Fire Brigade News
Finally some rain, hopefully the 2 week plus dry spell has been broken. Not only was it dry but the temperatures were in the 70s most of the time. Every time it stops raining I worry it will be the last rain. It actually dried out so much over that period that we had a vegetation fire. So for those of you doing your control burns keep an eye on them.
The pager went off about 00:30 on Friday morning with the information there was a veg fire in the area of Lucia. Oh yeah, right, I think, come on, this is winter! I head on down, Dave Egbert our duty officer has started all the appropriate equipment. Part way down we hear that actually a car is on fire which has spread into the vegetation, that makes much more sense to me now.
Margaret and Warren arrive on scene and give us a size up, about 2 acres and spreading. The vehicle is part way up the road to the Hermitage and the brush has ignited on either side of it burning up and down the hill. More Brigade members and equipment arrive and start their initial attack. By the time I come around the corner by Lucia I can see the fire has formed a large circle, burning in all directions. The car is history at this point and in the middle of the road so we can’t get the larger engines past it. (A side note here, if your car does catch fire, try to position it as far away from the brush as possible).
It gets “nudged” over by one of our engines and they make it through. USFS has arrived on scene, it is winter and they don’t have all their engines staffed. We call for mutual aid for 2 more type 3 (wildland) engines. As it is their fire, they take over the Incident Command. After 3 or 4 hours it appears we have a handle on it and by 06:00 our Volunteers are able to be released to go home. And for some of them to get ready to go to work for the day. In all we had mutual aid engines and tenders from Carmel Valley, Monterey, Seaside, Presidio of Monterey, Hunter Liggett, Cambria and San Luis Obispo County Cal Fire.
It was great that the Hermitage had a 50,000 gallon water supply, and most important, that we could hook up to it. The difficulty was that only our tenders on the upper part of the road could access it, the road was just narrow enough that 2 large engines could not pass each other. We used the other tenders we called in to supply the lower engines. It would be great if everyone would go out and check to see what kind of hook up you have on your water tanks, ideally 2 ½ “ fire thread.
The next night shortly before 01:00 we get paged for someone swept out to sea down by Limekiln. St. Parks is on scene when we arrive, a Coast Guard helicopter has been called, SO rescue and dive team as well. There is not a lot we can do for these type of calls, the surf was huge and pounding the rocks. We try to see if we can locate anyone in the ocean and keep them in our sight. We had no luck that night finding anyone, CG did their search pattern then had to leave to refuel. We were released by SO about 04:30 to head home. SO and CG continued searching until about 08:00 then called it off. Two days later the body was washed back in. Please be very careful when you are near the ocean, it only takes a moment to be swept away.
These were just 2 out of the 7 calls we had in one week, very unusual for February.
Some of our members and new auxiliary members are still in the middle of taking the First Responder class. This will continue till the end of March. We were happy to pick up some folks from Esalen and the Post Ranch, always good to have people with medical skills on property.
Coming up in March we have a full day and part of an evening and morning dedicated to our Strategic Plan. We have the consultant who helped us form the plan come in and do team building skills and work on the plan. We try to get everyone in the Brigade involved in this. Also in March we have our live fire propane training, which is just what the name implies. We had this several years ago and it is a great training. This will be at night in the St. Park so if you see any unusual “glow” from there it is probably just us. I’ll report on this next month.
I have to start reminding everyone now to mark their calendars for our second annual benefit BBQ, this will be on May 17th in the State Park again. Hopefully we will be able to show off our new engines and water tender.
Martha Karstens