How Calif. Fire`s `Wall of Flame` Trapped, Injured 4 in Crew
Oct. 05--In the early hours of the Valley Fire, four firefighters found themselves surrounded by spot fires on top of Cobb Mountain and were forced to deploy fire shelters as crews in the air and on the ground struggled to get aid to the trapped men, all of whom were badly burned.
In the first official account of how the four firefighters were injured in the early hours of the 76,000-acre blaze, which killed four people and destroyed nearly 2,000 structures, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, laid bare the details of how a four-man helicopter crew came to be cornered by a "wall of flame," and ultimately how they came to be rescued.
The internal report, called a green sheet and first published on the blog www.wildfiretoday.com, describes how the crew was flown in and dropped off in a clearing near where the fire started off High Valley Road in Kelseyville (Lake County) around 1:30 on Sept. 12.
From there, the four-man "helitack" team -- which consisted of Capt. Pat Ward and firefighters Niko Matteoli, Richard Reiff and Logan Pridmore -- used an access road to start attacking the left flank of the blaze. At that point, crews thought the fire would only burn about 20 acres and focused on the one structure it was threatening.
But the fire would soon explode, with spot fires, sparked by embers carried on strong winds, jumping ahead of the main blaze and trapping the men where they were attempting to make a stand against the growing inferno.
"The brush covered slope to their east completely torched into a wall of flame," the report said. "The wall of flame sent a significant wave of radiant heat ... onto the firefighters."
Faces burned from heat
Given the advance of the blaze, Ward issued a mayday call and the crew was forced to flee the goat pen where they had been seeking refuge from the flames. The men began deploying their fire shelters, personal aluminum tents "intended to be used only as a last resort when fire entrapment is imminent and escape is not possible," according to Cal Fire training documents.
"They could feel their faces burning from the radiant heat," the report said.
The flames had grown so intense that one of the firefighters' shelters had become fused to its plastic packaging, and he was forced to take his gloves off to properly deploy it. Another firefighter's shelter was so badly melted that he couldn't get it out of the pack. One of the men went to take a drink from his hydration pack, but "the water from the mouth piece was too hot to drink," the report said.
The four men crouched together as the flames roared all around them, "shielding the heat away ... each of them could see the visible burns to one another's faces and hands," the report says, but they soon began hearing explosions from inside the building they were huddled against and were again forced to move.
A fire captain stationed on the ground nearby called for water drops from a helicopter circling overhead, but the thick smoke column coming from the fire made that impossible, the report said.
Finally, a division chief drove up the driveway of the now engulfed property and spotted the shiny aluminum of the fire shelters. He swooped up the injured firefighters and loaded them into the back of his pickup truck before making a hasty exit.
The four men were taken to the burn unit at UC Davis Medical Center, where Ward remained in critical condition and had undergone several surgeries to treat his third-degree burns as of Sunday. The other three men all suffered first- and second-degree burns to their heads, arms and hands, the report said.
"The report is supposed to give context to these injuries and underscores the kind of conditions firefighters are facing out there," said Janet Upton, a Cal Fire spokeswoman.
The green sheet is the first of a series of reviews initiated after serious accidents on fire lines, Upton said, with the reports widely distributed to crews for review while the incident is still fresh in the minds of firefighters, and conditions are relatively the same. At the end of the process, a review board will evaluate the incident and decide whether policies need to be changed or if the injuries were simply the result of the inherent dangers of firefighting.
Upton said the release of the green sheet was important because the fire season is far from over. Two of the state's worst blazes happened in October: the Oakland hills fire, which killed 25 people and destroyed 2,900 structures in 1991, and the Cedar Fire, which blackened 273,000 acres in San Diego County and killed 15 people.
'Worse than critical'
One of the tools Cal Fire uses to gauge fire risk is fuel moisture levels, which are considered critical at 60 percent. In Lake County, those levels are hovering in the upper 40 percent range. The Valley Fire, which was 97 percent contained as of Sunday, is one of the fastest moving Upton said she'd ever heard of, as it grew from 50 acres to more than 10,000 in a matter of hours.
"Things are worse than critical," she said. "I've been talked to lots of veterans who are amazed at the ferocity these fires are burning with. I've been doing this for 30 years, and this is as bad as I've seen it."
Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfkale
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