Firefighters Huddle Under Shelter as Blaze Attacks

Over the roar of the fire, Engineer Tony Brownell is shouting into his radio: “Task Force 2, emergency traffic! We’re being burned over!”

More than a thousand firefighters have descended on this corner of the Sierra foothills, using bulldozers, shovels, fire engines and air tankers to battle a blaze now grown to 200 acres.

Radio chatter has been constant all afternoon. Now the airwaves fall silent. Everyone listens. Many are friends of Brownell and the two firefighters huddling under aluminum fire shelters with him, Eric Zane and Scott Martinez.

Brownell knows that every air tanker and helicopter on the fire is at his disposal--if only the pilots can find him. Again and again, Brownell describes his position. Aircraft bank overhead, but there’s too much smoke to see. They drop three loads of water, but each misses the mark.

Brownell, Zane and Martinez are on their own.

For what seems to them an eternity--15 minutes? 20?--searing gusts of wind buffet their shelters. With only a thin layer of reflective material shielding them, the three men squeeze under two small shelters and keep talking to fend off panic, their voices raised above the tumult.

Exhausting its fuel, the fire gradually eases, and the men shift into better positions. Martinez unfolds his own shelter and takes single refuge. Brownell, sitting up until now, turns over, though the road is so hot he stays on hands and knees.

But the fire isn’t done. Lunging into brush across the road, it flares up and pins them down once more.

Five minutes later, the fire is finally spent, and the men peer out. Where brush once grew so heavy you couldn’t see 20 feet, now bare and blackened sticks jut from smoking earth.

The firefighters rise dizzily and stagger down the road, wearing their shelters like tortoise-shells. Capt. Jeff Hawkins sees them coming, ghosts through the smoke. They look scared to death, he thinks, nothing but big, white eyes.

Brownell has first-degree burns on his left leg. Martinez is weak, disoriented and so dehydrated there’s barely any sweat left in him. Zane’s left arm has second-degree burns from an ember that lodged between sleeve and skin.

Hawkins’ crew offers them hits of oxygen and bottled water. But they can’t stay here. The fire is heating up again, so both crews gun their trucks down the burned-over road, away from the fire front.

Brownell is not a man given to overstatement. He usually scoffs at talk of fire in human terms, as if it were alive. It’s a natural process, Brownell has always said, and we just happen to be in the way.

Now he’s not so sure.

“This fire,” he tells himself, “is trying to kill somebody.”

*

Less than a mile to the south, at the corner of Nelson Bar Road and Stagecoach Lane, three neighbors squint into the sky. Air tankers roar over the trees on their way north toward the fire.

It’s more bad news for Ray McCarty, 74, a welder who retired here eight years ago thinking he’d found paradise: a mobile home with space out back for his hunting hounds. But life’s been harder since his wife died of cancer last year, and now this wildfire is making him nervous.

Beverly Brooks, 67, McCarty’s landlady across the pasture, is even more upset. Country life doesn’t suit her. She came back to tend her ailing mother, who died in 1992, and never got around to leaving. She likes her neighbors, loves her Chihuahuas, but chafes at the rural isolation. And wildfires like this, she says, scare the wits out of her.

You should be scared, Norm Williams tells her. Short and balding, with a tuft of white whiskers on his chin, the retired log-truck driver was reared on a ranch across Nelson Bar Road from the Brooks place. At 74, he’s loaded with opinions, and he’s not afraid to share them.

This country was safer from fire before the government started meddling, he says. Used to be, ranchers burned the timberlands to make for better grazing, and cattle chewed down the dry grass. Not anymore.

“They won’t let you burn in the wintertime when you should be burning,” Williams says. “They claim the ozone and all that horse dootsie.”

And now these firefighters don’t seem to fathom what any old-timer knows. After sunset this time of year, a northeast wind starts blowing off Miller Peak--opposite the way the afternoon wind is pushing the wildfire now.

Williams mentions this to a couple of firefighters. They nod and say they’re taking the winds into consideration, leaving Williams to sputter to his neighbors.

“Beverly, you better take off and go down to Oroville or somewhere. We’re liable to have fire before the night’s over.”

By evening, however, it appears they have little to fear.

The afternoon has been hellish for the firefighters. Two collapsed from heat exhaustion. One was hit by a falling tree. But they’ve done their job. Fire damaged two homes, but firefighters saved a dozen others.

The westerly wind has disappeared now, and the day’s intense heat is fading. At 8:45 p.m., an upbeat press release predicts that the 800-acre blaze, with firebreaks now completed around half its perimeter, will be fully contained by morning.

“This fire is over,” says Capt. Darryl Sanford, relaxing by his engine. He even has time to grab his cell phone and call his wife, just to say hello.

Fifteen minutes later, the wind begins to blow again.

*

Lightly at first, then steadily stronger, the hot, dry breeze presses in from the northeast. Against the black hillside, the red line of fire glows brighter. Embers fly.

Old Norm Williams was right. The fire is turning on its tail.

