Concow Inferno a True Test of Fortitude

The house is gone. Anything that could burn was swallowed up in minutes that night, and a bulldozer later scraped away the rest: a forlorn chimney, shattered dishes, the skeleton of a kitchen stove.

Everything, gone.

But Darryl Sanford still sees it all. The fire captain stands in what used to be the front yard, staring up at the charred limbs of a big oak tree.

It’s his first time back since September, when a wildfire unleashed itself across these hills and Sanford, trapped in a burning house surrounded by blazing trees, pulled off the narrowest of escapes.

He survived, yes, but he left someone behind.

“Every fireman’s dream is to save somebody’s life,” he says. “To fail at that . . . “

He did everything he could, and still the fire won.

*

Last year was America’s worst for wildfires since Yellowstone burned in 1988. Fires blackened 7.4 million acres of forest and grassland, twice the annual norm, and killed 17 people in 13 states. Officials counted 92,250 separate fires.

This is the story of one of them, based on interviews with 35 firefighters, survivors and others, and on the findings of a government inquiry released Feb. 8.

They call it the Concow Incident. Scorching some 1,800 acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills 80 miles north of Sacramento, it was not the year’s largest blaze. But it was one of the cruelest, and as things in California often are, it was a sign of what’s to come.

Throughout the arid West, civilization is spreading fast across a landscape meant to burn. As mansions and mobile homes sprout amid the pines, firefighters are drawn into a war that grows more dangerous with each victory.

Beat back nature often enough, they find, and people who live in wildfire’s way come to depend on you. Even when they shouldn’t.

*

Tuesday’s newspapers lie on the brown lawns of Oroville. It is dawn, Sept. 19, 2000, the cloudless start of a sizzling day.

“A near-textbook recipe for disaster,” declares the Mercury-Register’s front-page story. “With temperatures and humidities like those expected today, a passionate look could constitute a fire hazard.”

Summer is having one last gasp in Butte County, where the farmland of the Central Valley rises into the dry, forested foothills of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades.

By noon the thermometer is closing in on 100. Relative humidity is just 15%. Sunbaked oak and manzanita leaves rattle on branches, their water content a third of what it was in spring.

In this weather, the threat of fire is a constant presence, coiled in the weeds, ready to bound free with any spark: a horseshoe striking rock, a tailpipe hanging low, a cigarette butt bouncing off the road.

For two days, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has declared a Red Flag Warning, urging no use of lawn mowers or other outdoor equipment after 10 a.m.

But none of this deters Jim Stewart, age 71. Under the noon sun, Stewart sits atop a bulldozer, clearing brush on his property in Concow, a rural, unincorporated community 15 miles north of Oroville.

Grinding toward his house, Stewart looks back at the gully where he’d been working. Flames crackle in the brush.

Stewart powers the dozer back toward the fire, but it’s too late. Flames are scurrying up the steep ravine toward Concow Road, just above.

He rushes to the house and calls 911. It is 1:04 p.m.

A minute later, buzzers and bells are sounding at fire stations throughout Butte County. From the start, it’s a high-level dispatch: six engines, two bulldozers, two air tankers, one helicopter and two on-the-ground fire crews of 15 firefighters each.

They’ll hit this wildfire fast and hard, before it has a chance to spread.

Battalion Chief Wayne Wilson arrives at 1:20, just behind the first engines, and finds a fire already displaying what he calls “an aggressive personality.” Some brush fires fuss and fume, their smoke drifting lazily. This one has a smoke column that billows a thousand feet high.

It would be hard to design a more troublesome place for a fire to start than this brush-choked ravine. Wildfires love to climb, and the terrain ahead is like a napkin tilted over a candle, rising 700 feet to Miller Peak, a mile to the east.

Amid the wail of sirens, Wilson calls for reinforcements: 10 more fire engines, two more air tankers, two more bulldozers.

He also orders six more fire crews with 90 firefighters in all. They are the Marines of the firefighting world, toiling along a fire’s flanks to etch out bare-earth corridors with chain saws, shovels and sharp-bladed hand tools called Pulaskis and McClouds.

Wilson hopes to contain the fire west of Concow Road, but his plan is obsolete as soon as he announces it. Flames are climbing into the treetops and leaping across the road. In just 45 minutes, the fire has grown to 50 acres.

Air tankers swoop over the trees, at each pass dropping up to 1,800 gallons of water mixed with fire retardant and red dye. They can slow the fire’s spread but not stop it.

Wilson’s new plan: Use firebreaks to confine the blaze to a mile-wide corridor between two east-west roads--Pinkston Canyon Road along the southern edge, Deadwood Road to the north--and then try to pinch off its head before it reaches Miller Peak.

It’s a time-tested strategy. You don’t stop wildfire so much as herd it, letting it exhaust itself within strips of land cleared of fuel by backfires, bulldozers and hand tools.

But with this blaze, as with many Western fires these days, there is a complication: protecting dozens of homes tucked amid the trees and brush. Engine crews that once might have tagged along with fire crews, lending their hoses to wet down a fire’s flanks, now are ordered into a deadly zone once largely avoided.

As engines crowd onto narrow Concow Road, Wilson sends them up even narrower dirt roads along the ridge above the blaze. Each crew is to find a house, lay out hoses and wait for the fire to hit.

*

2:40 p.m: Fire Capt. Jeff Hawkins and Engineer Tony Brownell back their engines into the driveway of a mobile home off Tim Tam Lane, a gravel road traversing the ridge north of Miller Peak.

The fire, now covering 150 acres, churns toward them with the muffled roar of distant surf. It is a quarter-mile away and closing fast, blown by a 10-mph westerly wind.

