Returned Sweet Home firefighters discuss SoCal experience

Oregon Strike Team 17, which includes Sweet Home firefighters, center right, prepare to leave Yreka, Calif., to make the final leg of their drive home. The strike team consisted of engines from Albany, Sweet Home, Lebanon, Harrisburg and Dallas. Photos courtesy of SHFAD

While the rest of the population watched TV images of devastated neighborhoods, Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance Department members were on the scene of the Southern California fires, helping to put them out.

The seven SHFAD staffers spent Jan. 11-25 on the road or working on fire control for some of the 20-some fires that burned through nearly 60,000 acres, destroying more than 18,000 structures and killing at least 29 people, with more than 30 still unaccounted for.  More than 200,000 people were forced to evacuate.

Making the trip were Fire Chief Nick Tyler; Battalion Chief Shannon Pettner, who headed a structural engine strike team; Wildland Supervisor Christian Whitfield, who served as an engine boss; firefighter Josh Starha, who was an apparatus operator; firefighters Jake Hepler and Isaiah Harris; and firefighter Garrison Whitfield, who worked with another agency. They were part of a task force sent to Southern California by the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office to assist in the firefighting efforts there.

“Jake Kepler and Isaiah Harris are part of our wildland program,” Tyler noted. “We were very specific and purposeful with our wildland program in not just training those guys in wildland, but training them in structure fires as well.”

He said the ability to utilize wildland program members to supplement the Oregon task force because we could send two apparatus and not affect our daily operations.

The Sweet Home personnel and equipment were part of a total of 21 strike teams, 75

75 fire engines, 30 water tenders and 370 firefighters  mobilized by the state Fire Marshal’s Office.

Most of the damage in Southern California has been done by the two largest fires: the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades and the Eaton Fire in Altadena.

“Significantly different,” was how Battalion Chief Shannon Pettner described the situation she and other firefighters encountered when they arrived at the Palisades Fire after a two-day, roughly 900-mile trip from Sweet Home with the district’s Engine 25, Tender 23 and the chief’s unit. “A lot of the homes were completely gone.”

 

Scattered Responsibilities

She and Fire Chief Nick Tyler said that, unlike other California fires at which Sweet Home staffers have assisted in recent years, these were not primarily wildland conflagrations and the firefighters weren’t on the front lines, fighting oncoming flames this time.

Tyler said he spent most of his time in a Beaumont, Calif., operations center where his job was to make sure resources were being sent to where they were most needed.

He said his responsibilities included preparing to move “six or seven water tankers,” carrying 30,000 gallons of water, to combat new fires as needed.

“From a management standpoint, that’s a huge necessity,” Tyler said. “We all saw the news. The (Southern California) leaders took some black eyes for not being prepared.  So when we got down there, we were prepared to do some things.”

Sweet Home Firefighters Isaiah Harris, left, and Christian Whitfield mop up hotspots off of Mulholland Road, near Pacific Palisades.

He and other out-of-state firefighters provided “contingency,” he said. “If something else happened, we’d be there.”
Pettner said that what she saw in Palisades, where 6,800 structures, most of them single-family residences, were destroyed over an area of some 36½ square miles, was “significant damage, but it had not spread.”

“Generally, the fires I’ve been down there for are not completely focused in densely populated city areas,” Pettner said. “It was not in a lot of forested area, vegetated area to keep the fire going and spreading.”

Normally, she said, when firefighters arrive to help the fire is active and they are busy actually battling flames. This time there was a lot more mop-up of hot spots and containment, rather than direct firefighting.

“Our role was to prevent it spreading to standing structures,” she said.

Pettner, who said this was her fifth deployment to a California fire, said the Thomas Fire in 2017 in Ventura, and the LNU Lightning Complex fires in the California wine country in 2020 “were a lot more active” than the situation in Palisades.

“The Camp Fire in Paradise (2018) was similar but a lot more complete,” she said, comparing it and the Palisades blaze.

“Here (in Palisades), it was more selective. There might be one neighborhood where a house was completely gone but flowers were growing in the yard, but three other houses nearby might be untouched.

“Probably, people will come back and say, ‘Why is my home gone and the rest of the neighborhood is good?’”

Petttner said she was impressed by the response from the power and gas utility companies.
“Those organizations came in and did an amazing job, getting those things up and running. It was impressive to watch.”

After Palisades, Pettner’s team moved to Encino Hills, another hilly community north of Pacific Palisades, then to Reseda, farther to the north.

Their job, she said, was to be ready for any new fires.

“There was a concern that when the Santa Ana (winds, which blow off the California desert) come into play, new starts escalate quickly. We were in that area so that if any new fires started, we could get a handle on them to make sure they didn’t grow.

 

‘Difficult’ Questions

Tyler noted that fire and city officials in Los Angeles had experienced a lot of finger-pointing and questions about why the fires turned into conflagrations.

“ From a fire standpoint, could they  have been better prepared? That’s a very difficult question,”

he said. “It was an unusual event. With the conditions they had, the fuels that were super dry, the winds, you know, I don’t know how you prepare for that.

“Just the scale of it, I don’t know how you make the right decision on the front end of things because you’re dealing with so many variables. Where do you move your resources to?

“I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened down there, but applying that here, it would be very, very difficult. There are a million scenarios and you pick one, put all your eggs in that basket – very difficult.”

He likened it to the two large wind-driven fires in September of 2020 that threatened Linn County.

“You had both fires burning at the same time, one that started before the other. So you start moving a bunch of state resources to that and the next one requires attention.”

 

Chances to Learn

Tyler said a big plus for Oregon firefighters helping California, as they did in this case, is the chance to watch CalFire operate.

“They are extremely proficient because this is what they do,” he said, adding that Oregon firefighters use sprinkler kits on homes when fighting wildfires and “it takes us several minutes to deploy one of those.” Sprinkler kits are temporary or portable fire sprinkler systems composed of components such as sprinkler heads and pipes or hoses used when a fixed sprinkler system is not available, for protection of structures during wildfires.

“We were down there at the Thomas Fire and an engine pulled up and before they hit their air brakes, the sprinkler kit was half deployed. This is what they do, their bread and butter. And so for our guys to go down there and just see that and understand, it’s kind of like an amateur sportsperson watching professional sports, realizing, ‘Oh, that’s possible.’

“Our guys don’t do that all the time, but being able to see the professionals do that at the speed they do it, that helps our firefighters if we ever have an event or something like that.

He said that Oregon and California have a longstanding history of helping each other with firefighting.

 

Sacrifice, But Not from Taxpayers

“It’s not unusual for us to go to California,”  Tyler said.

The state of California pays, as Oregon does, for the costs involved in bringing in out-of-state firefighters and, for Sweet Home, funding backups at home while staff personnel are in California.

“That’s important because while we go down and it’s in my heart to help our neighbors, I don’t believe Sweet Home taxpayers necessarily should front that money, and so it’s 100% reimbursed and it costs our taxpayers nothing,” he said.

Tyler said the trip required commitment, not just on the firefighters’ part, but for their families.

“It’s important that we have people that are willing to work behind (the staff who went to SoCal) and put in extra hours here. We can’t do that on top of the families of everybody – not just the families of people sending firefighters to that area but the families of people working behind us here, right?

“It really takes dedicated staff and family to make all this stuff happen.”

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