Around 10 p.m., Battalion Chief Wayne Wilson halts backfire operations along the fire’s southern edge after they start spreading in the wrong direction, to the south.

Firefighters douse those errant blazes, and bulldozers and crews wielding hand tools redouble efforts to gouge out a firebreak ahead of the wildfire’s suddenly active southwestern boundary.

By 12:30 a.m., however, a 15-mph wind is driving flames through a half-mile gap in the firebreak and down the hill toward Concow Road, just a quarter-mile from where the fire started 12 hours earlier.

Wilson watches from Concow Road, waiting for the fire to hit. Then he turns around and sees that it already has. Wind-thrown firebrands have ignited at least 20 spot fires in the grass around a barn behind him.

An engine crew starts spraying, but they can’t put out all the spot fires. Flames soon swarm around the barn, flying up walls and into the eaves. In a few minutes the building is ablaze, and the crew retreats.

Southwest of Concow Road, along Nelson Bar Road, both brush and houses are thicker than up on the ridge. As residents pile into cars and race away, engine crews race in. They dash from driveway to driveway, deciding which houses to defend and which to write off.

The wind increases to 20 mph, and flames blast into the woods ahead. In minutes, the fire explodes into a firestorm, a term for which no precise definition exists, Wilson says. You just know it when you see it, and he’s seeing it now.

Fire looms above the treetops and crashes through the brush, everywhere at once. It pounces upon parked cars, leaving empty shells. It flings itself against roofs and walls, devouring whole houses in minutes. Gasoline cans boom inside garages. Windows melt to green globs amid the ash.

Some houses survive while neighbors’ go up in smoke. A house on Nelson Bar Road falls to smoldering rubble, yet a few feet away its white picket fence is not even singed.

The fire takes Arthur Strain’s house, painstakingly built with lumber milled from a single huge fir. But it spares the mobile home of Roy Clayton, who frantically sprays down his yard with a garden hose until his pumphouse burns down.

Just ahead, over the next hill on Stagecoach Lane, all is quiet.

Ray McCarty, Beverly Brooks and Norm Williams had watched the news a few hours before. They’d talked to friends and firefighters, and everyone had agreed: The fire was going the other way.

And so they’d gone to bed.

*

It is 2 a.m., and someone is banging on McCarty’s double-wide mobile home. Rousing himself from bed, he finds a firefighter at his door.

The wind has changed, Sanford tells McCarty and his son, Richard. The wildfire that more than 1,000 firefighters have battled all day is heading this way.

Better pack a few things and be ready to leave, Sanford says. Then he points south, toward a house across the pasture. Anyone at home over there? he asks.

“That’s my landlady, Beverly Brooks,” McCarty replies, and he volunteers to alert her.

As Sanford’s truck rumbles away, McCarty tries the telephone. It’s dead. He drives his pickup over to Brooks’ house, where he bangs on the door and calls her name. No answer, except for the yapping Chihuahuas.

He peers in through the screen door. A living room lamp throws light down the hallway to the right. McCarty can see Brooks lying on her bed in a room at the end of the hall.

“Beverly? Beverly!”

She stirs but doesn’t awaken, and McCarty decides to let the poor woman be. He’d visited with her a few hours ago, calming her fears by repeating what everyone else was saying: The fire was heading away from them, toward the northeast.

Let her sleep, McCarty figures. If the fire gets close, he’ll come back. There will be time enough. He heads home, grabs the garden hose and starts wetting down brusharound the yard.

Parked on Stagecoach Lane near McCarty’s house, Capt. Jeff Hawkins keeps watch with his two firefighters, Joe Saunders and Paul Carlos.

Behind the hill to the north, wildfire is ripping across the countryside, devouring houses, trees, cars, telephone poles.

But here, things are calm. Stars are sparkling. There’s no smoke, not even an orange glow, over the wooded ridge.

To Hawkins, the 40-acre pasture between Brooks’ and McCarty’s homes seems much safer than the manzanita thickets he’s seen all day. The field is full of star thistle, 3 feet high and as dry as hay. It burns like gasoline, but any firefighter prefers it to the sustained fire you get in dense brush and timber.

McCarty’s mobile home, on the other hand, is tucked back into higher brush and brambles at the pasture’s northern edge. Junk is scattered about the yard.

Hawkins sees this kind of thing all the time. People move to the country and want to live amid the trees, not out in the open. They bring their toys, then build sheds and garages to hold everything, but there’s never enough room, so yards fill with boats, kennels, old cars and stacks of lumber.

Such clutter is maddening to firefighters, trained to view the world in terms of its potential to burn. They lump all houses into two simple categories: losers and keepers.

Is brush cleared at least 30 feet from the house? Are gutters clean of leaves? Is the yard free of flammable junk and firewood? Are the walls and roof made of fire-resistant materials? If so, the house may be a keeper.

As for McCarty’s house--a definite loser, Hawkins thinks.

“If this thing goes, we’re not setting up here,” he tells his firefighters. “It would be nothing but trouble.”

Around 2:20 a.m., the stars begin to vanish.

