In wildfire's way: Suddenly, three are inside an inferno

E-mail this article Print this article Other links Part I: Sizzling heat and dry land were a recipe for disaster

This is Part 2 of a five-day serial. The story so far:

Hundreds of firefighters have attacked a wildfire racing through brush in the Sierra foothills. As some crews gouge bare-earth firebreaks along the blaze's flanks, others head to the deadly front. Their mission: Protect homes.

At one place, three firefighters are trapped when their own backfire roars over their heads. All drop to the ground and reach for their aluminum fire shelters. But one man fumbles. The two others, knowing he will cook in seconds, try to cover him.

CONCOW, Calif. - Over the roar of the fire, engineer Tony Brownell is shouting into his radio: "Task Force 2, emergency traffic! We're being burned over!"

More than 1,000 firefighters have descended on this corner of the Sierra foothills, using bulldozers, shovels, fire engines and air tankers to battle a blaze now grown to 200 acres.

Radio chatter has been constant all afternoon. Now the air waves fall silent. Everyone listens. Many are friends with Brownell and the two firefighters huddling under aluminum fire shelters with him, Eric Zane and Scott Martinez.

Brownell knows that every air tanker and helicopter on the fire is at his disposal - if only the pilots can find him. Again and again, Brownell describes his position. Aircraft bank overhead, but there's too much smoke to see. They drop three loads of water, but each misses the mark.

Brownell, Zane and Martinez are on their own.

For what seems to them an eternity - 15 minutes? 20? - searing gusts of wind buffet their shelters. With only a thin layer of reflective material shielding them, the three men squeeze under two small shelters and keep talking to fend off panic, their voices raised above the tumult.

Exhausting its fuel, the fire gradually eases, and the men shift into better positions. Martinez unfolds his own shelter and takes single refuge. Brownell, sitting up until now, turns over, though the road is so hot he stays on hands and knees.

But the fire isn't done. Lunging into brush across the road, it flares up and pins them down once more.

Five minutes later, the fire is finally spent, and the men peer out. Where brush once grew so heavy that you couldn't see 20 feet, now bare and blackened sticks jut from smoking earth.

The firefighters rise dizzily and stagger down the road, wearing their shelters like tortoise shells. Capt. Jeff Hawkins sees them coming, ghosts through the smoke. They look scared to death, he thinks, nothing but big, white eyes.

Brownell has first-degree burns on his left leg. Martinez is weak, disoriented and so dehydrated there's barely any sweat left in him. Zane's left arm has second-degree burns from an ember that lodged between sleeve and skin.

Hawkins' crew offers them hits of compressed air and bottled water. But they can't stay here. The fire is heating up again, so both crews gun their trucks down the burned-over road, away from the fire front.

Brownell is not a man given to overstatement. He usually scoffs at talk of fire in human terms, as if it were alive. It's a natural process, Brownell has always said, and we just happen to be in the way.

Now he's not so sure.

"This fire," he tells himself, "is trying to kill somebody."

Less than a mile to the south, at the corner of Nelson Bar Road and Stagecoach Lane, three neighbors squint into the sky. Air tankers roar over the trees on their way north toward the fire.

It's more bad news for Ray McCarty, 74, a welder who retired here eight years ago thinking he'd found paradise: a mobile home with space out back for his hunting hounds. But life's been harder since his wife died of cancer last year, and now this wildfire is making him nervous.

Beverly Brooks, 67, McCarty's landlady across the pasture, is even more upset. Country life doesn't suit her. She came back to tend her ailing mother, who died in 1992, and never got around to leaving. She likes her neighbors, loves her Chihuahuas, but chafes at the rural isolation. And wildfires like this, she says, scare the wits out of her.

You should be scared, Norm Williams tells her. Short and balding with a tuft of white chin whiskers, the retired logging-truck driver was raised on a ranch across Nelson Bar Road from the Brooks place. At 74, he's loaded with opinions, and he's not afraid to share them.

This country was safer from fire before the government started meddling, he says. Used to be, ranchers burned the timberlands to make for better grazing, and cattle chewed down the dry grass. Not anymore.

"They won't let you burn in the wintertime when you should be burning," Williams says. "They claim the ozone and all that horse dootsie."

And now these firefighters don't seem to fathom what any old-timer knows. After sunset this time of year, a northeast wind starts blowing off Miller Peak - opposite the way the afternoon wind is pushing the wildfire now.

Williams mentions this to a couple of firefighters. They nod and say they're taking the winds into consideration, leaving Williams to sputter to his neighbors.

"Beverly, you better take off and go down to Oroville or somewhere. We're liable to have fire before the night's over."

By evening, however, it appears they have little to fear.

The afternoon has been hellish for the firefighters. Two collapsed from heat exhaustion. One was hit by a falling tree. But they've done their job. Fire damaged two homes, but firefighters saved a dozen others.

The westerly wind has disappeared now, and the day's intense heat is fading. At 8:45 p.m., an upbeat news release predicts that the 800-acre blaze, with fire breaks now completed around half its perimeter, will be fully contained by morning.

"This fire is over," says Capt. Darryl Sanford, relaxing by his engine. He even has time to grab his cell phone and call his wife, just to say hello.

Fifteen minutes later, the wind begins to blow again.

Lightly at first, then steadily stronger, the hot, dry breeze presses in from the northeast. Against the black hillside, the red line of fire glows brighter. Embers fly.

Old Norm Williams was right. The fire is turning on its tail.

Around 10 p.m., Battalion Chief Wayne Wilson halts back-fire operations along the fire's southern edge after they start spreading in the wrong direction, to the south.

Firefighters douse those errant blazes, and bulldozers and crews wielding hand tools redouble efforts to gouge out a fire break ahead of the wildfire's suddenly active southwestern boundary.

By 12:30 a.m., however, a 15-mph wind is driving flames through a half-mile gap in the fire break and down the hill toward Concow Road, just a quarter-mile from where the fire started 12 hours earlier.

Wilson watches from Concow Road, waiting for the fire to hit. Then he turns around and sees that it already has. Wind-thrown firebrands have ignited at least 20 spot fires in the grass around a barn behind him.

An engine crew starts spraying, but they can't put out all the spot fires. Flames soon swarm around the barn, flying up walls and into the eaves. In a few minutes, the building is ablaze, and the crew retreats.

Southwest of Concow Road, along Nelson Bar Road, both the brush and houses are thicker than up on the ridge. As residents pile into cars and race away, engine crews race in. They dash from driveway to driveway, deciding which houses to defend and which to write off.

The wind increases to 20 mph, and flames blast into the woods ahead. In minutes, the fire explodes into a firestorm, a term for which no precise definition exists, Wilson says. You just know it when you see it, and he's seeing it now.

Fire looms above the treetops and crashes through the brush, everywhere at once. It pounces upon parked cars, leaving empty shells. It flings itself against roofs and walls, devouring whole houses in minutes. Gasoline cans boom inside garages. Windows melt to green globs amid the ash.

The fire takes Arthur Strain's house, painstakingly built with lumber milled from a single huge fir. But it spares the mobile home of Roy Clayton, who frantically sprays down his yard with a garden hose until his pumphouse burns down.

Just ahead, over the next hill on Stagecoach Lane, all is quiet.

Ray McCarty, Beverly Brooks and Norm Williams had watched the news a few hours before. They'd talked to friends and firefighters, and everyone had agreed: The fire was going the other way.

And so they'd gone to bed.

To be continued.

David Foster is AP's Northwest regional writer, based in Seattle.