The initial call came over the radio saying there was a vegetation fire at
Whiskeytown near the Carr Powerhouse and I left headquarters before the page was
finished going out over the air and I could already see it a plume and that
that was concerning that there was that much smoke already. When I got on scene
there was fire on both sides of the road and I heard the air attack on the radio
and you could hear the fear in the air attack's voice and you know normally hear
a helicopter pilot or somebody up in a plane and that's the calm in the storm
and there is a
there's a sense of urgency in his voice you don't hear out of a airplane very often.
The initial incident commander from the Park Service got out scene and the
fire was rapidly moving out from the first unit that arrived at scene and we
could see a pretty good column from here, down here at our headquarters, so we
realized it was a expanding incident pretty quickly.
Pretty soon we had a full air show up there, dozer out on the ground. CAL FIRE asked us almost right
away to deploy dozers and we gave that permission as soon as we were asked.
Fire was really doing what we had seen in the past the initial day, however, as rapidly
as it grew was something that was a little bit different until about the
second night it came out of there on us.
Our priorities very quickly shifted from containment right there to hey we need to go save the people in
French Gulch; that's our priority here. We drove over to the park headquarters,
opened up all the doors, showed people where the copy machine was and we made a
plan between CAL FIRE, the National Park Service, Shasta County Sheriff's
Department, CHP, to go evacuate Old Shasta and get those folks out. And it
was some urgent work that was done, it didn't matter what patch was on your
sleeve, it just, we went out and we did it and we saved lives that night, we saved
lives the next day, and I'm proud of my guys.
Normally when we're seeing fire activity that is extreme we're looking at our
evacuation zones that are maybe two or three miles out in front of the fire. On
Thursday afternoon when it came into Redding we were seeing, as you've heard
reported, we were seeing spot fires as far as five and six miles ahead of the
fire, so we moved our evacuation zones out to six plus miles which essentially
was taking out the entire west side of Redding.
As we're abandoning our incident command post in Buena Ventura as the fires rolling over the houses next to us,
that was kind of the wake-up call, it's like hey this is all hands on deck we
put our entire Division on tactical alert and got all available resources.
We plan ahead, we knew it was coming, but the way fire works is sometimes
unpredictable as these two gentlemen will tell you and we went from hours of time
and preparation to barely a few minutes. We had officers going to every
single household with either U.S. Forest Service law enforcement, CAL FIRE law
enforcement, the Redding Police Department, the Sheriff's Department,
if it had a badge it was at a door and getting people out of the way.
This was a very fast-moving fire, homes and people are being threatened so we were doing
our evacuations going door-to-door. California Highway Patrol, one of their
officers had lost their home and they're still out in the communities doing the
evacuations and serving the people and saving lives.
6:30 at night my brother-in-law's the CAL FIRE captain had sent me a text and said "hey it's getting close to
the river if you guys need to go back and get anything out, now is the time
to do it." So we elected to drive back to try to
grab some property so we looked around, see what was important to us, we grabbed a couple items and we just left.
That morning about 5:00 a.m., I was out at
Whiskeytown meeting with the Chiefs and just trying to figure out what we're
gonna do when it hit the city and by the time I got home, my wife was already
packing, we live on the west side, we were evacuated for about a week.
When I arrived home about 7:30, my wife ran down the driveway frantically waving her arms
and she said "hey, we've got to evacuate now. There's trees in the back
of our yard that are on fire." And I looked back and I saw that there were
flames coming up the back of the embankment to my house so that means it
had jumped the river and that was probably only about an hour's time from
when I had checked it.
We did the all call, everybody came back to work, staffed
an engine and was there for the fire fight and you know during that fire
fight, we had nothing left in the city so we really left 70 square miles uncovered.
I mean our guys they gave it their all and we really tried to save everything.
You know the wind, and it was just raining embers, and we just couldn't keep
up. It really was a war zone, fighting structure fires and a wildland
fire at the same time, trying to protect the exposures and then move on to the
next ones and then when you came back to check those ones that you just saved now
they were on fire. For a while, it was a losing battle.
I think what's gonna stand out obviously is the sound of the fire when it really
started to take off, when it became this kind of tornado-like monster if you will.
That sound, that smell, that is a take away for me definitely. I knew at that
point that we were going to be dealing with something that it was going to be
all hands on deck.
And I was in the neighborhood, trying to get people out of my neighborhood,
I just had that pause, that moment where I looked up at that
fire tornado and I was just in awe of it it almost looked like something out of
kind of a Marvel movie where it was spinning real slow, things are catching
on fire, and I'm thinking for a minute, can this be real? And as it got closer
things started catching on fire, homes were igniting, trees were igniting, things
were igniting in the air. Things were falling down onto me and my car and it
was just a surreal moment. I remember pulling out onto Quartz Hill from my
neighborhood and seeing that fire tornado in my rearview mirror and
looking ahead of me and seeing hundreds of cars in gridlock thinking if that
thing turns this way, we're in trouble including myself and so that was
pretty surreal moment when I realized in my rearview mirror it's going the opposite
way cause it bent North and I just took a big sigh of relief and just thanked
God that it turned the other way.
