Answering the Call : All it takes is oxygen, fuel and heat for the hills to burn. And when the Santa Anas fan the flames, a fire can become a chaotic inferno. That’s when the National Interagency Fire Center steps in.

The telephones started ringing in February, when wildfires burned the Southeast, then New Mexico. The trail then continued into Oklahoma and Texas, as the biggest fire season since 1957 began to unfold.

By August, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) was operating under Level 5, the highest state of preparedness possible. At one point, 52 large fires burned simultaneously. There were requests for more than 100 crews that the NIFC could not fill. The military was called in to assist, as flames seemed to flare everywhere.

In September, cooler weather arrived in most parts of the country, offering pause.

But at 11:30 a.m. Monday, the first call came in from Riverside: The Santa Anas were fanning chaos.

The NIFC tracks wildfires throughout the country and serves as the top tier of a system linking local, state and federal resources all over the country. It mobilizes crews from one fire to the next, finds airplanes or buses to carry them. It dispatches trucks pulling portable shower units, catering units or commissaries wherever they are needed.

When regional warehouses run out of anything from pumps or Pulaskis to helicopter buckets or AA batteries, the NIFC replenishes them. This year, enough fire hose to stretch from Boise to San Francisco was shipped out, as was enough Nomex protective clothing for a town of 35,000 people.

Fighting wildfires is a chess game of sorts, played against time, nature and increasingly limited resources. As fire began crowding Southern California with swarms of knights, rooks and bishops this week, officials in Boise were planning their next move.

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Rick Ochoa awakened at 5 a.m. Wednesday and slipped quietly out of the house, trying not to awaken his wife and two daughters. Since giving up coffee, he no longer stops at the Circle K, cutting his 20-minute drive to NIFC offices on the south side of Boise.

By 6 a.m., Ochoa, staff National Weather Service meteorologist for the NIFC, arrived at work and diverted from his daily routine. Usually, he turns to current weather conditions around the country, but on this day he anxiously headed straight to the extended forecasts.

The Santa Anas had kicked up on Monday, pushing fires that had burned homes and thousands of acres in Southern California. But there was another--possibly even more threatening--weather system developing that Ochoa had been carefully tracking. Another cold, upper level system was moving down from the north into the Great Basin.

As he studied the maps via computer and satellite systems, he saw the pattern continue to develop: strong high pressure headed for Utah and Nevada, matched by low pressure building off the coast of California. The maps detailed steep lines connecting the valleys of the low pressure to the peaks of high. In other words, more strong, dry winds are brewing, with the potential to grow even stronger than those that blew Monday, when gusts hit 70 mph. They should arrive this weekend.

For two hours, Ochoa studied dozens of maps in preparation for his 8:15 briefing. He has his own gauge for fire activity. The more people who show up for the briefing, the more fires there are. A couple weeks earlier, only three or four people would attend. At times this summer, there was standing room only, as more than 50 people crowded into the room.

As Ochoa stood at the front of the briefing room Wednesday, about 20 people were seated on folding chairs. At 8:15, the doors were locked, the lights dimmed. Ochoa went through his series of computerized maps, projected on a screen. The room was riveted on Southern California.

Ochoa described the developing weather system and expressed concern. Kim Christensen, assistant manager for the NIFC Coordination Center, gave an update of fires burning at Big Sur, Malibu, Orange and San Diego counties. Following the briefing, fire directors from the participating agencies met to form a strategy in anticipation of this weekend’s winds.

“For the most part, we’re in good shape,” Christensen says. “We decided to move a couple air tankers out of Montana and Wyoming, where storm systems are moving in. We don’t want them to get weathered in this weekend, so we’re going to move them to Boise or somewhere in case they’re needed in California.”

As the weekend approaches, local agencies are on alert and regional centers throughout the West have been notified to identify available resources and estimate the time needed to mobilize them.

In Boise, Ochoa will focus on the steep lines connecting peaks and valleys as the Santa Anas fill their lungs, waiting to exhale.

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Fire is a simple phenomenon, requiring only a triangle to illustrate its three primary components: oxygen, fuel and heat.

Fighting fire, however, demands a complex, fluid and unified system.

