The experience of fighting fires in Southern California is not a new one for Dave Batten of the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Sweet Home Unit office.
Batten worked as a firefighter in Southern California before moving to Oregon in 2017, then ODF, so he’d seen big fires in that region before.
But when he took off Jan. 9 for an 18-day stint assisting CalFire and other personnel fight the recent fires in that region, he saw “a lot of destruction,” he said last week.
Batten, with Sweet Home ODF Wildland Fire Supervisor Nick Case and Adrian Kast, who joined the Sweet Home office last fall, were among 70 ODF personnel and 30 engines, including three Type 6 quick-attack brush trucks from Sweet Home, that traveled to SoCal to help fight the fires. Their ODF strike team was assigned to help California firefighters get control of the Eaton and Palisades fires, which together burned nearly 37,500 acres and destroyed roughly 18,500 structures.
They left on Jan. 9 and returned on Jan. 26.
Their mobilization, Case said, was through a state-to-state agreement between ODF and CalFire, in which the states reciprocally send personnel to help with wildfires and catastrophes.
“Those resources and us going was part of that complete and coordinated system,” Case said, noting that in the last year he’s traveled to help with fires in Alaska and the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.
“This was an opportunity to kind of go and give back to those folks that routinely come to help us,” he said, adding that California firefighters had a big presence in Oregon during last summer, which was the worst wildfire year in the state’s history. The largest area since records have been kept burned in 2024, with nearly 1.89 million acres burned – the most in the United States. Texas was second with some 1.3 million acres burned, and California was third with 1.08 million.
Batten said he’s seen “devastation” similar to what he witnessed this time in SoCal, but “it was eye-opening, I think, for everybody else in my strike team, because none of them had ever been to Southern California.”
“It was a lot of destruction. A lot of devastation. You would drive down streets and there’d be nothing left and then, all of a sudden, there’s one house.”
When they arrived in SoCal on Jan. 11, they were assigned to the Eaton Fire, which was the larger of the two, burning 14,021 acres north of Pasadena, killing 17 people and damaging or destroying 10,491 structures.
They stayed there for half a day, then were switched to the Palisades fire, which had done similar damage, burning nearly 23,500 acres and leaving behind 12 deaths and 7,854 damaged or destroyed.
“The first few days, we were actually mopping up hot spots around structures,” Batten said. “Some structures were still standing. Some were just down to the foundations.”
“We were placed in the neighborhoods, for the most part,” Kast said. “We gridded backyards, properties, just to make sure that there wasn’t anything that was threatening the standing structures.”
“We weren’t directly involved with, say, suppression,” Case said. It was making sure our lines were secure as they tried to integrate community members back into those communities.”
Later, Batten said, “they finally moved us into more of a wildland area that we’re used to, and we were hiking mountains and hitting hot spots that they were finding with the infrared drones they were using.”
“There were a couple of days when we’d walk a mile into the canyon and find hotspots,” Case said. “The fire just moved so quickly, so rapidly, it just burned everything out.”
Kast and Case said a big difference for the Oregonians was the “completely different fuel model” they found in Southern California and the extremely low humidity.
“For us, when we get into the teens, we kind of worry about it,” Kast said. “We were in the single digits down there a couple days, really.”
“The weather patterns that they were experiencing, as Adrian alluded to, were significantly different from what we see on a daily basis,” Case said. “ I mean, you’re talking humidities of 2 or 3% versus ours, where we get down to the 10s – just the way fire moves, the vegetation components.
“The topography was very similar, with exception of the or the wildland urban interface – there were a lot of structures on some of those hillsides.”
They spent their nights on the beach, and experienced 60 mph winds “on a couple of nights,” Case said. He noted that he didn’t use a tent, but some firefighters who did “no joke, at 3 o’clock in the morning were chasing rainflies and tents into the ocean.
“I like to just crawl into a sleeping bag,” he added.
Case, who took over the Wildland Fire Supervisor position in Sweet Home after Neil Miller left in 2022 to become a cost recovery specialist for ODF in Salem, said it’s common for firefighters to move back and forth between states through cooperative arrangements like the one between ODF and CalFire.
He said the trip to North Carolina last fall is a good example.
Thirteen ODF staffers, “kind of a hodge-podge of sawyers and swampers (workers who assist saw operators by clearing away debris),” made the trip, he said. “It was a good training opportunity for our folks because we didn’t really know what everybody was getting themselves into.”
The Oregon team were requested because of their skills in the woods, Case said.
“We did a lot of saw work, opening up roads, old fire access roads, and cleaning up some of their infrastructure around some of their big tourist areas,” he said. “It’s a good opportunity to kind of foster that complete and coordinated (cooperative) system. Likewise, California sent some folks up here last summer to help us out.
“It’s our turn to repay the favor.”