Wildland Fire Today

Saturday was Walker Day which is our big, annual fundraising event and then Sunday morning we were dispatched out to a wildfire shortly after 4am and I didn't get home until about 3:45 the afternoon so no blog post but some pictures,

I started out as the Incident Commander (IC). I called it in at two acres, the final count was 2.9. There is a thing where volunteer departments are known to call in much bigger acreage than it really is so I felt good about that. 

From a few miles away.

We got lucky with a weather phenomenon known as the inversion layer and the fire laid down. 

The sun started to hit it, heating things up a little bit.

I can't believe our department has a truck like this. We sort of actually have two of them!

I turned over IC to the Forest Service after about an hour or hour and a half. That is some of their folks,

A little more technical, I established and Alpha division and a Zulu division. Our personnel took Alpha side and that is what they had to climb in the dark. Zulu started out with city resources but then we all engine crews were released.

From around 8am until 4:30 pm we provided water tender support (brown water truck is one of them)

That's me putting wet stuff on the hot stuff.

I look like Vincent in Pulp Fiction when he's picking up Mrs Wallace and he's looking around confused when she calls him on the intercom. It's a little hard to see but I am wearing a bladder bag which is a backpack sort of thing that holds 5 gallons of water and and the way it works, you can put out a lot of fire with them. 

We got lucky with a lot of things but our tactics weren't wrong, we had a tremendous number of resources respond and were able to take care of business. Our crews did a fantastic job.