-You talk about fire activity --
that day, we had the perfect storm.
We had dry fuel, we had high temperatures,
and we had a very strong wind.
-Ashland has a grass fire up by the water treatment plant.
In Oxford, if it hits, it's gonna go quickly.
And we're getting inundated with calls.
-It was a losing battle, 100%. -All these houses are gone.
-Any way you cut it, it was a losing battle.
There just was not enough water
and not enough people to fight these fires.
-I've got the trailer park involved.
I need some resources.
-Copy that.
55, be advised, no resources except what I sent you earlier.
-The fire behavior is completely different
from what we've been seeing.
They're burning hotter, faster,
they're so erratic with the winds.
You look at this one, I mean, it went north, and it'd go west
and it'd go east, and it just kind of spread.
-The Almeda Fire erupted into a fast-moving
blaze north of Ashland, Oregon,
in late morning of September 8th.
Historic red flag winds were predicted that day,
which pushed the fire north along Interstate 5,
consuming over 3,200 acres.
Oregon's resources were stretched thin,
battling over 10 large fires throughout the state.
-We were informed that there would be no resources available
to us should we have a major event.
So we knew, coming in to this incident,
that we weren't gonna be able to get much help.
-Jackson County Fire District #5 and the Ashland
Fire Department were the first units to respond.
Within minutes, a second alarm was called,
pulling limited resources throughout southern Oregon
and the Rogue Valley.
They numbered around 50 firefighters.
-So as soon as we got to the station,
the other firefighter and myself jumped in the engine.
At that point, they announced on the radio
that they had about five houses that were involved on fire.
So we knew instantly it was gonna be running quick.
We notified command that we responding,
and they sent us right away next to I-5, exit 19.
-Yeah, we're out at a car fire here.
Pull in here. Or stay in the middle.
Nobody on there. You see Aaron?
-We had a car fire at the gas station.
The car fire kind of took some of the heat out of it,
and then the next thing we knew, the whole field was going
and, like, off to the races, there was no, like, stopping it.
-While units from District #5 battled the flames south
of Exit 19, spot fires began to burn to the north,
threatening the Bear Creek Mobile Home Park.
-8311 we're on the south side of Lowe Road, the trailer park.
We have multiple trailers fully involved.
We have trees torching the sides.
-It came on the radio that a trailer park
just down the road was starting to have fire impinge on it.
-When we get into the park,
and we had a couple trailers going there,
we tried to hold it there.
Water was an issue.
Ran out of water.
Just the amount of wind and heat and trailers already going,
nothing we could do even at that point to stop it there,
so we just made that decision to move on.
-We were reassigned down to the highway,
and we were trying to flank the side of the fire
from jumping to Highway 99.
We were quickly overwhelmed in that mission.
-The wind, it just moved it so fast,
house to house to house, tree to tree to tree,
that it was just impossible to catch.
It started that day as a grass fire,
and it quickly progressed through that grass
fire area and wildfire area
and into what we call an urban interface fire.
Now, really?
I mean, there's no wildfire in the city of Talent.
I mean, where that thing was burning was asphalt --
the driveways, the homes, the fire hydrants.
It's just burning through multiple downtown areas.
There's so much black smoke everywhere,
you're breathing all that stuff in.
This was structure fire after structure
fire after structure fire after structure fire.
Over and over and over.
-The video shows basically all the buildings on fire.
I think that was kind of the part where it really sunk in,
and it was kind of a moment of defeat
'cause you realize the scope of the damage.
-The Willow Springs Division has four engines working.
We have about five structures fully involved.
-The fire continued north to the business corridor of Talent.
Fire District #5's Chief Hanley took command of the four engines
assigned to the Willow Springs Division.
Their job was to protect two subdivisions
and a retirement community
between Autumn Ridge Road and Willow Springs Drive.
-Watch the hose on the road here.
-So Autumn Ridge, by the time the fire got to Autumn Ridge,
it was just consuming, you know, homes in just a few minutes.
Imagine the volume of flame and smoke
that was coming across all of this area.
This was not smoke plumes and flames were going up in the air.
They were being sheeted across.
-We're thinking, you know, that we can make a stand,
and next thing we knew, that spot fire in Autumn Ridge
blew up, making a run through there.
