California’s weary firefighters are working double shifts. When will backup arrive?

Exhausted and working double shifts on nearly 400 wildfires, California firefighters were still waiting for many of the relief crews that were trickling into the state Thursday.

On Wednesday, officials announced they had requested 375 fire engines from out of state to join the 6,900 firefighters battling lighting-sparked fires that have destroyed nearly 200 buildings and are threatening 50,000 more. Tens of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate.

But many of those out-of-state crews had yet to arrive to relieve the California firefighters, even though many have been working 72-hour double shifts, said Brice Bennett, a Cal Fire spokesman.

“The goal is to get them here so we can put them to work and utilize them to provide some reprieve from our initial attack resources,” Bennett said. “We need to make sure we can get them rested and refueled. The firefight is long from over.”

Doug Rogers, deputy fire chief of the Vacaville Fire Protection District, said his volunteer crews spent had been hauling hoses up and down the hills in 104-degree heat early in the week trying to snuff out the earliest of the lightning-caused fires. They thought they’d succeeded.

Then came the wind, and the fire “started coming down with a vengeance.” A firefighter for 50 years, mostly with departments around Sacramento, Rogers said he’d never seen anything like it. He and his teams worked nonstop for about 48 hours, before getting a break Wednesday night.

“By last night,” Rogers said, “asses were dragging pretty good.”

They were back out Thursday, working with Cal Fire crews on damage assessments near Quail Canyon Road. Their partners were inmate firefighters from the nearby prison.

Such inmate labor is in short supply. Inmates serve as the state’s primary “hand crews,” using tools and chainsaws to cut fire lines and protect property.

The COVID-19 outbreak in state prisons prompted officials to release thousands of inmates early. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said that no inmate crews are currently on COVID-19 lockdown, but the number of inmate firefighters are down significantly since last summer.

In 2019, there were 2,800 inmate firefighters. This year, there are only 2,026.

In response to the pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration hired 830 new temporary firefighters to help offset the shortage.

In Marin County, just north of San Francisco, where a small fire is burning near the Pacific Ocean, county fire chief Jason Weber told The Associated Press he is waiting for assistance from Montana to arrive this weekend.

He said in his 25 years in fire service, “we’ve never seen this level of draw-down” from cooperating agencies, as there is heavy competition in the western United States for equipment and people.

Fighting fires from the air

With not enough personnel to cover so many fires burning at once, the state’s firefighting air corps has proven critical to fighting some fires.

May Eldridge, a spokeswoman for Cal Fire’s Nevada-Yuba-Placer Unit, said if not for pilots making drop after drop of fire retardant on the Jones Fire, “it could have been catastrophic.”

Over two days, pilots dumped 96,000 gallons of fire retardant, more than the Grass Valley Air Attack Base used all last year.

“Our biggest challenge with this fire was the slope,” Eldridge said. “It’s on the side of a mountain and so air resources were really the only thing that could get to it very quickly because our boots on the ground were literally climbing down into a canyon to get to it with hand tools to try to do something.”

The Grass Valley air base is one of 12 air attack and 10 helitack bases scattered across the state.

But Bennett said it’s misguided to assume that firefighting aircraft alone are going to make up for not having enough personnel.

“Fire retardant does not put out fires,” Bennett said. “All it does slow it down, and that’s so the boots on the ground can actually get close enough to it to put it out. Air tankers are not always the answer, especially when there are winds over 30 mph. Their drops are completely ineffective.”

He didn’t immediately know the number of firefighting aircraft working the fires on Thursday.

The state has ordered a dozen new firefighting helicopters, at $25 million apiece, but they won’t all arrive until 2022. Similarly, a fleet of seven C-130 transport planes being purchased from the Pentagon has to be retrofitted and won’t begin to show up until next year.

In the meantime, expect things to continue to stay smokey and communities to remain under threat in the days ahead, Bennett said.

“We have a substantial number of fires going right now,” Bennett said. “And we’re still on the upward swing from all these incidents from this lightning siege.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was originally published August 20, 2020 at 2:46 PM with the headline "California’s weary firefighters are working double shifts. When will backup arrive?."