Fighting fires and battling emotions

There are moments -- when the wind is so strong that flaming tumbleweeds soar overhead, when the fire moves through the chaparral so quickly you can hear it before you can see it -- when it feels like chaos on the front lines of a wildfire.

But firefighters have their rules: Identify escape routes, think clearly, act decisively. The rules drilled into their heads from the first day of training are supposed to work. They are supposed to keep them alive.

And so it was not only with immense sadness but a large dose of frustration that nearly 2,000 firefighters descended upon the ferocious Riverside County wildfire Friday, a day after four of their colleagues were killed and a fifth was critically injured.

Among them, the five firefighters had 37 years of experience. Authorities said Friday that the men appeared to have been briefed on weather conditions and logistics, and that while they had parked their engine in the thick of the fire, they appeared to have chosen their position with specificity and care. And yet, they were overtaken by flames so quickly that they did not have time to scramble back inside their truck.

U.S. Forest Service Division Chief Michael Wakowski, a 31-year veteran working the Riverside County fire, was asked to reconcile the fact that the firefighters appeared to do everything right, but died anyway. “I can’t,” he said, tears welling.

“You’re supposed to stay out of harm’s way if you follow all of these rules,” he said. “But sometimes things go bad. Stuff just happens. That’s just life out here. This is a sober reminder: Every day you could not go home.”

On a lonely highway south of Beaumont, the incident shattered the unique and placid brotherhood -- and, increasingly, the sisterhood -- shared by firefighters who specialize in fighting wilderness fires and were on the front lines of this one.

It came at the end of fire season. Much of the brittle vegetation that hugs the rocky ridges here would have died off soon. Seasonal firefighters, those who sign up for months-long contracts and make up a large portion of the firefighters, were scheduled to end their tour in a matter of weeks.

“In the early days, the early history of the U.S. Forest Service, it was a husband and a wife and their kids living in a lookout in the middle of nowhere,” said Charles Hixon, 31, a Forest Service assistant fire engine operator based in the Cleveland National Forest.

“It doesn’t feel any different today,” he said. “It’s a family of gentle people, people who like the outdoors. When somebody retires, you bring your whole family to the party. There is a routine to it. And just when everybody was starting to think that fire season was over, this happens. It’s a heartbreaker, man.”

Hixon was among the hundreds of firefighters holding the line off Highway 79.

Starving the fire

Authorities were hoping to use the road as a firebreak. If they could keep the fire from jumping the road toward the west, the fire would soon run out of fuel and, if things went well, would die out. If they failed, the fire would move into a large, rugged expanse of dry brush, and would move in a perilous path toward heavily populated areas, including the cities of Moreno Valley, Hemet and San Jacinto.

Even as flames licked against the east side of the highway, the firefighters said they could not shake the images of the dead firefighters and their engine, which was so badly burned that portions of it melted and some of its windows burst.

Many of the firefighters said they had paused before deploying to the fire to hug their spouses a little tighter, to reassure their kids a little more than usual, to say an extra prayer.

Alex Broumand, 39, a firefighter-paramedic with the Carpinteria Fire District and an eight-year veteran, took his sons to a Cub Scout meeting in the Santa Barbara area Thursday evening. On the way home, they heard on the radio about the firefighters’ deaths. When they walked in the door of their home, he got the call to head to Riverside County.

“My older son was standing right there,” Broumand said. “He said, ‘Are you going to go where those people got hurt?’ I said, ‘Yeah. That’s what I do. That’s my job.’ ”

A few hours later, Broumand was reading to his 4-year-old son, Aaron, in his bedroom. Most nights, he said, 8-year-old Ryan would have been indignant about the notion of joining his brother for such a babyish activity. This time, knowing his father was being deployed in a matter of hours, he came in and sat for the story.

“I had to talk to him a little bit afterward,” Broumand said. “I told him, ‘I’m going to come home safe.’ My job is not to be a hero. My job is to put out fires -- and to have an entire career putting out fires.”

Still, this time, he gave his wife an extra kiss on his way out the door.

“Because you never know,” he said.

Many other firefighters said they found themselves doing something they hadn’t done in years -- reviewing the fundamentals of their training to avoid the fate of their comrades.

Some pulled their standard-issue field journals from the breast pocket of their bright protective suits. On the back was a copy of the “Standard Firefighting Orders,” 10 rules written decades ago that “are not to be broken or bent,” Wakowski said. No. 10: “Fight fire aggressively, having provided for safety first.”

Others huddled with their colleagues on their strike teams to review a system known as LCES, which stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes and Safety Zones and is designed as an on-the-fly checklist for new firefighters.

Some went over the 18 “watch out” situations -- circumstances commonly circulated among firefighters. For example, firefighters are taught to use extra caution when fighting a fire at night that they did not have an opportunity to scout during daylight or when conducting an assault directly on the advancing front of a fire.

More than anything, firefighters stopped to remind one other that they are a stubborn lot, a tendency that can, under the wrong circumstances, prove fatal.

“Sometimes you focus so much, you lock into a place you don’t want to be,” said Dennis Witzke, a Ventura County engineer, as he shielded himself behind his truck from the smoke and wind as a helicopter made a drop on the nearby fire, spraying him and his co-workers in the process.

“Everybody thinks it can’t happen to them,” Witzke said. “But it can happen to all of us. Everybody went back to the basics today.”

And still, there was a fire to be fought.

Along Highway 79, thousands of dangerous embers floated from the east side of the highway toward the brush on the west side, sending firefighters scrambling up hillsides with axes, shovels and chain saws. On the east side, flames erupted routinely, and plumes of smoke billowed from blackened soil, an apocalyptic sight.

At one point, a sizable fire took hold near a landfill, on the wrong side of the road.

Stifling smoke

“This little spot hit and it just took off -- off to the races,” said Efraim Garcia, 34, a U.S. Forest Service firefighter.

Smoke blanketed the highway, reducing visibility to 50 feet. Firefighters, many of them carrying 26-pound bundles of hose over each shoulder, bounded toward the flames. At one point an engineer reported that his 500-gallon truck was running out of water. A supervisor told him to conserve: “Tell them to turn their damn nozzles down!”

Soon, the firefighters managed to contain their portion of the fire. If the line holds today, and if the wind shifts toward the west, as authorities are hoping, “it would turn it back toward the black,” Witzke said -- back toward the burned areas, where it would eventually run out of fuel.

“This thing can end right here,” he said.

“Then again, things can change in an instant.”

scott.gold@latimes.com

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BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX

Fire update

Developments in the Esperanza wildfire:

The fire spreads

Winds continue to drive the blaze, which had covered

39,900 acres and was

25% contained by nightfall.

Arson reward rises

The reward for information leading to the arrest and

conviction of the arsonist was raised to $500,000 .