Merced County firefighters helping fight numerous state wildfires

With dozens of large wildfires burning around the state, Merced County’s Castle Air Force Base continues to be a key site for DC-10 Air Tankers to reload and refuel.

Tankers come and go routinely nearly every day from the airfield outside Atwater, heading to and from the Rough fire in Fresno County; the Valley fire in Lake County; and the Butte fire in Amador and Calaveras counties.

“Castle is unique because it’s centrally located in California and we can move crews north or south or out of the state very quickly from here,” said John Harpain, the air tanker base manager assigned to Castle this week from the U.S. Forest Service.

Numerous large fires were still burning as of Monday in California, fueled by the dry, baked vegetation left from four years of extreme drought.

Harpain’s been with the Forest Service for nearly 20 years. “In my career, this (fire season) is easily one of the top three worst seasons I’ve ever seen,” Harpain said.

Between Jan. 1 and Saturday, a total of 5,225 fires had been reported in the state, consuming some 217,827 acres. During the same period in 2014, a total of 3,638 fires were reported with 90,894 acres burned, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Castle’s central location is important for refueling the planes; it’s also a key spot to mix and refill fire retardant tanks. “Last week, they dropped over 130,000 gallons of retardant in one day,” Fire Capt. John Slate said.

Those fire-suppression materials were dumped primarily in Fresno, Lake, Amador and Calaveras counties.

The base was quieter on Monday, with pilots resting at home after a week of dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of fire retardant on various blazes in the region. Maintenance crews performed routine checks on the engine of one of three DC-10 Air Tankers working in the state. The plane at Castle is expected to take off again Wednesday when pilots return from their days off.

Merced County officials also are doing much more to fight fires around the state than providing a refueling and maintenance station.

Chief Nancy Koerperich, from the Cal Fire-Merced County Fire Department, said firefighters from around the county were helping battle the Valley fire, the Butte fire and the Rough fire.

A 17-person “strike team” from Merced County was fighting the Rough fire in Fresno County on Monday.

“We’ve been doing what we can to help out here since it started back on July 31,” Koerperich said.

Koerperich, a professional firefighter for more than 30 years, said she agreed this fire season has been one of the worst in her memory.

“And we don’t have a lot of major resources in Merced County to help. Between volunteers and all the agencies in the county, we probably have less than 400 firefighters,” Koerperich said. “So, it makes me very proud that, despite our limited resources, we’re still able to keep a presence at home and serve our community while doing what we can to help everyone else in the state.”

The local strike team, composed of firefighters and equipment from Atwater, Los Banos, Merced city and Merced County, has been working on the west zone of the blaze. The Rough fire sparked during a lightning strike July 31. As of Monday afternoon, a total of about 138,053 acres have been torched. Firefighters said it was about 40 percent contained.

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 7:36 AM with the headline "Merced County firefighters helping fight numerous state wildfires."