Courage Under Fire

The three veteran firefighters pulled up to the winding dirt road and watched the raging, wind-whipped fire light up the night sky and lick at the narrow canyon trail. All agreed that to go farther would be mad.

“No way,” Fire Capt. Dan Young told his men. “It’s too dangerous. We might get trapped.”

A heartbeat later, the radio in the small truck carrying the entire crew from Orange County Fire Station 315 brought word that the wildfire had already trapped some mobile home residents--and the only way to get there was straight ahead.

“Let’s not waste time,” Young said, and with that they drove into the madness.

Through the rest of that night, the crew saved seven lives and three homes, fought the blaze with water and, when the water ran out, they made their stand with shovels and axes.

On Thursday, they were awarded their agency’s medal of valor and returned to the site of the fire for the first time since the week after the Oct. 13 blaze.

“It looks so harmless now,” Young said Thursday morning, surveying the still-charred canyon. “But it was a sea of fire that night.”

Young, fire engineer Bob Becker and firefighter Mike Overton were honored at their agency’s board meeting for their “daring and amazing rescue” of members of the Silva and Torres families, who were pinned in their mobile homes along the ridges of Baker Canyon.

The crew saved four men, a pregnant woman and two girls, ages 2 and 12.

“There were many stories of courage and danger among the 1,500 firefighters who worked the Baker Canyon blaze, but this effort was beyond the call of duty,” department spokesman Capt. Scott Brown said. “And the call of duty routinely requires people to put their lives on the line, so that’s saying something.”

The ordeal for the firefighters began when a motorist screeched to a halt outside the doors of the Station 315 about 11:15 p.m. and banged on the door. Young opened the door, and the screaming man pointed to the red glow building on the horizon. “I knew then we were in trouble,” Young recalled.

The hot, gusting Santa Ana winds had been blowing all day, and brush conditions were dry and dangerous, the worst of the fire season. Minutes later, the crew was a mile away, at the foot of the fire, where flames were 30 feet high and moving fast. After the radio call came, they headed into the face of it.

“It sounded like a freight train,” Overton said. “The fire creates its own wind and comes rushing through.”

*

Behind the wheel, Becker tried to navigate the small, 500-gallon pump truck down narrow ridgeline trails. The bright blaze cast long shadows that, along with smoke and darkness, made the going slow and treacherous. The truck’s taillights melted.

The fire crew reached a ranch, near the origin of the fire and site of three mobile homes on the slopes about 2,000 feet below the main house. As they began the drive down, they could see silhouettes in the trailer homes.

“There were embers everywhere, swirling around,” Young said. “It was like a snowstorm, but red.”

The two families rushed to their rescuers, but the firetruck--with a cab the size of a large pick-up truck--was too small for everyone. The fire was too intense to have anyone ride on the outside of the truck. Indeed, the heat was strong enough to burn the passengers sitting closest to the truck windows.

So Young made a decision: Becker would take the children, woman and one of the men up to the safety of the main house, then come back for his two fellow firefighters and the remaining three men.

“It was the only thing to do, but it wasn’t easy watching that truck leave us there with fire overrunning the whole area,” Young said. “I wasn’t sure we’d be there when it got back.”

*

Young and Overton, without the truck’s pump and hoses, used hand tools to shovel dirt on the encroaching fire and rip off parts of the trailer’s porch and roof that began to smolder.

Embers snuck into the gaps between their fire gear to sear their skin and the huge fire swallowed the oxygen in the air, making them light-headed. They tried to use the trailer’s meager water supply to wet the homes down, but the pressure gave out.

Minutes ticked by before the truck returned and, finally, ferried everyone to safety. The ragged firefighters felt relief until they saw a second blaze creeping up another ridge toward them. They launched into action again, clearing brush and wetting down the house where 10 people were gathered.

“Just when we thought we were safe, here comes another wall of fire,” Overton recalled. “We had more prayers than water.”

The front of the fire hit and the firefighters “hunkered down in the dirt” as the blaze surged past and over the house, Young said. The property was singed but mostly undamaged because the men had cleared away any fuel that would have given it a foothold.

*

“If you were standing in one spot, it was like a blowtorch, but just a few feet away there was nothing,” Young said. “Unbelievable.”

On Thursday, Young and the others found an odd, barren beauty in the rolling foothills and ridges where they fought for their lives a few months earlier.

But they found little to celebrate in their own efforts on that night. Each feels uneasy about the award and attention they’ve been given, and they say any firefighter would have done the same things.

“Nothing about it felt heroic,” Young said. “It just felt desperate.”