While two firefighters from each truck lay hoses in the yard, Brownell and Hawkins size up the house. Brush has been cleared back 20 feet from the eaves. The law requires 30, and prudence requires still more.

Borderline defensible, Brownell and Hawkins agree.

The old man in the yard tells them he’s been here 40 years, and he’s not about to leave now. By law, residents cannot be forced to evacuate, and this guy knows it.

Turn around and look, Brownell tells him.Flames are clawing through the brush 200 yards away. Embers sail past. The homeowner, suddenly quiet, hurries his wife and dog into the car, and they roar off down the road.

Hawkins and Brownell return to their task. They have measured this situation against the cardinal rule of firefighting: No house is worth a life. And they’ve reached the same conclusion as scores of other firefighters on this ridge today. They will stay.

The firefighters grab drip torches, metal canisters that dispense burning globs of oil and gasoline, and start laying down fire around the house. Their backfire chews through grass and weeds without leaping into trees above. Perfect, Brownell thinks. By replacing ground-level fuel with a layer of ash, this will slow down the main fire when it hits.

And just in time. The fire is at hand. Flames sweep through 15-foot-high manzanita brush near the edge of the yard. Smoke hides the sun, and the roar increases from surf to freight train. Sparks and firebrands pelt the men.

It was already 103 degrees. Now heat billows from the flame front. Sweat and soot stream down bodies encased in long-sleeved Nomex shirts and pants, neck shrouds, goggles, helmets, heavy boots and leather gloves.

The firefighters move slowly, taking shallow breaths to keep from searing their throats. The four crew members occasionally turn their hose nozzles to the mist position and cool the air over their heads. Brownell and Hawkins, without hoses, crouch low every few seconds to grab a breath of less smoky air near the ground, then straighten up and move on.

The firefighters aim short bursts of water at burning brush near the house. There’s not a drop to waste. Each truck holds 500 gallons, and a hose open full bore would drain the tank in four minutes.

Flames melt through the home’s outside power line. A chicken coop and shed catch fire. But the house is clear of flame. And the fire front, though nastier than Hawkins and Brownell would prefer, is passing by.

Things are going well, Hawkins thinks. Then he looks back--his engine is on fire! His crew rushes over, dousing the truck with its own hose, but not before plastic light covers melt.

And now the fire is making another run at them from a different angle. This is getting hairy, Hawkins thinks. They need help, fast.

He radios for air support, and within minutes hears the roar of an air tanker. He never sees the plane, but through clouds of smoke a red rain plummets. The soupy fire retardant smacks Hawkins, the house and the engine. A direct hit.

“Thank you!” Hawkins shouts to the sky.

*

The worst has passed for Hawkins, but it’s only beginning for Brownell and his crew. Worried that the wildfire will ambush them from a ridge to the south, they walk east along Tim Tam Lane, laying down fire along the road’s southern edge to burn out a safety zone.

Brownell, a brawny 6-feet-2, has fought wildfires for 12 years. He’s known to colleagues as an aggressive firefighter, a quality that earns respect in the field but makes safety officers nervous. His two crew members are greener, but Brownell considers them sharp. Scott Martinez, 25, has been with him for four years. Eric Zane, 21, is in his second season.

Their burnout starts well, but 400 feet up the road, Brownell senses change. In roadside brush he’d thought was clear, two spot fires are bubbling. And their backfire, until now simmering through the underbrush, is getting lively. Roadside pine trees ignite like torches.

Let’s get out of here, Brownell says. They drop their drip torches and start walking briskly back toward the engines.

Seconds later, their backfire leaps 40 feet into the sky. A wall of flame curls over them to become a fiery ceiling. Brownell looks one way up the road and then the other. It’s orange both ways. There’s nowhere to go.

“Deploy! Deploy! Deploy!” Brownell shouts, dropping to his butt.

All three men reach for their fire shelters, aluminum and fiberglass blankets that firefighters call Shake ‘N’ Bakes. Carried on the belt, they are tools of last resort, like the seat-cushion life preservers on an airliner.

Firefighters train until they can remove a shelter from its 3-by-5-by-9-inch box, rip off its plastic wrapper, unfold it and spread it over themselves in 30 seconds.

Brownell figures they have 10 seconds before they start to fry.Adrenaline surging, Brownell quells the urge to panic. In tight situations, you fall back on your training: Yank shelter out. Rip plastic off.

Side by side, Brownell and Zane execute each step in sync. They’re on their backs, kicking open the accordion folds of their shelters, when they hear shouts from Martinez, a few feet behind them.

“I can’t get it out!”

Martinez has trained for shelter deployments. But that was on green grass. He has never seen a fire this close, this hot.

His mind races. Take his gloves off? His hands will burn. Run? The fire is everywhere. Share a shelter? He’d just read a book about a Colorado fire in which two men died trying to share one shelter.

He keeps fumbling. There. The shelter’s out of the box. But now he can’t get the plastic off. The heat is unbearable. Brownell and Zane yell at him to hurry.

“I can’t get it out of my plastic!”

Brownell hears a change in Martinez’ voice, from frustration to terror. Without a word, he shuffles over and stretches his own shelter over Martinez.

Now he has Martinez’ head in his lap, but the younger firefighter’s legs are sticking out. Zane, spying the exposed legs, moves closer and shields them with his shelter.

Three big men. Two small shelters. This is not by the book. They should be on their bellies, faces in the dirt, hands and feet holding straps at each corner of each shelter to keep it firmly against the ground.

Instead, Brownell is sitting up, leaving a one-foot gap between the road and the edge of his shelter. Zane is on his back, his shelter riding up along the rear of his helmet.

All around them, the fire howls. He sees a tongue of flame lick in under one edge.

Then his left leg, pressed against superheated stone in the gravel road, begins to burn.

*

Next Sunday: Chaos in the hills.