news story / By David Garrison

Fire Without End

Up in the Trinities, an unholy fire season makes, breaks communities

(July 17, 2008)  Five firefighters from different parts of the country climbed out of a gray truck on Sunday morning. Dense smoke pressed against their red helmets, hot and heavy like a clothes iron. They all wore yellow shirts tucked into green fire-resistant cargo pants as they pulled supplies from the back of the truck.

They didn’t get close to the flames that day. They had a different task. They came to protect property and structures in Corral Bottom, a swath of private land that runs between two ridges in the Shasta/Trinity National Forest.

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If the fire came at all, it wouldn’t show up for a few days, but they came prepared. In the back of the truck, they had several rolls of firehoses, still in the box. They had gas cans. They had a pump. They had sprinklers, tools, nozzles. They had everything they needed, even lunch.

The order came that morning that the area is a new priority. A Trinity County Sheriff’s deputy arrived before the firefighters and told residents that the area is under a mandatory evacuation. At least two people stayed. Traffic on Corral Bottom Road increased throughout the day. More firefighters showed up. Semi-trucks carried bulldozers to different points and unloaded them. The new front to combat the Iron Complex fire had shifted. And it happened seamlessly.

Angela Smith is a public information officer for the Iron Complex fire. She arrived at the Incident Command post in Junction City from her home in Missouri on Wednesday, July 9. She sat in a beige tent with piles of maps and fire updates spread out on the tables around her. The loud hum from the fan on the air conditioner filled the tent. The circulating air ruffled the papers. She said that it takes a lot to fight a fire.

“When resources from a local area are taxed, they put out the call and people from all over the country come to help,” she said.

By Saturday, the Iron Complex fire, one of the 55 large uncontrolled fires that burned Northern California over the last few weeks, had chewed through more than 32,000 acres of land at a cost of $14.4 million dollars. Firefighting is a big operation and it takes a big organization to carry it out.

The National Interagency Coordination Center, based in Boise, Idaho, is always on call. After a lightning storm blew over Northern California on June 24 and sparked hundreds of fires, the NICC set up incident command posts at several locations in the state.

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