Some of the experts that have been studying the
Carr Fire are saying that we probably saw anywhere from three to five tornadoes.
We've never seen any to the scale that we saw out there and some of those
tornadoes they were classifying those as equal to an f3, possibly an f4,
tornado that you would see back east. The only difference is, is they estimated the
temperature in these tornadoes to be 2700 degrees.
Roger Moore, our chief of police, was out in his uniform talking to somebody and
once he knew the flames were here he went on, knocked on every door, made sure
everybody got out safely.
As that firenado took the west side of my River
Ridge neighborhood, I came back into the neighborhood about thirty minutes after
that fire storm went through and saw the rest of my home fall to the ground and
then my neighbor's home catch on fire so it was pretty much chaos that night.
I get a call from my lieutenant about 8:30, 9:00, and he says, "hey chief" and I
said, "hey what's going on?" He said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but your house
is gone." And I go, "shut up, no way." You know that's our way right, on
the Highway Patrol, and she goes, "Chief, your house is gone."
These are emotional events and what's emotional about it is not only the loss, that you're, that
you're witnessing it is the human element of people coming together and no
lines in the sand, I mean, we on this fire itself we had firefighters from
Australia, New Zealand, from a dozen different states, and the patch doesn't
matter at that point.
Everybody did their job just how we were supposed to. You can't
ever really prepare for something like that. You do it and we do the best we can
knowing that we have a pretty big fire season here in this
county but everybody joining up and rallying together.
We had staff at one of
our water treatment plants the entire time the fire went through it. Making
sure we had water flowing and making sure that the fire hydrants were flowing
you know for fighting the fire. We had our parks crews battle their way up up
to South Fork Mountain was where our repeater is for communications to make
sure that generator got back on line so that first responders had communication.
We could not do our job without effective communications and the
dispatchers that are there and the dispatchers are a huge assistance to the
community and also to the officers and also have a calming effect because it
could still be falling apart and the dispatchers are there with their voice
reassuring the public and the officers keeping calm to a very chaotic
situation.
The city officials, a lot of what we did, is back off and let those people do what
they do right? Be professionals and come back in at a time when they need the
support to get reimbursement, to get funding flowing, to get purchasing. What
we did is really support the professional men and women who actually
made sure that our city was going to be okay.
I think that they send SRT
because it's a quick response one, they know that we're all trained, they
can call us and within 72 hours or 24 hours or 12 hours we can be somewhere
and secure what they want secured. Our primary mission was just the evacuation
zones, making sure that those zones weren't entered and we were also doing roving
patrol to make sure that the homes that were evacuated, no one's breaking into
them and just kind of just being there.
That really always opens my eyes when
those types of resources are made available to you in a small office. It
just makes me proud of the Highway Patrol and proud of the agency that we are and
our ability to protect our communities.
The resiliency, the statements people would make you know that we're going to
rebuild you know and then that this Shasta strong kind of mentality
embraced the community. That's what I'm most proud of is that we have a
community that stands behind all of us.
We are gonna rebuild, in fact I have
plans all drawn up and they were submitted Monday and waiting for CalRecycle
just to clear my lot and I can't wait to pour a foundation and I can't
wait to get rid of the ashes and the memories and just to rebuild and that's
gonna be good, it'll be a new beginning.
You can sit and you can grieve and you can feel sorry for yourself,
but you've got to look forward. And me and another highway
patrolman, a buddy of mine, we went over there and sifted and were able to
find medals that my grandpa had from World War II, some of the medals from
Vietnam from my uncle, so there's a bunch of small victories that you can get.
Donations that have poured in have been unbelievable, both you know money and clothes and
supplies, I mean just here at the office we've had unbelievable amount of you
know toiletry kits and water. We've had a ton of support and it's really been
helpful for our guys.
The community, they they knew we weren't from there and I
think they all knew that and so they would talk to us find out where we came
from, they realized we came a long way. It was humbling because then they appreciate us
being there, we're like, "hey, you guys are the ones going through this." I remember one
night a lady came out with her two kids it was like 10:00, 11:00, at night she
came out and they were handing out doughnuts to us and they stood there for
like an hour and a half, literally an hour and a half, in the intersection with
us and just talked and you know we laughed with the kids and gave them stickers.
And then anytime you went to a restaurant if you try to get to a
restaurant that was open before they close, they were receptive, they
appreciated us, they thanked us, it was extremely humbling because you know
what they're going through.
I'd love to get the message out of hope. To me, you
have a choice when you get up in the morning, you're either gonna be up or
you're gonna be down. I choose to be up only because that's how I want to live. If you
don't have any hope, you have no fun, you have no smiles, you don't have any good
feelings, you need hope in your life.