A Ribbon Cut Stubborn Day Fire Down to Size

The Day fire was raging out of control Sept. 18 when three top-ranking fire officials knelt on their hands and knees atop a table, crafting a strategy to squeeze the blaze from two sides.

Under them was a giant map of the Los Padres National Forest, a rugged expanse of canyons, pines and chaparral where a Labor Day trash fire had sparked a conflagration. Just in the previous few days, the size of the fire had doubled to 74,000 acres and was threatening Ojai and other communities in western Ventura County. Now, meteorologists warned of Santa Ana winds that could set hundreds of homes ablaze.

So the strategists decided to divide the fire in half, drawing a line through the mountains with a fluorescent green ribbon and creating two commands -- one in Ventura and one in Castaic -- in hopes of trapping the blaze.

“We were literally on the table with a ribbon,” Mike Dietrich, incident commander for the fire, recalled Sunday.

The strategy -- along with Santa Ana winds that were weaker than feared -- was credited by weary fire officials with allowing them to finally declare that the blaze should be contained by tonight. The fire was 95% contained Sunday, and almost half of the 4,600 firefighters have been sent home.

As Santa Ana winds sent the fire dancing back and forth between the two fronts, those on one side of the fire went on the offensive while those on the other side took a defensive position.

The fifth-largest fire in California history, the Day fire -- so named because of its start on Labor Day -- has so far cost $70.3 million to fight and burned more than 162,700 acres. But even though it got close to several communities, caused the I-5 Freeway to be shut down several times and once jumped a fire road, it destroyed only five buildings, including one home.

Working nearly 50 miles apart, the divided commands coordinated the digging of 160 miles of fire line -- a line so long that it would stretch halfway from Ventura to Sacramento.

If the fire is contained by 6 p.m. today as expected, the two ends of that line will meet, creating a full circle.

Firefighters dug that line largely by hand, using shovels and axes, assisted by bulldozers and other equipment. Officials even called in a modified DC-10 jet capable of dropping 12,000 gallons of retardant at a time.

The strategies were knit together in makeshift command posts, in rooms with walls plastered with colored maps, tucked far away from the fire lines and television cameras.

Many of those who masterminded the strategies are veterans of other major Southern California fires, including the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County, the most devastating in the state’s history.

But even as they were pulling the noose around the Day fire, officials worried about what they may still face in a Southern California fire season that has barely started. “We still have another six weeks,” said William C. Waterbury, a U.S. Forest Service official from Albuquerque who oversaw both commands. “The fuel is still out there. It’s still extra dry.”

Dietrich and his counterpart in Castaic, incident commander George Custer, a U.S. Forest Service fire management officer from Florida, rarely talked in person about the Day fire but consulted repeatedly by cellphone. The double command worked seamlessly, said Dietrich, 52, of Azusa, whose “day job” is fire chief of the San Bernardino National Forest.

Still, this fire has proved so unpredictable that even at Sunday’s 6 a.m. briefing, no one was declaring total victory, least of all the meteorologist who reported to the 200 weary, coffee-drinking firefighters that 12 lightning strikes had been spotted off the Santa Barbara coast.

Some firefighters groaned. Others laughed ruefully.

All weekend, in the paramilitary tent cities that have sprung up across Ventura County, firefighters talked of going home.

Some had arrived less than a week ago; some have been here for weeks. The T-shirts they wore at the Sunday briefing showed from how far they had traveled to fight this fire: Los Angeles County, San Luis Obispo, Arizona’s Navajo Country, Alaska and Indiana.

They talked about being weary of the MREs eaten cold at “coyote camps” in the mountains, the never-ending threat of new winds and fresh fire, the too-brief calls to wives and loved ones.

Many crews spent two days at a time in the mountains before returning to Ventura or Castaic overnight to get hot showers and hot meals.

They needed the break after hiking five miles or more into the wilderness just to get to the fire. “The steepness of the ground is really extreme,” Mike Denning, 31, a 12-year veteran from Silverton, Ore., said Friday night as he and his teammates waited to enter the dining hall at the Ventura County Fairgrounds command center.

No firefighters have been seriously injured in the effort, and the worst wounds were bee stings, bruises and blisters, fire officials said. “For the size and scale of this incident, that’s remarkable,” said John Bridgwater, 57, a district ranger with the Los Padres National Forest.

But there was plenty of discomfort. Some complained of the heat. At one campsite in the mountains, the air was so thick with tiny gnats that crews donned dark green mosquito netting hoods as they put up tents and sorted groceries.

For many the work never seemed to stop. Larry Price, 58, an engineering contractor from Fillmore, had been driving a bulldozer for 21 days straight, often at night. “To me, the worst thing is when you are trying to navigate through rocks in the middle of the night,” he said Sunday.

As a light rain fell under gray skies Sunday, Dietrich took the time to narrate his perspective on the fire, standing in front of a series of large maps in the briefing room.

He waved his hand over the steep, inaccessible area in the Sespe Wilderness where the fire started Sept. 4 and then spread east toward the I-5 Freeway corridor, which houses crucial lines carrying electricity, gas and power south to the L.A. Basin.

“This is the lifeline,” Dietrich said. “The focus was to keep the fire from going east.” So firefighters did not go directly into the fire but worked to surround it.

The plan worked until the weekend of Sept. 16, when Santa Ana winds whipped the fire into a frenzy, burning a huge swath across the national forest and doubling the fire’s size.

That is when Dietrich and his colleagues split the forests with the green ribbon.

For Dietrich, the worst moment came about seven days later, as he and more than 4,000 others tensed for the dreaded winds to start gusting.

He compares it to being at the top of a roller-coaster, just before plunging down. And he cautioned his troops at the Sept. 22 6 a.m. briefing that they faced “a very serious situation. Get ready for the roller-coaster. Be prepared.” His goal, he said Sunday, had been for his crews to stay together, survive that downward plunge and the loop-the-loops ahead.

“My stomach was in a knot,” he said. “I didn’t sleep that night.”

Soon the northeastern command in Castaic had its own wild ride as the winds began blowing north, sending flames over a creek and Lockwood Valley Road, threatening homes.

“It just blew up that day,” said fire information officer Betsy Coffee, a ranger from Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, who like many helping here is a federal employee on loan to fight the blaze.

So the fire command put out calls for more aid. “All of a sudden, there were nonstop helicopters here,” Coffee said. She said she saw as many as five helicopters lined up over the Lockwood Valley staging camp, “like this was LAX.”

But at Saturday’s 6 p.m. briefing in Lockwood Valley, firefighting plans were upstaged by talk of how to disassemble the tent city and send crews and equipment home. In a sign of continuing federal budget concerns, several federal employees said, such dismantling is done rapidly as big fires are contained so that people and equipment can be shipped to the next trouble spot.

“We have so many fires that we see each other many times each year,” said Bridgwater, who credited that familiarity with making it easy to work together so smoothly.

If all goes well, the two Day fire commands will be reunited as one command Tuesday evening at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. The occasion will probably be marked, not with speeches and brass bands, but by one commander passing the microphone to another.

“No pomp and circumstance here,” Dietrich said.

*

deborah.schoch@latimes.com