Structure Fire!

Tuesday night, Walker Fire was called out to a structure fire around 10pm. Part of the process for responding to any incident is an evaluation of what is actually happening which can sometimes differ what what the person calling 911 might think they're seeing. For a fire, we tell dispatch that there is a "working fire" when there's actually fire.

Sometimes it may come in as a fire but not actually be one but this was. One of our firefighters lives very close to the scene and let us know on our tactical channel that it was a fire and I in turn relayed to our dispatch. My telling dispatch "working fire" signals to any other departments coming to assist (this is known as mutual aid) that there is really a fire too. 

The fire occurred about a minute or two away from a substation we have that has one engine that is four miles from our main station. We have six firefighters that live up in the area I am talking about so they were able to grab that engine get to the scene quickly and start the process of trying to prevent things from getting worse. In this instance, getting worse would have meant embers blowing onto other houses, there were quite a few very close by including one that might have only been 50 feet away. Another potential bad outcome could have been ripping as a ground fire and then taking out other houses.

We came from where the arrows are, driving uphill to what I called lower road. The reporting party or RP called from that one house at the bottom of the drawing marked RP so we were called to that address. The fire though was actually on Upper road. It was all very bunched up and the fire was easily reached with hose from Lower road. Both Upper and Lower roads dead end.

Engine 85 is the truck stationed in the area and was on scene first. I drove Engine 86 with two other firefighters and I assumed IC (incident command) when we arrived and also functioned as the engine operator (engineer) of 86 for most of the incident. Having two roles on an incident this complex is not ideal but it just played out that way. 85 pulled hose straight up from their truck toward the back of the house and 86 pulled hose up toward the front of the house. 

Shortly thereafter, mutual aid arrived at what seemed like the same time, one engine from two different departments. They checked in with me when they arrived and asked "where do you need us?" Fortunately, I knew they layout of the area also I did not want to turn Lower road into more of a parking lot than it already was so I asked them to go in on Upper road and work from up there. For anyone who has been a firefighter my thinking was that engines 1 and 2 (not their real numbers) could get the A and B sides while we worked the C and D sides. 

The larger red box is the house and the smaller was a wood pile that went up that some of our personnel worked on. WT stands for water tender which is a water truck. Ours hold 2000 gallons, far more than what engines carry. They'd fill the engines, run dry eventually, then go refill and come back.

We were able to knock down the fire pretty quickly which greatly reduces the threat of the fire spreading. Shortly after this point I released the two mutual aid engines. 

From there it went from drama and high leverage to the drudgery of trying to actually extinguish the fire. There was what was essentially deep rubble inside footprint of the house. The rubble was deep like quicksand so there was no way to get in there with hose and effectively, fully put it out, this would have been unsafe in my opinion. 

At this point we started to use foam to try to smother the heat. We used a lot and got to the point where there was just one area that was still obviously retaining heat. There could have been other areas holding heat, we couldn't be certain but there was the one area where after foaming it up pretty good, smoke would start coming up again 10-20 minutes later. 

All in it was about 12 hours and one of those calls that we'll always remember.