And about the time I took those few pictures, the wind felt like
it was gonna kind of settle down a little bit,
and then it just -- the winds picked back up
and everything just went to pieces again.
-At this point, it's not just only Talent burning,
Phoenix is burning at this time.
And it was probably that same time that I found out
that our Fire Station 3 was burning.
-So at that point,
we probably had six firefighters for two neighborhoods.
So there's probably 40 to 60 homes in that entire area.
Probably over half of the neighborhoods are gone.
-As the fire continued into Phoenix,
crews were reassigned to Talent Avenue.
Their objective was to keep the fire burning east of the road.
If the fire crossed Talent Avenue,
they would lose the rest of the town.
-I'm told, "All of Talent Avenue's yours.
Don't let it cross the road,
and here's what you have for the rest of the night."
That's when I met Curt, saw his engine
was one of the ones that was working for me.
When Talent Avenue really started lighting off,
that, of course, is when hydrants went dry.
-We don't have enough water or resources.
Every single building was on fire when we came into the city.
Like, I don't know -- where do we start?
And then as soon as you felt like you
were making some headway,
I mean, you'd run out of water and we'd have to refill.
And as soon as you'd come back,
that structure that you were working on is now gone.
And it was kind of almost this head-banging-against-the-wall
moment where there's nothing you can do to slow this.
-Seen a lot of shit through my career,
and not a lot of it
has ever really I wouldn't say bothered me,
but especially at the time, I can just work through it.
I really realized that, like, holy --
We're hearing reports of the malls on fire.
We're hearing all this shit that it's making
runs through Medford.
And my wife's texting me,
she's asking if she should evacuate.
And so there's just all these things.
Kind of pressure's hitting me.
The other thing in the back of my mind
is we were fighting structure fires all day with no error.
You know, cancer's a big issue.
I breathe so much fucking shit all day.
I want my family safe, and then at the same time, like,
I'm in a job right now
that's probably gonna take years off my life
that I could be with my family, and it just --
I've never had those thoughts before.
-We all breathed in and were consumed
by so much nasty carcinogenic smoke.
It was really a tough fight.
You're just like, "Did I just seal my fate,
like, on one event?" You know?
Did I breathe in enough stuff over the last 24, 36 hours
to basically just stamp myself as now
I'm gonna have cancer in 10 years from now?
'Cause that's what 9/11 was for those guys.
Right?
You know, those guys are still dying every year.
Those guys are dying from the work they did at Ground Zero.
-The winds eventually shifted,
pushing the Almeda Fire back onto itself.
In the end, it stretched over 14 miles from its origin in Ashland
to where it died south of Medford,
an expanse it covered in just under 48 hours.
Nearly 3,000 structures were lost.
-You know, it's very overwhelming.
And it's very surreal when you watch your community burn down.
-You get in your head
where you feel like you didn't do anything.
You didn't stop anything from burning.
Everything that, you know, we've been on medical calls
and a fall victim, maybe "Oh,
I've been at that person's house for chest pain" --
we've been to all these places.
We've gone to all these businesses.
And you're looking at them going, "What did I do?
I feel like I've done nothing."
-Reports that there are at least 96 active large fires
in the US, the biggest,
of course, in California, Washington State, and Oregon.
-We did everything we could do to stop this thing,
and we just couldn't.
There was just nothing we could do.
Everything was stacked.
We've always been told this is a high-risk area.
Where Talent is, it's high risk.
But we just don't have the ability to meet the need
if something like this happened again.
You know, that part has to change.
We have to get political to a degree
and say that this is our reality
and we have to put funding kind of where our mouth is.
We need resources.
-So I don't believe these fires are going away.
They're gonna keep getting bigger.
We're gonna keep setting new records.
The fire service is always gonna push for fire prevention.
When it comes down to these large-scale incidences,
these mega-fires or super-fires that we've been having,
resources are the number-one key
that we're gonna be able to handle.
-It's tough --
It's tough to think that this won't ever happen again.
Like, if you look at the way our weather is
and the recoveries of the forest,
it really just burned through a greenway that had,
like, a bike path and lots of fuel in it,
and then got into these cities and ripped through these cities.
But as far as a huge wildfire, still prime.
It's still right there to burn.