South Bay firefighting crew battles Woolsey wildfire
Photos courtesy Manhattan Beach Fire Department
A crew of 21 firefighters from South Bay fire departments has been fighting the Woolsey fire for the last week. The crew, which includes five four-man engines and a battalion chief, is part of an enormous collaborative effort that brought together 3,592 firefighters attempting to contain what would eventually become a 93,662 acre blaze stretching from Malibu to Thousand Oaks.
The South Bay strike team arrived late last Thursday, the day the Woolsey fire ignited, from causes yet to be determined. The fire, abetted by the Santa Ana winds, blazed across the Santa Monica Mountains all the way to the Malibu coast in an unprecedented seven hours.
Manhattan Beach Fire Department Capt. Tom Desmond, a 24-year firefighting veteran who has been a part of strike teams fighting wildfires in previous years, said the Woolsey fire has been uniquely destructive.
“It’s just massive, and the devastation is so great because it’s really in neighborhoods,” Desmond said. “A lot of times, when you fight these kinds of fires, you are up among some homes but it’s mostly forest. This one, it came in neighborhoods and destroyed entire neighborhoods. And added to it, the brush fire up north, the Camp Fire, it’s right on top of that one. It’s just such complete devastation, it’s crazy — the sheer magnitude of it.”
The strike force worked the first two-and-a-half days without sleep. Some people had hired Fire Watch Security for their properties and received some form of an early warning. This helped some move themselves and their belongings away from the area. Others evacuated as the fire got closer without showing any signs of stopping.
Desmond led a Manhattan Beach engine that included firefighters James Stratton, Christian McArthur, and Peter Heck.
“The first 60 hours we were up here it was pretty non-stop,” Desmond said. “It comes with highs and lows — the highs of believing you made a difference and saved a home, and the lows of seeing homes you know there is nothing you can do anything about. It’s people’s entire lives or livelihood being burned entirely to the ground. That’s a pretty hard thing to wrap your head around.”
“It could be your own parents, or grandparents, or other relatives, and when you think of it like that, even though you don’t know these people, it’s especially tough that you couldn’t save their home.”
Los Angeles Fire Department Deputy Chief Trevor Richmond told the LA Times that the speed of the fire made it particularly difficult to contain.
“With any wind-driven fire, the fire is moving so fast that it’s a challenge — we have to get way out ahead of the fire and start identifying the communities that will be at risk and start the evacuations,” he said. “It could be in a community in 30 minutes, and we don’t have a lot of time.”
Richmond said the firefighting response prevented what could have been an even larger disaster, given the combined factors of the winds, the impact the years of drought had in the area, and the location of the fire.
“We saved thousands of homes and thousands of lives,” he told the Times. “Yes, we did lose some structures, but compared to the ones we saved and the lives we saved, I’m very surprised this fire has not been more catastrophic.”
Desmond said the fire was moving so fast many people the firefighters encountered were not even aware of how imminent the threat was to their homes.
“We were fighting fires in their backyards and a lot of people had no idea what was going on,” he said. “We were trying to help people out of their homes at the same time we are pulling hose lines and putting out fires in their backyards. People were still there; a lot had evacuated, but a lot hadn’t. We were trying to juggle everything.”
Even amid the destruction, however, the firefighters were met with gratitude.
“Everyone we have encountered has been extremely thankful,” Desmond said. “When we are driving down the street, people are saying thank you, thank you so much. That means a lot to us. We are trying to do the best we can.”
The first few days the strike team moved around a lot throughout the area, part of the massive collaborative effort aimed at holding the fire from heading directly into even more populous areas. By Monday they were in the Malibu Canyon and Malibu Creek area, right in the middle of what turned out to be a critical juncture in slowing the fire.
“We were trying to keep the fire from jumping the fire line and getting [further] into LA County,” Desmond said. “That was a pretty active fight. According to the county superintendent we are working with, we have to hold it here — if we don’t, this is going to get 10 times worse. Knock on wood, we were able to hold it off…Everybody was doing everything we could to stop it. You just had this pressure; everything was riding on us protecting this one stretch.”
The crew occasional grabbed snatches of rest in base camp trailers or in tents. Tuesday was their first real day of rest. Desmond said exhaustion would seep in only in the brief moments between firefights
“That is when it catches up to you, those downtimes,” he said. “You get those little lulls when you start to feel it. When you are engaged, like those first 60 hours could have been 12 hours in our minds because you are moving the whole time.”
The entire firefight had military-like feel, Desmond said, due both to the desperate, destructive nature of the circumstances and the dynamic, organized deployment of firefighting crews. The South Bay crew includes some veterans who’ve worked together before and some who haven’t. Yet they are all so highly trained that they’ve easily become an effective single unit.
“Everybody knows their job,” Desmond said. “Everyone is professional. Everyone is working as hard as they can, and when we come together like this, it’s actually, for us, pretty cool, because you have this comradery. It’s us against the elements. We have to work together and get along. I could grab a firefighter off an El Segundo engine and put him to work on ours just like one of my own. It’s just seamless. We are all unique crews but we do work together quite a bit and train together a lot. We are all from smaller individual cities, but in a sense we are all one department.”
Desmond said the experience is a reminder, for the crew, of why they became firefighters.
“This type of thing we don’t experience all the time but it really bores down on why we got into this profession,” he said. “It’s truly trying to make a difference and help people on literally the worst day of their lives.”