Texas volunteer firefighters lose homes but battle on

Mizzy Zdroj and her fellow firefighters barreled down Cottletown Road, in pursuit of flames that had choked the sky with smoke and bedeviled the all-volunteer force.

“Stop!” she begged.

Zdroj hopped out of the truck and charged toward her wood-frame home, which she and her husband had spent years refurbishing. She threw open their chicken coops and the pen of the family donkey, Sally. Then she raced back to fighting the Bastrop County Complex blaze, which has devastated this patch of central Texas since it was sparked Sept. 4.

Two days later, another firefighter greeted his sleep-starved comrades with good news. Station No. 1 — the closer of two department stations to Zdroj’s home — had been saved.

“My heart jumped with joy,” she recalled. “I said, ‘My place made it, right?’ ”

His face fell.

Zdroj soon learned the fire had touched other members of Heart of the Pines Volunteer Fire Department. The firefighter with a 1-year-old daughter lost his house. So did another firefighter who’d battled cancer.

More than half of the department’s 24 members lost their homes, said Assistant Chief Scott Sutcliffe, whose two-story, stone-facade house was among those reduced to rubble.

His antique gun collection was ruined. Nothing remained of the hot tub and the retractable roof, which allowed him and his wife, who’s also a firefighter, to admire the stars.

“Oddly enough, knowing it was gone made it easier to fight the fire,” said Sutcliffe, 49, who has fire insurance and plans to rebuild. “You quit having to worry about it.”

The 34,068-acre Bastrop County blaze, which is 50% contained, has proved to be the most ruinous of the 181 fires that have singed Texas in the last week. As of Sunday, it had killed two people and destroyed 1,554 homes, a state record for a single fire.

Now the Heart of the Pines department is battling two adversaries: flames and heartache.

Like Sutcliffe, Zdroj has found some relief in work. It’s not exactly solace, but it’s something to do, something worthwhile.

Zdroj, 45, an artist with pink-streaked hair, alluded to her yellow Nomex uniform, which seems to swallow up her petite frame. “As long as I got this on,” she said, “I can fight that fire. I can help, even if I don’t have a place to go home to.”

More than three-fourths of Texas’ fire departments are run by volunteers, according to the State Firemen’s & Fire Marshals’ Assn. Like many of them, Heart of the Pines is short of manpower and money. It cares for 36 square miles of a region known as Lost Pines with hand-me-down trucks and a water tender with a “Franken-engine” Sutcliffe cobbled together with various parts.

The crew is collegial, throwing barbecues and ordering Sutcliffe helmet decals that shortened “assistant” to its first three letters. When the firefighters put in a septic tank, Zdroj’s 8-year-old twin boys pitched in with pint-size shovels. The group sometimes goes a month without a call and is compensated mostly with thank-yous.

With much of drought-ravaged Texas in flames, Bastrop County initially relied on its nine volunteer fire departments, all about the size of Heart of the Pines, when fire erupted Sept. 4. They had no aircraft to survey the blaze or dump water and fire retardant.

“The fire was in control,” said Mike Fisher, the county’s emergency management coordinator.

The crews had never seen a fire like this. Flames roared through parched pines and post oaks, and the smoke churned like white water.

When the Sutcliffes arrived, flames swept over their water tender, but they got out OK.

Zdroj was alerted to the fire while she was at home with her adult daughter, Whitney Niemann, who was getting ready for a date with her boyfriend. “I looked at the sky. I thought it was a cloud at first,” Zdroj recalled. “Then I realized it was smoke.”

She asked her daughter to take the twins and their two small dogs, Boo and Weenie, to the local restaurant and gas station where their father, Chris, worked. Then she rushed to the front lines. As daylight dwindled, she said, “We started hearing the fire. It changed the sky. It’s like when you put a flashlight under a pillowcase. It just glowed.”

The crew zipped around the forest, defending what homes it could. A cluster of six homes survived. Others didn’t. Zdroj was pained by dogs cowering in pens and cats scratching at windows.

At least the fire, as far as she knew, was still miles from her home.

Zdroj purchased her seven acres in 2005. She was swayed to buy it, in part, because of nearby Station No. 1. Her beloved grandpa had been a firefighter in Oklahoma; sometimes, she’d tag along when he doused flame-riddled hay bales and barns.

“That’s hero stuff,” Zdroj said one afternoon outside the Smithville Indoor Recreation Center, in between puffs on a Pall Mall cigarette. She joined the Heart of the Pines department about two years ago after the Wilderness Ridge Fire destroyed 26 homes in the area.

Zdroj and her family had been living in a tent and later in what she described as a “little tin shack” before they moved a rundown farmhouse to the property and began refurbishing its pine floors, wood cabinets and ornately carved front door.

They hunted deer and wild hogs and raised chickens and rabbits. Their sons, Ashron and Raistlin, made tepees and played with Sally the donkey. “It was our Shangri-La,” Zdroj said. “I knew it was dangerous, with all the pines. But I was in denial like everybody else.”

After the fire passed through, she and Sutcliffe and others in the department returned to ground that was a sea of ash. On some streets, more chimneys remained than homes.

They had worked for days with hardly any sleep. And with the fire still raging, they had little time to mourn.

But when they can, the members of the Heart of the Pines Volunteer Fire Department gather at Station No. 2, a metal building with a couple of cots, a box of eyedrops and an odd collection of donated books, including encyclopedias and “The Six-Minute Souffle.” Now they greet each other with hugs instead of hellos.

“This whole thing has fraternalized us,” Zdroj said. “They’re my brothers now. Anyone who goes through that kind of hell with you, you’re cast iron with them.”

For Zdroj, there are other reasons to camp out at the station. Sleep has not been kind. She dreamed the other day of standing amid her pine trees, working a fire hose, screaming “Crank it up!” and “Dump the rabbits out!” That morning, she called her father, a Vietnam War veteran. They both cried.

Lingering at the station also keeps her away from Cottletown Road, where the fire warped her sons’ bikes and her grandpa’s cast-iron toys. Her great-grandma’s treadle sewing machine: gone. Her grandma’s butter-maker: gone. Her rabbits: dead. But some chickens survived the blaze, as well as Sally, though her hoof was cracked and part of her tail burnt off.

At first, Zdroj was overwhelmed. She had no fire insurance. Would her family have to make do in a tent again?

But a fellow Heart of the Pines firefighter came to her rescue. His house was spared, as was his guest house. He offered it to her family.

ashley.powers@latimes.com