Smoke is curling over the ridge. Glowing embers sail out of the darkness and land in the star thistle. At first, the weeds don’t ignite, and Hawkins sighs in relief.

Now comes a gust of wind, another volley of firebrands. They land like tiny bombs, and this time the thistle catches fire.

“OK, boys, we’re going to work,” Hawkins says.

Already facing out toward Nelson Bar Road, Hawkins drives the engine 50 yards forward, to the edge of a spot fire. In the minute it takes his firefighters to charge the hose and start spraying, the fire has spread too much to stop. Other spot fires are breaking out all over the pasture.

Hawkins pulls up a few yards, hoses dragging behind the engine, but the fire quickly catches up to them.

“Cut the hoses and get in,” Hawkins shouts. Saunders and Carlos pile in, and Hawkins speeds the truck along Stagecoach Lane, away from McCarty’s house and toward Nelson Bar Road. In his rearview mirrors, Hawkins sees only orange.

They pull ahead of the fire and look back toward the mobile home. Flames are licking at the house. Brush is burning along both sides of Stagecoach Lane, and McCarty and his son are running around the front yard, trying to get a half-dozen dogs into two trucks.

“They’re in it deep,” Hawkins thinks. He knows what he has to do, but he polls his firefighters anyway: Should we get them?

Absolutely, both reply.

The engine roars back up McCarty’s drive, plunging into a cloud of choking smoke. As Hawkins turns the engine around, Carlos and Saunders get out to retrieve the McCartys.

Hawkins is not one for macho pretense. He figures any firefighter who claims never to get scared is either crazy or a liar. Fear sharpens the senses. But now, with will-I-ever-see-my-wife-again thoughts running through his mind, Hawkins is edging toward the line that separates healthy fear from mindless panic.

It appears McCarty and his son have already crossed it. They’re still trying to round up their hunting hounds, and not making much progress. Flames swirl around the fire engine, and Hawkins can’t sit still. He twists in the driver’s seat and yells out the window.

“Get them in here! We gotta go!”

The McCartys resist. With most of their dogs now in the pickups, they want to drive out themselves. But Hawkins is adamant: It’s too late for that. All sweat and smoke, father and son tumble into the fire engine’s cab, carrying one favored hound named Bones.

The doors slam shut, and Hawkins hits the accelerator. Behind him, Ray and Richard McCarty sit silently, staring out at flames churning up from the blackberries.

With the windows closed, they hear no more of the fire outside: not the roar of the flames, not the crackling brambles, not the desperate howls of the dogs left behind.

*

Norm Williams jolts awake. Someone’s pounding on the wall of his mobile home.

“Your house is on fire!” he hears a voice shouting.

“Then put the son of a bitch out!” he yells back.

He and Lesta spring out of bed, make it to the door. Williams shakes. His wife begins to cry.

That fool firefighter got it wrong, Williams thinks. The house isn’t on fire--the world is. Flames are in the woods across Nelson Bar Road, right up to the pavement.

“Listen,” Williams says. “What we gotta do is keep our heads on our shoulders.”

They’re in good shape to make it out of this, he figures. Firetrucks line the road. And the Williamses know the tricks of surviving in wildfire country. They water their lawn, mow weeds in the field and trim branches on trees near the house, which has metal siding and a fire-resistant composition roof.

Williams tells his wife to get the family photos and financial records she’d gathered up earlier and throw them in the truck. He’ll get the motor home out of his workshop.

Outside the shop, he finds firefighters standing by three trucks.

“Why in the hell aren’t you trying to put out the fire?” he demands.

“We don’t use water out of the tankers until it hits a structure,” one replies.

Williams says he’s got water and grabs a garden hose.

“Don’t do that. You’ll have a heart attack,” a firefighter says.

“I been here 74 years,” Williams says. “If I have a heart attack, it’s my heart. If you guys are so goddamn afraid you’re going to burn to death, there’s a faucet at the end of that building and one here, right by you. Turn the goddamn water on and keep cool, or whatever the hell you want to do, since you’re not going to do nothing else, I guess.”

He strides away--and there, standing dazed in the road, is Ray McCarty.”Norm, they wouldn’t let me get my dogs out,” McCarty says. “My pickup’s burned up. Everything’s gone.”

Gone? Williams suddenly remembers his other neighbor on Stagecoach Lane.

Beverly. Where’s Beverly?

The two men look across the street, through the trees. Beverly Brooks’ house is wrapped in flame.

*

Next Sunday: Thirty seconds late.

The Story So Far

This is Part 2 of a three-part serial. The story so far:

Hundreds of firefighters have attacked a wildfire racing through brush in the Sierra foothills. As some crews gouge bare-earth firebreaks along the blaze’s flanks, others head to the fire’s deadly front. Their mission: Protect homes as the fire sweeps past.

At one property, three firefighters are trapped when their own backfire roars over their heads. All drop to the ground and reach for their aluminum fire shelters. But one man fumbles. The two others, knowing he will cook in seconds, try to cover him. The fire howls all around, and against heated rock, one man’s leg begins to burn.