircraft, too, is brought in for the hottest spots, and can include large bombers carrying fire-retardant chemicals from Ontario or Hemet Ryan airports, or even Orange County Sheriff’s Department helicopters that are authorized to scoop large buckets of water from back-yard swimming pools if necessary, said Young.

For the most part, however, said Anderson, fighting a large brush fire means depriving it of fuel by bulldozing firebreaks or running ahead of the fire and deliberately “back burning” vegetation in front of the fire to cut it off.

Lighting backfires, said Young, often involves painful decisions. If a fire is burning out of control in a certain direction, he said, “you go to plan B and to the areas we’ve already set the fuel breaks, and someone has to have the courage to say, ‘We’re going to lose this area, let’s move 30 minutes ahead and ignite backfires.’ That’s a very courageous decision to make, to say that we’re going to lose 50,000 acres unless we identify this 50 acres we’re going to have to lose.”

There are two principle rules in wild-land firefighting, said Young: Be successful, but survive.

“The decision that firefighters make minute by minute as they move through a conflagration is that they want to deploy limited resources where they’ll be the most effective and where they’ll live,” he said. “If five fire engines couldn’t save that house but the three that are there could save 10 of those other houses, that’s where we’ll go. We’ll be successful and we’ll live through the day.”

Such decisions in some cases can be aided by a hand-held fire behavior computer. Elements such as wind speed and direction, degree of slope of a hill, height of flames, fuel moisture and number of units at the scene are fed into the computer, which then provides an estimate of how and where the fire will spread and how many units will be needed to fight it.

Still, said Anderson, with all the technology, firefighting is an intensely personal endeavor.

“You have specific orders to follow,” he said, “and if you don’t, you’re in trouble. The worst thing is to get trapped, where you don’t have an escape route, where you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mother Nature’s not going to tell you, ‘Oh, by the way, you’d better leave now.’

“A structure fire is in a confined area, but in a brush fire, if something happens, you don’t have a chance to just walk away. What if a quarter-mile-square area ignites at one time? You don’t have time to run. More firemen are lost in brush fires than anywhere else.”