The NIFC is a partnership between the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs and National Weather Service. It is reflective of the cooperative network linking the local volunteer fire department to a nationwide inventory of resources, a network that brought streams of fire engines from Northern and Central California down Interstate 5 on Monday and Tuesday to help.

Each NIFC agency has a voice in determining which regions will get the resources they have requested when there aren’t enough to go around. In 1995, that wasn’t a problem. But this year, like 1994, they have been stretched thin. Almost 6 million acres, the most since 1957, have burned this year in 93,548 fires.

The most notable shortage has been in Type I “hotshot crews,” considered the highest trained and best conditioned. They work and travel together as 20-member units throughout the fire season and are assigned the most demanding tasks, often hiking miles in treacherous terrain to wage hand-to-hand combat armed with little more than chain saws and specialized scraping tools (Pulaskis). There are only 66 such crews in the country, and this year some hotshots have amassed more than 1,000 hours overtime.

The formation of the interagency network, which began to evolve in the 1960s, along with the adoption of standardized operating procedures, have resulted in a more effective approach to fighting fires. In the past, agencies fought fires independently, sometimes in competition with one another.

“Literally, crews would fly into Boise and get off the airplane, and if we had a bus here, we’d take them to our fire, when they may have been ordered by the Forest Service,” says Les Rosenkrance, national director of fire and aviation for the Bureau of Land Management.

*

As the Santa Ana winds whipped up Monday, fires were reported throughout the Southern California zone: Big Sur, Orange County, Calabasas, San Diego County. Local agencies responded, and the NIFC went to work.

At 9 p.m. Monday, the NIFC Coordination Center received a request for two air tankers for the Big Sur fire. Planes arrived from Oregon the following day.

At 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, Riverside ordered 35 crews for the Malibu-Calabasas fire. The order was followed by smaller requests for additional crews. Twenty crews loaded up on buses in Arizona by noon, arriving at Pepperdine University, their staging area, between 9 and 10 that night.

The NIFC’s contracts on two jets expired in September, so a commercial DC-10 out of Minneapolis was chartered to pick up five crews in Billings, Mont., at 8 p.m. Tuesday for the Big Sur fire. The plane continued to Great Falls, arriving at 9:47 p.m. for 10 more crews, then continued to Missoula, arriving at 11:05 p.m. for the last three crews. The plane arrived in Monterey at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday.

“It’s a little more difficult to find crews this time of year, because a lot of people have returned to school or to other jobs,” Christensen says. “But because there aren’t a lot of fires in the rest of the country, we were able to get these crews fairly quickly.”

Christensen, like everyone who works in the Coordination Center, the hub of the NIFC’s mobilization efforts, has fought fires. She knows what it’s like to be out on the line with too few crews or not enough equipment. She understands the frustration of fighting a fire for three weeks with little rest and no days off, then having to wait for a plane to take her home.

When fires are everywhere and the nation’s 11 regions are calling in, competing for resources, hard decisions must be made. Dispatcher Julie Landreth says she has been called every name in the book:

“What I try to keep in mind is that everybody’s going to get to the fire, and everybody’s going to get home. The fire’s going to get put out, and everything’s going to be OK.”

So far, the Southern California fires have been fought primarily with local and regional resources. The NIFC has been called upon to mobilize 48 crews, as well as four tankers and seven helicopters. In addition, radio equipment was flown to Big Sur from the NIFC’s cache, the nation’s largest supply of portable communications equipment.

Like many components of the NIFC, the communications equipment is used for more than fires. Radios are sent out to assist in hurricanes, floods and volcanoes. They were used for the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Northridge earthquake. A portable digital microwave system was transported in a converted horse trailer to the Olympic Games in Atlanta for the kayak competition. Radios will be shipped from Boise for the presidential inauguration and the lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

As many as 350,000 AA batteries a day are used to keep them running. There’s enough equipment for 47 to 52 major incidents. At times this year, the $24-million inventory was nearly depleted, the warehouse almost empty.

Fighting wildfire is big business. Through early September, $513 million had been spent.

That figure could go up this weekend, as careful watch is kept locally while the dry winds blow.

And in Boise, where winter has arrived and fresh snow covers the highest peaks, they will be waiting for the phones to ring.